Robert Heinlein: “Once you get to earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system.”
Ted Cruz: “Bwahahahaha!!!”
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History repeats. See the Tax Cutters on the Hill fron the SETI Songbook.
Future be damned, projects we kill.
Tax cutters on the Hill.
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I know slightly more about missiles and nuclear weapons than I am comfortable with, and this one is easily explained.
Let’s suppose that your neighbor tells you that he is going to carry out target practice in his backyard. You have doubts about your neighbor’s sanity in the first place, but you have CCTV so you reckon he won’t try anything. Then you look out the window and there he is with a laser. Pointing straight at your CCTV. Think about it.
The missile was launched from Norway but on a trajectory which looked like that of an ICBM. The fear was that it was an EMP weapon - the equivalent of a laser taking out your CCTV - disguised as a peaceful launch. If an EMP weapon goes off in the right place it blinds radar, and now you can’t see the main ICBMs coming.
Fortunately for us all its course changed from that of a ballistic missile in time for it to be identified as harmless.
This is what my point is about. The US launchers of the rocket were reckless because they could not imagine how it might look to the Russians. In case you didn’t know, among the NATO armies the US has a reputation for recklessness.
Simply telling somebody who is deeply suspicious of you, with good reason, that what you are doing is safe - is not going to give much confidence, is it?
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Before I sidestepped over into quantum computing, my target specialty was quantum gravity theory. I’m still pretty fucking bitter about the giant concrete ring with which Congress left my adoptive home state…
…because they refused to cooperate with CERN for less cost to build an “atom smasher” that could have probed even higher energy density domains that the amazing LHC. Luddites!!!
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Er, no.
The idea that fusion results in clean power is long discredited - from when it became clear that D-D fusion wasn’t going to work on Earth in any reasonable timescale. D-T fusion has a whole range of problems, but one of them is that it ends up being nearly as “dirty” as good old fission power. It would take a lot of ancillary equipment to start sustainable fusion, and that equipment is going to be vaporised by a lot of neutrons. It wouldn’t be pretty (and currently it would be the size of an aircraft hanger, based on what LL is doing).
The idea that someone was going to put a die laser in a box with a mirrorball and a bit of lithium deuteride as a target and make a portable H-bomb has turned out to be somewhat fictional. Fortunately.
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I remember that thing; I think I was starting college at the same time they started construction. They made it seem like everyone was going to work there one day.
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You remind me that we were quite fortunate, after WW2, to have Eisenhower and Krushchev as heads of state for a while. Eisenhower was surely the greatest Allied commander of WW2, and Krushchev was a key player in rescuing the Soviet Union from the effects of the initial German Blitzkrieg. Eisenhower warned about the militry-industrial complex; Krushchev got rid of Beria and did a lot of de-Stalinisation.
His daughter wrote that after Krushchev learned about what the Tsar Bomba could do, he was appalled. Certainly the USSR then wound down the size of its nukes.
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Well, the invasion never happened, but I’m pretty sure we collectively stared long enough into the abyss to have lost the war for all intents and purposes.
Yielding:
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The thing that makes nukes so terrible, so inconceivable to use is that they indiscriminately endanger heads of state and military high mucky-mucks. They have that in common with what we refer to as terrorist acts. Weapons that don’t neatly confine themselves to obliterating the battlefield just ain’t fair.
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That’s exactly why I love them so much. Anything that equalizes the risk for the peasant and the rulers is fair in my book.
No more secure undisclosed locations for ya, warmongers.
If we have to quiver from a threat, you shall too.
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Well I don’t know where you got that I was talking about fusion for power generation. Pfft.
There are several potential approaches to making a fusion bomb without a fission primary, only thanks to Big Plutonium and the PC “non-proliferation” conspiracy, no one’s allowed to try. Until human progress is unshackled, we won’t know how small and cheap such a wonder could be. People once thought femtosecond lasers, atomic clocks and tunnelling microscopes were huge expensive things, too, until someone tried making them outside of a Department of Energy lab. So I’m optimistic that some day, every schoolchild will be able to have their own tactical nucular safety device, preventing school shootings forever.
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At the risk of piling on, I would like to add the name John Bordne to the list of people to thank for not blowing up our planet:
http://portside.org/2015-11-02/okinawa-missiles-october
"(…) Bordne was serving at one of four secret missile launch sites on the US-occupied Japanese island of Okinawa. There were two launch control centers at each site; each was manned by seven-member crews. With the support of his crew, each launch officer was responsible for four Mace B cruise missiles mounted with Mark 28 nuclear warheads…
Bordne says, it suddenly occurred to him that it was very peculiar such an important instruction would be tacked to the end of a weather report. It also struck him as strange that the major had methodically repeated the coded instruction without the slightest hint of stress in his voice, as if it were little more than a boring nuisance. Other crew members agreed; Bassett immediately resolved to telephone the major and say that he needed one of two things:
Raise the DEFCON level to 1, or
Issue a launch stand-down order.
Judging from what Bordne says he heard of the phone conversation, this request got a more stress-filled reaction from the major, who immediately took to the radio and read out a new coded instruction. It was an order to stand down the missiles … and, just like that, the incident was over…"
(Assuming all this is true/can be verified, with the usual caveats, etc. Yes please use your own best judgement, use your own crap detector, etc.)
Amazing, really, just how few of us would even know what hit us, just see the bright flash, or hear the explosion and >poof< we’re all toast in the short- or long-term. Human actors as strong and weak links?
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Dang, I was just in Waxahachie two days ago! Stopped at the Golden Spice (Thai and Chinese–nice staff, good food) on our way to Austin. I shoulda stopped for a looksee.
It’s kinda the opposite of this, I suppose:
… which we go to at least once a year. Space City is still mission control for the International Space Station. Good value for the (tax) money, IMO.
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I… don’t understand how that end state could have occurred, unless this was a match between two players utterly unfamiliar with the game.
I hope, I really hope, that your post is a troll. Because if it isn’t, I have a U-238 lined hat you might like.
…do you have two? Pwetty please?
Riveting read.
But I was sturck by this part:
At the beginning of the crisis, Bordne says, Capt. Bassett had warned his men, “If this is a screw up and we do not launch, we get no recognition, and this never happened.” Now, at the end of it all, he said, “None of us will discuss anything that happened here tonight, and I mean anything. No discussions at the barracks, in a bar, or even here at the launch site. You do not even write home about this. Am I making myself perfectly clear on this subject?”
For more than 50 years, silence was observed.
I’m repeatedly told it is absolutely impossible for any group of people to hold any kind of secret for any appreciable amount of time and that the suggestion of of such secrecy amounts to conspiratorial nonsense.
Someone would have come forward with the information. Surely!
Bah!
Not really, I considered the trolley option about 100% reliable.
Wrong version:
Always take the Laibach option!
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