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Thread: Warning in Hawaii

  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by rwanttaja View Post
    The way I read Floats' response, he wasn't arguing with the news reports that people were scrambling for shelter. I believe his point was that, if an attack came, available shelters wouldn't do people much good.

    Ron "The crackers were stale" Wanttaja
    Yes, exactly!!! I don't know why Bill needs an English translation of my very good English.

  2. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by waltermitty View Post
    Yep, the effects of nuclear warheads are greatly exaggerated. I think the average warhead is something on the order of 40 kt. Anything outside a 5 mi radius wouldn't receive much damage.

    Your "name" is well earned and deserved. You are indeed living a very rich and vivid fantasy life.

  3. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Floatsflyer View Post
    Your "name" is well earned and deserved. You are indeed living a very rich and vivid fantasy life.
    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.

  4. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by Floatsflyer View Post
    Yes, exactly!!! I don't know why Bill needs an English translation of my very good English.
    Classic troll behavior. Deliberately misread a statement, then attack.

    Ron Wanttaja

  5. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by rwanttaja View Post
    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
    Big warhead made sense when there was a single warhead per missile. With MIRV there can be 12 warheads limited by treaty to 9. I think most are in the 40 kt range, roughly twice the size those used in WWII.

  6. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by waltermitty View Post
    Big warhead made sense when there was a single warhead per missile. With MIRV there can be 12 warheads limited by treaty to 9. I think most are in the 40 kt range, roughly twice the size those used in WWII.
    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.

  7. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Floatsflyer View Post
    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.
    Littleboy about 16 kt Fatman around 21.

    START and SORT limited the number of MIRVd warheads, I'm an ex-grunt so that ain't 'xactly my area of experise. I was the NBC NCO so I had the neat little blast calculator which gave the 1 and 5 psi rings.

  8. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by rwanttaja View Post
    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.
    How many died in the USA from fallout from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in WW2?

  9. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by dougbush View Post
    How many died in the USA from fallout from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in WW2?
    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

  10. #20

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    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.

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