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Davy Crockett (nuclear device)
- bayesian_horse 8y agoAnd some people still wonder why Germans have an aversion towards anything called "nuclear".
- emiliobumachar 8y agoCome on, these are two separate discussions. Nuclear power can be used without making weapons.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoHistorically, no. Nuclear power has always been tied to nuclear weapons in terms of infrastructure and technology. Only lately have there been attempts at nuclear power without the capacity for weapons development. Except for dirty bombs, of course, which are possible with virtually any radioactive material. And fear of "nuclear" technology isn't totally about rational arguments. It's not baseless either, because so many "impossible" accidents happened and its so hard to dispose of nuclear waste safely. The deployment of small nuclear grenades, intended to detonate near or in our cities for such "minor" targets as tanks hasn't exactly helped that fear.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoSkepticism about expert classification of accidents as "impossible" is a completely rational argument given the history. Again, I'm not trying to have either debate. I'm just arguing against conflating them, at least within each single country. Once we're policing other countries about keeping off bombs, then, sure, forbidding their power plants might make sense.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoRationally it makes sense to separate the idea of nuclear contamination from casual use of small nuclear weapons from nuclear contamination from nuclear power accidents or waste disposal problems. Emotionally it doesn't make sense at all.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago> Nuclear power has always been tied to nuclear weapons in terms of infrastructure and technology. This is a reason to be wary of nuclear power in e.g. Iran. If you're worried that nuclear power in the United States or Europe will allow western countries to develop nuclear weapons, you're too late. It should also be noted that (edit: some of) the first nuclear weapons were developed using uranium, which is naturally occurring and can be enriched using centrifuges or other technology without any nuclear reactor at all. > And fear of "nuclear" technology isn't totally about rational arguments. It's not baseless either, because so many "impossible" accidents happened and its so hard to dispose of nuclear waste safely. This is FUD. Nothing is ever "impossible" but we deal with things more dangerous than nuclear waste on a regular basis, with less care taken and more actual accidents. Meanwhile you have a nuclear plant with multiple safety measures, then something happens which overcomes half of them but not the other half and the story is how unsafe this is rather than how the multiple overlapping safety layers worked as intended. The only majors disasters have been outside the United States in plants with lower safety requirements. The Chernobyl plant was designed unsafely and operated unsafely and even then the death toll was on the same order of magnitude as the collapse of a skyscraper or the sinking of a large ship, but nobody calls for an end to skyscrapers or ships, much less dams (which are much more dangerous), and that's before we even mention automobiles. The waste problem is also entirely political. The major long half life component is plutonium, which can be reprocessed and used as reactor fuel in newer reactors, which actually permanently destroys it -- the only way to make sure it's never used for weapons. The shorter half life components have to be stored to cool off, but we're talking dozens of years rather than thousands there. Many of them also have commercial value in medical imaging and things like that.
- mikeash 8y agoA bit of a nitpick: the first and third bombs ever detonated were plutonium weapons. Uranium bombs were developed in parallel, mostly as a backup plan in case the much more complicated but otherwise superior plutonium bomb ended up not being workable.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoIn reality it doesn't matter what else is dangerous in this world, when you have the possibility of a nuclear reactor blowing up or making portions of the country uninhabitable. For virtually no benefit. Just don't do it. Of course, all the experts keep saying nothing bad is going to happen with "our" technology in "our" country with "our" government regulating it. But in reality stuff did happen again and again, and with the potential damage even very low probabilities become scary. I don't get why being a "political problem" negates the nuclear waste argument. For one thing, suitable sites are a lot less common than previously thought, and safety of sites used earlier has been overestimated rather badly. For another, the "political" problem of getting people to accept a nuclear waste dump in their vicinity is extremely real and not going to go away. Not from any attempt of rational persuasion anyway. Again, it's not so much about rationality as about fear. But it's also about the fact that engineers tend to underestimate the risk in relying on Human operators, designers, regulators and the stability of a government. Nuclear power plants have a lifetime measured in decades. The weather will change, the demand will change, the technology will change. All good reasons not to commit to decades long problems (centuries, in the case of Tschernobyl and maybe even Fukushima, and decommissioning old power plants looks to be a lot more expensive than everyone thought).
- 08-15 8y ago> Nuclear power has always been tied to nuclear weapons in terms of infrastructure and technology You mean like the CANDU reactors?
- dboreham 8y agoNuclear power plants were literally the factories for weapons.
- mikeash 8y agoNuclear reactors were. Nuclear power plants didn’t show up until a decade later.
- dboreham 8y agoNot sure why that's relevant. It takes O(years) to plan and build one. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/UK-marks-60th-anniversary-of-Calder-Hall http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/UK-marks-60th-ann...
- mikeash 8y agoIt’s relevant because producing bomb material and producing power are somewhat orthogonal, as evidenced by the fact that bombs were being made for about a decade before any power was produced.
- 08-15 8y agoCitation needed. (Spoiler alert: they weren't.)
- atemerev 8y agoWhy? These devices (and SADMs) literally saved West Germany from being overran by the Soviet Union. No other option would have prevented it. German officials _insisted_ that tactical nuclear devices would have been deployed, even against American reservations at this time. They were right, in hindsight.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoRelying on nuclear contamination as deterrence to avoid the nuclear contamination of your country is inherently scary. Especially if the real decision makers live thousands of miles away. There has always been a resistance against American nuclear weapons in Germany. It just didn't play a big role up until fairly recently.
- 08-15 8y ago> Relying on nuclear contamination as deterrence to avoid the nuclear contamination of your country The idea was to rely on giant explosions to stop an invasion. This isn't deterrence, it's a very practical way to stop tanks, infantry, capital ships, etc. What would you prefer, soviet occupation or some radioactivity in some places? The answer from Greenpeace activists would clearly be "soviet occupation", and I'm not sure whether it's because they know next to nothing about radioactivity or because they like socialism.
- majewsky 8y agoMy parents and grandparents lived under Soviet occupation (in the GDR) for decades and they had a pretty good time, all things considered. So did millions others.
- 08-15 8y agoI lived under Soviet occupation (in the GDR) for 14 years, thank you very much. It was a relatively good time, compared to, let's say, the stone age.
- 8y ago
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoI first heard of this as part of the backstory to Metal Gear Solid 3, and was sure Hideo Kojima had made it up. The idea of soldiers carrying nuclear weapons into battle seemed too ridiculous to be real.
- rjsw 8y agoI remember reading a post from someone who was trying to track down one of the backpacks that had been designed to carry the Davy Crockett bomb.
- rdl 8y agoThe backpacks for the Special Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADM) would be better, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...
- fenwick67 8y agoThe flying platforms from MGS3 are real too, believe it or not, although they never saw combat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_X-Jet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_X-Jet
- krylon 8y agoWhoa! A flying Segway, 30 years before the Segway!
- JCSato 8y agoNo way! I was so sure those were a Kojima-ism
- tomjakubowski 8y agoI am excited to learn the real-life basis for those incubator "things" in Death Stranding.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI thought the same thing about the Fulton recovery system. Really feels like the cold war era was this era of advanced technology infancy, where we were going wild about all the possibilities. So much half baked mad Science and engineering that made it really far into development.
- DanCarvajal 8y agoTheoretically it would have been pretty useful in helping suppress any Soviet ground invasion of Western Europe, giving an entirely new scale to the "scorched earth" strategy. I've long had a fascination with the Cold War, but I'm glad I was only around for about three years of it.
- atemerev 8y agoAccording to the Soviet defectors, this is what have ultimately saved West Germany from a full-scale invasion similarly to what have happened to Czechoslovakia at 1968.
- lukasLansky 8y agoOccupation of West Germany would be a much bigger deal from international relationships standpoint than Czechoslovakia occupation was. I'm saying that as a Czech citizen. Taking West Germany would be revisionist. Reaffirming the fact that Czechoslovakia "belonged" to Russia? No one expected West would be concerned, not after political decission was made during WW2 that Soviets are going to "liberate" the land.
- atemerev 8y agoAs a Russian, I am saying that taking West Germany had been the Soviet wet dream since the beginning of the Cold War. :) Soviets were (and probably are) just fine with revisionism, as the Ukrainian affair teaches us. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine.
- hef19898 8y agoNot sure about that, I read more than one article analysing Soviet Cold War plans and coming to the conclusion that, as mich as NATO, the majority focused on defense against any offensive operations. They seemes, for the most part, pretty content to hold on to the Warsaw Pact countries. Not to say that thay most likely would have jumped at the chance of swaling West Germany, pretty much like NATO whith any opportunity to get a Warsaw Pact countrey without nuclear war.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y agoSee also: M65 atomic cannon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M65_atomic_cannon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M65_atomic_cannon
- ourmandave 8y agoI wonder what the standing orders were on these for forward NATO units? Nukes at a platoon level could escalate a war very quickly.
- claydavisss 8y agoread Daniel Ellserg's "The Doomsday Machine" summary: Remote commanders had autonomy due to concerns that centralized control could be subverted. Also, no reliable "call off the dogs" mechanism. Centralization of control of nuclear weapons came much later than the public believes.
- dukoid 8y agoBelievable escalation path concerns might be what prevents a war in the first place though.
- Animats 8y agoIn "About Face", Hackworth had something to say about that. Units did not have the warheads, but they could be brought forward very quickly.
- petra 8y agoHow smaller than this can you get ? How close if this to the minimal "critical mass" ?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 8y agoDepends on what you use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of_a_bare_sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of... Apparently a sphere of Californium-252 that's 6.9cm in diameter will do the trick.
- dukoid 8y ago"Popular speculation about californium as a weapon material has usually centered on Cf-252 due to its neutron-emitting celebrity. Its comparatively short half-life (for weapons purposes), intense and penetrating neutron radioactivity, and high thermal output make it quite unsuitable for this however." http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq6.html#nfaq6.2 http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq6.html#nfaq6.2 Also, 6.9cm isn't that far from the 10cm needed with Plutonium...
- vardina 8y agoA friend once scolded me for using the term "suitcase nuke", saying that such were impossible and that any nuclear weapon would necessarily be far larger than a man could carry. But the Wikipedia entry on "critical mass" indicates that about 10 kilograms of plutonium would be sufficient to make a true nuclear fission device. FWIW I've always heard lower values for the critical mass weight than Wikipedia gives, but nonetheless it seems that a "suitcase nuke" is a real possibility.
- ceejayoz 8y agoThe Davy Crockett could certainly fit in a suitcase - just take a peek at the photos. Briefcase nukes may be a bit less likely.
- rbanffy 8y agoDevices like this (residual radiation aside) would probably be extremely handy when building infrastructure on planetary surfaces.