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From: pnelson@antares.Tymnet.COM (Phil Nelson)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Nuclear Devastation
Summary: how may times?
Message-ID: <7339@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 10 Jun 89 05:40:36 GMT
References: <7001@cbnews.ATT.COM>
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From: pnelson@antares.Tymnet.COM (Phil Nelson)
In article <7001@cbnews.ATT.COM> hall@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (john hall) writes:
>
>In article hall@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (john hall) writes:
>
>>On the generic quality of "destroy the world n  times" statements.
>
>In article pnelson@antares.Tymnet.COM (Phil Nelson) writes:
>>This is obviously a silly way to calculate; 
>
>That was the  point of the post.
>

Oh, sorry.

... cut some about the total area destroyed, well answered elswhere.

>>From: sun!portal!cup.portal.com!mmm
>>I remember seeing an article in BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS 
>>which calculated 1000 warheads of 1 megaton each would be 
>>enough to "destroy" Europe.  Their criterion was producing 
>>enough fallout to kill everybody who wasn't in a real deep shelter.  
>>They assumed ground bursts to maximize fallout.  
>
>Ground bursts, with the exception of hard targets, are a
>relatively stupid way to use nukes.  Destruction/nuke
>goes way down and fallout distribution depends on the
>weather.
>

Probably they meant by ground burst, that altitude that maximizes fallout, I
can't find my nuke book, I think it's ~1000 feet?

 I repeat the question asked elswhere: how deep is "real deep"? I am curious
because I have some wild calculations of my own: Suppose everyone lives in a
town built under the ground, each town has ~1000 citizens and is self-
sufficient. Spread all these towns evenly across the surface of the Earth,
and it will take 4.5 million nukes to kill everyone. I wonder how long it
would take to build 4.5 million nukes?

[mod.note:  I'll beat the Christmas rush by answering, "about as long
as it will take to build all those underground towns and convince
people to live there. " 8-)  - Bill ]

 The 200,000 weapon number quoted elsewhere was probably in "Hiroshima 
equivalents", let's say 20,000 actual devices (more than the number from
the Scientific American article, or from International Institute for
Strategic Studies numbers, as quoted in my 1982 Hammond Almanac),
divided by 4.5 million which would be required, would give us the ability
to destroy the world .005 times over! (and that assuming every device was
a direct hit, and large enough to kill it's target, etc...)

 So I conclude: We are inviting nuclear war by presenting such ideal targets,
let's keep the bombs (we might need them for splitting "Meteor"s or some-
thing :-), abandon the cities and rebuild with small underground towns.
We could use the abandoned cities for target practice. Well, we should keep
some of them, I guess, for art's sake. Think of a city as a giant modern art
sculpture :-)

>Nuclear war is horrible enough without exaggerating it.

Then how do you explain the existance of the "Nuclear Winter" hypothesis? :-)

>
>John Hall


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