No, I think he's about right. One thing I found online is that the 50% casualty radius for a 1 megaton device is 8 km...about five miles. A 40kt tactical device is more than an order of magnitude less powerful. The USAAF dropped almost 5% of that amount in conventional explosives on Tokyo on just one night. It was actually more effective than the nuke, being spread out over a larger area.
Nuclear weapons have this "doomsday" aura about them. True in many ways, but not really when rogue states are involved (due to their limited arsenals). It is the threshold beyond which no sane government is expected to pass...first side to use them is going to be condemned, no matter the provocation. Retaliatory use is going to be frowned at, too. If the US committed a counterstrike on North Korea, more Americans would probably die from the fallout coming back at us via the jet stream than in the initial attack itself.
Ron Wanttaja
Last edited by rwanttaja; 01-15-2018 at 05:41 PM.
Really? There's a treaty governing the number of thermonuclear warheads a MIRV can carry to various targets? Really? That's beyond laughable. So laughable it's beyond unimaginable comprehension. Sounds more like a SNL sketch.
BTW, the 2 bombs dropped on Japan were 10KT EACH.
Nobody really knows. Nothing was tracked, back then, and American society was disrupted by the end of the war. Medical insight into radiation was non-existent; they'd blast your body with enough radiation to take a real clean image with no consideration as to the long-term effects. IIRC, a "famous test pilot" with initials "CY" [forum software won't let me post his name] attributed his first wife's cancer to overexposure to X-rays. They even put x-ray machines in shoe stores to show your feet in their new shoes.
So no one was tracking any effect. In any case, there were only two, and relatively low yield.
I remember as a kid being told not to eat snow because it contained radioactivity from Russian nuke testing. It was obviously a concern by the late '50s.
Ron Wanttaja
And my thread about staying fit to fly by using a bicycle for exercise was removed. I guess staying fit to fly using exercise does not fit the agenda of the EAA but this thread does.