RSA Replay: Command and Control

[@ChrJahnsen]

I live in Denmark and I got to know of Eric Schlosser from my Super Size Me DVD bonus material. I became an instant fan. Schlosser has the most pleasant relaxed voice. I would listen to him talk for hours even if the subject was changes in crochet fashion through the 19th century. ☺

[@edicarbajal2575]

Interesting research, never though about it. All that it is a big concert for everybody around the world.

[@hahahashish]

He sounds a bit like Kevin Spacey

[@Teapode]

Castle Bravo would not kill everybody in Washington a New York. It just misunderstanding of magnitude of the weapons and surface. If weapon is 1000x stronger its range is only 20x times bigger. And others things like with weight of a paper money is untrue, because critical mass needed to make an fission was much higher than the weight of paper. Warhead cant just accidentally blow up because of a man with screw diver. Nuclear weapons are not just some kind a uncontrollable TNT. It is very hard to make them work.

[@msakel100]

You are not quoting this correctly; he said half of population of New York and everyone else in mentioned cities. Exclusion zone after Castle Bravo was 570.000 sq miles/circle 850 miles across, or comparable to 1% earth land area. This was in 1954 with 1 15MT weapon... Wind might blow to sea and save people from a lot of fallout, but it wouldn't help much anyway knowing how ground explosions work. He was talking about efficiency of nuclear weapons which were 1,38% for Little Boy and 20% for Fat Man. Later boosted designs like thermonecluar tested in Castle Bravo much more, up to about 100 times. It is truth shockwave of such weapon isn't very destructive compared to much smaller designs, fallout makes most of difference. Even if called thermonuclear and based on fusion instead of fission, fusion fuel adds only about 1% of yeald while technicaly they are still kind of fission devices, only boosted by fusion. So think of all population in cities around Washington DC where nothing could dilute fallout which is very, very nasty stuff in this huge designs. Bigger they are, more fission and fallout ther is. I know i'm wrong about some aspects, although Eric's speech was mostly based on hard facts. Let's hope for times when we somehow dismantle this weapons and only use liquid salt thorium reactors if they are the only alternative before others are developed. Seems like they already are, but that is another ot thing.