Soaring, Cryptography, and Nuclear Weapons 303
Martin Hellman sends in a pointer to his essay that uses analogies from cryptography and the sport of soaring in an attempt to draw people in to thinking about the risks of nuclear weapons. Quoting: "... I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home." Hellman is best known as co-inventor (with Diffie and Merkle) of public key cryptography, and has worked for over twenty-five years to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. He is also a glider pilot with over 2,600 logged hours. Hellman adds, "Readers needing a break can go to some photos of the Sierra Nevada mountains taken from my glider."
Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
...who's takeaway from the article is that we need to build more nuclear plants?
Must have been a stack overflow somewhere. /BOFH reference
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:4, Insightful)
...who's takeaway from the article is that we need to build more nuclear plants?
America does need to build more nuclear plants.
The rest of the world is because it is safe and clean.
Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, need you name more?
Yes, you do.
Even reasonable environmentalists [npr.org] are considering nuclear.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
And the reasonable environmentalists might be right. Technology might possibly have developed over the last 20+ years.
We're afraid of technology that had flaws in its infancy. Maybe humanity has learned, and possibly improved technology since then?
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's even worse than technology that had flaws in its infancy. Chernobyl is the only serious civilian power-generation reactor accident. And Chernobyl had a tremendously bad design that never would have been approved in the West, even in the period when everything nuclear was considered to be good, and what killed it was a horribly conceived experiment run by idiots that never would have been allowed in the West, again not even during that optimistic period.
It's great to take lessons from Chernobyl, but it's wrong to take away the lesson that nuclear power is dangerous.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
My understanding is that the ridiculously thick containment structure around the TMI reactor (the lack of which is one of Chernobyl's unforgivable flaws) would have saved the day anyway. And things have improved since then, my point was merely that it wasn't bad even to begin with.
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
The general public seems to think that coal power is pretty acceptable, even though its toxic waste, vastly more than is ever produced by any nuclear plant, goes straight into the air and the population's lungs. But somehow the prospect of burying a miniscule amount of nuclear waste is considered to be vastly worse than breathing in vaporized mercury around the clock. It boggles the mind.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
One of the brightest moments for McCain in the debates (for me obviously) was when he said he supported nuclear fuel reprocessing. Obama isn't against nuclear in principle; I hope he will be open to the idea of reprocessing instead of letting the red herring issue of nuclear proliferation that caused Carter (a nuclear physicist!) to ban breeder reactors.
The general public seems to think that coal power is pretty acceptable, even though its toxic waste, vastly more than is ever produced by any nuclear plant, goes straight into the air and the population's lungs. But somehow the prospect of burying a miniscule amount of nuclear waste is considered to be vastly worse than breathing in vaporized mercury around the clock. It boggles the mind.
That's because of tremendous ignorance about even the basics of radiation, such as the longer the half life, the lower the radioactivity. And that while high levels of radiation are of course very bad, something with a half life of ten thousand years isn't necessarily more poisonous than something that isn't radioactive at all. Oh and of course there's the general fear-mongering of all things radioactive since the dawn of the atomic age, perpetuated by Hollywood myths where even in the distant future any nuclear reactor is a single leaky coolant pipe away from nuclear detonation.
Whereas inhaling the byproducts of coal power plants has been an American tradition for over a century. So nobody thinks about how bad it really is.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:4, Interesting)
God, tell me about it. After reading a comment on the good old somethingawful forums on the subject I did the math for how much uranium/thorium and other nasties can be found in coal. a few parts per million doesn't sound like much but when you burn billions of tons of coal it adds up FAST.
Powering everything with nuclear and having a chernoble every year would put less radioactive material into the air/water/ground.
I wish someone could get around to actually finishing an IFR so we could just say "burn it for fuel in the ifr" whenever someone spews crap about how there's no way of getting rid of nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years. Technical problem, technical solution.
Slightly disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that's overstating it a bit. The rational reasons for not reprocessing fuel revolve around the following issues:
1. Transporting used fuel to the reprocessing center and back.
2. Production and separation of enormous quantities of Plutonium, which needs to be carefully guarded due to proliferation and terrorism risks.
3. Some hazards in the reprocessing itself. There have been several serious accidents in reprocessing plants, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorp_nuclear_fuel_reprocessing_plant#2005_leak [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident [wikipedia.org]
(and other incidents)
4. Reprocessing only really starts to make good economic sense if you bring fast breeder reactors online, and those have safety issues of their own.
Something like the IFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor) might substantially reduce these risks, but until an advanced breeder reactor is actually built and operated for a significant period, it's hard to say how safe they really are, and whether they'll make economic sense.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:4, Informative)
But nuclear waste is also vastly more concentrated, so nobody is near it.
What's worse: coal pollution that causes 0.1% birth defects in the entire population, or nuclear waste that causes 10% birth defects in anyone who lives within 100ft of it?
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, it really is dangerous. That's why nuclear power plants are considered terrorist targets.
That's funny, nuclear plants don't even make my list. On my list are things like planes, train stations, embassies and other government buildings, cafes, malls, and busses.
While you are correct that Chernobyl was a bad design and an ill-conceived experiment started the disaster, do you recall what caused Three Mile Island or what the consequences might have been had the hydrogen bubble ignited?
Do you recall that TMI happened BEFORE Chernobyl, and sparked a quite thorough redesign of reactors to make them safer, and GenIV reactors, if we ever get around to building them, would be safer yet?
And the bigger problem is the cost and various issues with properly sequestering the waste. Using nuclear power is basically like borrowing to run the country - we get the immediate benefit and our children have to pay the price.
First, the stuff is safer than coal - a lot of the pollution from coal actually ends up in the environment. Besides that, I(and many other nuclear proponents) figure we'll be going after that high level waste in less than a hundred years to use it as fuel again. Other options include breeder reactors and reprocessing using modern methods to reduce the amount of waste, and the lifespan of the waste, substantially.
Any idea how much it will cost to pay just for the guards to monitor a waste site for 100,000 years or so? I don't think that is factored into the cost of electricity from a nuclear plant, is it?
How long until the Mercury released by Coal plants exits out of the environment? How long until the CO2 is sequestered again?
And yes - it is factored in. The federal government told the nuclear power plant operators: You WILL pay us $X per megawatt/hour produced. We WILL dispose of the waste. There's lawsuits going on about that one.
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Chernobyl was bad design. What makes you think Three Mile wasn't shitty design?
Three mile happened 29 years ago, and would NEVER have happened with todays reactors.
Regarding waste. Should we wait until there is a complete solution to this problem, or bet on it being solved in the semi-near future? I consider the gains worth the "risk" of having to keep the waste locked up worth thousands of coal-plants. Especially since coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
Do we guard the coal ash? Don't our chil
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Informative)
Will you stop spreading FUD?
So is burning coal, operating a steel plant, manufacturing dangerous chemicals, and driving a race car. Yet we do all those things on a regular basis!
That's why there are 3 columns of stealth troopers protecting each plant from invasion by the Slitheen.
Or in other words, [Citation Needed].
Um... it DID ignite. Several times. Ignition of hydrogen in the reactor core only complicated a difficult situation. However, the reactor operated more or less as intended in that situation and the risk to the surrounding area was minimal. Certainly not anywhere near Chernobyl levels. (Chernobyl ran into a lack of shielding against a boiler explosion. So all those materials were spread around surrounding areas rather than being contained by three feet of concrete.)
That's a terrible analogy. Nuclear power is just fine. Most of the hot stuff is gone within days to months. That's why reactors can be serviced and/or dismantled within a few months to a few years of being shut down. If anything, we're leaving our kids a nasty power crisis and dirty air because we refuse to build more nuclear plants!
I am being completely serious here. Any materials that last that long are more than safe enough. Heck, anything with a nuclear lifetime that long is safer than the Potassium stored in your body*.
Think about it. Radiation is a process whereby mass is converted into energetic particles. Thus the mass itself is the fuel for the radioactivity. The more radiation produced, the faster the mass is converted into that radiation. In result, the mass will burn itself out in a short period of time. Materials with 10,000 year lifespans convert their mass to radiation so slowly that you can count each particle as it is produced. Compared to cosmic radiation, that's a zero risk.
Furthermore, there are different types of radiation. A great deal of radiation (e.g. alpha and beta) can't even penetrate the dead layer of cells on our skin!
In effect, the situation with nuclear radiation has been overblown. Read up on radioactivity if you want to understand the true dangers of working with the material. Once you understand things better, you may start demanding that your local coal plant be replaced with a nuclear plant! (Did you know that coal plants disperse more radioactive material into the environment than any other power-producing technology?)
* In a human body of 70 kg mass, about 4,400 nuclei of 40K decay per second.
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Context: stuff with a half life of 10,000 years
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The fallacy in your reasoning is that if you have enough stuff with a 10,000 year half-life, even though its radioactivity-per-gram is low, total radioactivity can be high enough to cause health risks to nearby living creatures.
You do realize that the logical answer to this part is to grind the waste up and distribute it, right? The fact we can concentrate it so much is what allows us to contain it in the first place.
Even a solid block weighing hundreds of pounds isn't going to hurt you if it's an alpha emitter, as long as you aren't eating/inhaling it.
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These people who like to minimize the danger of radioactivity like alpha and beta by saying it doesn't penetrate the skin, completely disregard the fact that most exposures people in surrounding areas of a nuclear accident will get will be through inhalation and in
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And while it is obvious to anyone versed
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Informative)
And neither will external materials that have low-level radioactivity for 10,000 years.
Let's be clear for a moment: Litvinenko was poisoned. He didn't accidentally ingest 10 micrograms of Polonium 210 any more than you or I have accidentally ingested 5 mg of Pu-238. With a half-life of about 1/3yr, a temperature that easily exceeds 500C, and a heavy weight that prevents it from becoming airborne, Polonium poses little risk outside the laboratory or industrial environments where it is used. In addition, Polonium is a highly stable heavy metal that is unlikely to chemically bond to common materials and/or make it into the water or food supply like the more concerning Su-90 or I-131.
The greatest concern with Polonium-210 is that tobacco fertilizers contain the material [nytimes.com], probably from natural Uranium decay in the soil. The tobacco plant absorbs the chemical and thus it gets into cigarettes. The quantities are miniscule, even by Polonium-210 standards (partially owing to the short half-life), but enough to eventually lead to lung cancer.
Let's count up the deaths, shall we?
Three Mile Island [wikipedia.org]: 0 deaths
Chernobyl [unscear.org]: 47 deaths (there were also 4,000 cases of Thyroid cancer that were successfully treated)
London Great Smog [wikipedia.org]: 12,000 deaths
That last one was caused by burning coal. 12,000 deaths from a disaster caused by burning coal. Versus a maximum impact from nuclear power of ~4,050 people. (Only a small handful of who directly lost their lives.) And that's DESPITE the USSR building a sub-standard facility, DESPITE the USSR requiring untrained personal to safety test the facility, DESPITE the lousy and late evacuation job, and DESPITE the massive release of radioactive materials.
If that's not sinking in, read it again. Coal is MASSIVELY more dangerous than nuclear power plants. Period, end of story. If you have your brain even half-way engaged, you should be demanding that every one of our coal plants be ripped out.
(The 125,000 death figure, BTW, is a myth [magma.ca].)
TMI was not a "bad" design for its time. By modern standards it is, but then it was acceptable. And guess what? NOBODY DIED. Chernobyl on the other hand lacked BASIC safety measures. Like concrete for example. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that putting a solid concrete bunker around a super-heated boiler is a good idea in case it should explode. (Boiler explosions are a VERY common industrial accident, regardless of nuclear materials.) For some stupid reason, the bunker wasn't there. Furthermore, the untrained techs who performed the tests actually DISABLED the shutdown systems by cutting wires so that the reactor could not auto-sc
/wastes/fuel reserves/s (Score:2, Interesting)
Be suspicious of any chain of reasoning based on taking what Homeland Security et al think as true. These people are fear mongers, and use artificially created fear to control the masses. For some reason their otherwise incoherent policies always seem to align on one point: they increase the profits of big oil.
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I remember when that 100,000 year figure was first bandied about back in the '70's.
HINT: It's meaningless drivel. That "half-life" concept pretty much guarantees that the things that are seriously radioactive will stop being so very quickly.
Pretty much the only things that will still be radioactive after a centu
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I'd put the figure at a little more than 100 years, some of the medium level 200-500 year stuff can be nasty if you're exposed for an extended time.
But ya, people are retarded when it comes to radiation. I don't know how often I've heard the phrase "dirty bomb" when someone wants to claim that nuclear power plants would be much use for terrorists even after it's pointed out that you can't just grab a handful of normal nuclear fuel and turn it into an H-bomb in your garden shed.
NEWS FLASH PEOPLE: Any terrori
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While you are correct that Chernobyl was a bad design and an ill-conceived experiment started the disaster, do you recall what caused Three Mile Island or what the consequences might have been had the hydrogen bubble ignited?
The hydrogen bubble did ignite- several times. Several Containment building pressure spikes were noted from the repeated conflaguration of the hydrogen generated by the destroyed reactor core.
Again, the containment building did it's job just fine. Further, reactors built after that acci
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...do you recall what caused Three Mile Island...
Three Mile Island was a success! No one died. The safety protocols in place worked. It led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community. Radiation levels to the surrounding population was about 1/6th of what would be received from a chest Xray.
Stop treating TMI as if it were a disaster. It wasn't. Chernobyl on the other hand was, but NOT TMI!
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. That's why we SHOULD be reprocessing that stuff and burning it in reactors. Yet the powers that be feel reprocessing increases the risk of nameless Bad Guys(TM) getting their hands on fissionable materials. Never mind that the Uranium slugs used in regular reactors are far more useful to Bad Guys(TM) than reprocessed Plutonium. (If you have limited resources, a gun-type bomb is infinitely easier to create than an implosion device.)
The thing is, the nuclear waste issue has been incredibly overblown by environmentalists and government alike. We have solutions. It's just a matter of getting this regulatory ship realigned to meet the modern world.
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Are you even aware that the uranium used in reactors isn't bomb grade?
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Informative)
Complete and utter nonsense caused by a misreading of early safety reports. Allow me to inject some real information:
Rather, waste management [from reprocessing] is made very much easier. The decree that Yucca Mountain must isolate the waste for more than 10,000 years is due primarily to the presence of long-lived transuranic elements. Appropriate reprocessing will allow those troublemakers to be consumed in fast reactors, leaving only the real waste--the fission products--to be disposed of, and their radioactive toxicity fall below that of the original uranium ore after less than 500 years. Effective waste management becomes a slam dunk.
Are you aware that reprocessed Plutonium isn't bomb grade?*
Both would require significant reprocessing to be made into weapons. If you must do it, it's much easier to reprocess Uranium. At least then you'll be ready to build your bomb. With Plutonium, you're not even half-way there.
* http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2006/april/article2.html [aps.org]
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You only need to watch over the waste for "thousands of years" if you don't reprocess it.
Wind farms and solar both are limited by the fact that you can not throttle them. I am all for them but until you develop a clean, long lasting, and cheap battery that has about 1000 times the current energy density of current batteries solar and wind will only meet a small percentage of our power needs.
Nuclear plants are a stop gap. If managed correctly it is a 100 to 200 year stop gap. By then we better have fusion do
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And it is news to me that the entire amount of energy used in mining, extracting, and enriching uranium is nuclear. Do we have nuclear-powered mining trucks now?
I see why you posted anonymously.
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Do we have nuclear-powered mining trucks now?
To my knowledge, we don't have coal powered trucks for mining coal, fan powered hoists for wind turbines, or solar forges for solar panels.
That's because oil has thus far been particularly suitable for mobile power. We need electric vehicles run by nuclear power - it's not a real problem in the restricted confines of a mine.
The fact is that it takes about 5 orders of magnitude less uranium for a given amount of electricity helps with the efficiency.
Right now it's cheaper to exploit nuclear fission than to
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...I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home.
The problem with this quote is that these days a freeway/airport is probably thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant build next to your home.
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Thermonuclear War (Score:2)
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
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After all, we don't want to start a nuclear war unless we really have to.
- Col Lionel Mandrake
He's a fool. (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, if you all don't have nuclear weapons, and I covertly do, I win.
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1. Get everyone to agree that nuclear weapons are bad.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Re:He's a fool. (Score:5, Funny)
2. ???
Never knew those were supposed to be ASCII mushroom clouds!
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Also depends on what you have. Say, hypothetically, you're in charge of an Iran-like banana republic and the US had no nukes but you had two nukes, then you take out New York and Los Angeles with the nuclear strikes. The US' forc
It's a big problem... (Score:2)
Also depends on what you have. Say, hypothetically, you're in charge of an Iran-like banana republic and the US had no nukes but you had two nukes then you take out New York and Los Angeles with the nuclear strikes
Well, yes, but the problem is that a good sized h-bomb that takes out NY and LA takes with it a good chunk of the northeastern USA and southern california. Take a took at a map of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bravo_fallout2.png [wikipedia.org]
That's a fallout plume of 1000 rads out to a range of over 100 mi
Re:It's a big problem... (Score:4, Informative)
Are you talking hypothetically, or realistically?? I can promise you that if a state launched an ICBM, we'd have nukes popping out of our silos likely before their missiles started re-entry. The US is ready within an extremely short period (a time I can't say) to retaliate against any missle strike.
Likewise, let's say they launch from around Channel Islands and take out LA in minutes from initial launch, there are crews 24/7 waiting in Silo's to turn key and launch. Economy, and conventional forces have no play. All it takes is an Executive Branch decision, a few minor, procedural events, and several hundred thousand people reach the temperature of the sun in a few minutes half way across the world.
With regards to EMP, do some googling for the term "survivable" and you'll see we've been fielding systems for decades that are designed to make it through the EMP. I'll give you one example to start, MILSTAR EHF satellites.
what the hell do you win? (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of nuclear weapons is to overtly have them; if your possession of them is truly "covert," you don't win a damn thing. Even Israel's nuclear program was an open secret for years because it allowed them to gain the effects of deterrence without openly proclaiming that they had a nuclear arsenal. But nobody seriously believed they didn't have one.
Re:what the hell do you win? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The whole point of nuclear weapons is to overtly have them; if your possession of them is truly "covert," you don't win a damn thing. "
Touch one off on an enemy center of gravity without them knowing it was you, and you can win a bunch if the object is to disable the enemy.
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Ok, give every nation 10 nuclear weapons, to be deployed against any nation, ally or enemy, that launches nukes first. Suddenly, using nukes leads not just to the country being attacked retaliating, but also to 1600 nuclear missiles flying at you from litterally every corner of the globe.
The problem with MAD is that it is only a halfway solution. It might just be possible for the US or the Soviet union to remove enough of the others nuclear arsenal that a victory is possible without massive civilian casua
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But zer whole point of ein... nuclear deterrent is wasted if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell zer whole world, eh?
Secret nukes: bad idea. If your neighbour attacks you and you use nuclear weapons in self-defence, millions are dead. If you publish details of your armament to the world ahead of time, your neighbour never dares attack in the first place. Conversely, if you attack your neighbour with your secret arsenal,
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Zero.
One.
Technically, according to your argument and looking only from a mathematical standpoint, you are infinitely safer next to a nuke weapons storage. But I guess you've never heard of someth
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Now, how many nuclear reactors have had serious problems?
One.
Methinks thy count is off. There are at least 2 that I know of: Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. I'm sure there are more.
Apples and oranges (Score:2)
To use a car analogy, that's like comparing a head-on crash with a dead battery.
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Dangers... (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, all this fear running around and western democracies - and the Russians - are the ONLY ones who have managed them responsibly. We haven't blown the world up, and the worst are some "near misses" which didn't produce anything. Shoot, we're farther away now from nuclear war between major powers than we have been since before the Cold War.
Point fingers at Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and their ilk. Leave the rest of us out of it. They're the nuclear "powers" to be afraid of, and we should raise defenses against their armament which are overwhelming - not detente.
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Honestly, all this fear running around and western democracies - and the Russians - are the ONLY ones who have managed them responsibly.
Maybe I'm just not up on my history, but when have any of the other nuclear powers detonated a nuclear weapon other than in uninhabited areas for testing purposes?
Was there a nuclear war between India and Pakistan that I missed? Did Israel wipe Syria off the map while I wasn't looking?
None of the countries that have nukes have blown up the world. The only one that has used them for their intended purpose (blowing lots of people up) is the US, and that was more than 60 years ago. To say that any other cou
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Why would they? No country will use a nuclear weapon unless it's their last option. To do so would virtually guarantee total annihilation at the hands of the US. They would almost certainly use the nukes just like everyone else does: as a deterrent and as a bargaining chip.
Clearly, it would put them in a much stronger negotiating position on the world stage. This is why we should be stopping them from getting nukes, not because we think they'd actually use them.
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Especially when their President (I know, I know, he's largely a figurehead) thinks he is going to help usher in the 12th Imam by bringing about the end times.
BULLSHIT! (Score:4, Informative)
Now you are suggesting that Iran would nuke the second most sacred Islamic religious site after Mecca in a suicidal mission?!!
I also argued against the existence of any suicidal tendencies among Iranian leaders in previous comments [slashdot.org] which hopefully will shed some light on your distorted view of reality.
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Yes, and China is threatening the USA with weapons handed to them by Nixon [washingtonpost.com], right?
If you read a bit of recent history, you would realize that Iraq was armed by the Soviet Union. The US offered some gestures of conciliation to Iraq after Iran suffered the Islamic revolution, but Saddam was always a Soviet puppet.
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I realize I shouldn't be feeding the trolls here, but still: some of those near misses have been pretty [wikipedia.org] fucking [wikipedia.org] near [wikipedia.org] (and these are just some well-known examples!).
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In fact, North Korea probably doesn't even have any nuclear weapons. They claim to, but their single nuclear test was a dud, if in fact it was a test at all. Even if they have them, they are likely to be so primitive as to be far too large to fit on a missile, leaving them with a bomb that can't actually be moved to where it will destroy its target.
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I think you are missing a point.
Your argument seems to be, "we haven't had a nuclear war since 1945, so the risk of nuclear war must be extremely low."
A lot of Hellman's article (and the whole point about the glider antics) was pointing out how awful the human intellect is at working out risks (as if the current economic mess, or for that matter Las Vegas, didn't spell that out even more eloquently). He is certainly correct to argue that it is even more dangerous to be complacent.
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Off the cuff statistics make me sick. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah...I would love to see how he produced that "risk analysis" statement. I guess, since nuclear reactors are virtually not dangerous at all with todays technology, it can be said that something that is only a little dangerous (relying on nuclear weapons for security, which has worked for almost 60 years) can be a thousand times as dangerous, because 1000 * 0 = 0.
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http://nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf [nuclearrisk.org]
It's in the appendix, near the bottom. It definitely is preliminary and not in depth, but that's probably due to a lack of accessible/accurate data.
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it can be said that something that is only a little dangerous (relying on nuclear weapons for security, which has worked for almost 60 years)
As he points out in the article, "a little dangerous" isn't good enough. A 99% per year safety margin for nuclear deterrence would be small, but actually a 1% chance of nuclear war each year isn't an acceptable risk... and moreover is not a sustainable long-term strategy. As he points out, although nuclear weapons have not led to nuclear war in the last 50-60 years, that really only establishes that "the chance of nuclear war is somewhere between zero and 6% per year". Those are terrible odds.
His point i
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Strange risk analysis.
Out of untold tens (hundreds?) of thousands of nuclear weapons, only 2 have ever been used on people, and that was at war time. Zero have gone off accidentaly.
Out of the dozens (hundreds?) of nuclear power plants that have been build & torn down, there have been 1 major (Chernobyl) and 1 minor (Three Mile Island) accidents.
That's a pretty small sample size to be dividing against a zero.
I too wanna see how he produced that "risk analysis".
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I think his math is a bit off... It's more like a negative inverse of hi
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It seemed evident to me from reading the article that his basic premise was to rationalize the existence of nuclear possibilities, not to derive whether or not they do in fact exist.
Probably his most flawed conception was that conflict between NATO/Russia would automatically result in nuclear escalation.
That is quite absurd. Neither Russia nor America has ever considered the use of nuclear arms as a blanket protection for their strategic assets. If Russia invaded Germany tomorrow America would be all
Some dodgy statistical analysis in there (Score:2)
Lessons from Dr Gatling (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling [wikipedia.org]
In 1877, he wrote: "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished."
Sounds a lot like this, from TFA:
Since World War III would mean the end of civilization, no one would dare start it.
The thing is, just as many bodies lie in the dirt since the invention of the machine gun, and armies are effectively as big as ever. Also, this invention has been used to commit COUNTLESS atrocities that wouldn't have been as possible before it was introduced.
My point is simple, focusing on the WEAPON is futile. In the hands of men anything will eventually be turned to evil. You have to assume the worst case when dealing with weapons and humanity. This is also why you basically HAVE to participate in the arms race. The opposite choice is elimination.
which brings us to iranian proliferation (Score:5, Insightful)
pro-israel or anti-israel
pro-usa or anti-usa
you should be against iranian proliferation
there's this weird alien line of thought out there that goes like this: "if the usa has nukes, why shouldn't iran?"
what that thought represents is tribal nationalistic thinking trumping common sense
common sense holds that NO ONE should have nukes. so proliferation is bad, for whomever. the most logical approach to iranian proliferation then is this: "i am against iran having nukes, AND i am against the usa having nukes"
but this whole "i support iran having nukes, to balance out the usa" is a level of stupidity beneath respect
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fair enough, but what do you do once you are "against" iranian proliferation? John McCain (and many others) think that this means the U.S. should bomb Iran. I'm as against Iranian proliferation as I am against Korean, Bolivian, or Austrian nuclear proliferation -- but I am also against using phony claims of an imminent Iranian nuclear threat to justify hypocritical policy choices. If Iran does choose to go nuclear, that will be a decision that I have little influence on, and I'm not about to advocate bom
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yes, then what? exactly how would using nukes change that situation? The genocidal punishment of 23 million North Koreans (plus who knows how many South Koreans and Chinese "collateral damagees") for the actions of their leader may satisfy your desire for a mean-spirited revenge in such a situation, but it doesn't seem like it would make the world any better or safer. Should we do something if NK did that? Of course; I'm just not sure that "nuking them" is a very imaginative or appropriate response.
Re:which brings us to iranian proliferation (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason is that these countries are, ostensibly, sane, although I am beginning to wonder about Russia. Iran is ruled by a bunch of fanatics that believe in fairy tales and are attempting to bring about the return of the 12th Imam. The countries on your list have not used nukes, excepting the US pre-understaing-much-about-the-long-term-impact. We haven't since.
Yes you're right the US is the only country that has ever used nukes, and though we haven't done so since, it's pretty clear the reason had nothing to do with restraint on the part of the United States -- it is well documented, for example, that Eisenhower and Nixon both considered using nuclear weapons in China and North Vietnam. So as far as using nukes, perceived "sanity" does not seem to be the major deterrent. In fact, the major deterrent seems to be nukes in the hands of our enemies. As far as whether Iran is "sane," I would suggest you look at what they've done, not just the idiotic religious rhetoric of the country's titular leaders. Iran simply has not behaved aggressively in international affairs. They have not invaded their neighbors despite their sabre-rattling towards Israel (though Iraq invaded Iran in 1980). The Iranian military is no joke, to be sure, and nukes will make it more powerful, but that is really a major concern only for anyone unwise enough to attempt to invade Iran. Pakistan's and India's governments are also filled with millenarian fundamentalists (and, hell, we've had quite a few of those in power here in the United States as well!) but the fact is that when the chips are down, these states have acted like states, and have not used their nuclear weapons "irrationally." I see no reason to believe Iran would.
All that said, I am still against a nuclear Iran; I just don't think we can realistically do much more than we are already doing about it. Get the UN to castigate them, sure; encourage government reform, definitely; but if you think invading Iran is going to help anything you are living in an absurd fantasy land with John McCain.
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Here is my solution. Let Iran build a nuke, and get the security council to agree that if Iran uses it, overtly _or_ covertly, we get to turn Iran into a parking lot
Which Iran would agree to immediately because they are controlled by a theocratic government whose religion espouses an afterlife. It is not easy to deter nations where the culture of death, supported and spread by religion, is glorified above life itself. There can be no meaningful deterrence when your opponent carries out "martyrdom operations" (aka suicide bombings) as a matter of national policy.
exactly right (Score:4, Insightful)
the principle of MAD (mutually assured destruction) worked in the cold war between the usa and the ussr because russian leaders did not want to see dead russian children and american leaders did not want to see dead american children
meanwhile, iran is a theocracy
the deeply religious believe the afterlife is a glorious reward for the righteous, an eden. in its war with iraq, iran sent children with little wooden keys around their necks to clean up minefields. the keys were the keys to heaven. how is a death a deterent for those who see death as a reward? how do you deter iranian leaders when they think dead iranian children are in a better place?
a theocracy with a bomb should give everyone a special pause
iran with the bomb is different and unique when considering any other country that currently has the bomb
iran really should not get the bomb. no theocracy should
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its the bizarre desperate and failing attempt at rationalization that accepts nuclear proliferaiotn in the name of nuclear disarmament. and so far, that absurdity is what you represent to me
I'm not rationalizing anything, and I'm trying to justify anything. I'm simply stating the truth that sooner or later the US will probably have to learn to deal with a nuclear Iran just like we learned to deal with a nuclear China, India, Pakistan, etc. Frankly, it's a fact whether or not we bomb Iran or engage in unspecified acts of "covert sabotage." We're long past the situation in 1981 where a single nuclear reactor could be bombed to end a nuclear program -- if Iran decides to make nuclear weapons,
there IS a bias here (Score:2)
the bias is yours, thinking that what underlines the actions of other countries is american actions. responsibility for everything in the world does not lead to washington dc. who is responsible for iran having nukes? IRAN is, and ONLY iran. to see it another way is, frankly, condescending to iranians. that they have no motivations or desires of their own, that they are merely cardboard cut out reflections of western actions. that's patronizing of you
if i see a child punch another child, and so i kick that
sure, why not (Score:2)
international inspection teams in the usa, sounds like a good idea
it is possible to oppose iran and not support the usa. it is possible to oppose iran and the usa at the same time. so when you hear me oppose iran, do not automatically assume i am pro-usa
the usa did not give nukes to pakistan (Score:2)
khan got them via a variety of means: dutch, chinese sources [wikipedia.org]. but this isn't to blame the dutch or chinese like you blame the usa. the best way to describe the truth and ascribe blame for pakistan having nukes is that pakistan wanted nukes like india had, so it went out and got them. the fault of pakistan having nukes is... drum roll please... pakistan's
for you to suggest that the usa "gave" nukes to pakistan is a sort of braindead propaganda that imagines the world works like a bad hollywood movie plot, a
Who the hell is Merkle? (Score:3, Funny)
Disturbing Times (Score:2)
I was also watching a C-SPAN panel of economists a couple weeks ago, and one of the panelists was extrapolating
Rocket Assist for Glider? (Score:2)
The bomb provided peace (Score:2)
Situation before the Atomic bomb :
Every 20-30 years, wars regularly happened between the most industrialized or powerful countries on earth.
The bomb ended WWII.
After the bomb :
No open/direct/full conflict between the most powerful countries on earth since then.
60 years of 'peace' as we have now since 1945 are an exception in the long recurrent wars that regularly dotted history.
The Problem with Rational Thought on Nuclear Arms (Score:2)
CANDU (Score:2)
Nuclear power isn't dangerous (Score:2)
Nuclear power isn't dangerous - bad engineering is dangerous. There's nothing special about nuclear power that makes it more dangerous than other industrial scale projects when engineered poorly.
Chernobyl was a massive engineering mistake, sure. But poor engineering of Chinese coal mines kills around 6000 per year. The Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India leaked fumes, killing something like 15,000 people in 1984. The BASF fertilizer plant in Oppau, Germany blew up in 1921 killing like 600 peop
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Ever hear about this little place in the South Pacific called the Falkland Islands? You should check it out, it may be interesting to you.
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Yeah,
That was where the nuclear armed Great Britain invaded Argentina's sovereign territory known as, Las Malvinas, right?
</flamebait>
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Please do not be such an idiot. Even if you want to take that side, said invasion happened in 1833. Unless I have grossly misunderstood things, Great Britain didn't have nuclear weapons at the time.
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Can I reel you in now?
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Nah, I wasn't responding to your troll, I was responding to how it wasn't even a sensible troll. :-)
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<flamebait fuel=napalm>
The loser doesn't get to name the territory or write the history.
</flamebait>
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You should check your geography before posting.
The Falkland Islands are absolutely NOT in the Pacific Ocean.
(but in the south Atlantic).
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Not geography, just a simple brain fart. Thanks for the correction in any case.
or, put more succinctly (Score:2, Interesting)
military responses to economic and ideological problems never works
Re:risk analysis Vs.real world (Score:4, Insightful)
I think, perhaps, the person you quoted meant invasions by the military forces of actual countries.
It'd be more of an infiltration of the US by illegal aliens than an invasion. Invasions are rather obvious and hostile affairs.
Non-state actors aren't the target of MAD policies. They generally don't care what sort of destruction they face. A state, on the other hand, has to worry about the continuance of the state.
Psycho with a nuke: not deterred by MAD.
Rogue state with a nuke: leaders still probably not deterred by MAD.
Developed stable state with a nuclear arsenal: welcome to club MAD.
Plus I'm quite sure most (by surface area) of the US would be quite willing (and eager) to sink both coasts into the ocean to quell a fifth column threat.
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The US government has no right to prevent drug trafficking or immigration, not matter what it claims. The only aggression going on is that of customs and DHS against drug transporters and immigrants.
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Why would my complaining about "illegal aliens from Mexico" be considered racism?
The US needs to protect its sovereignty, and a big part of that is preventing people from crossing its borders without authorization.
I have nothing against legal immigrants, and have a lot of respect for people who go to a new country where the dominant language isn't their first language, and make that home.
The current US immigration policy is almost undoubtedly too hard to go though, and should be loosened up, but that doesn'
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