I think the purpose of the post was more to show off conceptually advanced techniques rather than to actually analyze the dataset in a straightforward manner.

I think the purpose of the post was more to show off conceptually advanced techniques rather than to actually analyze the dataset in a straightforward manner. Correct. I admit it turned out to be a bit too much for one post, but i wanted to use some real world data (the nukes) to demonstrate the techniques. Edit: I could be wrong, but I don't think R (or any other stats package) supports "group subtraction" of distributions, which is how we calculate the survivable nuclear weapons.