Trump wants to nuke hurricanes!

[Anomalocaris]

Not only a hurricane would be impervious to a nuke, the hurricane would carry dangerous fallout more efficiently. What's next? Arm sharks with chainsaws?

Well, I suppose nuking hurricanes could potentially be a good idea... if your goal was more efficiently destroying the human race. Which, at this point, might not be too bad an idea given that we’ve degenerated to the point where Trump actually won the highest office in the land (even if it was through Russian interference) and there’s a very real chance that we’ve already reached the point of no return on global warming.

Seriously, does nobody seem to grasp the whole “nuclear explosions=shittons of radioactive fallout after the initial explosion” thing? A nuke is not just an extremely effective explosive. The same force that causes that cool looking mushroom cloud spreads radioactive material across a certain radius of where the bomb went off (one type of this is called fallout), and given that Trump would be doing this to a hurricane, A MASSIVE FORCE OF WIND, that radius is going to be really fucking huge. If I sound condescending, that’s only because this is such a stupid idea that it needs it.

Not to nit pick, but fall out from nuclear weapons is to a substantial degree the artifact of the military requirements governing the design.    If the goal is to simply dump a lot of energy into the atmosphere using nuclear explosives to disrupt hurricanes, then it would be efficient to simply build very large devices with the highest possible explosive yield, much higher than most practical military weapons.   The physics of staged fusion explosive devices is such that the more powerful the device, the cleaner one could make it relative to its yield.    A 50 MT device can be far cleaner than 50 1 MT devices, and positively squeaky clean next to 2000 Hiroshima sized bombs, even though they would all dump the same amount of energy into the atmosphere.    So it is not necessarily true that very powerful nuclear explosive devices designed from the outset for non-military purposes needs entail high levels of radioactive fallout.

Besides understandable sensitivity to detonating nuclear devices for any purpose, the fundamental reason why using nuclear devices to stop hurricanes is stupid is any practical devices that can be delivered into the eye of a hurricane won't be nearly powerful enough to make a much of dent on a powerful hurricane.  

So just a factual correction

[Rev. Rye]

Okay, so looking at the Tsar Bomba, the only 50 MT nuke ever made, some salient facts:

• It was so big that the deploying plane needed to have its bomb bay doors and fuselage fuel tanks removed.
  
• The fireball (with a diameter of 5 miles) never reached the ground, due to the shockwave, and reached the same altitude as the deploying plane
  
• To give the pilots a 50% chance of survival, the bomb was given a small parachute to buy them time before the bomb went off, and the creation of this parachute disrupted the Soviet nylon industry. 
  
• Everything in a 35 kilometer radius of ground zero was destroyed.
  
• Admittedly, the fallout was limited, due to a highly efficient detonation (the effects of hurricane winds might compensate for any particular safety measures that ensured this the first time.)
  
• The 50 MT yield wasn't even the full projected yield, with a potential 100 MT yield possible. If detonated, it was calculated that "The effect of this bomb at full yield on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%."
  
• There is a general consensus that a 50 MT nuke is too big to be useful.
  
• The detonation of the Tsar Bomba was one of the major catalysts of the 1963 Partial Test Ban.
  
• The biggest nuke ever detonated by the US, the Castle Bravo test, only had a yield of about 30% that of the Tsar Bomba.
  
• The biggest nuke we have at the moment, the B83, is about 2.4% the yield.
  

I'm still kind of dubious that a bigger nuke could potentially be cleaner.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Fallout isn't a product of the design of a bomb, it's material that has been irradiated in the blast.

[Anomalocaris]

Fallout isn't a product of the design of a bomb, it's material that has been irradiated in the blast.

It is the product of bomb design.  Most of the fallout material derives from the material in the bomb, where the radiation is by far the most intense at the moment of the fission or fusion reaction.   Different atomic nuclei under the radiation converts to different isotopes, some more radioactive, some less so.  Their presence can also alter the total yield of the nuclear explosion itself.  Military weapons specifically select different temper material to put in the bomb to adjust or boost the the yield within a compact size, and also to directly increase radioactive fall out.    In fact there are military weapons specifically designed to achieve the maximize fall out for a given explosive yield not only of just any radioactive material, but the most dangerous radioactive material whose half life is the ideal compromise between being very dangerously radioactive and being radioactive long enough to keep effected area contaminated for years. 

The so called colbalt bomb is one such example.   Cobalt bomb is a two stage hydrogen bomb with temper material added to produce copious amounts of radioactive cobalt during the explosion which will then come down as fall out.   Cobalt is particularly nasty because it is highly radioactive, readily absorbed by the human body, and stays radioactive for a relatively long time.    The Russians claim to be building a 100 MT cobalt bomb.  They say they are doing this to get around america’s Missile defence.  They plan to deliver the warhead using giant nuclear powered robotic torpedos that would creep silently over weeks or months past any ASW defense to detonate off enemy coastal cities.   Calculations show if such a bomb detonates off New York in the right season it would drop enough fallout down to Miami to make the entire eastern seaboard uninhabitable for several decades.

---

Okay, so looking at the Tsar Bomba, the only 50 MT nuke ever made, some salient facts:

• It was so big that the deploying plane needed to have its bomb bay doors and fuselage fuel tanks removed.
  
• The fireball (with a diameter of 5 miles) never reached the ground, due to the shockwave, and reached the same altitude as the deploying plane
  
• To give the pilots a 50% chance of survival, the bomb was given a small parachute to buy them time before the bomb went off, and the creation of this parachute disrupted the Soviet nylon industry. 
  
• Everything in a 35 kilometer radius of ground zero was destroyed.
  
• Admittedly, the fallout was limited, due to a highly efficient detonation (the effects of hurricane winds might compensate for any particular safety measures that ensured this the first time.)
  
• The 50 MT yield wasn't even the full projected yield, with a potential 100 MT yield possible. If detonated, it was calculated that "The effect of this bomb at full yield on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%."
  
• There is a general consensus that a 50 MT nuke is too big to be useful.
  
• The detonation of the Tsar Bomba was one of the major catalysts of the 1963 Partial Test Ban.
  
• The biggest nuke ever detonated by the US, the Castle Bravo test, only had a yield of about 30% that of the Tsar Bomba.
  
• The biggest nuke we have at the moment, the B83, is about 2.4% the yield.
  

I'm still kind of dubious that a bigger nuke could potentially be cleaner.

Large hydrogen devices achieve their yield by having multiple stages.   Only the very first stage necessarily produce substantial amount of material that are radioactive and long lived and this dangerous in fall out.   Subsequent stages don’t have to produce much if any additional long lived radioactive fall out.

The fact that actually nuclear weapons have more fall out than the minimum is by design, not necessity.

The czar bomba is too large to be useful as a military weapon to be delivered by bombers or ballistic missiles.  But if the goal is to heat air to stop a hurricane, the measurement of usefulness would be different.   Then the limit would probably be how big of a device can you physically deliver into high altitude in The eye of a hurricane far off shore and detonate without killing anyone.

Also, there are military uses for even larger bombs.  See cobalt bomb described above.

Nuclear weapon technology right now imposes no limit on how powerful a fusion explosive device can be.   One could arbitrarily add stages to a hydrogen bomb to achieve any yield desired. The practical limit is really how Unweirdly would the resulting device be.

[Rev. Rye]

I'm watching "Godzilla: King of Monsters" right now. Didn't know it was a documentary.

To be fair, the original Godzilla was inspired by the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident, wherein a Japanese tuna fishing boat got caught up in the Castle Bravo nuclear test (everyone survived but a radioman who already had cirrhosis, even if they managed to contract hepatitis as a result of blood transfusions that were part of the radiation sickness treatment.)





Speaking of fuck-ups, I discovered this: After Receiving Denial Letters, Immigrants Fear End Of Medical Deferral Program.

I seriously start to wonder if Trump does all this crazy shit, like talking about nuking hurricanes, to distract attention away from actions like sending immigrants back to their foreign nation even though they have life-threatening medical issues that their native lands can't treat, shit that would, in any other administration, be a Moral Event Horizon (at least if he didn't do it multiple times a week). You know what, Trump isn't Hitler. He's Idi Amin.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yeah, I knew all that back in the '70s. The secret base for Monarch is named "Castle Bravo".

---

And I'm currently watching "THEM", a much more direct "radiation mutation" warning movie.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"I never even knew a Category 5 existed...People have never seen anything like that."
-- Trump, 2017

"Never heard about Category 5's before, a Category 5 is big stuff...A category 5 is something that, uh -- I don't know that I've even heard the term, other than I know it's there. That's the ultimate, and that's what we have, unfortunately."
-- Trump on Hurricane Dorian, apparently not remembering Irma, Maria, and Michael, which also occurred during his presidency

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

"I never even knew a Category 5 existed...People have never seen anything like that."
-- Trump, 2017

"Never heard about Category 5's before, a Category 5 is big stuff...A category 5 is something that, uh -- I don't know that I've even heard the term, other than I know it's there. That's the ultimate, and that's what we have, unfortunately."
-- Trump on Hurricane Dorian, apparently not remembering Irma, Maria, and Michael, which also occurred during his presidency

Plagiarism!!  You'll be hearing from my solicitor.

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Public pronouncement by government officials are not subject to copyright in the US.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Public pronouncement by government officials are not subject to copyright in the US.

Curses.  Foiled again.

Boru