FUN POLICE

[Andy Dingley]

We have to ask -- when you finally made it outside, where had you parked?

[Dave]

Hey, quick, hide !! Someone is asking who dented his car door while at the cinema !!! I know who, but I'm not telling !! WaveyDave

[dennis]

I was on the bus.

[dennis]

It wasn't a Focus so I won't worry.

[Alan]

In message , John wrote

The US Navy has some good 'safety related' examples

[BigWallop]

This is a real doozer

is supposed to be a genuine document, but I think someone is at the wind up. :-)

original page

[The Natural Philosopher]

It's not too far from the truth.

First that the actual 'explosion' produces no gas like a conventional one.Its all heat, and the shockwave is at much lower pressure.

Secondly that the main killer is heat. And the attendant hard gamma, which is essentially heat in another part of the magnetic spectrum.

And finally, that the lingering radiation is small compared with the blast. What killed people in the Japanese bombs, was absorption over time of people living in the area: This is a war document and they probably lied a bit about that, knowing that in any case the military wouldn't be camping in a radioactive pit for long.

The document would appear to be based pretty much on the official report on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, which makes interesting reading.

that the references to people being killed 'several times over' i.e. they got flattened, burned to death and took enough radiation to kill them as well..Note also, with respect to the above, that the main killer was direct gamma radiation - i.e. the other frequencies in the EM spectrum. There were relatively few deaths from residual radiation. This was possibly due to the fact that the explosion was done as an air burst, rather than ground burst. Although many sources claim the death rate remained higher among the population exposed, actual statistical studies showed that by around 1950, the death rate post the explosions of the survivors was about the same as the Japanese norm.

In short, the military made a pretty extensive report on the attacks it had made, and they showed that although the bombs were devastating, they were not unsurvivable.

If you go further on into the Cold War, you also see that the development of he H-bomb, relatively 'clean' in terms of fission products, became the preferred choice for strategic weapons. Those were weapons capable of sterilising fairly large areas with very little lingering radiation. I.e. if you didn't get a direct exposure, you would probably survive: But if you did, advisory military reports would be the least of your worries. If you made it through the blast and initial heat/gamma attack, you would probably live.

Its a far cry from that to today, where any exposure of a few percent above background, about what you get from flying at 30,000 ft, is a 'major nuclear incident'

It suited both the West and the Sovbloc to play up the threat of nuclear war during the 50's and 60's. To make it as 'unthinkable' as possible: Nevertheless, the actual figures are by comparison, a lot less chilling than the popular press and science fiction of the times portrayed it.

What really shifted the world away from world wars post 1945 - at least nuclear ones - was the simple fact that it became obvious that for the first time in warfare, casualties among those who sent the military off to fight might be orders of magnitude higher than amongst the military themselves. That provided strong political pressure amongst democratic populations to avoid it.

Aside, if you read the _official_ accounts of Chernobyl*, what is the most surprising thing is how *few* people died. And that's from very close up rather nasty radiation. The firefighters lost several people. All from direct exposure right at the pile. There have been a few hundred I think thyroid cancers, but these have been survivable.

Nuclear reactors are in a way nastier than atomic explosions: there is far more low grade fissionable material in them many of which are chemical poisons, and the radiation tends to be more lingering, and more alpha/beta type than gamma.

On the other hand, they don't produce *atomic* explosions. Both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were characterized by reactors being pushed beyond limits by a combination of events, with safety systems disabled, by personnel who didn't have the correct training in their operation. The other major incident, Windscale, was similar in that the reactor was being run beyond design limits to make weapons grade plutonium in quantity, and was literally 'open' to the skies.

And although there waa steam explosion at Chernobyl, it did relatively little direct damage. The most damage was done by the reactor fire, and he radiation encountered by those who put i out.

"What everybody knows' about nuclear weapons and power, is very much at odds with the actual facts that are contained in the official reports.

Note that there was no reason for the US report on the Japan bombs to be biased. they were coldly assessing the results of a wartime experiment, in terms of its precise destructive power, after effects, psychological impact, and ultimately defense against it.

• as opposed to the anti-nuclear hysterical ones.

[BigWallop]

> It is supposed to be a genuine document, but I think someone is at the wind

>

It isn't a wind up?

But it's heat that is hotter than standing on the sun for just a second or two (unless it's night time of course), and the pressure front, although over a short distance, carries a vacuum behind it. When the low but sustained pressure front hits an object, it first blows it forward. Then a bloody great vacuum cleaner comes along at the back of the blower and sucks the object up into the air. And it does all that in a few seconds while it's microwave cooking everything else.

Ouch !!! :-)

I think the first part of the heat spectrum would do me nicely, thank you.

I think it also shocked the people who made it. They knew something of what could have been, but they didn't expect the devastation that was actually created. I heard that one of the assistant scientists said something like "My God, we really have brought hell to the earth". So it shocked a good few people who should have known better.

That's bookmarked for future reading. I'm a busy man at the mo' :-) But it does look ike an intersting read.

I'll reserve further comment until I read through the document you have linked to. Although, I must say one thing. I did have a sort of inkling that the bombing must have been less devastating than was reported to the public and the world by the press releases. And what brought those thoughts was the fact that, if it had been as bad as was reported, no one in their right minds would have been willing to build any further weapons of that sort, ever again. Yet the US and others were willing to continue with a nuclear weapons assembly industry.

If it was that devastating, no one would have survived, including the people who made the thing. That secret would have stayed a forgotten secret.

[Rod]

If it is very hot that matters, just have a look at sonoluminescence:

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "BigWallop" saying something like:

Odd leap of logic there. It continued because it had cost billions and it was a new toy.

[BigWallop]

Is that the thing that high speed boat propellers have to deal with? If the propeller moves through the water at a certain speed and frequency, you can see those little lights sparking off them.

[Rod]

Never come across it in relation to propellors. But sounds quite possible.

[Dave Liquorice]

All the stuff I've seen about radioactive fall out has been mainly based on the assumption of a ground burst, where vast amounts of material from the ground are sucked up and irradiated in the fire ball.

Air bursts are good for killing all electronics over a wide area and eradicating exposed life forms with relatively little physical damage. Ground bursts are good for massive physical damage but not so effective at killing electronics and life at the time of explosion but the fall out renders places not very healthy for a long time.

[BigWallop]

It could be gearbox damage I'm thinking of. :-) LOL

[Mike]

By dropping it on the foot of the H&S guru :)