Tag Archives: nukes

Video Of 1950s Nuke Exploding Over Five Officers

Posted by on July 18, 2012 Comments Off

In the late 1950s, Americans were starting to fear nuclear war. Of course, outside of the blast radius of a nuclear detonation, things are nowhere near as terrible as movies and popular opinion will have you believe. So in 1957, an Air Force Colonel got five other officers to agree to stand directly below a low-yield nuclear detonation, to prove that nukes weren’t as terrible as we are led to believe. Two fighters then flew over them and fired a nuclear missile which then detonated 18,500 feet above (not 10,000 as the video says), while one of the officers narrated the whole thing.

Two things that stand out are the amount of time it takes for the “ground wave” to hit them after the flash of the detonation (same effect as thunder arriving after lightning), and the point right after that, in which the sky turns black. The missile’s yield was a mere 2 kilotons — the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 16 and 21kt, respectively, and the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, yielded 50,000 kt. By comparison, the most powerful conventional (i.e., non-nuclear) weapon’s blast yield is only 0.044kt.

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From YouTube, via NPR

Nuclear Weapons Are The Most Effective Peacekeepers In History

Posted by on July 6, 2012 1 comment

Political scientist Kenneth Waltz wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs entitled Why Iran Should Get The Bomb (beware: it’s behind a paywall), which obviously drew a lot of attention. He was then interviewed by an Asian-Pacific magazine called The Diplomat, with whom he discussed the position that proliferation of nuclear weapons is actually a great idea. His main point: World War III never came. Since the end of the second world war in 1945 with the only wartime detonations of atomic bombs in history, the major world powers have enjoyed the unprecedented state of peace now known as Pax Americana:

On one hand the world has known war since time immemorial, right through August 1945. Since then, there have been no wars among the major states of the world. War has been relegated to peripheral states (and, of course, wars within them). Nuclear weapons are the only peacekeeping weapons that the world has ever known. It would be strange for me to advocate for their abolition, as they have made wars all but impossible. — Kenneth Waltz

He goes on to point out that the nuclear deterrent is so strong that even the most bitter of rivals — Soviet Russia and the US, Soviet Russia and China, Pakistan and India — have not risked going to war with each other and bringing about mutually assured destruction. Two countries that possess nuclear arsenals are forced to find peaceful solutions to their problems; and the inevitable skirmishes that happen are quickly resolved, lest they escalate into nuclear war. It’s hard to imagine World War II having happened if Poland and France had nuclear weapons.

 

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the dropping of "Little Boy"

 

In this light,  the main problem with states like Iran gaining nuclear weapons is not the risk of nuclear war, but the fact that it puts them on a more equal footing: we can’t invade Pakistan the way we did Afghanistan and Iraq, which makes nuclear states harder to bend to our will. (There is also the risk of something going wrong — computer malfunction, sabotage, theft — which could lead to a nuclear explosion, but presumably if a state is sophisticated enough to develop nuclear weapons, it’s sophisticated enough to secure them, too.)

Right now, Israel presumably has the bomb, is the only nation in the Middle East that does, and its military hegemony over the region is causing instability. If Iran were to also have nukes, the effect would ironically be to stabilize the the Middle East because neither state could act against the other — they would be at a stalemate. In contrast to Israel’s interests, that balance of power and the resulting stability is exactly what America wants: peace would keep the price of oil low, diffuse terrorist tendencies which arise from the hopelessness of ever winning a conventional war, and remove the need for American military involvement in the Middle East.

Of course, for this scenario to work without plunging the world into nuclear winter, it would require that all nuclear weapons be in the hands of sane people. Given the recent rulers of Iran and North Korea, that may not be a wise assumption.

From The Diplomat, via Slashdot

Map Of Nuclear Explosions

Posted by on August 5, 2011 Comments Off

There have been over 2,000 nuclear detonations on Earth since 1945. Of these, only two were during war (the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), with the rest being exploded for testing purposes. After the end of the Cold War, nuclear testing rapidly declined and the last tests took place in 1998 — with the exception of North Korea’s two tests, in 2006 and 2009. Between 1945 and 1998, there was an average of one nuclear bomb going off every week — 2,053 total tests. Most of these tests, especially since the 1960s, have taken place underground; the rest have been mostly atmospheric, but also underwater and 21 in outer space.

A Japanese artist made the very cool animated map below, which shows where and when each nuclear explosion took place. The first minute or so goes by pretty slowly but afterward, the calendar in the upper right hand corner moves forward one month every second, and there are counters for both the total global detonations and ones for each country. The total tallies are given at the end, but they differ somewhat from Wikipedia, so here are those figures:

  • USA: 1054 tests from 1945 to 1992.
  • Soviet Union: 715 tests from 1949 to 1990. Russia has not conducted any tests since the fall of the Soviets.
  • UK: 45 tests from 1952 to 1991
  • France: 215 tests from 1960 to 1996
  • China: 45 tests from 1964 to 1996
  • India: 6 tests, one in 1974 and five in 1998
  • Pakistan: 6 tests in 1998
  • North Korea: 2 tests, one in 2006 and one in 2009. But due to the small size of the explosions, it’s unclear if these tests were successful or even genuine.
  • Israel: possibly 1 test in 1979. There was a probable nuclear explosion in the Indian Ocean, between South Africa and Antarctica, known as the Vela Incident. If this was a nuclear explosion, the likely country responsible was Israel.

Some more interesting trivia on nuclear detonations:

  • The first hydrogen bomb was tested by the US in 1952, but it was not deployable until 1954.
  • The first nuclear detonation in outer space was also by the US, in 1958.
  • The largest detonation ever was done by the Soviets in 1961 and was more than 3x bigger than the largest American explosion.
  • In 1961 and 1962, the Soviets detonated the four largest bombs in the history of the world. The fifth largest was detonated by the US in 1954.
  • All nuclear states except for India, Pakistan and North Korea have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
  • There are now about 8,000 active nuclear weapons in the world, down from the high point of 65,000 in 1985.
  • Russia has the largest supply of active nuclear weapons at over 2400, the US is second with just under 2000 and France is a distant third with almost 300.

Video via Buzzfeed and Laughing Squid