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Dr John C. Clark, a scientist who disarmed atomic bombs twice
- neilv 1y agoThe same article mentions what sounds like a worse job: > The 701st soldiers were guinea pigs for evaluating the bomb’s flash, burn and shock-wave effects under field conditions.
- shusaku 1y agoI have to say, including that detail was outstanding writing. It really upped the suspense and sense of horror even though you knew they’d make it out alive.
- seanthemon 1y agoSeveral countries used their men as guinea pigs for nuclear tests. Most notably was a video I watched of British soldiers going through the same thing, the anecdote of seeing bones through your hand when you try to cover your eyes is haunting. https://www.forcesnews.com/nuclear/britains-nuclear-bomb-guinea-pigs-untold-story https://www.forcesnews.com/nuclear/britains-nuclear-bomb-gui...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Vilian 1y agoI mean, if you succeed good job!, if you don't, that's not your job anymore
- almosthere 1y agoWhat I came to say too. It won't matter to YOU if it doesn't go well... and honestly the family would be well compensated, likely (well after 45 years in this life - probably not).
- Simulacra 1y agoI remember an awkward TED interview with Victor Vescovo when he was talking about being in a submersible miles down and what could go wrong in such situation's. He made a good point: those kind of situation's, when something goes wrong, you wouldn't even know it. https://www.ted.com/talks/victor_vescovo_what_s_at_the_bottom_of_the_ocean_and_how_we_re_getting_there https://www.ted.com/talks/victor_vescovo_what_s_at_the_botto...
- wbl 1y agoEh not necessarily. If the floatation system fails you might slowly suffocate at the bottom of the sea.
- cyberax 1y agoUnless you're over deep enough ocean to be crushed.
- brippalcharrid 1y agoI don't know what's worse: a gradual realisation that there's going to be nothing that anyone can do to prevent your sudden, violent death or a gradual realisation that you're going to be slowly asphyxiated.
- ranger207 1y agoEspecially if your government refuses offers to help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster
- LorenPechtel 1y agoMost subs, most oceans, the bottom is far beyond crush depth.
- sgarland 1y agoThe majority of any given point in the world’s oceans are deeper than the crush depth of any submarine. Submersibles, not so much (modulo Oceangate’s).
- Simulacra 1y agoWhat saddens me is that I can't find hardly any information about this guy. John Charles Clark. Nuclear triggerman, and one very brave person. Very little written about him.
- tetris11 1y agosame, nothing on wikipedia
- SaberTail 1y agoOn the one hand, it sounds very stressful. On the other hand, if you screwed up, you wouldn't even notice because your brain would be obliterated before it would register.
- Razengan 1y ago[flagged]
- genter 1y agoThis was in the desert in Nevada. It was just him and one other person.
- cryptonector 1y agoTwo other men. | Once at the base of the 300-foot-tall shot tower with a live atomic bomb on its top, the three men got ready for their ascent.
- randerson 1y agoAnd if you're successful, imagine how well you'd sleep that night.
- sriram_malhar 1y agoIf it were me, I'd be hopped up on so much adrenaline that I'd probably not sleep for days!
- HPsquared 1y agoA bit like Pascal's Wager.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- bdbenton5255 1y agoNuclear weapons can be repurposed for nuclear energy. Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them. These weapons cannot be used ethically, they poison the soil, air, and water. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/military-warheads-as-a-source-of-nuclear-fuel https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... A quote from Sun Tzu is etched in stone at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just outside the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation: "Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
- nssnsjsjsjs 1y agoYes those victorious warriors will find a way to split into 2+ warring factions.
- elmomle 1y agoIf that were to happen then they would not be this ultimate class of warriors.
- nssnsjsjsjs 1y agoThey may be great warriors but bad diplomats
- wrasee 1y agoPresuppose that the following argument contains the solution. This is my solution.
- ssivark 1y ago> "Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood." With such power asymmetries, the "bleeding" might merely be displaced to after the battle is settled. Look at the history of how colonialism played out.
- sgjohnson 1y ago> is the worst job in the world Is it though? You either succeed, or nothing is ever your problem again.
- cubefox 1y agoIt is. Death is bad because we don't want to die, not (just) because it tends to hurt.
- hinkley 1y agoGetting blown up by enough high explosives to detonate a nuclear device is not painful at all. You’ll be about as dead as the Deepwater Horizon people.
- flowerthoughts 1y agoIt's absolutelty an irreversible hysteresis. That's more about not wanting to have fear for dying. After the actual dying, you (probably) don't have a desire to be alive, so the only real problem is the fear leading up to it.
- gjm11 1y agoThis is wrong. I would prefer not to die soon, not only because it would be unpleasant but also because my death would be inconvenient for my employer, distressing for my friends and family, bad for charities I donate to, etc. And also because there are various things I would like to do that, if I get hit by a car tomorrow, I will never get to do. (The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)
- edzillion 1y agoYou listed: > my death would be inconvenient for my employer _first?!_ I believe you have your priorities wrong. Most regret not spending enough time with their loved ones. You only get one life after all.
- wat10000 1y agoIt’s strange how the brain works. In terms of your personal survival if something goes wrong, there’s no difference between disarming a nuclear bomb and, say, a 500lb conventional bomb. But the nuke feels much scarier, at least when reading about it from the comfort of my home.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rank0 1y agoNon-controversial statement
- wk_end 1y agoIt sounds pretty bad, but have you ever been stuck maintaining legacy enterprise software?
- bonki 1y ago... or printers.
- john-h-k 1y agoI’ll happily admit if I was asked to do this I’d run away screaming. That being said, once it’s failed detonation (and you’ve cut off any possible signals to the detonator), wouldn’t you roughly expect it to be as dangerous as transporting one? They mention the large chunk of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary* explosive in there, but the key attribute of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger. So the only failure mode is “somehow the detonator itself has entered a state that did not detonate with the initial signal, but will eventually detonate after >1hr”, which you’d _hope_(!) it was wired to prevent. Again, I’d shit myself immediately in this scenario. Just interesting from an engineering perspective *see comment below, `high` explosive does not mean "hard to detonate". Cursory searches for the [limited] information on the trigger-explosive used in nuclear weapons suggest they were mostly secondary explosives, and also will probably have put me on a new watchlist!
- kadoban 1y ago> They mention the large chunk of high explosive in there, but the key attribute of high explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger. I think the term you might mean is "secondary explosive"? Because as stated this is _very_ wrong. Nitroglycerine is a high explosive. Nitrogen triiodide is a high explosive. Not really compounds known for being hard to trigger, unless you consider a light featherdusting to be rough treatment. Otherwise I suspect you have a good point, just the terminology seems wrong to me.
- john-h-k 1y agoYes, I am wrong it seems. I am unsure where I got the high<->secondary mixup from, I'm sure I saw something talking about high explosive and defining it strictly as "needs supersonic shock wave to initiate", but have just checked and can't find anything saying that. Will edit my prior comment, thanks
- kadoban 1y agoI'm far from an expert (I just like fun parts of youtube xD) but I'm wondering if the terms just get conflated because the only high explosives anyone will use a large amount of by choice are the stable ones, so they're (almost?) all secondaries too.
- jiggawatts 1y agoIronically, compared to — say — landmines, nuclear weapons are very “safe” by design. Many things need to be triggered “just so” to blow one up even conventionally, let alone as a proper nuclear weapon. For example, they use only insensitive explosives. The trigger is purely electric and needs a lot of power. Just pull the battery and it’s a solid inert lump. Also the plutonium “physics package” is less radioactive than you would think. It’s safe to handle with just gloves for short periods.
- jonstewart 1y agoAll except Little Boy…
- dreamcompiler 1y agoIf you banged on a modern nuclear weapon for an hour with a 2 kg hammer, you'd have a sore arm. Soak it in warm water and take an aspirin. If you sawed into one with a metal cutting saw, it would just quietly turn itself into a brick. Nuclear weapons are designed to be both tough and delicate (meaning: they like to brick themselves) at the same time. An extraordinary amount of clever engineering across decades has made them this way.
- jiggawatts 1y agoReminds me of this quote from XKCD What If? > But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. > “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.” Ref: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
- LorenPechtel 1y agoDisagree on the just part. A metal cutting saw into plutonium wouldn't exactly be good for your health. So long as it sits there as a sphere it's not going to hurt you, but it's way down there on the periodic table where basically everything is pretty toxic. You do not want to inhale the dust!
- fraserphysics 1y agoHere are a couple of related jobs that could be in a movie: 1. Disabling a terrorist weapon. When you find a mysterious box in NYC making ticking noises and emitting radiation, who you gonna call? 2. Forensics and attribution. When 1 fails how do you figure out what happened and who is responsible?
- ranger207 1y agoIIRC from a Tom Clancy novel that dealt with that (Sum of All Fears?) the precise mix of isotopes in the fallout can pinpoint exactly where the material was refined, which can help pinpoint where it might've been lost
- protocolture 1y agoAlways wondered whether that was something Tom Clancy had actually researched or whether he pulled it out of his ass.
- exmadscientist 1y agoIsotopic origin analysis is a very real technique, and it can be used for more than just nuclear materials. For example, it's often possible to pinpoint which mine a sample of metal ore came from. It's not foolproof, of course, and it requires a lot of data to pull off usefully, but it sure isn't fiction.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoSomething that bothered me about the book: Yes, looking at a sample of material it's feasible to match it up with known samples. But after the detonation that makes no sense at all. Everything's been vaporized and mixed with what's around. And a lot of stuff has been transmuted. Identifying it if they found the bomb would be one thing, identifying it after detonation makes no sense at all to me.
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- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- ggm 1y agoJoseph Karneke, a ww2 navy clearance diver also did some bomb test related checks on dud/failed devices. It's at the end of his autobiography.
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago[flagged]
- biggerben 1y agoNot to be confused with Dr John Cooper Clarke, expert in disarming poetry. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hkH9BHS-ph4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hkH9BHS-ph4
- DrScientist 1y ago> The 701st soldiers were guinea pigs for evaluating the bomb’s flash, burn and shock-wave effects under field conditions. Yet somehow the story is about a hero that disarmed a bomb - not that he had tried to set off and test the effects on almost 1000 soldiers.... A cool customer in more ways than one....
- Arch-TK 1y agoHe would most likely have been there with those 1000 soldiers. The tests were intended to put you close enough to see and hear the blast but not close enough to be either scorched or significantly irradiated. Specifically the tests were aimed at training soldiers on what to expect from a nuclear blast and to see how those soldiers would react. Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected.
- cryptonector 1y ago> Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected. There's other cases to consider: - the enemy drop bombs near our men - we drop bombs near enemy men In each case how the impacted soldiers react would be interesting and somewhat predictive of the other cases.
- DrScientist 1y agoOf course they aren't close enough to get obliterated - however there are well documented occasions where soldiers were placed so scientists could study the effects of radiation exposure ( among other things ). Look up Operation Desert Rock.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoDon't think that he didn't take every possible precaution: >Clark averted his eyes and lowered the car’s sun visor in case the device did go off and its flash caught him by surprise.