This was really when people started figuring out how bad fallout from thermonuclear bombs could be. General Fields described it most lucidly:
"If Bravo had been detonated in Washington, D.C., instead of Bikini, Fields illustrated with a diagram, that lifetime dose in the Washington-Baltimore area would have been 5,000 roentgens; in Philadelphia, more than 1,000 roentgens; in New York City, more than 500, or enough to result in death for half the population if fully exposed to all the radiation delivered. This diagram was classified secret and received very little distribution beyond the Commissioners." [1]
Image reproduced here [2].
Thermonuclear bombs are really terrifying. If one goes off and you're in the fallout zone do not go outside for at least 2 weeks. If you survive the initial blast you have about 10 minutes to get inside where you must stay. If you're still outside and it's 'snowing' ash you're already dead. More tips and tricks in [3].
Though these days, they say it's likely that a single individual or small group can have even worse impact from a basement bioterror lab.
>>If you're still outside and it's 'snowing' ash you're already dead.
Are you sure? Even from this article - Pacific Islanders came out and even licked the "snow" curious what it is, yet only a single death is attributed to it. Shouldn't they all have died if it's as bad as you say?
But moreover, many of those people likely died due to complications down the road. The US government has done a poor job of accurately tracking the deaths of even US service members years after their exposure to radiation. You might not die right then, but you'll live a significantly abridged life.
Fine. Correction: You *may be already dead, within 2 weeks from acute radiation syndrome. It does depend how close or far to the detonation site you are. If you're catching the first snow in the nearby vicinity of the detonation, then that's where you're in a fatal dose range, by my understanding. There may very well be snow far away that is less fatal.
During ABC (nuclear, biological, chemical) survival training in the army we were taught to dust off the snowflakes off each other as often as possible to maximize survival until the radiation zone could be left. I got the impression it was survivable for some amount of time.
The one recorded death was a Japanese citizen, which caused a diplomatic crisis. The Marshall Islands were occupied by the US and very remote, so it was probably easier to sweep any deaths that may have occurred in the local population under the rug...
Being fairly ignorant of this stuff, your comment made me check the location of bikini atoll. I had just assumed it was reasonably close to the USA but it might as well be south east asia's back yard compared to the distance across the pacific to the US. History and international nuclear testing rules aside, imagine the reaction from nations like China, Japan or Australia today if the US set off a 15 megaton thermonuclear reaction that close to them! 1954 was a different world.
Successive territorial claims to the Marshall Islands were made by Spain (first landing, 1526, formal claim, 1874), Germany (1885), Japan (~1911), and the US (1944), the latter two during World Wars Sr. & Jr., respectively.
Unlike many of its Pacific island posessions, the Marshalls were not aquired under the Guano Islands Act (which I'd suspected when seeing the above comment):
Hm. That's strange, because USSR's 57 Megaton Tzar-bomb had a negligible amount of radiation:
"Radioactive contamination of the experimental field with a radius of 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 mi) in the epicenter area was no more than 1 milliroentgen / hour, the testers appeared at the explosion site 2 hours later, radioactive contamination posed practically no danger to the test participants" [1].
One of the main differences is what the tamper is made out of (the casing). You need a material that is reflective to the X-rays used to compress the fusion fuel. In Castle Bravo, this was made out of uranium-238, in the Tsar bomb, it was made from lead. Using uranium boosted the power output by about 2x, at the expense of making the bombs far, far dirtier. The extreme heat and the high neutron radiation from the primary (a fission device) detonating would cause the uranium to decay into more unstable isotopes (U-235, Pu-239, etc.) which would then fission themselves.
The ideology at the time was that a larger blast was more important, since at the time nuclear weapons were still to be dropped by bombers (No ICBMs for another decade). You wanted the bomb to take out the target even if you couldn't quite reach it.
The Soviets estimated that using the same technique would have produced a yield of 100 Mt, but for testing, lead was used to limit the fallout to something they deemed manageable.
Air burst vs ground burst. As a good rule of thumb air bursts are fairly clean, ground bursts are very dirty.
About ten years ago Chinese general stated that in a nuclear war they would use a curtain of ground bursts on the Western coast of the US (and presumably also the UK) to destroy the population.
There are semi-classified maps from the late 50s which show that most of the UK would have been turned into a desert in an old fashioned fission bomb war. (They were posted online about fifteen years ago. I downloaded them but lost them in a drive crash.)
It's also known strategy to target power reactors with ground bursts to spread even more fallout and kill even more people for longer.
Anyone suggesting "Nuclear war - not so bad actually" is delusional.
That's only because it was airburst and the fallout dispersed in air.
Tsar Bomba was very clean relative to the yield.
Even then, it release more radionucleonides than any bomb before it (airburst). They limited the yield to 50 megatons, because fallout in Europe would have been catastrophic from a bigger 100 mt bomb that was allowed by the design.
Castle Bravo was a ground burst and produced a crater about 2Km across. The debris from the crater ended up as fallout.
Tsar Bomba was detonated at an altitude of 4Km, the shock wave prevented the fireball from reaching the ground and producing a crater, so it produced less fallout.
Most modern bombs can be tuned for the size of the explosion + the amount of fallout produced. Also the fallout heavily depends on how high up the bomb is detonated - detonate it close to the ground, then all the soil and debris gets irradiated and thrown into the air. Detonate it high up and you still get the destructive heat blast and shock wave, but not a whole lot of fallout.
Should you ever find yourself in a situation where this information is useful, there's the seven-ten rule of fallout radiation decay:
A book by Cresson H. Kearny presents data showing that for the first few days after the explosion, the radiation dose rate is reduced by a factor of ten for every seven-fold increase in the number of hours since the explosion. He presents data showing that "it takes about seven times as long for the dose rate to decay from 1000 roentgens per hour (1000 R/hr) to 10 R/hr (48 hours) as to decay from 1000 R/hr to 100 R/hr (7 hours)."[41] This is a rule of thumb based on observed data, not a precise relation.
I understand modern weapons actually use enriched uranium tampers, for even more fission. This lets them be even smaller for a given yield.
Gold has been proposed for radiological bombs due to production of 198Au, which decays with a halflife of 2.7 days and produces a 411 keV gamma photon. I understand the 5 MT W71 warhead contained a lot of gold, due to a desire to reduce fission product production to reduce radar interference (it was to be used in the Spartan ABM).
> In nuclear war, practically all detonations would be airbursts. They don't cause similar fallout.
No, definitely not. It really depends strongly on who your opponent is and what their strategy might be. And on whether they stick to their pre-anounced strategy. And how many exchanges (first, second, third strike) you might get to.
Generally, there are two strategies that are usually distinguished in US literature for leading a strategic (i.e. big, as opposed to small, tactical) nuclear war: counter-force and counter-value.
Counter-value means that your nukes target what values the enemy has by destroying enemy cities and the population and goods/industry/infrastructure in those cities. Destroying a large, non-reinforced, "soft" target like a city with humans in it is more efficiently done by airburst, because the overpressure/temperature effect is weaker but spread over a far larger area. Weapons also don't need to be that accurate, if you miss downtown Manhattan by a kilometer, it won't matter much. Most smaller nuclear powers, those with a no-first-use doctrine and those without accurate fast delivery systems (i.e. modern ICBMs or SLBMs) do rely on a counter-value strategy. The goal there is usually something akin to France: They aim to be able to kill more of the enemy population than there are French to kill.
Counter-force means that your nukes target the enemy military infrastructure, most prominently ICBM silos and command infrastructure. Usually this strategy calls for a preventative first strike with very accurate weapons that can destroy heavily reinforced underground structures surrounded by possible anti-missile systems. Meaning you have to hit the target with multiple ground bursts, quickly and as accurately as possible. Since you have only one try at this, some of your warheads might be shot down and some might miss by a few hundred meters, causing the crater to not destroy that ICBM bunker enough, there will be quite a few warheads on the way to each single silo. Meaning that this supposedly "humane" strategy will produce enough fallout to still kill a lot of the enemies population. One example would be https://www.nukestrat.com/china/Book-173-196.pdf p184, where a US counter-force strike against a Chinese missile silo site out in the sticks would kill between 5 and 20 million Chinese just from fallout. And of course, if your counter-force strategy includes command bunkers near capital cities (ground burst), nuclear submarine bases near other harbors (ground/sea burst) or larger military airports (air burst), you are bombing much closer population centers, also with mostly ground bursts. Most prominent in claiming a counter-force strategy is the US.
So most probably, if your opponent is the US, GB or Russia, you'll receive a large number of ground bursts in the first strike. Only if there still were an exchange after that, would there be any significant number of air bursts.
> If Bravo had been detonated in Washington, D.C., instead of Bikini, Fields illustrated with a diagram, that lifetime dose in the Washington-Baltimore area would have been 5,000 roentgens; in Philadelphia, more than 1,000 roentgens; in New York City, more than 500, or enough to result in death for half the population if fully exposed to all the radiation delivered.
If it were to, half of Washington-Baltimore would've been blown to pieces, and burnt to the ground first.
> If it were to, half of Washington-Baltimore would've been blown to pieces, and burnt to the ground first.
No way. Looking at NUKEMAP right now, a 15 megaton surface burst like Bravo, in the center of Washington, wouldn't even deal "heavy blast damage" much past the National Cathedral. Beyond that, you're looking at "moderate" blast damage sufficient to destroy wooden homes afflicting the rest of the District proper; once you're out past Laurel or so (a decent halfway point between Washington and Baltimore) you're not even breaking windows anymore.
It’s worth reminding people that the US still refuses to properly clean up or compensate the Marshall Islanders for this and the 66 other nuclear tests done on their islands.
The US did a half-assed clear up. They dumped tons of radioactive waste into a crater on Runit Island and capped it in concrete, which is now deteriorating.
The material outside the dome is hotter than the material inside the dome. I agree it was a half-ass cleanup, but OTOH dilution and time are wonderful things. The damage has already been done to the local marine life.
I know it's near trivial in comparison but I really understood the power of atomic weapons as a child when I read what happened to the Saratoga, namely the explosion lifted the ship out of the water, more like thrown it out of the water several meters high. How can anything lift a thirty seven thousand ton ship???
To be fair if you look at conventional weapons against ships most of them manage to lift ships out of the water (or just break them in half).
I think it was that "Not what you think" Youtube channel, saying that today weapon systems are powerful enough that there is no amount of armor that you can put on a ship that would protect it on a direct hit (so ships are actually becoming less armored and more agile to prevent being hit).
That's true at least with today's heavy torpedoes. They detonate under the ship, breaking its spine/keel. That will sink a ship. If a ship is properly buttoned up, damage controlmen are squared away, etc. most antishipping missiles will result in a mission kill, but not a quick sinking. Even without active intervention, ships stay up through quite a number of big hits in SINKEXs. However, Mark 48 torpedoes and the like are in a different class, and are generally what are used to bring the festivities to a close.
Of course, both torpedos and antishipping missiles can carry nuclear warheads, which rather changes the equation. When a friend worked the Outer Air Battle problem back in the day, a projected worry was a regimental-sized Blackjack raid firing AS-16 diving hypersonic missiles with at least some fitted with 300 kt nuclear warheads (AS-16 was/is the Soviet equivalent to the SRAM). Combine that with missiles from Oscar II submarines and Backfire bombers and you've got a party.
Even by WWII the futility of trying to armor-plate aircraft carriers like battleships was already recognized. The British put some armor on their aircraft carrier flight decks to give some defense against land-based bombers, but in the Pacific, neither the US nor Japan did this, leading to outcomes like Midway.
I think the description I read was something to the tones of throwing it in the air ten meters or so high, no traditional weapon is capable of that, not even close, not even today. Yes, it can be sunk, for sure but throwing a ship that big out of the water like that?
I don't know if anyone else pointed this out, but that fishing vessel got screwed over coming and going.
"The crew suffered acute radiation syndrome (ARS) for a number of weeks after the Bravo test in March. During their ARS treatment, the crew was inadvertently infected with hepatitis through blood transfusions."
The risk of an accident is much lower than the risk of full-on wars w/o them. Nuclear weapons are the reason I can raise my children in a relative peace.
> Nuclear weapons are the reason I can raise my children in a relative peace.
You can raise your children in relative peace because the social contract still holds. The fact that a neighbour you don't like hasn't walked into your house and shot everyone to death, has nothing to do with your goverment/military stockpiling nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons need to be dismantled or stored in neutral territory in case we encounter belligerent aliens.
Maybe. What if it is like forest fire prevention? The dead timber accumulates, and thus when an uncontained fire breaks out, it is 1000s of times worse as a result.
Fully managed forests, sometimes have controlled burns now, to prevent this.
Are nukes like this? Maybe, for tension can build, and build, and then?
Given the track history of near nuclear accidents, attempting to dismantle all of the existing ones may be statistically more likely to cause an accident, simply in the dismantling process.
I'm still mind bogglingly confused at how badly the San Onofre nuclear power plant got butchered that I really think there was sabotage involved. It's hard to believe what happened to the place is all because of sheer stupidity.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors do both leverage atomic nuclei, but they are pretty darn different. Dismantling nuclear weapons is unlikely to cause a radiological accident. Before nuclear detonation, nuclear weapons aren't all that radioactive. Nothing like post detonation.
You probably know this, but nuclear reactors, despite how well known various incidents are, are still among the safest, cleanest, and lowest carbon ways to make electricity we know [1]
Given the track history of near nuclear accidents, attempting to dismantle all of the existing ones may be statistically more likely to cause an accident, simply in the dismantling process.
Nuclear weapons don't last forever and need to be dismantled/replaced at some point, so dismantling them all doesn't add additional risk as long as it's done over a long enough period that they would have needed to be replaced anyway.
“Dismantling the nukes” doesn’t necessarily mean to monkey with the physical package. You can just change the alert level of the nuclear forces. Instead of paying man and women to operate the silos at hair trigger, you can pay them to move the warheads to storage where they protect them. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition.
Funny timing - I'm reading Topographies, a book of essays by Stephen Benz, and just last night I read a poignant one about visiting a WWII-era atomic testing site in the New Mexico desert. Looks like this link gets you to it in Google Books:
That's an interesting mistake. Fusion reactor designs today mostly target deuterium-tritium fuel, because it's the most energetic and easiest to get net power. They plan to breed the tritium from a blanket of lithium.
Based on this article, it sounds like the bomb scientists were using lithium deuteride fuel just as a solid form of deuterium, and didn't realize the lithium would breed tritium and fuel a more powerful reaction.
Now I'm wondering whether this unfortunate event was the seed for today's reactor designs.
They were expecting the lithium-6 to split and contribute to the boom. They were expecting the lithium-7 to be inert. They just didn't consider it worth the isotope separation work to use just lithium-6. Likewise, they didn't realize how much energy the U-238 jacket would add.
Readit News
"If Bravo had been detonated in Washington, D.C., instead of Bikini, Fields illustrated with a diagram, that lifetime dose in the Washington-Baltimore area would have been 5,000 roentgens; in Philadelphia, more than 1,000 roentgens; in New York City, more than 500, or enough to result in death for half the population if fully exposed to all the radiation delivered. This diagram was classified secret and received very little distribution beyond the Commissioners." [1]
Image reproduced here [2].
Thermonuclear bombs are really terrifying. If one goes off and you're in the fallout zone do not go outside for at least 2 weeks. If you survive the initial blast you have about 10 minutes to get inside where you must stay. If you're still outside and it's 'snowing' ash you're already dead. More tips and tricks in [3].
Though these days, they say it's likely that a single individual or small group can have even worse impact from a basement bioterror lab.
[1] Hewlett and Holl - Atoms for Peace and War around pg 181 (free pdf history book) https://www.energy.gov/management/downloads/hewlett-and-holl...
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/img/castle-bravo-if-on-dc.png
[3] Nuclear War Survival Skills (free pdf book) https://www.oism.org/nwss/
Are you sure? Even from this article - Pacific Islanders came out and even licked the "snow" curious what it is, yet only a single death is attributed to it. Shouldn't they all have died if it's as bad as you say?
But moreover, many of those people likely died due to complications down the road. The US government has done a poor job of accurately tracking the deaths of even US service members years after their exposure to radiation. You might not die right then, but you'll live a significantly abridged life.
LD50 for prompt exposure is 4-5 sieverts. 1 sievert of exposure translates to about a 1% lifetime cancer risk.
Now, if you're inhaling the ash that's another matter. At that point you're probably dead.
Deleted Comment
It was a very different time.
Ok..how different? What would Australia do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands#History
Unlike many of its Pacific island posessions, the Marshalls were not aquired under the Guano Islands Act (which I'd suspected when seeing the above comment):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act
"Radioactive contamination of the experimental field with a radius of 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 mi) in the epicenter area was no more than 1 milliroentgen / hour, the testers appeared at the explosion site 2 hours later, radioactive contamination posed practically no danger to the test participants" [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Test_results
The ideology at the time was that a larger blast was more important, since at the time nuclear weapons were still to be dropped by bombers (No ICBMs for another decade). You wanted the bomb to take out the target even if you couldn't quite reach it.
The Soviets estimated that using the same technique would have produced a yield of 100 Mt, but for testing, lead was used to limit the fallout to something they deemed manageable.
About ten years ago Chinese general stated that in a nuclear war they would use a curtain of ground bursts on the Western coast of the US (and presumably also the UK) to destroy the population.
There are semi-classified maps from the late 50s which show that most of the UK would have been turned into a desert in an old fashioned fission bomb war. (They were posted online about fifteen years ago. I downloaded them but lost them in a drive crash.)
It's also known strategy to target power reactors with ground bursts to spread even more fallout and kill even more people for longer.
Anyone suggesting "Nuclear war - not so bad actually" is delusional.
Tsar Bomba was very clean relative to the yield.
Even then, it release more radionucleonides than any bomb before it (airburst). They limited the yield to 50 megatons, because fallout in Europe would have been catastrophic from a bigger 100 mt bomb that was allowed by the design.
Tsar Bomba was detonated at an altitude of 4Km, the shock wave prevented the fireball from reaching the ground and producing a crater, so it produced less fallout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bombahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weaponhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
A book by Cresson H. Kearny presents data showing that for the first few days after the explosion, the radiation dose rate is reduced by a factor of ten for every seven-fold increase in the number of hours since the explosion. He presents data showing that "it takes about seven times as long for the dose rate to decay from 1000 roentgens per hour (1000 R/hr) to 10 R/hr (48 hours) as to decay from 1000 R/hr to 100 R/hr (7 hours)."[41] This is a rule of thumb based on observed data, not a precise relation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#The_seven-ten_...
The 7x intervals are:
- 7^1 (7) hours: 1/10 initial radiation
- 7^2 (49) hours, about 2 days: 1/100
- 7^3 (343) hours, about 2 weeks: 1/1,000
- 7^4 (2401) hours, about 2 months: 1/10,000
- 7^5 (16,807) hours, about 2 years: 1/100,000
7^6 is about 15 years, 7^7 is about a century.
The empirical data is based on values to 7^4 (two months). See:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/336049/can-the-7...
Castle Bravo had huge fallout for two reasons
1) It had natural uranium tamper that had very dirty reaction. Huge amount of radionuclides. Modern weapons use beryllium reflectors and gold.
2) It was ground burst in water. That white "snow" was coral. Neutron activaton of sodium in seawater makes things even worse.
Hydrogen bomb can be made cleaner than fission bomb. In fact bigger bomb, less fallout.
Gold has been proposed for radiological bombs due to production of 198Au, which decays with a halflife of 2.7 days and produces a 411 keV gamma photon. I understand the 5 MT W71 warhead contained a lot of gold, due to a desire to reduce fission product production to reduce radar interference (it was to be used in the Spartan ABM).
No, definitely not. It really depends strongly on who your opponent is and what their strategy might be. And on whether they stick to their pre-anounced strategy. And how many exchanges (first, second, third strike) you might get to.
Generally, there are two strategies that are usually distinguished in US literature for leading a strategic (i.e. big, as opposed to small, tactical) nuclear war: counter-force and counter-value.
Counter-value means that your nukes target what values the enemy has by destroying enemy cities and the population and goods/industry/infrastructure in those cities. Destroying a large, non-reinforced, "soft" target like a city with humans in it is more efficiently done by airburst, because the overpressure/temperature effect is weaker but spread over a far larger area. Weapons also don't need to be that accurate, if you miss downtown Manhattan by a kilometer, it won't matter much. Most smaller nuclear powers, those with a no-first-use doctrine and those without accurate fast delivery systems (i.e. modern ICBMs or SLBMs) do rely on a counter-value strategy. The goal there is usually something akin to France: They aim to be able to kill more of the enemy population than there are French to kill.
Counter-force means that your nukes target the enemy military infrastructure, most prominently ICBM silos and command infrastructure. Usually this strategy calls for a preventative first strike with very accurate weapons that can destroy heavily reinforced underground structures surrounded by possible anti-missile systems. Meaning you have to hit the target with multiple ground bursts, quickly and as accurately as possible. Since you have only one try at this, some of your warheads might be shot down and some might miss by a few hundred meters, causing the crater to not destroy that ICBM bunker enough, there will be quite a few warheads on the way to each single silo. Meaning that this supposedly "humane" strategy will produce enough fallout to still kill a lot of the enemies population. One example would be https://www.nukestrat.com/china/Book-173-196.pdf p184, where a US counter-force strike against a Chinese missile silo site out in the sticks would kill between 5 and 20 million Chinese just from fallout. And of course, if your counter-force strategy includes command bunkers near capital cities (ground burst), nuclear submarine bases near other harbors (ground/sea burst) or larger military airports (air burst), you are bombing much closer population centers, also with mostly ground bursts. Most prominent in claiming a counter-force strategy is the US.
So most probably, if your opponent is the US, GB or Russia, you'll receive a large number of ground bursts in the first strike. Only if there still were an exchange after that, would there be any significant number of air bursts.
Deleted Comment
If it were to, half of Washington-Baltimore would've been blown to pieces, and burnt to the ground first.
No way. Looking at NUKEMAP right now, a 15 megaton surface burst like Bravo, in the center of Washington, wouldn't even deal "heavy blast damage" much past the National Cathedral. Beyond that, you're looking at "moderate" blast damage sufficient to destroy wooden homes afflicting the rest of the District proper; once you're out past Laurel or so (a decent halfway point between Washington and Baltimore) you're not even breaking windows anymore.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=15000&lat=38.895&lng...
This is why they made films to teach kids to duck and cover. The bombs weren't survivable at ground zero, but most kids wouldn't be at ground zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runit_Island
I think it was that "Not what you think" Youtube channel, saying that today weapon systems are powerful enough that there is no amount of armor that you can put on a ship that would protect it on a direct hit (so ships are actually becoming less armored and more agile to prevent being hit).
Of course, both torpedos and antishipping missiles can carry nuclear warheads, which rather changes the equation. When a friend worked the Outer Air Battle problem back in the day, a projected worry was a regimental-sized Blackjack raid firing AS-16 diving hypersonic missiles with at least some fitted with 300 kt nuclear warheads (AS-16 was/is the Soviet equivalent to the SRAM). Combine that with missiles from Oscar II submarines and Backfire bombers and you've got a party.
"The crew suffered acute radiation syndrome (ARS) for a number of weeks after the Bravo test in March. During their ARS treatment, the crew was inadvertently infected with hepatitis through blood transfusions."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru
Said South Africa...
You can raise your children in relative peace because the social contract still holds. The fact that a neighbour you don't like hasn't walked into your house and shot everyone to death, has nothing to do with your goverment/military stockpiling nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons need to be dismantled or stored in neutral territory in case we encounter belligerent aliens.
Maybe. What if it is like forest fire prevention? The dead timber accumulates, and thus when an uncontained fire breaks out, it is 1000s of times worse as a result.
Fully managed forests, sometimes have controlled burns now, to prevent this.
Are nukes like this? Maybe, for tension can build, and build, and then?
Note: I don't know an alternative.
i don't except that this number is greater than 0. i hope the cia and the kgb know.
I'm still mind bogglingly confused at how badly the San Onofre nuclear power plant got butchered that I really think there was sabotage involved. It's hard to believe what happened to the place is all because of sheer stupidity.
You probably know this, but nuclear reactors, despite how well known various incidents are, are still among the safest, cleanest, and lowest carbon ways to make electricity we know [1]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Nuclear weapons don't last forever and need to be dismantled/replaced at some point, so dismantling them all doesn't add additional risk as long as it's done over a long enough period that they would have needed to be replaced anyway.
Have you any link to a good summary? The Wikipedia is interesting but doesn’t make us sound as malicious/scandalous as you suggest.
The idea that nuclear war are mad but lets keep normal wars seems really insane to me.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
https://books.google.com/books?id=PnfnDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT91&lpg=P...
It's remarkable how world-changing (and potentially world-ending) this technology is and how infrequently most of us think about it.
Based on this article, it sounds like the bomb scientists were using lithium deuteride fuel just as a solid form of deuterium, and didn't realize the lithium would breed tritium and fuel a more powerful reaction.
Now I'm wondering whether this unfortunate event was the seed for today's reactor designs.