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His Divine Shadow posted:I wonder if the russians have got any nukes pointed at Finland? I'd figure at least Helsinki. During the Cold War, both NATO (the US, factually) and the Soviets had designated nuking targets in Finland, mostly places like airports, harbours and things like that*. And the adjacent cities, of course. One big concern of the West was stopping the Red Army from marching through Lapland into Norway, so a preemptive nuke or a few there might slow the Soviets down. And the Soviets planned on attempting to stop Western nuclear missiles in Finnish air space, which would probably also be a bad thing for Finland. Obviously it's impossible to know what the current, non-Soviet Russia has planned, but presumably their immediate interests in case of WW3 would be denying NATO the use of Finnish air space and the like. *See e.g. Rislakki, Paha Sektori
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Mar 18, 2022 08:39
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You'd think taking out a few cargo ships wouldn't dent the Russian economy that much compared to the sanctions already in place essentially cutting them off from most Western markets, but I have no numbers to back this up. But I suppose some already-sailing pirates could change their flags?
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Mar 24, 2022 16:49
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Mister Speaker posted:I have a question about yield. Basically I'm curious how it's even a variable thing. Is it simply a function of ending up with a bigger or smaller sphere of fissionable material when the device assembles? My limited understanding of atom bombs is there needs to be a specific amount of material to go prompt supercritical - suggesting that there's at least a floor to how small a bomb they can make. Is this fundamentally wrong though? Is it more about the density and/or purity of the assembled device? I mean, thinking about it right now we've seen things like the Davy Crockett that seem to work. There's a lot of factors here, but with fission bombs, it's a question of how much of the fissile material you can get to fission before the thing blows apart. The "critical mass" of a nuclear device means that the neutrons that are released from fissioning nuclei are enough to prompt other nearby nuclei to undergo fission, thereby sustaining a chain reaction, and a super-critical mass is one where you have more than enough neutrons released as a function of time, meaning that the chain reaction increases and more and more energy is released until ka-blooie. The critical mass is a function of various things like density of your fissile material, the shape of it (how the neutrons can fly around), and you can also help the neutron chain reaction along by reflecting them back towards the fissile core with tamper materials that plink the neutrons back, etc. The "gun type" bomb ("little boy") has a donut of fissile material and when detonated the bomb shoots the donut of fissile material into a rod of fissile material, and the joined blob exceeds critical mass and fissions for a little while. The "implosion" type bomb has a sphere (spherical symmetry is easiest I think, but I'm not an explosives expert by any means) of plutonium that's not critical mass, but when the surrounding "normal" explosion occurs, the density of the plutonium rises because it is literally being squeezed together, and it begins fission. There's more complications to this such as tampers and other design parameters that deal with neutron fluxes and reflections and it's too early in the morning to go into these, but basically the take-home message is that you want to maximize the amount of fuel spent to get the most bang for your buck, quite literally. A thermo-nuclear bomb has a fission "starter" that heats up the fusion fuel to, as NdGT might say, star temperatures, which then undergoes fusion until this device too tears itself apart. The actual design is more complex, but basically you have a fission core that blows up, and the blast releases energetic stuff like hard radiation and (radiation) pressure that compresses a fission "spark-plug" surrounded by fusion material, and when that thing goes the fusion material, typically isotopes of hydrogen, gets hot and dense enough to fusion. The more fusion fuel you put in there, bigger the ka-boom, roughly speaking. And the yield can be adjusted not only by the amount of fuel, but how you want the explosions to go around the bomb, materials for guiding neutrons and so on. Fundamentally the problem is that these things blow up; the Sun is a hydrogen bomb of sorts going off constantly, but there's enough fuel there that gravity will keep it together for some time.
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Mar 25, 2022 05:43
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Mister Speaker posted:I guess the part that I just struggle to wrap my head around with these devices is the sheer timescale on which things happen. Am I correct in my understanding that it's a burst of gamma and x-rays from the fission trigger that hits the deuterium/tritium gas and turns it into a plasma, before the fission device is finished exploding? I'm just astonished by the idea that a device essentially powered by conventional explosives packed into a compact shape next to a cylinder of gas even works at all and doesn't simply disassemble itself every time. Gamma and x-rays travel at the speed of light, shock waves, neutrons and things like that are orders of magnitude slower. I dunno if that helps per se, but it's a bit like when a lightning strikes far away from you, you see the flash "long" before you hear the sound. (The things going boom inside a nuke are super-sonic, but either way.) e: quote:EDIT: Also, is it true what I've heard that hydrogen bombs can be scaled up with tertiary (or further) stages, theoretically infinitely? Theoretically doing some heavy lifting there, but yes, daisy-chaining the detonations could increase the yield to higher and higher magnitudes. Of course you wouldn't need anything bigger than something that'd literally break the Earth into pieces, at least until Elon manages to start up his slave colony on Mars. Rappaport fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Mar 25, 2022 |
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Mar 25, 2022 19:06
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John F Bennett posted:Will my video games still work after nuclear war? Do all Steam games work in offline mode? If not, hope you have your Turok CDs around somewhere!
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Mar 27, 2022 13:21
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Concerned Citizen posted:well if russia nuked a bunch of nato bases or military units with tactical nuclear weapons, the us would respond by nuking russian bases and military units with tactical nuclear weapons. the key would be communicating exactly what you're doing and saying you're going no farther unless russia goes farther, and that you seek to end the war as soon as possible. and that is probably exactly what russia would expect the us to do.  I'm... Not really sure this is how MAD works, on any level. Admittedly, despite some good effort from luminaries such as LeMay, we haven't exactly empirically tested what would happen if some sovereign nation or alliance thereof nuked another one with nuclear capability, but the whole idea of having nukes in the first place is that they're not meant to be used. That's why "tactical" nuclear weapons were such a boogaboo during the OG Cold War, because the idea of a limited nuclear exchange was actually against the interests of all parties involved, and even Reagan (sort of) understood this. Obviously no one rational wants a nuclear exchange, but if a rogue actor (which, according to the principles of MAD, any first-striker would be) started lobbing nukes around, there would have to be a response, but I'm not sure what makes you think there would not be a series of escalations, since the tit-for-tat-principle would dictate that whoever stops nuking first "loses" the exchange. And on top of that, even if by some miracle the POTUS up there managed to talk
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Mar 27, 2022 18:57
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Concerned Citizen posted:MAD doesn't mean one nuke automatically leads to a full scale response, and that's why tactical nuclear weapons are so dangerous - tempting to use because you think you can control the outcome, but it's such an enormous gamble and incredibly dangerous. Obviously no one should actually do this but I'm just saying it's not an off the wall concept and it's why Russia has so many tactical weapons in the first place. You do realize what the acronym stands for, right? I honestly don't understand where this scenario is coming from, why would Russia assume that, in an "existential crisis", it could somehow defuse the situation with a limited strike, and why would it assume that NATO would not retaliate with equal or greater force, since it is known that (or assumed by MAD, whichever you prefer) NATO possesses this capability? Do you really think Vova and sleepy Joe would have a pleasant chat over the red phones about how many missiles they're shooting at the moment, like two guys playing chess via letter correspondence?
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Mar 27, 2022 19:18
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D-Pad posted:You are correct that it's a dumb idea but Russia has been talking about an escalate to deescalate strategy for decades now where they would employ this exact strategy so just because we think it's unworkable doesn't mean it's not a thing they consider part of their toolbox. Right, but at that point we're outside the parameter space of MAD, and it's basically everyone winging it, so all bets are off anyway. I seem to be more concerned than the eponymous citizen about how that'd work out in real life, but then again I'm not responsible for anyone's nuclear arsenal.  Concerned Citizen posted:it would assume that nato would respond with equal or at least similar force, because it knows that nato knows it has second-strike capability. a full-scale nuclear response would be suicide, whereas a limited strike would give all sides the possibility of de-escalation. which is why the strategy is called "escalate to de-escalate." while a tactical nuclear attack is a "bad idea," russia could decide it is preferable to total defeat. this is a very important concept for russian deterrence since it is totally outclassed in a conventional war after the dissolution of the soviet union. I'm not sure how to engage with this confusion of ideas, to be honest. You seem to acknowledge in one paragraph that mutually assured destruction means what it says on the tin, but at the same time are arguing for solutions outside the confines of MAD. Which, well okay, if we are operating outside MAD, what makes you think that one or both sides in a nuclear exchange would consider a response of (relatively, I assume, I'm not sure how reliable estimates of collateral damage etc. could be made in timeframes of minutes) "a similar magnitude" to be the "reasonable" one, instead of going for the "rational" response that any state (or coalition) actor willing to use nuclear armaments has taken one step too far and their entire nuclear capability has to be nixed in the bud? The latter seems likely to evoke the MAD playbook response, and good night northern hemisphere technosphere I guess, but what is telling NATO forces that if they "only" nuke 5 Russian airfields like Russia just nuked 5 NATO airfields that the Russians won't escalate further, leading to the same end result? Not to mention that this scenario pre-supposes perfect coördination and discipline on all levels of both players' nuclear chain of command; if Russia actually had the "dead hand" system running, as depicted in Dr. Strangelove and possibly real life (!), how can NATO assume that "just" launching a couple of "tactical" nukes won't trigger the non-human MAD retaliation? I suppose a case could be made that the "rational" response to a nuclear attack outside the confines of MAD would be a devastating conventional assault instead, but this would also likely result in Russia escalating their nuclear strikes, and we're back to where we started. The entire concept of MAD fundamentally states that nuclear war must be made impossible to wage, via the threat of mutual destruction. As soon as we (or the Russians, in this case, evidently  ) begin looking at the conflict with a little nuking allowed, we are implicitly outside MAD. It seems bizarre to me to assume that a one-sided abdication of (essentially) agreed-upon balance wouldn't result in the other "player" attempting to re-level the playing field. No one wants a nuclear exchange, but no one wants to live on a globe with a rogue agent who seems willing to start said nuclear exchanges as if it weren't a potentially civilization-threatening action, either.
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Mar 27, 2022 20:41
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Current models say that Nuclear Winter is bullshit, so how would a massive catastrophic nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1983 effect, say, Argentina or New Zealand? It would still massively mess with climate (or weather in the short term, I suppose). I guess by the 80s everyone was of the opinion that air bursts were sufficient vehicles for delivering megadeaths, so you wouldn't get as much awful fall-out circling the atmosphere. Relatively speaking! On a different part of the globe you'd probably see more cancer rather than more immediate radiation damage. Of course the northern hemisphere would be totally screwed in many interesting and horrifying ways, and that'd still have secondary effects like massive disruption in food production, but the other hand, there'd be less people to feed globally. 80's stuff hasn't been declassified as much as very early, and therefore "outdated" in military terms, stages of the cold war, but it's not that hard to make educated guesses. Dr. Strangelove was a controversial movie when it came out, because they had "accidentally" gotten many actual details right! I think the film studio had to convince some military folks that they had not conducted espionage for the movie, but that might just be a myth. Anyway, global thermonuclear war is wasteful in the sense that due to the fixation on megadeaths, large population centers tend to make for popular targets, which isn't optimal if you're wanting to spread the damage around. And of course some of this is just due to the physical fact that hydrogen bombs are "inefficient" in the sense that so much of the blast is concentrated in the center of the boom, when someone wanting to optimize megadeaths might want to spread the damage around. So, cold war planners "outdid" their plans in the sense that you'd be lobbying around way more nukes than "necessary", mostly at cities, just to be absolutely sure. So, the northern part of the world would be obliterated, but less strategically interesting places would see, again relatively, less out-right destruction. Of course the immediate humanitarian disaster would still be unfathomable, as people not right in the kill zones would probably try to flee their freshly nuclear bombed countries to less hot locations, so to speak. How many would actually make it to remote locations such as NZ is anyone's guess, since even late in the 80's places like ports and airports, even civilian ones, were considered targets of high importance, so there might not be that many ships left lying around in the aftermath. But even from Europe and the USSR, one could conceivably try to move the remaining populations around via land, or that at any rate the remaining populations would try to move themselves, since they'd get hungry and sick, and so on. It's a bit like climate change: It sucks, is horrifying, but it's not literally going to destroy the entire ecosphere. Technological civilization in the nuked areas would be severely impacted, with all the associated effects on populations (mostly people, but a lot of pets would get eaten, etc., too). So it's sort of the end of the world, but also not as literally as one might imagine. Disclaimer: I also think global thermo-nuclear war is a horribly bad idea, do not try this at home under any circumstances, etc. Rappaport fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Apr 11, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 12:52
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Outrail posted:Yeah nice try you're just trying to keep all the thermo-nuclear war to yourself. Well Steam does tell me I have a couple hundred hours in Twilight Struggle, but the aim is to try and not have a global thermo-nuclear war. Or at least get the other guy to take the blame.
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Apr 11, 2022 14:42
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I'm European, so I just take it for granted that one or both sides of the Cold War would've thrown nukes my way. I wonder how you'd go about nuking some place like Australia, in terms of targeting. There's large cities, but there's also so much land where people could live. The point of total nuclear war is sort of by definition destroying everything for the sake of destruction, because theoretically that keeps the other guy from nuking you first. So does Australia make the list? NZ? I guess in a multi-polar world it'd be more likely that some war planners somewhere would want to nuke everything around them, rather than just "the West" or "the East".
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Apr 11, 2022 15:09
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:That description of Australia also applies to the US and Canada, who are definitely on any soviet/russian nuke list. Hell the same applies to Russia too- probably 3 US/UK/FR missiles are absolutely levelling the relative wastelands of the Northern Fleet's district for every one in Moscow Oblast if full MAD nuclear exchange happened. For better or worse Australia and NZ (and Japan and South Korea and maybe Taiwan too) are in Team USA when you're planning for apocalypse. They're getting pasted if Europe is. Fair enough, at least back in the 80's they certainly had the missiles to spare, on both sides.
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Apr 11, 2022 15:49
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Volmarias posted:All this just reinforces my decision to live somewhere that's going to be vaporized in the initial moments of a nuclear exchange. If I cannot poo poo post, what is even the point of my life? As morbid as this thought is, I've sometimes tried to figure it out as well. I live in a metropolitan area, sure, but the main targets (presumably) would be a few kilometers around me, so would I get blasted sufficiently quickly, or die from the building crumbling around me? Those nuclear yield calculators seem to suggest a firm "maybe" as the answer. Not that I think my main concern is getting nuked per se, but it's something to think about if sleep isn't forthcoming!
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Apr 11, 2022 18:21
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Mister Speaker posted:Not really tho? Maybe I'm not reading between the lines enough here, but at the risk of being pedantic I want to again bring up something that I read that resonated strongly, I think it was written by someone who worked on targeting strategy during the Cold War: "We don't target cities. We target infrastructure, much of which happens to be in cities." Yeah, sure, I'm not arguing that cold war planners were somehow inherently more monstrous than their bombing counter-parts in earlier conflicts, it's just that their job was by its nature horrific and very anti-humanitarian. In a way, at least, of course the madness of MAD sort of says that you have to posture as a monster to avoid the actual unwanted "result" of nuclear war. "Just think of the real estate!" Stanislaw Lem raised the question how moral a society can be when its most vaunted experts raise the number of their potential victims to the eight and ninth powers of ten, but few wars have been very nice. I would argue a little bit that the logic of MAD does sort of expect everyone to at least try to maximize their megadeath dispersal power, but as you and other posters have said this is sort of inevitable anyway. The whole point, from the "moral" stance, is that nuclear war should be so horrific that it makes war impossible. That didn't work with dynamite, but we've not sent the thermo-nuclears flying, yet. One interesting question raised by a few thinkers is what would have happened if USSR didn't collapse, and an actual arms race in space would have occurred. That would, in theory, enable proxy wars with few if any direct human casualties, but the counter-point is that we (as a species) would fill the sub-lunar sphere, and then potentially most of our immediate surroundings in space, with all sorts of anti-satellites, anti-anti-satellites and so forth until space was in a perpetual state of war. But I guess that proved just too expensive with the technology of the day. Oh, and on the topic of efficiency, a superior weapons technology, which mercifully the laws of physics seem to prevent, would be a thermonuclear device that instead of a spherical explosion "spread out" its pay-load like a sheet of stellar temperature tin foil, neatly destroying both human life and real estate from a huge area with just the required amount of death-spreading energy reserved for each man, woman, child and train car. Hypothetically.
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Apr 11, 2022 18:52
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Mister Speaker posted:To me the real scary fact about nuclear weapon design (which unfortunately the laws of physics DO allow) is something I'd heard and asked for clarification about earlier: Thermonuclear weapons can be daisy-chained into multiple stages, and in this way there is no theoretical upper limit to their yield. We all know the Tsar Bomba was downtuned to 50MT, just think about what crazy single 500MT doomsday device the Russians (or your bad guy of choice) could have made if they were truly intent on the "gently caress with me and I'll crack the planet in half" angle. It's technically true, I don't think anyone's tried making one of those "planet-busters", and part of the reason why Tsar Bomba was scaled down was that they figured the pilots wouldn't survive the full 100 MT blast. Though knowing Soviet views, this also may be a myth. Be that as it may, it's still "wasteful" in the sense that the blast is more or less spherical, but if one is content to just cram enough fuel in there, well. But at that point you're, as you say, making a literal suicide bomb intended to at least disrupt the mantle, which would also have unfortunate effects on human and animal life, among other things. That's not really war in any meaningful sense of the term, but it does seem like a good deterrent, assuming you'd get your opponents to believe you'd either use it yourself, or couple it to a "dead man's hand" system.
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Apr 11, 2022 22:18
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Outrail posted:We should deploy one of those planet busters against Mercury or Pluto or some other trash tier planetoid so the others know their place. Good news, everybody!  quote:Project A119, also known as A Study of Lunar Research Flights, was a top-secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon, which would help in answering some of the mysteries in planetary astronomy and astrogeology. If the explosive device detonated on the surface, and not in a lunar crater, the flash of explosive light would have been faintly visible to people on Earth with their naked eye. This was meant as a show of force resulting in a possible boosting of domestic morale in the capabilities of the United States, a boost that was needed after the Soviet Union took an early lead in the Space Race and was also working on a similar project. They chickened out, though.
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Apr 12, 2022 15:24
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Some early probes pretty literally just crashed on the celestial body in question, that's sort of like bombing, maybe Russia could manage that
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Apr 12, 2022 18:55
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Well, upsetting the mantle would take a hefty blow, but for comparison, the Chicxulub event has been estimated to have been around 70 teratons, which is only what, five orders of magnitude from the theoretical yield of Tsar Bomba? But again, constructing one of these babies is very much in the realm of theory. Until someone tries I don't think anyone has been suggesting that current ICBMs could be used to literally crack the Earth.
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Apr 22, 2022 06:09
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I wonder if the US could weaponize California and just dump that baby into the ocean with a suitable chain of underground bombs along the fault line? Although I guess the enormous waves would have to cross the entire Pacific, so a lot of the energy would be wasted 
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Apr 22, 2022 08:03
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In a world where Jeff Bezos exists, I'm not convinced we can argue that Lex's plan would be considered a bridge too far. And Lex has a better hair-cut, too.
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Apr 24, 2022 00:37
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In a surprise twist, the emus breed by the same mechanism as the, erm, aliens in Aliens do. Do not mess with these emus.
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Jun 29, 2022 18:03
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In case people are still interested in the mid-long-term effects of a global nuclear exchange, there's a new paper in Nature Food that looks at food output as a function of dust spewed into the atmosphere in various hypothetical scenarios. I haven't had time to look at their methods thoroughly, but they've sure managed to make some  graphics. The article is open access, so have fun! Discussion posted:In conclusion, the reduced light, global cooling and likely trade restrictions after nuclear wars would be a global catastrophe for food security. The negative impact of climate perturbations on the total crop production can generally not be offset by livestock and aquatic food (Fig. 5a). More than 2 billion people could die from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia (Table 1).
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Aug 15, 2022 22:25
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Mister Speaker posted:Ah right, I actually knew about the difficulty in producing nukes but it totally slipped my mind. I guess it would be immediately very obvious to outside observers then, if KSA started making steps towards a weapons program. Unfortunately, all of the "axis of evil" rhetoric made for a really good point why small states like North Korea would want a nuclear weapon. It doesn't really make them more scarier than they already were, since you can just bomb Seoul down to rubble with conventional bombs too. But, once you start throwing the word nuclear around, it's a lot more menacing. Practically speaking, there isn't a lot the international community can do against nations who are really keen on making a nuclear weapon. Back during the Cold War the CIA had a list of nations who could "in general terms" manufacture a nuclear bomb out of scratch within a three-month timetable, and this included pretty much everyone in the industrialized world. No one really wants to be a nuclear power though, since it generally speaking just makes you look like a huge rear end in a top hat. I guess the French are an exception to this, since they enjoy being assholes. But all the same, it doesn't really make sense for Switzerland to manufacture a nuclear weapon or three just for the sake of having it, since it only brings in negative things to their already stable foreign policy calculus. What might surprise you to know is that the obscure and small nation of Sweden was well on their way to having nuclear bomb capabilities, you know, in case they ran out of Finns to keep the Soviets at bay 
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Aug 27, 2022 08:37
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Wheeljack posted:A clandestine nuke is of little use as a military deterrent though, and that’s the primary reason to have one. North Korea and Iran want one to say “hands off our territorial integrity.”  What use is a weapon system if you tell no one about it?!
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Aug 30, 2022 01:05
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I wonder how 150Mt of soot compares to the stratospheric aerosols of a major volcanic eruption. Krakatoa put about 90Mt into the atmosphere in 1883, and that doesn't seem to have really done much. Rappaport posted:In case people are still interested in the mid-long-term effects of a global nuclear exchange, there's a new paper in Nature Food that looks at food output as a function of dust spewed into the atmosphere in various hypothetical scenarios. I haven't had time to look at their methods thoroughly, but they've sure managed to make some Sorry for quoting myself. Though the article looks at fairly large soot amounts, not "just" obliterating a single nation.
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Sep 23, 2022 23:13
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wins32767 posted:The generals aren't the issue  quote:Curtis LeMay (1906-1990) was a United States Air Force general.   Though LeMay was a general in a military that was still somewhat de-coupled from the civilian administration, presumably Putin has purged the Russian military from independent thinkers of this calibre.
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Oct 1, 2022 02:53
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Volmarias posted:He genuinely thought he could, but a number of factors changed the outcome dramatically I would add to this a very surprisingly unified EU/Europe willing to sanction Russia and Putin's friends, and pour war material into Ukraine to help them fend off the genocidal Russians.
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Oct 12, 2022 17:47
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Cicero posted:He's a moron that likes authoritarian strongmen, which is why people believe he wouldn't have come down nearly as hard on Russia as Biden has. Since this is the less than serious war thread: Okay, you've got a point with the strong men, but Trump's also infamous for calling McCain a "loser", and how Trump likes "people who don't get captured" or whatever. You know, since McCain was a POW. Now, after about a month, Zelenskyy was both alive and active, and Vlad was getting his poo poo kicked in by the courageous Ukrainians. Who would win in the pinball death match inside Trump's head, the  strong-man loser Vlad who won't even ride bears anymore, or that handsome bearded fella Zie Lentsky who looks buff in his tee-shirt?Of course the real answer is 
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Oct 13, 2022 20:28
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Pleasant Friend posted:In practice it would be just an extention of MAD theory, which is prevention. The US, speaking through backdoor channels, making clear to Russia if they escalate to nukes here there will be a proportional response elsewhere. Your second line seems to explain why even you don't actually think it works this way, but where did you learn MAD? Even Nixon, while posing as a crazy person (or was he  ) bombed Cambodia because the generals felt that had some military value. And that was conventional war!
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Oct 14, 2022 05:08
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Sucrose posted:If Putin knows for sure that setting off a nuke in Ukraine won’t win him anything there, then he won’t consider it. I mean, maybe? Historians haven't been able to pin-point exactly when Hitler figured he couldn't win the war, but some credible guesses put it as early as '43. At any rate, by January '45 he knew he was just playing for time before his suicide. Setting aside that we can't really figure out who is more loony-toons between Adi and Vova, Putin set out on this crazy quest of his (among other things) to cement his legacy and postmortem image. If any peace deal will look to him like he'd lose out on his grasp on power, and potentially get him placed behind bars or defenestrated, he might as well just go all out. Of course this brings us back to how the Russian nuclear chain of command actually works, and whether this would just get Putin defenestrated anyway, since he hasn't set his palace of cronies up quite as well as Hitler did, but still.
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Oct 15, 2022 23:11
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Mister Speaker posted:Right OK this is a part I'm still wondering about - so it's density and not necessarily size that makes a mass of fissile material go supercritical correct? And the core of a bomb is one piece of the stuff that just gets compressed, literally squeezed smaller, by the blast wave? I was sort of under the impression it was slices of a sphere suspended apart by something like styrofoam getting slammed together into supercritical by the blast wave. The requirement for the fission chain reaction to go critical is that the neutrons released by fission events are sufficiently likely to meet a friendly heavy atom (its nucleus) to make whopee with, blowing apart that nucleus and releasing some more neutrons looking to get friendly. The neutrons go about their business in a random walk, so what you can do is increase the density (number of nuclei per volume element) of the fissile material, use neutron reflector materials around the thing you're trying to make go boom, etc., and you have to do it fast. Rapidly imploding a sphere of plutonium is one of the easier ways (nb. not that easy, shaped explosions are hard) to get a decent amount of the fissile stuff fissioning before the chain reaction tears itself apart and makes that beautiful mushroom cloud we've all learned to not worry about. The gun type that was mentioned earlier "just" puts two sub-critical lumps of fissile material into one another, making a critical whole, but it turns out that this tends to blow itself apart faster than the squeezed up version, so it's less efficient. It also weighs more, since the squeeze method requires less nuclear fuel to, erm, squeeze, to get to a critical mass than having two regular-density-lumps being shoved together would. The fusion part is a different kettle of fish; the fission part is the (nuclear) detonator, whose purpose aside from a big boom is to heat up its immediate vicinity hot enough that fusion becomes energetically affordable. Then you have stuff like tritium in there to fusion, and you get an even bigger boom, straight out of the same stuff that makes our Sun grow all those pretty flowers and trees. Ain't nature beautiful?
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Oct 22, 2022 08:24
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That article is a bit odd, starting out with the binding energy it seems like they're examining a gedankenexperiment of turning the Moon to a monatomic dust or something? Never mind that just having loads of Tsar Bombas around wouldn't do that in the first place.
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Oct 22, 2022 18:16
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Sucrose posted:Yeah, I’m worried they’re gonna set off a really low-yield nuclear bomb on Ukrainian territory and then claim that Ukraine did it as a false flag attack, maybe not so much for strategic reasons but to get their foot in the door on the use of nuclear weapons. I realize we're both now thinking about this harder than Putin has or ever will, but from whom would Ukraine supposedly have obtained the bomb? The US?
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Oct 26, 2022 08:23
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Shooting Blanks posted:the Soviet Union stored nuclear weapons in Ukraine at one point. I don't know if it was strictly storage or if they had any kind of launch/assembly facilities, but it's possible that poo poo got left behind during the fall and missed/forgotten about during the Nunn-Lugar dismantling. I'm not saying it happened or even that it's likely (I have no idea), but that's the only possibility I see. The joke here is that Ukraine got rid of their nukes in exchange for guarantees from both the "west" (the US and UK) and the "east" (Russia) that their sovereignty would be respected. Womp womp! Obviously the idea of a Ukrainian false flag whatever attack is a fever dream from the bargain bin Goebbelses working in the Kremlin, but for Ukraine even on paper to detonate a "low-yield nuke" would require them having one in the first place. I guess Kremlin saying they bought one from NATO or Israel is no more or less preposterous than saying Ukraine hid some in the 90's, or made one between 2014 and 2022 Point being, it's dumb and the UN would laugh in Russia's face.
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Oct 26, 2022 16:03
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Volmarias posted:The argument would be for domestic consumption, not international consumption. And, we all thought the same thing in the beginning, because starting a war in Ukraine was objectively dumb and everyone knew it, but he did it anyway, so at this point there's no "that's too dumb to possibly happen" scenarios. I guess, but to trot around the tired comparison, around January-February '45 Hitler's main "paladins" (Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, Göring) were plotting their lives beyond the demise of Adolf and the Third Reich. Putin might try to lash out in increasingly stupid ways, but it remains to be seen whether he's managed to make his immediate circle as assassination-reluctant as Hitler did. And to turn it on its head, if it is solely for domestic consumption (and isn't the trope that the Russian population is largely apathetic and/or inundated with propaganda already), would they need a "small nuke" or a dirty bomb, when their own media could just say Ukraine used one? The decadent West is full of lying homo-nazis, who are you going to believe here?
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Oct 26, 2022 18:52
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Volmarias posted:The difference in level of reaction will be extremely different between saying something and doing it. Actually using a nuclear weapon has been declared an unacceptable line to cross. A dirty bomb might be treated like a chemical attack aimed at civilians, although IIRC NATO said that nuclear contamination crossing their borders would be considered an attack. Right. If Vova just wants his domestic audience to think that Ukraine has unleashed Azov nazi isotopes in the struggle against the might of Russia, it would make a lot more sense (relatively speaking) to simply state it in their propaganda stream, not detonate a "low yield nuke" in Ukraine, which was the hypothetical that launched this particular conversation. (I keep putting "low yield nuke" not in scare quotes but to emphasize that this was the phrasing used in Sucrose's post. Dirty bombs are not low yield nukes!) The hypothetical about Putin's inner circle I was going for was the scenario where Vova says to commit some personal version of a nuclear stage exit. NATO diplomacy efforts in the past months have gone in some amount to informing lower levels of the Russian state apparatus that any use of nuclear weapons would be a big, international no-no, and I don't mean just ol'sleepy Joe going on teevee to say that. If NATO has successfully informed lower level operatives, whoever they might be, that this line of behaviour would result in major retaliation that has a reasonable chance of harming the welfare of said operatives, their families etc., then they'd have clear personal incentives to obstruct Putin, and this seems to me a function of the level of desperation all around. We can even assume that no one sufficiently high up the chain(s) of command has a vested interest in the existence of the Russian Federation as an entity, and this calculus isn't significantly altered. As you say, the counter-balance is whether Putin's security forces are seen as an immovable obstacle (which invited the comparison to the Reichsführer-SS), and obviously it's impossible to gauge from the outside whether the gangsters around Putin are capable of a concentrated effort to remove him.
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Oct 26, 2022 20:36
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Look, it's really simple. If I don't use my massive arsenal of thermo-nuclear bombs to blow up the Moon into smaller chunks, inevitably causing a good portion of them to fall back on Earth creating awesome tsunamis and a climate catastrophe to end technological civilization, how will the Moon know it crossed my red line? Think, man, think!
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Oct 29, 2022 18:52
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fnox posted:I don't think its an exaggeration to say that the risk of nuclear war is at the highest it has ever been. But somehow we're not certain it will be the planet ending thermonuclear war, unlike how it was for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Intentional nuclear war, at any rate. From what we know, the closest shaves we've historically had have been various human interventions to automated systems suggesting to one side or the other that the enemy has launched, proceed with thermonuclear war [ ] y [ ] n? So far, people have opted for n. But a "limited" nuclear exchange is worrisome in a different way, since it sends a bad message if the 'international community' doesn't retaliate to someone lobbing just one or two nukes onto any target.
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Nov 1, 2022 10:57
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I'm running out of shelf space already! How small is the smallest nuke?
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Mar 2, 2023 10:30
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Capt.Whorebags posted:The USAF "unmanned shuttle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37 has had orbital missions of two and a half years, just cruising around low earth orbit. Ink on a page and all that, but I think that'd violate the Outer Space Treaty. On the other hand, there's fun Stanislaw Lem stories about what could happen when the arms race goes to space!
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Mar 3, 2023 01:11
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