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From: john@anasazi.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.sci
Subject: Re: Plutonium, Water, Tactical vs. Strategic
Message-ID: <260@anasazi.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 10-May-86 10:02:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: anasazi.260
Posted: Sat May 10 10:02:29 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 17-May-86 01:47:10 EDT
References: <358@drutx.UUCP> <1063@whuxl.UUCP> <2384@jhunix.UUCP>
Reply-To: john@anasazi.UUCP (John Moore)
Organization: Anasazi, Phoenix Az.
Lines: 140
Xref: watmath net.politics:15975 net.sci:862

In article <393@ccird1.UUCP> rb@ccird1.UUCP (Rex Ballard) writes:
>please give the facts.  I'm not a nuclear physicist (I can't even
>spell it).  Most of my information comes from bits and pieces of
>information given in the general press including UPI, NPR, and
>network news, and various other general programs.
Yeah... this part is obvious. It is a shame you didn't look in any
available book about nuclear blast effects, etc, before putting
out this article. Your style of writing makes it seem very
authoritative, but your numbers are sheer garbage! This is too
bad, because you probably mislead some folks.
	I wish I could provide you with the exact numbers, but I
recently moved and my book on nuclear weapons effects, and it's
associated "nuclear effects calculator" are missing. However, I
can still give you pretty good approximations. See below:
>and tests, there is a limited chain reaction.  This is why a nuclear
>airburst of a 20 Kiloton bomb can wipe out a larger area than a ground
>zero explosion.
Sorry, an airburst wipes out a larger area for a much more obvious reason:
more ground area is exposed to the prompt radiation and shock wave because
it is LINE-OF-SIGHT to the blast. Furthermore, more of the energy is directed
towards structures on the surface. In a ground burst, a lot of the energy
goes down, into the earth, and up towards the sky. In an air burst, the
energy which goes "down" hits a wider area because "down" is a town or 
whatever.
>
>When we begin to talk about 3000 20 Megaton bombs in nuclear airburst
>configurations with targets spaced within a 200 mile radius of each
>other, preferably on a cloudy day, we could see a "blanket effect" of
>burning hydrogen/oxygen between the individual targets.  Some small
I really don't have the facts to back up this, but I doubt you do
either. I suspect that someone with a better knowledge of physics would
calculate that the energy released by the burning H2 O2 would be peanuts
compared to that initially released by the bomb.
>weapons (the small ones), leave craters in underground tests of up to 3
>miles.  The same weapons above ground, could wipe out a 100 mile radius
>in an airburst.  Strategic weapons (the big ones) could wipe out a 300
>mile radius.
This is real garbage. Typical tactical weapons leave craters a few hundred
yards in diameter (go read Scientific American for details). Strategic
weapons may wipe out a 3 to 5 mile radius, not 300 miles! I once calculated
the number of 1 Mt bombs, optimally spaced, and detonated at optimum altitude,
necessary to wipe out Phoenix, AZ. It would take around 45. If your numbers
were right, it would just take one or two. I believe that blast effects
go down with the CUBE root of radius, not the Square root. Thus a 20 Mt
bomb (about as big as anyone bothers to build) would wipe out an area
with only 10 times the radius of the Hiroshima bomb.
>Just as a mathmatical excercise, the 20 Kiloton bomb dropped
>on Hirosima leveled a 3 mile radius.  The field strength force
>of a bomb is 1/distance**2 right?  Let's say n=f/(d*d).  The
>force at the three mile point would have been 20/9 or about
>2 KT.
The radius was a lot less than 3 miles. People survived less that
1/2 miles from ground zero.
	Your force calculation is nonsense. KT is not a measure of
force, it is a measure of energy.
>Is this math right?
>
No
>So in other words, a ground zero explosion of a 20 megaton bomb
>would level a 100 mile radius.  The same bomb in an airburst
See above!
>Of course most major hospitals would be fried, as would most power
>plants, communications centers, and trained workers.  We could compound
>that by pointing out that flammable materials such as gas mains would
>follow the lines and cause lots of secondary fire-works.  And of course
>little water to put them out.  About the only thing worse than
>dying in a nuclear war would be surviving long enough to experience
>the pain and suffering with no hope of long term survival.
Hey, we all know that nuclear war sucks. The effects you describe would
be true in a full scale nuclear war without SDI. Do you really think
that the proponents of SDI are this STUPID? They may not be able to
build a system that works (who knows), but I suspect they looked
a little closer at the collateral damage than your writings would imply.
>Some tactical weapons (the very small ones) are very small, only 1 or
>2 Kilotons, enough to level a shopping center or (more likely)
>an airport.  Their main advantage is that they are about the size
>of a ping-pong ball and are therefore easy to deliver but hard
>to shoot down.  They can be installed in small "gliders" and
Nice try... maybe the size of a large hand grenade. What is your source
for the "ping-pong" ball size?
>Theoretically, IF these tactical "micro-bombs" could be used without
>escalating into a full scale exchange of Strategic weapons, they would
>be about as destructive as napalm or various conventional weapons.
>IF tactical weaponry did not lead to launch of strategic weaponry,
>use of such devices would substantially lower the cost of delivery
>systems, reduce the man-power needed to gain a strategic position,
>and reduce the risk to pilots who could drop such weaponry from
>relatively safe altitudes and positions.
>
I'm not sure what this has to do with the Plutonium discussion, but let
me flame a little failed logic in the above paragraph. Even if the
weapon was the size of a pinhead, you still have a small problem
delivering it in a strategic (read... long range) exchange. First
of all, you need a propulsion system that will go several thousand
miles. You can't simply scale a ballistic missile down very far. The
total size of the thing is not simply ratioed to the size of the warhead.
One which simply tried to put a pea across the ocean would still be
a pretty big machine. 
>In fact, much of the research into delivery systems have been the
>subject of various jokes.  When we had an H-bomb the size of a hand
>grenade, they couldn't find any volunteers to throw it :-),  the
It was a small fission bomb, not an H-bomb.
>The problem, for both sides, is that there is no such understanding.
>If such tactical weapons were actually used, tested, or deployed
>in an improper manner, it would be a violation of the various treaties,
>and grounds for counter assault using progressively larger weapons,
>with the eventual possibility of an all out exchange of strategic 
>nuclear weapons.
>
>Naturally, the U.S. would like to be able to set a threshold of say 1
>Kiloton, because we have smaller bombs in this size range, but the
>U.S.S.R. doesn't have much of anything under 8 kilotons (2 mile
>radius).  Also, the U.S. would like to be able to use many micro-bombs
>to be sure of getting the desired target, however, if the U.S. sends 20
>1 Kton bombs, why shouldn't the U.S.S.R. treat that as the equivilent
>of 1 20 Kton bomb, and respond with 1 20 Kton bomb on an equally
>populated area?
What in the world are you talking about? If we went over and dropped
rocks on Moscow, it would be an act of war. There is no reason at
all to drop micro-nukes... any nuclear blast will be detected
as such... after all, the flash has a very distinctive, double
humped, signature, and there is the small fact of radiation.
>I haven't heard what the radiation levels would be for these
><1 Kton fusion weapons.  Would it be worse than other conventional
>weapons such as phosphorous bombs?
Good grief! The answer to this should be obvious to anyone! A
phosphorous bomb has no radiation whatsoever! Any fusion or
fission weapon does... lots of it.


-- 
John Moore (NJ7E/XE1HDO)
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