I do, and I know what I'm talking about.
I won't bother going into the details, because the masses raised on three generations of anti-nuclear everything propaganda will not accept the truth.
1. All of the Japanese "radiation burn" victims that are repeatedly portrayed in every documentary about the Hiroshima bombing are, in fact, victims of flash burns, a type of thermal radiation damage caused by the intense infrared heat of the fireball. They are not radiation victims at all.
2. Very few if any victims at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki died due to radiation illness. Many were unable to recover from other wounds because of the complications caused by radiation illness. They had exposures great enough to seriously compromise their immune systems, so they eventually succumbed to wounds they may have survived had they not been exposed to the radiation.
3. The "cobalt bombs" theorized in "On the Beach" never existed. They were rejected as impractical and not militarily (including strategically) effective by all of the nuclear powers.
4. The science fiction, actually more like fantasy "radiation mutants" described in the Swedish film are so inaccurate as to be silly.
5. If you refer to ongoing research on the Antarctic Ozone Hole you will find that it has shrunk greatly. It may even be gone completely now. This did not happen by accident, but happened because of the heavy restrictions placed on chloro-fluoro-carbons beginning in the 1970's.
6. The world's inventory of nuclear weapons, most of which was in the hands of the two 'Super Powers,' the United States and the Soviet Union has decreased by 95 percent since 1980. The largest reductions were begun through the START treaties negotiated between the Reagan and Gorbachev administrations.
7. The TTAPS Study that popularized "Nuclear Winter" in 1983 was shown to be deeply, even fundamentally flawed. It has been resurrected several times by various groups, but is ultimately nonsense. One of the deepest flaws is the assumed combined yields of nuclear weaponry and their distribution of targets. By the 1980's both Super Powers had switched completely from counter-value to counter-force strategies. That means that we ceased targeting cities and focused on targeting the other side's nuclear forces. We were able to do this beginning as early as the late 1960's because delivery accuracy was improving rapidly and drastically, rapidly as at the rate of improved generations of weapons at two per decade and drastically as in improvements on the scale of orders of magnitudes. The accuracy of a missile warhead in 1960 was on the order of a few miles. Accuracy by 1970 was on the order of a few hundred meters, accuracy by 1980 was on the order of tens of meters. The mean warhead yield in the United States dropped from about a megaton in 1960 to 125 kilotons by 1980. That's an eight fold decrease, in case you are arithmetically challenged. The only number for weapon yields that I came across was from a Russian study that postulated weapons detonations totaling 5000 MT. In the 1980's we (the United States) carried an inventory of approximately 10,000 warheads. At an average yield of 150 kT, the entire inventory would provide a combined yield of 1,500 MT. That leaves us 3,500 MT short. At the same time, the Soviet Union carried an inventory estimated at two to three times the size of the U.S. inventory with a similar average yield, 4,500 MT. That's a total of 6000 MT. So, we would need to launch or drop 82 percent or our combined inventories. But, in 1815 a volcano erupted (Tambora in Indonesia) that released the equivalent of, wait for it, 33,000 MT. It may have produced a volcano winter that killed hundreds of thousands. Our global population is about 7 times the size that it was then, so we might see several million die, less than one tenth of one percent of the global population if we detonate only a little more than five times the entire global inventory of nuclear weapons. Of course, these studies all examine dispersed detonations. Let's ask a simple question, has there been an empirical case study? Yes, they made predictions on the damage to the atmosphere that would be caused by Saddam Hussein burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields in 1992. They overestimated the amount of damage by only an order of magnitude or two, or 1000 to 10000 percent. So, let's forget about global warming BS. We have Saddam Hussein to thank for that study, but it was on the expensive end of laboratory testing.
"On the Beach" makes for an interesting character study. How will various people react when they know that the end of the world is coming. But nuclear weapons should be viewed as a plot device. I, for one, require less willful suspension of disbelief to accept "The War of the Worlds" as a realistically likely event than global nuclear holocaust.
By the way, I spent my career in the United States Air Force as an intelligence operator. I started as an enlisted airman as was coaxed into becoming a crypto-logic linguist. After ten years of, well, I'm not quite allowed to say. Cryptology is the breaking of codes, a linguist studies foreign languages or at least one foreign language in the USAF. Please, use your imagination. Then I got the air force to send me to university where I earned a bachelor of science degree in nuclear engineering. That was mostly centered on making electricity, so after one tour I returned to school at the Air Force Institute of Technology. By attending a military graduate school they could put me in classified courses. I earned my masters degree in nuclear engineering focused on bombs. That included a course on the medical effects of nuclear weapons. The summary of that course with regard to radiation injury is that if you are close enough to the detonation to die from the radiation, don't worry about it. The blast wave or the thermal radiation will kill you anyway, so the radiation is only icing on the cake.
You would probably not qualify for either of my military careers. Don't feel badly about that. The statistics collected by the military show that 98 percent of those who meet the fairly stringent requirements to join the military in any position cannot qualify either.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
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greg-233
8 years ago
Well, I still don't think it's unscientific propaganda.
Propaganda is a word that tends to be misused a lot. The purpose of propaganda is to win people over to a certain point of view. Before On the Beach had been written most people had already realised that nuclear war would not be a good thing. They didn't need Nevil Shute to write a novel to persuade them of that.
"3. The "cobalt bombs" theorized in "On the Beach" never existed."
Which was what I wrote in the opening post. Like I said, On the Beach is a science fiction story. I can't think of any science fiction story that got its science 100% correct. In any case, the writer Brian Aldiss summed it up perfectly when he said:
"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts."
When people criticise a science fiction story for being "unscientific" it reminds me of people who complain that a portrait of Jesus is inaccurate because he looks too Anglo-Saxon.
I'm not sure how a few burning oil fields in one little part of the Middle East could officially discredit the whole nuclear winter hypothesis. It's hardly of the same magnitude as detonating nuclear weapons over hundreds of cities spread around the world.
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dannieboy20906
8 years ago
Dr. Sagan and his TTAPS co-conspirators used the burning of approximately 700 oil wells in Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's soldiers as a case study to support their global nuclear winter hypothesis. They (not me) claimed that the soot lofted into the atmosphere by the oil well fires would similar cooling problems as soon as Saddam Hussein threatened to set the fires. When the fires were started, they failed to produce a significant fraction of the cooling predicted. According to the rules established by the scientists making the prediction, their hypothesis was proved wrong. That's what science is. The entire foundation of their theory is based on computer modeling. Their computer model was used, according to them, to predict the effects of the burning oil wells. Their computer model grossly over-estimated the effects, just as critics of their model said from the beginning.
You may not see it as propaganda because you simply don't buy into the scenario and for you it is about the story. Okay, that's fine. But take a look at the posts from other viewers, along with their drivel about "The Day After," and other movies that repeatedly, and grossly exaggerate the effects predicted for a large scale, or for that matter any nuclear exchange. Look at the numbers they toss around for the casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anyone who can be shown to have lived in either city at the time of the bombing is counted as a victim when they die, regardless of their age at death or their cause of death.
When we reduced nuclear stock piles after START I, the anti-nuclear crowd quickly revamped their theories to argue that even a few hundred detonations would cause the same problems as thousands of detonations.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
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znapper
8 years ago
Would the smoke from the oil-wells not be too low to have any effects? (ie, it would come down again pretty much in the same region, by rain)
I mean, a nuclear explosion (dependent of yield and burst-height) would bring materials much higher up in the atmosphere.
Also, a burning city would burn and smolder for a very long time (I saw you mentioned that cities are no longer actively targeted....but since the theory of nuclear winter is based on such targeting, lets say for a moment that this is the reality), the particles would be different from oil-fields burning and material ejected by a volcano.
Also, a volcano can have a global effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
It's not about the size of the bang, but the materials spewed out during the eruption, as well as the height the particles are transported, if it is above the rain-forming altitudes, particles will stay and accumulate high up and start reflecting the rays from the sun.
The question is (if we are talking about the times of maximum stockpile numbers), how much material and soot would be spewed out in the atmosphere, compared to Mount Tambora?
Do not forget that even a slight imbalance to the climate, would greatly affect food-production. A global "bad year" of grain-production would cause big problems even without the havoc of nuclear aftermath to deal with.
Most deaths in a nuclear war would be from starvation (at least that's what I've concluded from the information I have seen). Some even claim that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan would influence global climate.
I am no meteorologist, so I cannot say whether it is correct or not, however, computer-models are more accurate these days than in the 80's. ^^
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dannieboy20906
8 years ago
I am a severe critic of the entire premise of "Nuclear Winter." The people who need to explain why their predictions failed are the creators of the computer models. TTAPS, named by the initials of the last names of the group who popularized the nuclear winter scenario, wrote the one dimensional computer program back in the late 1970's. It has been improved since, rather I should say it has expanded to take advantage of faster CPU speeds and more efficient memory management of small computers. But, the results of the program have not changed substantially.
In 1991, prior to the launch of the coalition counter-offensive in Iraq and Kuwait to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein threatened to sabotage the Kuwaiti oil fields. I think the Kuwaitis had more than one thousand oil wells at the time. Members of TTAPS claimed that setting fire to as few as 400 of the oil wells would create a cloud of partially burned oil aerosols that would substantially decrease the mean temperature near Iraq. In fact, the Iraqi army set fire to approximately 800 of the wells (I'm not sure about that number. I'm working from memory. I am sure that the number was much more than used in TTAPS claim for how much damage would be done by a certain number of oil wells. Please Google nuclear winter or Kuwaiti oil well fires 1991 if you want more details.) There was a small (a few degrees Fahrenheit) for a few days. Unfortunately for the credibility of TTAPS computer model, it had predicted twice or more the drop in temperature and that it would last for months. The greatest difference is in the duration of the decrease in temperature because they grossly underestimated the dispersion of the clouds. They had forecast that the clouds would harm food production, but that did not happen at all.
Krakatoa (in about 1820?) and I think it was named Tamora (1815) each released something on the order of 10 to 100 times the entire combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union (again, I am going on memory here) at our respective peaks. We did not reach our peak arsenals at the same time, but about twenty years apart, the Soviet Union later than the United States. Those explosions impacted the weather, but not nearly to the level that TTAPS and other groups claimed for the nuclear winter scenario. The big volcano eruptions are the best counter-argument to nuclear winter that exist. I will make the claim here that nuclear winter is a fallacy. It has never been held in sufficient regard among United States nuclear warfare planners or intelligence analysts to even consider it in their plans or calculations.
There have been many major variations in climate of the glove over the last 200 million years, or so. Modern human beings have lived through the last approximately 100,000 of those years. Modern agriculture began only ten thousand years ago, but has, nevertheless been through some much smaller climate variations. These climate variations have been so massive that they are difficult to comprehend, much less describe.
Americans, that is, the residents of the United States throw away, into the garbage as surplus enough food every year to feed the entire planet. The problem is that if we donated it all to a charitable organization, they would not be able to transport it from here to where the hungry mouths are before it spoiled. Growing enough food is not the problem.
Computing speeds have increased enormously and computing memory is much larger and more efficient. That does not producer more accurate computer models. It allows them to be more sophisticated, but their performance against the real world continues to be limited by the assumptions and mathematical descriptions of the programmers. The ongoing controversy over "global warming" is really about computer models that have been notoriously unreliable. We know that CO2 levels are increasing at an alarming rate. The true controversy is over how large the impact is and whether or not it is already kicking in. I do think we need to reduce the growth, even turn around the growth in CO2 levels, but I don't trust the computer models at all. My mistrust there stems from the secrecy of the modelers.
You encourage my wishes for a global nuclear holocaust. Perhaps 85 to 90 percent of the population would starve to death. And the dead would select themselves for elimination by being too dim to figure out how to find or grow food. Unfortunately, I think we have shrunk the huge inventories of the United States and former Soviet Union (by more than 90 percent) too much to achieve that kind of result.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
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