Two years ago today, COVID fear-mongering began in earnest: “Two weeks to flatten...” Today’s talking heads revert to an older, more durable fear-mongering.
I am much more concerned about a starving, lawless, immoral populace in a collapsing civilization than I am of nukes. And we are seeing the beginnings of that collapsing civilization right now. I am choosing to focus on the real threat, and nukes are not it. Once again, all of this nuke crap is to make us forget what they have/are doing to civilization right now. IMHO. Stay alert. The monsters would love for us to forget what they've done over the last 2 years... and, unfortunately, it is working. Sigh.
Hmm... nuclear bombs were tested in the 1950s at Maralinga in South Australia (other places too, of course, but Australia is my own country) - and the dangers of the radiation was not understood for quite some time. Dignitaries used to go out to watch, on viewing platforms - and turn their back just before the explosion, since they did know that you would go blind by looking at the explosion directly. But the army guys would wander out in their ordinary shoes and clothing to inspect the aftermath... the fallout sometimes did drift all the way to Adelaide, and there was some gradual awareness that it was not good for you to touch, to breathe, to ingest in any way.
Like covid however, I am sure that whatever real danger exists (and I think there IS real risk) is being blown up to hysterical levels. And yes, used to keep everyone terrified and docile...
Nuclear weapons are very real and are very dangerous. They have not necessarily been left dormant. Nevertheless, the risk of nuclear war is low because the foundation of the Cold War stalemate of mutually assured destruction remains intact.
MAD is the official story, for sure. It maintains a stalemate very nicely. But doesn't it seem interesting that in all of these decades there has never been a nuclear weapon accident? If atoms collide all the time everyday, then wouldn't a collision of the many quintillion atoms in ordinary objects have done this at least once? The only nuclear accidents have been radioactivity leaks from power plants, and those with serious consequences.
Nuclear chain reactions are not created by one neutron hitting another. You Need a whole lot of them. The reason we haven't had accidental discharges, ever, is (1) everyone builds them with a lot of safety features, and (2) it's very hard to do. If it was easy, everybody would have one.
Nuclear chain reactions are initiated by a neutron hitting the nucleus of another atom and splitting it (fission). The theory is that this will liberate neutrons in the second atom, and send them careening perfectly into other atoms, bursting their nuclei as well. given the size of the atomic particles and their great distances, this was computed to be very unlikely.
Your 2nd point that everybody would have one: The convenience of assuming that the big powers must have great and fearsome weapons is too old a dogma to easily release, but is way easier to perpetuate that dogma than to actually live up to what Oppenheimer himself said couldn't work.
One neutron does not start the chain reaction. You need a lot of them in close proximity, what physicists call critical mass. In a safed bomb,, you don't have that. And weapons are dogma because they work. The biggest weapon has always won.
Opie said it wouldn't work because he didn't want it to work. An early version of misinformation. He became worried they would actually use it to win a war and prevent millions of GI deaths. He was unconcerned about the GIs, and unconcerned they started it. Too bad we didn't develop it sooner so we could have dropped one on Adolph. That would have saved a lot more GIs. Maybe if Opie was more enthusiastic, we would have.
Wish it were that easy. Workers have learned that the blue flash happens very quickly and they die afterwards even in a small accident. There are ~ 2-3 neutrons for each fission. Given enough proximity to the spontaneous release of neutrons a given amount of pure U-235 immediately becomes a hazard. U-235 spontaneously releases neutrons as it decays. One becomes many rather quickly. A R0 > 2, you might say.
Getting a quantity of U-235 is hard to do, very hard to do. Ask the Iranians.
Maybe the fact that 30 year-old nuclear eggs won't crack well are why the military is going towards biological weapons, easier to do clandestine tests.
This guy is so full of nonsense it's unbelievable. As one who was directly involved in some of the testing, it was quite real. The YouTube videos were digitized versions released to the public from archives at Sandia Labs. They are but a fraction of all those archives. Better yet the lights did go out in Hawaii as a result of a test and those EMP effects are still important.
You can "learn" all kinds of false things. Sometimes subtly false. The history of physics is full of this kind of thing. Anyway, nuclear bombs just aren't something one can confirm for oneself by experiment.
And you can avoid learning many true things. Many do.
You've probably never died, but probably accept it based on the vicarious evidence. Those who want to play with nukes can get trained and find one of the many jobs that do. Or you can just rely on the evidence.
Everyone is freaking out over last season's shoes!! DEW and EMP/EMF weapons are far more fashionable these days. All the cool countries have acquired these.
I wondered about this, so I asked a high school classmate of mine who was, incidentally, an actual rocket scientist (with the US Army). He said the following:
“The nukes in the bunkers, silos & submarines are real & ready to go. They are every bit as effective as advertised. Reentry vehicles are accurate to at least 100 meters.
What should concern you is that there are only 44 interceptors ready to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles. And we'd like to shoot two at each incoming warhead.
I don't think NK has reentry survivable reentry vehicles, much less accurate ones. I doubt Russia & China's are as capable as ours, but are plenty capable & sufficiently numerous.
As bad as anything is destruction of most any nuclear power plant could pollute the world.
P.S. I've been to ground zero at Trinity Site. That was an impressive event.”
Excellent, Dr. Huber. A while back I decided to stop living in fear (of dying/becoming ill). It changed everything, and made the lying fearmongering very obvious. Everyone is staring at screens all the time, letting themselves be constantly freaked out. I say call their bluff. Refuse the mask, what’s the worst that can happen? I appreciate your writings.
they were 2 for 2 in the 1940s with dumb drop weapons, 80 years later im sure they have improved their abilities.
my thoughts are not nuclear though they are biological, having read Ken Alibeks' book called biohazard (freely available in pdf https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/esmallpox/biohazard_alibek.pdf) i see the advantages to not just nations but other world actors.
The biggest Alamogordo explosion left a crater 5 feet deep and 30 feet wide. When reading that, I thought a bulldozer might do the same in a morning's work. The Nakatani book is quite interesting.
Radioactive fallout doesn't prove that fission occurred, just that fissile material was dispersed. Maybe those tests in fact were so-called "dirty bombs".
Fallout from testing is real, anyway. Caused a lot of cancer in the American West.
Well, it was about 10x larger than that, and it was a wee little 20kt bomb.
Anyway, your reasoning about the probability of neutrons hitting nuclei is okay as far as intuitive math goes, but neglects to multiply those small-sounding probabilities by the huge number of neutron sources in play when a mass goes critical or beyond. Working these numbers out is, I believe, undergraduate physics homework these days.
An open minded look but perhaps a bit if wishful thinking. These things are maintained, not gathering dust or rusting. Many nations have them. Are they all just shooting craps and saying.....these may work ? The destructuve power of what currently exists is way beyond what was used in WW2.
The bombs work and the DoD spends a lot of money to ensure that they keep working. The electronics decay along with the fissile materials. They are periodically replaced and upgraded. Even if only 10% work, that's still a whole lotta Armageddon goin' on.
May I suggest reading, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes and "The Los Alamos Primer" by Robert Serber to gain a basic understanding of fission bombs. The book "Dark Sun" by Rhodes will give you a basic understanding of fusion bombs.
Colleen: "this distance between the nuclei of adjacent atoms even in the same molecule is 7,400 times the width of the nucleus"
Which is why you need critical mass, which means a huge number of nuclei. When you have enough nuclei, each neutron is likely to hit something before it leaves. This is also why the shape matters.
The critical mass for U-235 is around 52 kg. One kg of U-235 contains around 4 x 10^25 nuclei. Do you see how that's a whole lot of mosquitos the neutron can hit?
If you remove the mosquitos (go below critical mass), then yes, the chain reaction fizzles.
If this does not work, then how does France generate 70% of its electricity with nuclear power? Nuclear power is all about balancing the chain reaction so it neither explodes, nor fizzles out.
"Each neutron is likely to hit something before it leaves." It is highly unlikely for one neutron to target so precisely, as in article. The fizzling happens, because the likelihood of a chain reaction of consecutive unlikely events approaches zero. Conditional probability of dependent events is P(1st event) x P (2nd event | 1st event) = unlikely x unlikely = all the less likely.
Colleen - either I'm not understanding correctly, or you're not understanding correctly. I'm pretty sure I understand these probabilities well.
You've been taken for a ride here, and taking a position on this discredits your other positions.
The probabilities here work like this:
P to hit something = (1 - P to not hit anything) = (1 - (0.999...999^N))
... where N is the number of nuclei that could possibly be hit on the neutron's way as it exits.
You can see that:
N=0 - no possible targets - impossible to hit:
P to hit something = 1 - (0.999...999^0) = 1 - 1 = 0
N=1 - one possible target - incredibly small chance to hit:
P to hit something = 1 - (0.999...999^1) = 1 - 0.999...999 = 0.000...001
But when you have critical mass, N becomes extremely large. This is because N scales with the number of nuclei, and critical mass is many nuclei in a favorable geometric arrangement.
If a hit causes 2 neutrons to emit, a critical mass is when N is large enough so that P=0.5. Then every neutron has a 50% chance to smash and emit 2 more neutrons, which is a nice chain reaction. Nuclear explosion is when P >> 0.5. A criticality accident is when briefly, P > 0.5.
There are on the order of 10^26 nuclei in a critical mass of U-235.
I would add here that if you do not understand this, this is so enormous, I would discredit everything you've ever done in science. You cannot comprehend a study if you don't get this.
Denis, you're out on quite a limb here. First, you discredit your argument by making ad hominem attacks, which everyone can see is a red flag for lack of substance in argument and risk of not being taken seriously. Second your zero entropy assumption is very tenuous, not based in physical or chemical reality. Further, your superstition that a nuclear explosion in the precisely programmed manner that you allege would definitely happen, has never worked in the advertised manner in the real world. That's fine that you believe it; I have no problem with you believing it. Obviously, no one wants such a devastating event as nuclear war to happen either. Everyone here is clearly glad that this has not happened. 3/4 of the humans and trees survived within a mile radius of the largest nuke to date, not later succumbing to radiation poisoning. This is not exactly what the American public has been told.
Also, your argument hinges on the assumption that if critical mass is big enough, then the worst will surely happen, and that a high-impact collision will ensure that it happens. I'm okay with you being certain of that. I am not, however, certain of that.
There are more logical fallacies in what you wrote:
"N=1 - one possible target - incredibly small chance to hit:
P to hit something = 1 - (0.999...999^1) = 1 - 0.999...999 = 0.000...001
But when you have critical mass, N becomes extremely large. This is because N scales with the number of nuclei, and critical mass is many nuclei in a favorable geometric arrangement."
That is fine, and there you have a possible first collision(s). For your chain reaction to succeed, it not only needs no weak links, no missed opportunities for nuclear fission at each step, it needs a long sequence of links. The threat of nuclear explosion rests on multiple unbroken chains initiating from each impacted nucleus, in an amplifying effect. This is not likely given the small fraction of area available for hits over misses, multiplied by the same low probability for successive iterations. Conditional probability applies due to the chain reaction that you allege.
Despite all of the alleged sightings throughout history, the Loch Ness Monster has still not trundled out of the lake and gobbled up the villagers. If people still want to believe it exists, because so many have said so all this time, that is fine, but I reserve my right to remain skeptical of the claims, even though there are furious people out there outraged that anyone would doubt their well-informed, widely acknowledged and sincerely made claims.
While I appreciate the reassurance, I'm not entirely sure I want to test the theory.
I am much more concerned about a starving, lawless, immoral populace in a collapsing civilization than I am of nukes. And we are seeing the beginnings of that collapsing civilization right now. I am choosing to focus on the real threat, and nukes are not it. Once again, all of this nuke crap is to make us forget what they have/are doing to civilization right now. IMHO. Stay alert. The monsters would love for us to forget what they've done over the last 2 years... and, unfortunately, it is working. Sigh.
Totally agreed.
Fear does not prevent dying---it prevents living. Thats the plan.
Exactly. That is the worst weapon: fear.
Hmm... nuclear bombs were tested in the 1950s at Maralinga in South Australia (other places too, of course, but Australia is my own country) - and the dangers of the radiation was not understood for quite some time. Dignitaries used to go out to watch, on viewing platforms - and turn their back just before the explosion, since they did know that you would go blind by looking at the explosion directly. But the army guys would wander out in their ordinary shoes and clothing to inspect the aftermath... the fallout sometimes did drift all the way to Adelaide, and there was some gradual awareness that it was not good for you to touch, to breathe, to ingest in any way.
Like covid however, I am sure that whatever real danger exists (and I think there IS real risk) is being blown up to hysterical levels. And yes, used to keep everyone terrified and docile...
Nuclear weapons are very real and are very dangerous. They have not necessarily been left dormant. Nevertheless, the risk of nuclear war is low because the foundation of the Cold War stalemate of mutually assured destruction remains intact.
MAD is the official story, for sure. It maintains a stalemate very nicely. But doesn't it seem interesting that in all of these decades there has never been a nuclear weapon accident? If atoms collide all the time everyday, then wouldn't a collision of the many quintillion atoms in ordinary objects have done this at least once? The only nuclear accidents have been radioactivity leaks from power plants, and those with serious consequences.
Nuclear chain reactions are not created by one neutron hitting another. You Need a whole lot of them. The reason we haven't had accidental discharges, ever, is (1) everyone builds them with a lot of safety features, and (2) it's very hard to do. If it was easy, everybody would have one.
Nuclear chain reactions are initiated by a neutron hitting the nucleus of another atom and splitting it (fission). The theory is that this will liberate neutrons in the second atom, and send them careening perfectly into other atoms, bursting their nuclei as well. given the size of the atomic particles and their great distances, this was computed to be very unlikely.
Your 2nd point that everybody would have one: The convenience of assuming that the big powers must have great and fearsome weapons is too old a dogma to easily release, but is way easier to perpetuate that dogma than to actually live up to what Oppenheimer himself said couldn't work.
One neutron does not start the chain reaction. You need a lot of them in close proximity, what physicists call critical mass. In a safed bomb,, you don't have that. And weapons are dogma because they work. The biggest weapon has always won.
Opie said it wouldn't work because he didn't want it to work. An early version of misinformation. He became worried they would actually use it to win a war and prevent millions of GI deaths. He was unconcerned about the GIs, and unconcerned they started it. Too bad we didn't develop it sooner so we could have dropped one on Adolph. That would have saved a lot more GIs. Maybe if Opie was more enthusiastic, we would have.
Wish it were that easy. Workers have learned that the blue flash happens very quickly and they die afterwards even in a small accident. There are ~ 2-3 neutrons for each fission. Given enough proximity to the spontaneous release of neutrons a given amount of pure U-235 immediately becomes a hazard. U-235 spontaneously releases neutrons as it decays. One becomes many rather quickly. A R0 > 2, you might say.
Getting a quantity of U-235 is hard to do, very hard to do. Ask the Iranians.
Something about critical mass…
Maybe the fact that 30 year-old nuclear eggs won't crack well are why the military is going towards biological weapons, easier to do clandestine tests.
I think so also, and people don't seem to be as jumpy about nukes anymore as about bugs.
Nuclear science is fake - as fake as the covaids. Nuke lies: https://fakeotube.com/video/209/nuke-lies
This guy is so full of nonsense it's unbelievable. As one who was directly involved in some of the testing, it was quite real. The YouTube videos were digitized versions released to the public from archives at Sandia Labs. They are but a fraction of all those archives. Better yet the lights did go out in Hawaii as a result of a test and those EMP effects are still important.
Prove it.
Prove what? I know what I witnessed. Check Honolulu news for the Starfish Prime event.
Interesting video as the author scans and analyzes the footage TV viewers watched in the 50's purporting to show nuclear blasts.
You can learn it if you want. Or, maybe not.
You can "learn" all kinds of false things. Sometimes subtly false. The history of physics is full of this kind of thing. Anyway, nuclear bombs just aren't something one can confirm for oneself by experiment.
And you can avoid learning many true things. Many do.
You've probably never died, but probably accept it based on the vicarious evidence. Those who want to play with nukes can get trained and find one of the many jobs that do. Or you can just rely on the evidence.
Why focus on nukes? That is so last century!
The greater and far more occulted threat, is from Direct Energy Weapons (DEWs) which are being deployed globally as we type.
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2018/11/24/directed-energy-weapons-dew/
👏👏👏🙏
Everyone is freaking out over last season's shoes!! DEW and EMP/EMF weapons are far more fashionable these days. All the cool countries have acquired these.
I wondered about this, so I asked a high school classmate of mine who was, incidentally, an actual rocket scientist (with the US Army). He said the following:
“The nukes in the bunkers, silos & submarines are real & ready to go. They are every bit as effective as advertised. Reentry vehicles are accurate to at least 100 meters.
What should concern you is that there are only 44 interceptors ready to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles. And we'd like to shoot two at each incoming warhead.
I don't think NK has reentry survivable reentry vehicles, much less accurate ones. I doubt Russia & China's are as capable as ours, but are plenty capable & sufficiently numerous.
As bad as anything is destruction of most any nuclear power plant could pollute the world.
P.S. I've been to ground zero at Trinity Site. That was an impressive event.”
So I’m still wary of WWIII.
Excellent, Dr. Huber. A while back I decided to stop living in fear (of dying/becoming ill). It changed everything, and made the lying fearmongering very obvious. Everyone is staring at screens all the time, letting themselves be constantly freaked out. I say call their bluff. Refuse the mask, what’s the worst that can happen? I appreciate your writings.
they were 2 for 2 in the 1940s with dumb drop weapons, 80 years later im sure they have improved their abilities.
my thoughts are not nuclear though they are biological, having read Ken Alibeks' book called biohazard (freely available in pdf https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/esmallpox/biohazard_alibek.pdf) i see the advantages to not just nations but other world actors.
Is it easier to improve abilities, or to convey the impression of improved abilities?
Psychological warfare is very old indeed.
While I applaud your openness to considering heterodox ideas, you are very wrong here. Nuclear weapons are real, and extremely dangerous and powerful.
You’re right to not worry too much about them, though. If it comes to that there’s not much you can do anyway. ;)
If you don’t think nuclear chain reactions are possible, what do you think has happened at all the hundreds of nuke explosions in the 40s, 50s, 60s?
The biggest Alamogordo explosion left a crater 5 feet deep and 30 feet wide. When reading that, I thought a bulldozer might do the same in a morning's work. The Nakatani book is quite interesting.
A bulldozer doesn’t produce radioactive fallout.
Radioactive fallout doesn't prove that fission occurred, just that fissile material was dispersed. Maybe those tests in fact were so-called "dirty bombs".
Fallout from testing is real, anyway. Caused a lot of cancer in the American West.
I agree. Fissile material, radioactive contamination: these have caused much disease.
Nor 20kt of force all at once.
Well, it was about 10x larger than that, and it was a wee little 20kt bomb.
Anyway, your reasoning about the probability of neutrons hitting nuclei is okay as far as intuitive math goes, but neglects to multiply those small-sounding probabilities by the huge number of neutron sources in play when a mass goes critical or beyond. Working these numbers out is, I believe, undergraduate physics homework these days.
I think 300m wide.
An open minded look but perhaps a bit if wishful thinking. These things are maintained, not gathering dust or rusting. Many nations have them. Are they all just shooting craps and saying.....these may work ? The destructuve power of what currently exists is way beyond what was used in WW2.
The bombs work and the DoD spends a lot of money to ensure that they keep working. The electronics decay along with the fissile materials. They are periodically replaced and upgraded. Even if only 10% work, that's still a whole lotta Armageddon goin' on.
May I suggest reading, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes and "The Los Alamos Primer" by Robert Serber to gain a basic understanding of fission bombs. The book "Dark Sun" by Rhodes will give you a basic understanding of fusion bombs.
Colleen: "this distance between the nuclei of adjacent atoms even in the same molecule is 7,400 times the width of the nucleus"
Which is why you need critical mass, which means a huge number of nuclei. When you have enough nuclei, each neutron is likely to hit something before it leaves. This is also why the shape matters.
The critical mass for U-235 is around 52 kg. One kg of U-235 contains around 4 x 10^25 nuclei. Do you see how that's a whole lot of mosquitos the neutron can hit?
If you remove the mosquitos (go below critical mass), then yes, the chain reaction fizzles.
If this does not work, then how does France generate 70% of its electricity with nuclear power? Nuclear power is all about balancing the chain reaction so it neither explodes, nor fizzles out.
"Each neutron is likely to hit something before it leaves." It is highly unlikely for one neutron to target so precisely, as in article. The fizzling happens, because the likelihood of a chain reaction of consecutive unlikely events approaches zero. Conditional probability of dependent events is P(1st event) x P (2nd event | 1st event) = unlikely x unlikely = all the less likely.
Colleen - either I'm not understanding correctly, or you're not understanding correctly. I'm pretty sure I understand these probabilities well.
You've been taken for a ride here, and taking a position on this discredits your other positions.
The probabilities here work like this:
P to hit something = (1 - P to not hit anything) = (1 - (0.999...999^N))
... where N is the number of nuclei that could possibly be hit on the neutron's way as it exits.
You can see that:
N=0 - no possible targets - impossible to hit:
P to hit something = 1 - (0.999...999^0) = 1 - 1 = 0
N=1 - one possible target - incredibly small chance to hit:
P to hit something = 1 - (0.999...999^1) = 1 - 0.999...999 = 0.000...001
But when you have critical mass, N becomes extremely large. This is because N scales with the number of nuclei, and critical mass is many nuclei in a favorable geometric arrangement.
If a hit causes 2 neutrons to emit, a critical mass is when N is large enough so that P=0.5. Then every neutron has a 50% chance to smash and emit 2 more neutrons, which is a nice chain reaction. Nuclear explosion is when P >> 0.5. A criticality accident is when briefly, P > 0.5.
There are on the order of 10^26 nuclei in a critical mass of U-235.
I would add here that if you do not understand this, this is so enormous, I would discredit everything you've ever done in science. You cannot comprehend a study if you don't get this.
Denis, you're out on quite a limb here. First, you discredit your argument by making ad hominem attacks, which everyone can see is a red flag for lack of substance in argument and risk of not being taken seriously. Second your zero entropy assumption is very tenuous, not based in physical or chemical reality. Further, your superstition that a nuclear explosion in the precisely programmed manner that you allege would definitely happen, has never worked in the advertised manner in the real world. That's fine that you believe it; I have no problem with you believing it. Obviously, no one wants such a devastating event as nuclear war to happen either. Everyone here is clearly glad that this has not happened. 3/4 of the humans and trees survived within a mile radius of the largest nuke to date, not later succumbing to radiation poisoning. This is not exactly what the American public has been told.
Also, your argument hinges on the assumption that if critical mass is big enough, then the worst will surely happen, and that a high-impact collision will ensure that it happens. I'm okay with you being certain of that. I am not, however, certain of that.
There are more logical fallacies in what you wrote:
"N=1 - one possible target - incredibly small chance to hit:
P to hit something = 1 - (0.999...999^1) = 1 - 0.999...999 = 0.000...001
But when you have critical mass, N becomes extremely large. This is because N scales with the number of nuclei, and critical mass is many nuclei in a favorable geometric arrangement."
That is fine, and there you have a possible first collision(s). For your chain reaction to succeed, it not only needs no weak links, no missed opportunities for nuclear fission at each step, it needs a long sequence of links. The threat of nuclear explosion rests on multiple unbroken chains initiating from each impacted nucleus, in an amplifying effect. This is not likely given the small fraction of area available for hits over misses, multiplied by the same low probability for successive iterations. Conditional probability applies due to the chain reaction that you allege.
Despite all of the alleged sightings throughout history, the Loch Ness Monster has still not trundled out of the lake and gobbled up the villagers. If people still want to believe it exists, because so many have said so all this time, that is fine, but I reserve my right to remain skeptical of the claims, even though there are furious people out there outraged that anyone would doubt their well-informed, widely acknowledged and sincerely made claims.