41 ms·

Nukes of Hazard (2013)

207 points by sizzle 12y ago

100k 12y ago
I read "Command and Control" on vacation this summer and I highly recommend it. It interweaves jaw-dropping nuclear weapon disasters from the whole nuclear age with a detailed account of one particular incident. It's astonishing how close we've come to accidental nuclear detonation (and then what happens?). That's really the point of the book: it's a matter of when, not if.
- RachelF 12y ago
  It makes a great read. The interleaving of the Titan accident and the rest of the story is leads to a disjointed structure though, making it a bit hard to follow. It seems quite possible that we'll blow ourselves up by accident.
lotharbot 12y ago
The article claims that a nine-megaton blast would wipe out "most of the state of Arkansas". Wikipedia claims the lethal radius on a bomb of that size is about 20 miles for thermal effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb#Effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb#Effects ), which is around 2% of the area of Arkansas; other effects are described as having an even smaller radius. I suspect, but cannot prove, the wikipedia number is more likely to be correct.
- NamTaf 12y ago
  Castle Bravo [1], [2] was a 15Mt yield set off on Bikini Atoll, notable because it was predicted to be 6Mt but was almost 2.5x that. Considering how much of the Bikini Atoll is left ([3], with pin on the location of detonation) and that the command centre for Castle was on the Atoll, I'd say that Arkansas is ok. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Castle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo [3] https://goo.gl/maps/thGe6 https://goo.gl/maps/thGe6
  - pantalaimon 12y ago
    I think the problem is that people can't live there anymore.
    - Crito 12y ago
      You could live there, it just isn't a very good place to live anymore. You would need to fly in your own food and water, and you'll still be getting irradiated, but we're talking "probably get cancer one day" irradiated, not "die of radiation sickness" irradiated. Bikini Atoll was also worse than this hypothetical Arkansas scenario in two ways: 1) The soil there is potassium poor, causing local plants to more readily take in radioactive cesium. 2) It was also hit by 22 additional bombs.
    - pault 12y ago
      That's not really fair. Little Rock isn't the nicest place but I know someone with a very nice summer home in the Ozarks.
- Spearchucker 12y ago
  It's sad that semantics appear to be more worthy of discussion than the mere existence of such raw destructive power.
  - CamperBob2 12y ago
    It's a sign that the journalist just didn't give a crap. What else did they not give a crap about?
    - acqq 12y ago
      See my other answer here, it's not so simple as you believe, as soon as you consider the fallout.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- arethuza 12y ago
  Fall-out effects from such a large & dirty H-bomb detonated at ground level would have been pretty bad - you wouldn't want to be downwind of such an event. [Edit 1] Actually, if you consider the indirect effects of the use of such a weapon - particularly the large number of refugees fleeing contaminated areas, huge numbers of injured etc. while such a detonation wouldn't destroy an entire state it would probably reduce it to complete chaos. e.g. The UK government estimated in the 1950s that three H-bombs would be all it would take to destroy the UK as a functioning society - the UK ambassador in Moscow even had a drunken debate with Kruschev on this point - suggesting that the hundreds of weapons the Soviets had pointing at the UK were complete overkill... [Edit 2] The UK government was always pretty gloomy/realistic about the likely impact of a nuclear war on the UK - basically even in fairly optimistic scenarios such as the Square Leg exercise used as the basis for Threads were absolutely awful. A real attack would have been far worse that the one shown in Threads, if anyone can conceive of that.
  - gambiting 12y ago
    >> suggesting that the hundreds of weapons the Soviets had pointing at the UK were complete overkill... As Schlosser says in his book - because of the lack of coordination between the Air Force, Army, US Navy and Missile Forces, at one point there was something like 400(sorry if I remembered the number wrong,but it was in hundreds) nuclear rockets aimed at Moscow, many of them with multi-megaton payload. If they were launched, Moscow wouldn't be just destroyed - the entire area would be turned into the biggest crater on earth.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      I remember the figure of 400 as well - don't know if that included UK weapons as well (e.g. the Chevaline upgrade to Polaris was mainly about defeating the ABM defenses around Moscow). NB An interesting article by Charlie Stross on the relationship between the US and the UK's "independent" deterrent: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-uk-and-nuclear-disarmam.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-u...
    - cstross 12y ago
- wamatt 12y ago
  Thanks for catching that. It struck me as odd too. Disappointing to read needless hyperbole in the New Yorker.
- justin66 12y ago
  If by "wipe out" the author meant create a lot of casualties and do immense property damage and by "most of the state" the author was talking about population and infrastructure value and not surface area, it's a very defensible statement. The central part of the state is pretty densely populated and that bomb is large. edit: for starters consider that in a state of three million people, 725k are in Little Rock, which is only 116 square miles. Then read the specs on that bomb you linked to again.
- zorbo 12y ago
  There's a nuclear detonation simulator here: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Here's a link with the numbers plugged in: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&lng=-92.2895948&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&ff=50&zm=7 http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l... Arkansas would not be "wiped out".
  - aeturnum 12y ago
    If you enable the fallout option, you will see a much more encompassing effect that would have rendered a lot of land unlivable.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  >I suspect, but cannot prove, the wikipedia number is more likely to be correct. The Wikipedia number is not correct, because even a single blast has long term consequences, and in a full scale war, the consequences are more significant than the initial damage. Even if the blast was just one a of a handful, survivors would have to contend with fallout from other detonations, followed by nuclear winter, followed by years of famine, mutation, cancer, and other diseases. In a full scale war, nukes are targeted at nuke power plants, so there would be even more fallout - enough to sterilise many parts of the US. Initial casualties would be a small percentage of the eventual total. Even a limited exchange in a distant part of the world would have global consequences. See e.g. http://phys.org/news/2013-12-nuclear-war-civilization-famine.html http://phys.org/news/2013-12-nuclear-war-civilization-famine...
  - lotharbot 12y ago
    > "in a full scale war, the consequences are more significant" The specific point being discussed was a local disaster -- a 9 megaton bomb which was damaged by somebody dropping a tool on it -- not an all-out war scenario. Which is why I responded the way I did. In that scenario, I don't see any realistic case in which the entire state of Arkansas would be "wiped out". Possibly fallout would have rendered a fraction of the state uninhabitable for several weeks, and possibly some long-term effects would render a smaller fraction of the state uninhabitable for much longer, but the whole state "wiped out" is just sloppy journalism.
    - acqq 12y ago
      No, see the answer from aeturnum: use the online calculator, enable falout. You'll have to zoom out the map: the area of the effects is approximately as big as the state. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&lng=-92.2895948&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&ff=50&zm=7 http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l...
      - lotharbot 12y ago
        I did in fact already run this scenario. The fallout area is large if you set the threshold low enough. But from what I understand, the largest rings do not render the area uninhabitable by any means. Perhaps the smallest inner ring does. Fallout is also generally a short-term effect -- weeks, not decades. Also be aware that fallout from an underground blast (as in a silo) is going to spread much differently from fallout from an airburst.
- hollerith 12y ago
  Another technical mistake in the New Yorker article: it implies that since the missle was armed, the fire could have produced a megaton-sized blast. Not true: the component that undergoes fission in all US nukes designed after 1945 is spherical, and for the component to release significant amounts of energy, the sphere has to be compressed by a very precisely-timed combination of about 20 explosions of conventional explosives (TNT or such). In fact, a new kind of electronic device needed to be invented by the Manhattan Project to meet the precise timing demands. So, although it is possible for the fire to ignite the conventional explosives, it would almost certainly have not done so in precisely the way needed to activate the atomic components of the bomb -- at least that is what I have read somewhere. (Sorry, I do not remember where -- maybe Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ.) The worst thing that could realistically have happened is that the fire and a conventional explosion would have spread the radioactive components of the bomb (particularly, plutonium) into the environment, in the manner of a dirty bomb.
  - jimmyswimmy 12y ago
    Your comment assumes that the weapon was one-point safe, which was not true for all US devices. I cannot remember the source but apparently for many years (through at least the 80's, I believe) many US weapons could have produced a yield if subjected to a fire. Suppose the trigger device providing the precise timing could misbehave at high temperatures. Or, in the same source I mentioned earlier, it was disclosed that there were wiring paths which could have melted together in a fire and cause the weapon to fire.
aaronbrethorst 12y ago
From reading the article, I get the sense that the best thing working in our[1] favor was having a series of relatively steady, not crazy hands on the nuclear football, on both sides. It's still incredibly frightening that the annihilation of the human race was literally placed in the hands of two people at any given time, but a testament to the capability of the Soviet Politburo and the American political system to elect capable human beings. [1] i.e. the human race
- lotharbot 12y ago
  That came up in a previous discussion of nuclear weapons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 ). To quote my wife (Dove), "There were several close calls during the Cold War, and while the powers involved always chose to respond (they had to, it was doctrine at the time), they always chose to respond cautiously. Both sides wanted to avoid a "hot" war at almost any cost." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 ).
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Realistically, human civilization would still have survived a full scaled thermonuclear exchange during the height of the Cold War. Things would not have been great, but humanity would still have survived.
  - PythonicAlpha 12y ago
    "Humans" as such would have still survived, but I don't know, if that what would have been left of it would be realistically to be called "civilization". I am also not to sure, if they (the remnants) would survive for long with global climate change and radioactive fallout everywhere.
    - InclinedPlane 12y ago
      Almost certainly a Cold War maximum nuclear war would result in collapse of industrialized civilization as we know it, concomitant with an enormous reduction in worldwide population. Nevertheless, a lot of things would almost certainly remain: literacy, agriculture, metalworking, the ideas of science and industry, and so on. Human civilization would be in a very bad state for a good long time, but it would mostly be a setback to previous eras, not complete destruction of civilization.
rtpg 12y ago
>And the missile was armed. Schlosser says that the explosive force of the warhead on a Titan II is nine megatons, which is three times the force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it had detonated, most of the state of Arkansas would have been wiped out. That is the scariest thing I have read in a while. I always had the impression that there were a lot of active steps in a bomb actually exploding.
- winestock 12y ago
  The largest nuclear detonation set off by the United States was Castle Bravo. It was fifteen megatons. It had serious fallout issues, but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
  - PythonicAlpha 12y ago
    >but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon I don't know, what you are referring to here, but to my opinion, given the distances of a relatively wide area with very limited population, the results where grave enough. Generations of the inhabitants where contaminated and had babies with many defects or deaths born. I guess the descendants of these poor people still struggle with the effects of this bomb. Given such an event in or near a city of the US, I guess not only one city might get wiped out but the effects would be very real and destructive in a very big part of the US.
    - PeterisP 12y ago
      "Horrible effects" and "wiped out" mean very, very different things and can't be used interchangeably, especially if you're writing an article that pretends to be serious.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Such activities should not just be labeled a crime against humanity but as a crime against the eco-sphere.
naz 12y ago
> Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square Are there people that know how big a Cub is, but don't know how big a Cessna is?
- sspiff 12y ago
  I had to look up what a Piper Cub was, whereas I believe almost everyone knows what a Cessna looks like. It's only the most common air plane ever built.
- tim333 12y ago
  Cessnas do come in a variety of sizes.
trhway 12y ago
nah... we'll collapse our civilization slowly by turning into one big always connected ant colony hidden in concrete from the overheated unfriendly environment
runarb 12y ago
Nuclear bomb security may have be less advanced than we were lead on to believe. For example British nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key: "British nukes were protected by bike locks" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm . If one puted that in a movie plot I think few would believe it.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Is much the same now, the UK doesn't have launch codes and operates the whole thing as a sort of dead-man's switch, apparently partly based on if the Today program has been broadcast on Radio 4. edit - we also used to rely on the AA's radio network - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/in-the-event-of-a-russian-nuclear-attack-call-the-aa-710672.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/in-the-eve...
  - mootothemax 12y ago
    Is much the same now, the UK doesn't have launch codes and operates the whole thing as a sort of dead-man's switch, apparently partly based on if the Today program has been broadcast on Radio 4. Are you sure you're not confusing that with nuclear submarine commanders checking that BBC Radio 4's still broadcasting as part of their "is the country still there" checks? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort : According to Peter Hennessy's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, 1945 to 1970, the process by which a Trident submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes... establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting
    - dghf 12y ago
      Not really a confusion: if the letter of last resort (sealed orders to be opened in the event the Government is destroyed) says "launch the nukes", you do have a sort of dead man's switch, assuming the sub's captain follows the orders.
mootothemax 12y ago
The UK's leaders wrote "Letters of last resort" to their nuclear submarine commanders, explaining what to do if the government was destroyed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort It's terrifying that nuclear war was considered likely enough to do this.
- dghf 12y ago
  My understanding was they still do: I read somewhere (can't find the link now, sorry) that when the system was explained to Tony Blair on his second day in office, he went white.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Firing the nukes after the destruction of the government is 50% of the purpose of Trident. It's a second-strike deterrence weapon. It's not as if it could be practically used as a first-strike weapon independently of the US, there aren't enough warheads to obliterate Russia or China on our own.
Rapzid 12y ago
"...the American public was regularly frightened by warnings about the dangers of a nuclear attack that was always made to appear imminent" Not much has changed.
- axman6 12y ago
  But the terrists are real. Did you already forget 9/11, the greatest tragedy ever inflicted by man upon itself?
  - _s 12y ago
    9/11 the greatest tragedy? I can think of much worse - though it could be argued if it weren't for 9/11 the world wouldn't be in the state it is in now.
    - boomlinde 12y ago
      I don't think that his claim was entirely sincere.
    - golergka 12y ago
      I think that it may have been sarcastic.
    - axman6 12y ago
      As others have stated, there was a heavy dose of sarcasm to my comment; I felt that HN would be the sort of place where "/s" weren't necessary but I guess not.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Did you even read the article? Such fears may have been totally rational.
  - Zikes 12y ago
    We're afraid because they have nukes because they're afraid because we have nukes because we're afraid because they have nukes because they're afraid because we have nukes because...
myrandomcomment 12y ago
How hard is it to report facts. "The plane split in two, the base was evacuated, and the fire burned for two and a half hours. But the explosives in the warhead didn’t detonate; that would have set off a chain reaction." This statement seems to imply the bomb would have went off, which is just not true. The physics just do not work that way.
- axman6 12y ago
  Depending on the design, isn't there some chance that the heat could detonate the conventional explosive used to force the nuclear material together? as far as I understand it, there is definitely a risk of detonation, though it's hopefully very low. Physics is not directly the reason for it being so low either, but more safeguards put in place to ensure detonation only happens when it's supposed to and is prevented otherwise.
  - MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
    If I understood this correctly, the main challenge in nuclear bomb design is to time the conventional explosions in such a way that the resulting blast will compress the nuclear material, achieving critical mass, and not simply tearing it all apart. So I think that this fire would probably not have caused a nuclear explosion.
    - XorNot 12y ago
      Years of testing have never yielded a nuclear detonation from the conventional explosives cooking off in a warhead - radioactive strewn desert in Australia is a testament to the British testing this directly. Nuclear bombs require absurd - something on the order of microseconds (I suspect nanoseconds probably come into play) detonation precision in order to reach super-criticality.
  - mnw21cam 12y ago
    Most high explosives will not detonate when burnt. They need to have a shock wave running through them for the detonation to occur. The initial shock wave is usually created using a detonator, which uses a very small amount of a much more risky explosive. You can get a lump of C-4, and use it as fuel for a fire to cook over without any danger, and in fact soldiers certainly used to do this. You can also hit it with a hammer - the shock wave caused by this isn't strong enough to cause a detonation. In terms of a nuke, you need to detonate a set of independent lumps of explosive with very precise timing, in order to get a compression lens that will squash the fissile core sufficiently to get a nuclear explosion. Heat is unlikely to cause this to happen with a sensibly-designed bomb.
mobiplayer 12y ago
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention when in 1966 the US dropped 4 nuclear bombs off the Spanish coast. It was, of course, an accident but I've always felt it was pretty serious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
- tim333 12y ago
  It sees they actually dropped some on Spain rather that off the coast. From Wikipedia: "Of the four Mk28-type hydrogen bombs the B-52G carried, three were found on land near the small fishing village of Palomares"
Spearchucker 12y ago
This is my problem with the American and Russian government - actually any government - they play games. Stupid, myopic and arrogant idiots who see life other than their own on this planet as a thing to be toyed with. Intellectually they're little better than teenagers. Machiavelli's blueprint smothers the benevolence of the Ghandis, the Tutus and the Mandelas. A populace too absorbed in day-to-day survival is in no position to change the status quo. Depressing.
- arethuza 12y ago
  Both "Better red than dead" and "better dead than red" were slogans thrown around in my youth here in the UK in the 70s and 80s. Utter craziness - all of it.
  - kghose 12y ago
    This attitude is part of 'better to be dead than a slave'. I think many people saw what the Nazis did in the occupied territories and their thinking was influenced by that (extending it to, what would happen if the Soviets invaded our lands).
    - mseebach 12y ago
      By the 70s and 80s, people knew (or had the option to know - many chose not to know) what the Soviets did to people at home, so it wasn't totally out of whack to assume what would happen if they invaded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_De...
      - arethuza 12y ago
        Well, had it been my choice between a nuclear war where 90%-95% of the population of the UK would have died in optimistic scenarios and surrendering to the Soviets (and yes, I am fully aware of how badly they treated people in their own country and the countries they controlled) I know which one I would have chosen.
sidcool 12y ago
A very fascinating article.
chriswarbo 12y ago
> In 1960, the computer at... NORAD... warned, with 99.9-per-cent certainty, that the Soviets had just launched a full-scale missile attack against North America... They later discovered that the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at Thule Airbase, in Greenland, had interpreted the moon rising over Norway as a missile attack from Siberia. This is why numbers shouldn't be reported with too many significant figures. I doubt the engineers thought the reports could be %99.9 certain, given that they're extrapolated from noisy sensors, networked across huge distances and that the opponent is adversarial (actively trying to avoid detection). Percentages can cause a false sense of certainty too; as Leonard Mlodinow points out in The Drunkard's Walk about changing wine ratings from out-of-10 to percentages. We might be quite sure that an 8/10 compares favourably to a 7/10 but not to a 9/10; we can't say the same about an %82 with an %83 and an %81. If you're forced to report percentages, or tenths of a percent, write the estimated error alongside. Raw numbers like "%99.9" have an implied "+/- %0.05" afterwards. And that, ladies and gentlement, is why Die Hard 4.0 contains too many many significant figures.
- fela 12y ago
  In which case can you define what an error interval on a probability estimate means? :) I think probabilities can either be well calibrated or not. (Which then of course begs the question of how you define being well calibrated for probabilities of events that happen very rarely). An error interval does not seem to make too much sense.
- DennisP 12y ago
  Put it that way and it sounds like 99.9999% is just an excessively precise version of 99%. Really it's the difference between .01 and .000001. It's just an expression of the order of magnitude: one in a hundred, a thousand, a million.
  - aragot 12y ago
    ...and we did hit that one chance in a million that it was wrong.
    - 12y ago
Rapzid 12y ago
I wouldn't have thought how trumped up and ludicrous this all was. I was born in 1984, so I really started becoming aware in the bubble that existed after the wall fell and before 9/11. Sure, I read 1984 and Farenhiet 451 but the seemed like commentary about the future, what could become. Apparently they were just as relevant when they were written. Constant war with the "enemy". The threat of attack at any time. Constant fear. All so people could build their little empires inside the military and intelligence communities. Build their bombs. Spend that sweet tax-payer money. Feel important. Lie to the government. The past seemed so legit and so ancient when I was growing up. After 9/11 I had no idea history was repeating itself. Now we have the ever present(statistically ridiculous) threat of "terrorism". The NSA needs more powers, more money; to protect us of course. They WOULD say that because that's how they get more money, more employees, more power. Still lying to the government of course(weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?). Now we have an ex-NSA head launching a venture charging companies 1 million a month to protect them! Of course they'll contract back to government. And the NSA will tell use all about how we don't need to worry about what they are doing, we just need to pay up. sigh
- simonh 12y ago
  > The threat of attack at any time. Constant fear. All so people could build their little empires inside the military and intelligence communities. I'm pretty sure the Soviet Union did exist, and actually did have WMDs. Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it. I fully accept a lot of mistakes were made during the cold war, and I also deplore the expensive, ineffective and unnecessary overreach by western intelligence agencies, but the threats they were and are purporting to defend us from are very real. Some of our responses to those threats have been mistaken and unnecessary, but it certainly does not follow that those threats don't exist and don't need to be responded to.
  - mkaziz 12y ago
    If we're talking statistics, far more Americans die of diabetes and heart problems than terrorism. Better to spend trillions of dollars there, no, instead of bleeding that money in Iraq and Afghanistan?
danso 12y ago
Jesus Christ...what a thing to read if you needed to not fall asleep for awhile. I think this is a perfect real-life example of Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"...the whole world has nearly been annihilated, several times over, due to most inexplicably benign human errors...and that's not even counting the errors of bureaucracy (such as the misreporting of Russian nuke capability, which let military officials press the need for an absurd number of excess warheads). Also, this is the first time I can remember that I've ever seen a correction in a New Yorker article.
asadlionpk 12y ago
There was a really nice documentary on similar subject: Countdown to Zero http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769/
mariusz79 12y ago
All we need is a solar frame, pandemic, or string of larger earthquakes in some parts of the globe. That would cause some nuclear plants to meltdown. Life on Earth would become impossible. No need to worry about some accidental nuclear war. Damn, we're dumb.
- zorbo 12y ago
  Can you back that up with some numbers, or a source perhaps? Because that just sounds like fearmongering. We've already had two nuclear plant meltdowns, and life on earth is doing just fine.
  - mariusz79 12y ago
    Fear mongering? Let's see: First of all, Chernobyl Exclusion zone is about 1000 mile^2. [3] Life is not doing just fine there. And the effect of Fukushima meltdown are not going to be known for the next few years, but there are indications that it may not be as harmless as we are led to believe.[4] There are currently 62 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 100 nuclear reactors in 31 states in the United States. [1] A recent study led by European researchers found Fukushima is not alone, as 22 other plants around the world may be similarly susceptible to destructive tsunami waves, with most of them in east and southeast regions of Asia. [2] The World Nuclear Association estimates that 20 percent of nuclear reactors worldwide operate in areas vulnerable to earthquakes.[5] [1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=207&t=3 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=207&t=3 [2] http://news.discovery.com/earth/plants/nuclear-plants-at-tsunami-risk-120924.htm http://news.discovery.com/earth/plants/nuclear-plants-at-tsu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_Exclusion_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_... [4]http://fukushima-diary.com/2014/07/nuclear-expert-fukushima-plant-now-like-swamp-radioactive-material-due-contaminated-water/ http://fukushima-diary.com/2014/07/nuclear-expert-fukushima-... [5]http://www.frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/how-many-us-nuclear-plants-are-located-near-earthquake-faults http://www.frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/how-many-us-nucle...
    - zorbo 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
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swah 12y ago
The movie plug is in the article but most of us are only skimming so let me plug it again: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dr_strangelove/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dr_strangelove/ I didn't like 2001, maybe because in 2014 its harder to appreciate, and it has a very slow pace. Dr. Strangelove a much easier watch.
- gdubs 12y ago
  "Fail Safe" [1] is also an excellent movie. I believe it was based on the same book as Strangelove, but is a drama and not a dark comedy. Excellent movie and cast.
  - swah 12y ago
    Which one ? http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/ vs http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1175374-fail_safe/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1175374-fail_safe/
    - gdubs 12y ago
      Sorry, forgot the link: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/
iSnow 12y ago
I guess the most scary stuff I read in quite some time: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm... - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 - http://rbth.com/defence/2014/04/03/ultimate_deterrent_how_the_russian_perimeter_system_works_35633.html http://rbth.com/defence/2014/04/03/ultimate_deterrent_how_th... - http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand?currentPage=all http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf... This had so many ways to end in tears and it still does.
kjbekkelund 12y ago
The weather rocket was launched from the island where I grew up in Norway (Andøya in Vesterålen, just north of Lofoten). After the event a local marketing agency created this t-shirt: http://baardmichalsen.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/tskjorte-0002.jpg http://baardmichalsen.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/tskjorte-0...
jonnathanson 12y ago
Anyone who enjoyed this article, or at least the subject of it, should check out the book itself ("Command & Control" by Eric Schlosser). It's a great read. The book's chapters alternate between two narratives. The first is a real-time account of a bomb-gone-haywire scare in Arkansas, and the people called in to deal with it. The second is a history of nuclear arms, escalation, and near-misses during the Cold War. I could have done without the first narrative. It is awkwardly written, repetitive, and slow. (No doubt Schlosser does this to draw out the scenario across N chapters. The tactic actually makes things worse, sapping the story of its immediacy and urgency). But the main, historical narrative is fantastic.
AnimalMuppet 12y ago
tl;dr: Modern nuclear warheads should not go off by accident, even in (almost) any conceivable accident. Modern warhead design has the idea of the "strong link" and "weak link". The strong link is a critical part of the detonation path, and is not ordinarily in place. It can only be put in place by arming the warhead, or by a severe accident. But any accident severe enough to put the strong link in place should be more than enough to destroy the weak link, which is also a critical part of the detonation path. A warhead accident could still leave an awful lot of radioactive contamination, of course...
AnimalMuppet 12y ago
I seem to recall hearing that, back in the 1960s, the US at least offered to the USSR that we would teach them how to improve their nuclear command and control. The thinking was that, yes, in event of war this would improve their ability to fight, but it was more important to reduce the possibility of accidentally starting such a war.

207 points by sizzle 12y ago

100k 12y ago

I read "Command and Control" on vacation this summer and I highly recommend it. It interweaves jaw-dropping nuclear weapon disasters from the whole nuclear age with a detailed account of one particular incident. It's astonishing how close we've come to accidental nuclear detonation (and then what happens?). That's really the point of the book: it's a matter of when, not if.

RachelF 12y ago
It makes a great read. The interleaving of the Titan accident and the rest of the story is leads to a disjointed structure though, making it a bit hard to follow. It seems quite possible that we'll blow ourselves up by accident.

lotharbot 12y ago

The article claims that a nine-megaton blast would wipe out "most of the state of Arkansas". Wikipedia claims the lethal radius on a bomb of that size is about 20 miles for thermal effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb#Effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb#Effects ), which is around 2% of the area of Arkansas; other effects are described as having an even smaller radius. I suspect, but cannot prove, the wikipedia number is more likely to be correct.

NamTaf 12y ago
Castle Bravo [1], [2] was a 15Mt yield set off on Bikini Atoll, notable because it was predicted to be 6Mt but was almost 2.5x that. Considering how much of the Bikini Atoll is left ([3], with pin on the location of detonation) and that the command centre for Castle was on the Atoll, I'd say that Arkansas is ok. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Castle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo [3] https://goo.gl/maps/thGe6 https://goo.gl/maps/thGe6
- pantalaimon 12y ago
  I think the problem is that people can't live there anymore.
  - Crito 12y ago
    You could live there, it just isn't a very good place to live anymore. You would need to fly in your own food and water, and you'll still be getting irradiated, but we're talking "probably get cancer one day" irradiated, not "die of radiation sickness" irradiated. Bikini Atoll was also worse than this hypothetical Arkansas scenario in two ways: 1) The soil there is potassium poor, causing local plants to more readily take in radioactive cesium. 2) It was also hit by 22 additional bombs.
  - pault 12y ago
    That's not really fair. Little Rock isn't the nicest place but I know someone with a very nice summer home in the Ozarks.
Spearchucker 12y ago
It's sad that semantics appear to be more worthy of discussion than the mere existence of such raw destructive power.
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  It's a sign that the journalist just didn't give a crap. What else did they not give a crap about?
  - acqq 12y ago
    See my other answer here, it's not so simple as you believe, as soon as you consider the fallout.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
arethuza 12y ago
Fall-out effects from such a large & dirty H-bomb detonated at ground level would have been pretty bad - you wouldn't want to be downwind of such an event. [Edit 1] Actually, if you consider the indirect effects of the use of such a weapon - particularly the large number of refugees fleeing contaminated areas, huge numbers of injured etc. while such a detonation wouldn't destroy an entire state it would probably reduce it to complete chaos. e.g. The UK government estimated in the 1950s that three H-bombs would be all it would take to destroy the UK as a functioning society - the UK ambassador in Moscow even had a drunken debate with Kruschev on this point - suggesting that the hundreds of weapons the Soviets had pointing at the UK were complete overkill... [Edit 2] The UK government was always pretty gloomy/realistic about the likely impact of a nuclear war on the UK - basically even in fairly optimistic scenarios such as the Square Leg exercise used as the basis for Threads were absolutely awful. A real attack would have been far worse that the one shown in Threads, if anyone can conceive of that.
- gambiting 12y ago
  >> suggesting that the hundreds of weapons the Soviets had pointing at the UK were complete overkill... As Schlosser says in his book - because of the lack of coordination between the Air Force, Army, US Navy and Missile Forces, at one point there was something like 400(sorry if I remembered the number wrong,but it was in hundreds) nuclear rockets aimed at Moscow, many of them with multi-megaton payload. If they were launched, Moscow wouldn't be just destroyed - the entire area would be turned into the biggest crater on earth.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    I remember the figure of 400 as well - don't know if that included UK weapons as well (e.g. the Chevaline upgrade to Polaris was mainly about defeating the ABM defenses around Moscow). NB An interesting article by Charlie Stross on the relationship between the US and the UK's "independent" deterrent: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-uk-and-nuclear-disarmam.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-u...
  - cstross 12y ago
wamatt 12y ago
Thanks for catching that. It struck me as odd too. Disappointing to read needless hyperbole in the New Yorker.
justin66 12y ago
If by "wipe out" the author meant create a lot of casualties and do immense property damage and by "most of the state" the author was talking about population and infrastructure value and not surface area, it's a very defensible statement. The central part of the state is pretty densely populated and that bomb is large. edit: for starters consider that in a state of three million people, 725k are in Little Rock, which is only 116 square miles. Then read the specs on that bomb you linked to again.
zorbo 12y ago
There's a nuclear detonation simulator here: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Here's a link with the numbers plugged in: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&lng=-92.2895948&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&ff=50&zm=7 http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l... Arkansas would not be "wiped out".
- aeturnum 12y ago
  If you enable the fallout option, you will see a much more encompassing effect that would have rendered a lot of land unlivable.
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
>I suspect, but cannot prove, the wikipedia number is more likely to be correct. The Wikipedia number is not correct, because even a single blast has long term consequences, and in a full scale war, the consequences are more significant than the initial damage. Even if the blast was just one a of a handful, survivors would have to contend with fallout from other detonations, followed by nuclear winter, followed by years of famine, mutation, cancer, and other diseases. In a full scale war, nukes are targeted at nuke power plants, so there would be even more fallout - enough to sterilise many parts of the US. Initial casualties would be a small percentage of the eventual total. Even a limited exchange in a distant part of the world would have global consequences. See e.g. http://phys.org/news/2013-12-nuclear-war-civilization-famine.html http://phys.org/news/2013-12-nuclear-war-civilization-famine...
- lotharbot 12y ago
  > "in a full scale war, the consequences are more significant" The specific point being discussed was a local disaster -- a 9 megaton bomb which was damaged by somebody dropping a tool on it -- not an all-out war scenario. Which is why I responded the way I did. In that scenario, I don't see any realistic case in which the entire state of Arkansas would be "wiped out". Possibly fallout would have rendered a fraction of the state uninhabitable for several weeks, and possibly some long-term effects would render a smaller fraction of the state uninhabitable for much longer, but the whole state "wiped out" is just sloppy journalism.
  - acqq 12y ago
    No, see the answer from aeturnum: use the online calculator, enable falout. You'll have to zoom out the map: the area of the effects is approximately as big as the state. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&lng=-92.2895948&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&ff=50&zm=7 http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l...
    - lotharbot 12y ago
      I did in fact already run this scenario. The fallout area is large if you set the threshold low enough. But from what I understand, the largest rings do not render the area uninhabitable by any means. Perhaps the smallest inner ring does. Fallout is also generally a short-term effect -- weeks, not decades. Also be aware that fallout from an underground blast (as in a silo) is going to spread much differently from fallout from an airburst.
hollerith 12y ago
Another technical mistake in the New Yorker article: it implies that since the missle was armed, the fire could have produced a megaton-sized blast. Not true: the component that undergoes fission in all US nukes designed after 1945 is spherical, and for the component to release significant amounts of energy, the sphere has to be compressed by a very precisely-timed combination of about 20 explosions of conventional explosives (TNT or such). In fact, a new kind of electronic device needed to be invented by the Manhattan Project to meet the precise timing demands. So, although it is possible for the fire to ignite the conventional explosives, it would almost certainly have not done so in precisely the way needed to activate the atomic components of the bomb -- at least that is what I have read somewhere. (Sorry, I do not remember where -- maybe Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ.) The worst thing that could realistically have happened is that the fire and a conventional explosion would have spread the radioactive components of the bomb (particularly, plutonium) into the environment, in the manner of a dirty bomb.
- jimmyswimmy 12y ago
  Your comment assumes that the weapon was one-point safe, which was not true for all US devices. I cannot remember the source but apparently for many years (through at least the 80's, I believe) many US weapons could have produced a yield if subjected to a fire. Suppose the trigger device providing the precise timing could misbehave at high temperatures. Or, in the same source I mentioned earlier, it was disclosed that there were wiring paths which could have melted together in a fire and cause the weapon to fire.

aaronbrethorst 12y ago

From reading the article, I get the sense that the best thing working in our[1] favor was having a series of relatively steady, not crazy hands on the nuclear football, on both sides. It's still incredibly frightening that the annihilation of the human race was literally placed in the hands of two people at any given time, but a testament to the capability of the Soviet Politburo and the American political system to elect capable human beings. [1] i.e. the human race

lotharbot 12y ago
That came up in a previous discussion of nuclear weapons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 ). To quote my wife (Dove), "There were several close calls during the Cold War, and while the powers involved always chose to respond (they had to, it was doctrine at the time), they always chose to respond cautiously. Both sides wanted to avoid a "hot" war at almost any cost." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 ).
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Realistically, human civilization would still have survived a full scaled thermonuclear exchange during the height of the Cold War. Things would not have been great, but humanity would still have survived.
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  "Humans" as such would have still survived, but I don't know, if that what would have been left of it would be realistically to be called "civilization". I am also not to sure, if they (the remnants) would survive for long with global climate change and radioactive fallout everywhere.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    Almost certainly a Cold War maximum nuclear war would result in collapse of industrialized civilization as we know it, concomitant with an enormous reduction in worldwide population. Nevertheless, a lot of things would almost certainly remain: literacy, agriculture, metalworking, the ideas of science and industry, and so on. Human civilization would be in a very bad state for a good long time, but it would mostly be a setback to previous eras, not complete destruction of civilization.

rtpg 12y ago

>And the missile was armed. Schlosser says that the explosive force of the warhead on a Titan II is nine megatons, which is three times the force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it had detonated, most of the state of Arkansas would have been wiped out. That is the scariest thing I have read in a while. I always had the impression that there were a lot of active steps in a bomb actually exploding.

winestock 12y ago
The largest nuclear detonation set off by the United States was Castle Bravo. It was fifteen megatons. It had serious fallout issues, but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  >but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon I don't know, what you are referring to here, but to my opinion, given the distances of a relatively wide area with very limited population, the results where grave enough. Generations of the inhabitants where contaminated and had babies with many defects or deaths born. I guess the descendants of these poor people still struggle with the effects of this bomb. Given such an event in or near a city of the US, I guess not only one city might get wiped out but the effects would be very real and destructive in a very big part of the US.
  - PeterisP 12y ago
    "Horrible effects" and "wiped out" mean very, very different things and can't be used interchangeably, especially if you're writing an article that pretends to be serious.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Such activities should not just be labeled a crime against humanity but as a crime against the eco-sphere.

naz 12y ago

> Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square Are there people that know how big a Cub is, but don't know how big a Cessna is?

sspiff 12y ago
I had to look up what a Piper Cub was, whereas I believe almost everyone knows what a Cessna looks like. It's only the most common air plane ever built.
tim333 12y ago
Cessnas do come in a variety of sizes.

trhway 12y ago

nah... we'll collapse our civilization slowly by turning into one big always connected ant colony hidden in concrete from the overheated unfriendly environment

runarb 12y ago

Nuclear bomb security may have be less advanced than we were lead on to believe. For example British nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key: "British nukes were protected by bike locks" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm . If one puted that in a movie plot I think few would believe it.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
Is much the same now, the UK doesn't have launch codes and operates the whole thing as a sort of dead-man's switch, apparently partly based on if the Today program has been broadcast on Radio 4. edit - we also used to rely on the AA's radio network - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/in-the-event-of-a-russian-nuclear-attack-call-the-aa-710672.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/in-the-eve...
- mootothemax 12y ago
  Is much the same now, the UK doesn't have launch codes and operates the whole thing as a sort of dead-man's switch, apparently partly based on if the Today program has been broadcast on Radio 4. Are you sure you're not confusing that with nuclear submarine commanders checking that BBC Radio 4's still broadcasting as part of their "is the country still there" checks? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort : According to Peter Hennessy's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, 1945 to 1970, the process by which a Trident submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes... establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting
  - dghf 12y ago
    Not really a confusion: if the letter of last resort (sealed orders to be opened in the event the Government is destroyed) says "launch the nukes", you do have a sort of dead man's switch, assuming the sub's captain follows the orders.

mootothemax 12y ago

The UK's leaders wrote "Letters of last resort" to their nuclear submarine commanders, explaining what to do if the government was destroyed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort It's terrifying that nuclear war was considered likely enough to do this.

dghf 12y ago
My understanding was they still do: I read somewhere (can't find the link now, sorry) that when the system was explained to Tony Blair on his second day in office, he went white.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Firing the nukes after the destruction of the government is 50% of the purpose of Trident. It's a second-strike deterrence weapon. It's not as if it could be practically used as a first-strike weapon independently of the US, there aren't enough warheads to obliterate Russia or China on our own.

Rapzid 12y ago

"...the American public was regularly frightened by warnings about the dangers of a nuclear attack that was always made to appear imminent" Not much has changed.

axman6 12y ago
But the terrists are real. Did you already forget 9/11, the greatest tragedy ever inflicted by man upon itself?
- _s 12y ago
  9/11 the greatest tragedy? I can think of much worse - though it could be argued if it weren't for 9/11 the world wouldn't be in the state it is in now.
  - boomlinde 12y ago
    I don't think that his claim was entirely sincere.
  - golergka 12y ago
    I think that it may have been sarcastic.
  - axman6 12y ago
    As others have stated, there was a heavy dose of sarcasm to my comment; I felt that HN would be the sort of place where "/s" weren't necessary but I guess not.
Houshalter 12y ago
Did you even read the article? Such fears may have been totally rational.
- Zikes 12y ago
  We're afraid because they have nukes because they're afraid because we have nukes because we're afraid because they have nukes because they're afraid because we have nukes because...

myrandomcomment 12y ago

How hard is it to report facts. "The plane split in two, the base was evacuated, and the fire burned for two and a half hours. But the explosives in the warhead didn’t detonate; that would have set off a chain reaction." This statement seems to imply the bomb would have went off, which is just not true. The physics just do not work that way.

axman6 12y ago
Depending on the design, isn't there some chance that the heat could detonate the conventional explosive used to force the nuclear material together? as far as I understand it, there is definitely a risk of detonation, though it's hopefully very low. Physics is not directly the reason for it being so low either, but more safeguards put in place to ensure detonation only happens when it's supposed to and is prevented otherwise.
- MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
  If I understood this correctly, the main challenge in nuclear bomb design is to time the conventional explosions in such a way that the resulting blast will compress the nuclear material, achieving critical mass, and not simply tearing it all apart. So I think that this fire would probably not have caused a nuclear explosion.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    Years of testing have never yielded a nuclear detonation from the conventional explosives cooking off in a warhead - radioactive strewn desert in Australia is a testament to the British testing this directly. Nuclear bombs require absurd - something on the order of microseconds (I suspect nanoseconds probably come into play) detonation precision in order to reach super-criticality.
- mnw21cam 12y ago
  Most high explosives will not detonate when burnt. They need to have a shock wave running through them for the detonation to occur. The initial shock wave is usually created using a detonator, which uses a very small amount of a much more risky explosive. You can get a lump of C-4, and use it as fuel for a fire to cook over without any danger, and in fact soldiers certainly used to do this. You can also hit it with a hammer - the shock wave caused by this isn't strong enough to cause a detonation. In terms of a nuke, you need to detonate a set of independent lumps of explosive with very precise timing, in order to get a compression lens that will squash the fissile core sufficiently to get a nuclear explosion. Heat is unlikely to cause this to happen with a sensibly-designed bomb.

mobiplayer 12y ago

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention when in 1966 the US dropped 4 nuclear bombs off the Spanish coast. It was, of course, an accident but I've always felt it was pretty serious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

tim333 12y ago
It sees they actually dropped some on Spain rather that off the coast. From Wikipedia: "Of the four Mk28-type hydrogen bombs the B-52G carried, three were found on land near the small fishing village of Palomares"

Spearchucker 12y ago

This is my problem with the American and Russian government - actually any government - they play games. Stupid, myopic and arrogant idiots who see life other than their own on this planet as a thing to be toyed with. Intellectually they're little better than teenagers. Machiavelli's blueprint smothers the benevolence of the Ghandis, the Tutus and the Mandelas. A populace too absorbed in day-to-day survival is in no position to change the status quo. Depressing.

arethuza 12y ago
Both "Better red than dead" and "better dead than red" were slogans thrown around in my youth here in the UK in the 70s and 80s. Utter craziness - all of it.
- kghose 12y ago
  This attitude is part of 'better to be dead than a slave'. I think many people saw what the Nazis did in the occupied territories and their thinking was influenced by that (extending it to, what would happen if the Soviets invaded our lands).
  - mseebach 12y ago
    By the 70s and 80s, people knew (or had the option to know - many chose not to know) what the Soviets did to people at home, so it wasn't totally out of whack to assume what would happen if they invaded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_De...
    - arethuza 12y ago
      Well, had it been my choice between a nuclear war where 90%-95% of the population of the UK would have died in optimistic scenarios and surrendering to the Soviets (and yes, I am fully aware of how badly they treated people in their own country and the countries they controlled) I know which one I would have chosen.

sidcool 12y ago

A very fascinating article.

chriswarbo 12y ago

> In 1960, the computer at... NORAD... warned, with 99.9-per-cent certainty, that the Soviets had just launched a full-scale missile attack against North America... They later discovered that the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at Thule Airbase, in Greenland, had interpreted the moon rising over Norway as a missile attack from Siberia. This is why numbers shouldn't be reported with too many significant figures. I doubt the engineers thought the reports could be %99.9 certain, given that they're extrapolated from noisy sensors, networked across huge distances and that the opponent is adversarial (actively trying to avoid detection). Percentages can cause a false sense of certainty too; as Leonard Mlodinow points out in The Drunkard's Walk about changing wine ratings from out-of-10 to percentages. We might be quite sure that an 8/10 compares favourably to a 7/10 but not to a 9/10; we can't say the same about an %82 with an %83 and an %81. If you're forced to report percentages, or tenths of a percent, write the estimated error alongside. Raw numbers like "%99.9" have an implied "+/- %0.05" afterwards. And that, ladies and gentlement, is why Die Hard 4.0 contains too many many significant figures.

fela 12y ago
In which case can you define what an error interval on a probability estimate means? :) I think probabilities can either be well calibrated or not. (Which then of course begs the question of how you define being well calibrated for probabilities of events that happen very rarely). An error interval does not seem to make too much sense.
DennisP 12y ago
Put it that way and it sounds like 99.9999% is just an excessively precise version of 99%. Really it's the difference between .01 and .000001. It's just an expression of the order of magnitude: one in a hundred, a thousand, a million.
- aragot 12y ago
  ...and we did hit that one chance in a million that it was wrong.
  - 12y ago

Rapzid 12y ago

I wouldn't have thought how trumped up and ludicrous this all was. I was born in 1984, so I really started becoming aware in the bubble that existed after the wall fell and before 9/11. Sure, I read 1984 and Farenhiet 451 but the seemed like commentary about the future, what could become. Apparently they were just as relevant when they were written. Constant war with the "enemy". The threat of attack at any time. Constant fear. All so people could build their little empires inside the military and intelligence communities. Build their bombs. Spend that sweet tax-payer money. Feel important. Lie to the government. The past seemed so legit and so ancient when I was growing up. After 9/11 I had no idea history was repeating itself. Now we have the ever present(statistically ridiculous) threat of "terrorism". The NSA needs more powers, more money; to protect us of course. They WOULD say that because that's how they get more money, more employees, more power. Still lying to the government of course(weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?). Now we have an ex-NSA head launching a venture charging companies 1 million a month to protect them! Of course they'll contract back to government. And the NSA will tell use all about how we don't need to worry about what they are doing, we just need to pay up. sigh

simonh 12y ago
> The threat of attack at any time. Constant fear. All so people could build their little empires inside the military and intelligence communities. I'm pretty sure the Soviet Union did exist, and actually did have WMDs. Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it. I fully accept a lot of mistakes were made during the cold war, and I also deplore the expensive, ineffective and unnecessary overreach by western intelligence agencies, but the threats they were and are purporting to defend us from are very real. Some of our responses to those threats have been mistaken and unnecessary, but it certainly does not follow that those threats don't exist and don't need to be responded to.
- mkaziz 12y ago
  If we're talking statistics, far more Americans die of diabetes and heart problems than terrorism. Better to spend trillions of dollars there, no, instead of bleeding that money in Iraq and Afghanistan?

danso 12y ago

Jesus Christ...what a thing to read if you needed to not fall asleep for awhile. I think this is a perfect real-life example of Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"...the whole world has nearly been annihilated, several times over, due to most inexplicably benign human errors...and that's not even counting the errors of bureaucracy (such as the misreporting of Russian nuke capability, which let military officials press the need for an absurd number of excess warheads). Also, this is the first time I can remember that I've ever seen a correction in a New Yorker article.

asadlionpk 12y ago

There was a really nice documentary on similar subject: Countdown to Zero http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769/

mariusz79 12y ago

All we need is a solar frame, pandemic, or string of larger earthquakes in some parts of the globe. That would cause some nuclear plants to meltdown. Life on Earth would become impossible. No need to worry about some accidental nuclear war. Damn, we're dumb.

zorbo 12y ago
Can you back that up with some numbers, or a source perhaps? Because that just sounds like fearmongering. We've already had two nuclear plant meltdowns, and life on earth is doing just fine.
- mariusz79 12y ago
  Fear mongering? Let's see: First of all, Chernobyl Exclusion zone is about 1000 mile^2. [3] Life is not doing just fine there. And the effect of Fukushima meltdown are not going to be known for the next few years, but there are indications that it may not be as harmless as we are led to believe.[4] There are currently 62 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 100 nuclear reactors in 31 states in the United States. [1] A recent study led by European researchers found Fukushima is not alone, as 22 other plants around the world may be similarly susceptible to destructive tsunami waves, with most of them in east and southeast regions of Asia. [2] The World Nuclear Association estimates that 20 percent of nuclear reactors worldwide operate in areas vulnerable to earthquakes.[5] [1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=207&t=3 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=207&t=3 [2] http://news.discovery.com/earth/plants/nuclear-plants-at-tsunami-risk-120924.htm http://news.discovery.com/earth/plants/nuclear-plants-at-tsu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_Exclusion_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_... [4]http://fukushima-diary.com/2014/07/nuclear-expert-fukushima-plant-now-like-swamp-radioactive-material-due-contaminated-water/ http://fukushima-diary.com/2014/07/nuclear-expert-fukushima-... [5]http://www.frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/how-many-us-nuclear-plants-are-located-near-earthquake-faults http://www.frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/how-many-us-nucle...
  - zorbo 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

swah 12y ago

The movie plug is in the article but most of us are only skimming so let me plug it again: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dr_strangelove/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dr_strangelove/ I didn't like 2001, maybe because in 2014 its harder to appreciate, and it has a very slow pace. Dr. Strangelove a much easier watch.

gdubs 12y ago
"Fail Safe" [1] is also an excellent movie. I believe it was based on the same book as Strangelove, but is a drama and not a dark comedy. Excellent movie and cast.
- swah 12y ago
  Which one ? http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/ vs http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1175374-fail_safe/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1175374-fail_safe/
  - gdubs 12y ago
    Sorry, forgot the link: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/

iSnow 12y ago

I guess the most scary stuff I read in quite some time: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm... - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 - http://rbth.com/defence/2014/04/03/ultimate_deterrent_how_the_russian_perimeter_system_works_35633.html http://rbth.com/defence/2014/04/03/ultimate_deterrent_how_th... - http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand?currentPage=all http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf... This had so many ways to end in tears and it still does.

kjbekkelund 12y ago

The weather rocket was launched from the island where I grew up in Norway (Andøya in Vesterålen, just north of Lofoten). After the event a local marketing agency created this t-shirt: http://baardmichalsen.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/tskjorte-0002.jpg http://baardmichalsen.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/tskjorte-0...

jonnathanson 12y ago

Anyone who enjoyed this article, or at least the subject of it, should check out the book itself ("Command & Control" by Eric Schlosser). It's a great read. The book's chapters alternate between two narratives. The first is a real-time account of a bomb-gone-haywire scare in Arkansas, and the people called in to deal with it. The second is a history of nuclear arms, escalation, and near-misses during the Cold War. I could have done without the first narrative. It is awkwardly written, repetitive, and slow. (No doubt Schlosser does this to draw out the scenario across N chapters. The tactic actually makes things worse, sapping the story of its immediacy and urgency). But the main, historical narrative is fantastic.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago

tl;dr: Modern nuclear warheads should not go off by accident, even in (almost) any conceivable accident. Modern warhead design has the idea of the "strong link" and "weak link". The strong link is a critical part of the detonation path, and is not ordinarily in place. It can only be put in place by arming the warhead, or by a severe accident. But any accident severe enough to put the strong link in place should be more than enough to destroy the weak link, which is also a critical part of the detonation path. A warhead accident could still leave an awful lot of radioactive contamination, of course...

AnimalMuppet 12y ago

I seem to recall hearing that, back in the 1960s, the US at least offered to the USSR that we would teach them how to improve their nuclear command and control. The thinking was that, yes, in event of war this would improve their ability to fight, but it was more important to reduce the possibility of accidentally starting such a war.