> “It’s equivalent to 216 Empire State Buildings being blown into the sky,” Palumbi says.
> the armada of sunken warships, including the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier the length of a Manhattan avenue block that lies on the lagoon’s bottom.
Ughh, More "Journalist-SI units of measurement." Would it kill him to actually describe the mass displaced in kg or lb, and say the actual length of the warship? I get that he's trying to to dumb down measurements so they are understandable to people who don't know what pounds and feet are, but by using Manhattan-specific units, he even fails for people outside of NYC. Further, he's using one of his JSI units incorrectly: "Empire State Building" is typically used as a unit of height rather than mass. So much fail, avoidable by just using standard units of measurement!
Nuclear disaster sites become unacceptable to human life, thus becoming havens for wildlife. See also Chernobyl.
So at what point do eco-terrorists seek to cause nuclear incidents with the intent of causing less harm than human development and presence would cause?
(This has probably been explored in a Tom Clancy/Michael Crichton -type novel...)
> (This has probably been explored in a Tom Clancy/Michael Crichton -type novel...)
This is the plot of Rainbow Six, where a scheming group of evil environmentalists plan to unleash a weaponized strain of Ebola on the world to wipe out 99.99% of the global population so that the ecosystems will survive. Other comically evil things the environmentalists do include experimenting on homeless people abducted from the street and provoking/funding acts of terror worldwide as part of some hazy cover up for their activities.
It all ends in tears for the environmentalists though, at the hands of an all-American red-blooded special forces hero and his multi-national above-the-law and above-Top-Secret counter-terrorism task force.
Not really Clancy's finest hour, IMO, but a good look into the conservative id.
Well that's the thing: The book comes from a different world. More precisely, it came from 1998, when the Soviet Union (Tom Clancy's traditional antagonist of choice) was long gone, but Islamic terror wasn't yet the obvious replacement. He wrote a string of books with odd antagonists (eg, Japanese nationalists) during the period.
Wikipedia's definition arguably includes the non-fictional Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror, or fear, to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim. It is used in this regard primarily to refer to violence against peacetime targets or in war against non-combatants.
I think in the context of world war 2, the nuclear bombs were just a more powerful instrument of destruction. If anything, they saved humanity from more devastating total war with conventional arms, which would have killed millions more.
With the advent of the B29, the US was dropping napalm and phosphorus on Japanese cities to create massive firestorms. The glow of Tokyo burning was visible for hundreds of miles. On the scale of horror or inhumanity, I’m not sure how to compare different types of aerial bombardment targeted civilians as instruments of war production that needed to be eliminated.
Except they occured during an active war and achieved a military goal: to prevent a mainland assault which would have killed an order of magnitude more people.
I can't find the link right now, but have read a fairly convincing argument that it was the conventional type of bombing, not nuclear, that caused the Japanese to surrender. Still a terrible thing for Japanese civilians though.
I think it would be wrong to characterise that as the consensus, though. My understanding is that historians haven't come to a conclusive assessment, but that the majority view is that it did cut the war short and save lives (net).
Dropping a nuclear bomb on a civilian population is an act of barbarism. Dropping 2 is an act of insanity and is going down in history as one of the most reckless odious crimes against humanity.
Did you miss "in war against non-combatants"? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exactly that. Even Tokyo was considered.
PS, Pearl Harbour was against military targets, and peacetime is arguable considering the embargoes, etc. Still not "high ground" by any means, but hardly unprecedented. The US already had a fleet there precisely in case it was needed against the Japanese empire.
From the US Civil War to the atomic age, there was no such thing as a non-combatant. Industrialization meant that a modern society could indefinitely sustain mobilization and fight until economic collapse.
World War 1 was where his really came to roost. The machine gun and artillery turned the western front into an industrial scale killing machine that only ended when the German economy ground to a halt. Technology improvements in WW2 enabled destruction at a scale never witnessed in history and incomparable on a relative scale to nothing except Caesar’s Gallic campaign.
The way to win was about metrics — building more arms and killing as many people as possible. Japan was no different than cavalrymen in WW1, who believed that elan and decisive victory in the field would carry the day. Sociopaths like Curtis Lemay figured that out.
My point is, that this "everything's fair in love and war" attitude is without moral basis. It's not magically OK to be evil just because you are at war, and using wartime tactics when you are not officially at war is not worse than doing them during a war.
It’s not terrorism if a government does it openly. It was a breach of international law but to call an attack by one nation’s military on another’s terrorism is well outside any non propagandistic usage.
So you are saying that governments can not be terrorists (as long as they are open about it)?
Funny definition is that.
So, how do you call acts of agression performed by governments against non combatants?
Since the only reason not to call them terrorism is to paint (your?) government actions with a nicer brush, I assume you call those acts "liberation events"
> So, how do you call acts of agression performed by governments against non combatants?
War crimes.
The reason not to call it terrorism is because that is not what the word means. If a sovereign nation formally declares war to another, any action covered by international convention is classified seperately from "civil" or militant violence.
So it appears that nature can actually recover quite well from severe nuclear explosions and contamination (viz research from the Atolls and Chernobyl etc.). At least upon surface level examination. Deformities in new born living creatures seems to revert back to near normal levels within 2 or 3 generations. Trees and vegetation manage to eke out an existence and grow again.
Hollywood producers who rely on the post armageddon 'nuclear winter wasteland' will have to go back to the drawing boards.
Yet, I wonder what other long term genetic corruption will have occurred even in the surviving and supposedly thriving flora and fauna. Are we subtly developing life forms that will be able to better withstand any sort of nuclear holocaust and thrive once we are long gone?
EDIT: I am thinking the downvoters are reading the first paragraph of my post and not really getting to the last bit and getting the gist of what I am saying... ;)
I was distracted by the middle. It's not really the bomb, it's the fires. Setting a hundred cities on fire in an afternoon, each one pushes soot up into the upper atmosphere. sunlight gets absorbed there rather than down on the surface. It's really all about scale.
Interesting point. I assume they chose these atolls because the prevailing winds wouldn't blow any radioactive waste or ash clouds over populated lands. I've seen plenty of pre and 'during' photos of the test explosions, but rarely seen ones that are a few minutes after the fact.
I wonder just how much fire, smoke and debris was ejected into the atmosphere? I assume not much given the extent of water around the place, but if indeed 23 Skyscrapers worth of matter was moved, you would assume that most of it would have been scattered into the upper atmosphere as fine dust amongst the water vapour etc.
I wonder how that affected the weather and climate around the area over the next few days. They must have studied that, but I don't see very much available in terms of their findings.
That's not true. People said the same thing about the potential Kuwaiti Oil Fires in the first gulf war, and yet hundreds of wells and lakes of oil burned for months and caused no winter scenario.
yup, that one event didn't make it up to 10k feet. But as pointed out, it was like twilight, and the temperature dropped 5C. Asia was spared.
But if you continue on, you'll find more recent research, both pro an con. I think it's still a completely reasonable foundation for a dystopian fantasy story.
In spite of the specific events in Kuwait, I'd be willing to wager that if humans launch, say, 500 nuclear weapons there will be climate consequences resembling nuclear winter.
We probably won't agree on this point. I think we can agree, let's not find out.
The models justifying the "nuclear winter" scenario are wrong, and "nuclear winter" relies on politically motivated rhetoric to push a social agenda that is at odds with similar events in magnitude. The Kuwaiti Oil fires are a great example, as are events where forests the size of nation-states have burned, and caused no signifiacant cooling.
It's hyped exaggeration using rhetoric for political effect.
It is unreasonable to make up fake models and rhetoric, and then push it in the media under the auspices of science. How can you be trusted in the future?
> … as if nuclear war might be a thing that it was unreasonable to be against.
When a nuclear war is less bad than the alternatives, then it is unreasonable to be against it.
A lot of Western anti-nuclear sentiment was simply manufactured by KGB manipulation of useful idiots. It's sad: if not for fifty years of anti-nuclear propaganda, we might be off of coal and safely generating energy for the next couple of centuries while we work on environmentally-friendly ways to produce solar cells. Instead, we're belching forth pollution — to include radioactive pollution — at an unprecedented rate, decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, whose security the anti-nuclear propaganda was intended to ensure.
Nature seems like it would do just fine, and I don’t think that humanity would go instinct but obviously after all the infrastructure is destroyed, we won’t be able to support nearly the population of people that we did before.
Bravo was an interesting fuckup. Yield was far higher than anticipated. The volume of the resulting fallout was also far higher than anticipated, which created an international controversy and eventually led to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
I was very interested to see this first person perspective. I recently wrote an article that might serve as a historical companion to this one, based on public documents rather than on the ground reporting if you're interested: https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/3-nuked-sinking-the...
It's mesmerizing to scroll around looking for circles in the ocean. And then to spend all night reading depressing wikipedia articles about past behavior of the US government.
Was there any actions taken against US for this? Was the original idea to just destroy the place or was it an important point in the pacific side of the war? Either way, while reparations are a bit sensitive, this should have been easy, considering the relative scale of both countries.
Is it possible to currently visit any of these islands? It might sound ridiculous, but I've always thought that "nuclear tourism" was fascinating in a dark way.
Ive seen articles with people walking on top of the "cactus" dome, so clearly some people have managed it at some point.
Continental operates the island hopper [1,2] from Hawaii to Guam, which stops in Majuro and Kwajalein (Marshall Islands), and Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Chuuk (Federated States of Micronesia). So, it's relatively straightforward to get to the country (Marshall Islands). However, from Majuro to the Bikini Atoll is still another 800 km (500 miles) of ocean, and there is no easily available scheduled transport, from what I gather.
FWIW, Young Pioneer Tours (no affiliation, but I've been with them to North Korea and Iran, and can recommend them) offers guided tours of Chernobyl (and also the "least visited countries" tour [3], including Marshall Islands, but not the Bikini Atoll yet).
Just how apocalyptic is an all out nuclear war, really? I know the Hollywood scenario is essentially cessation of life on earth, but is this truly what would happen if all nukes were unleashed?
Life, and indeed humanity, would survive such a war. Modern civilization would not.
For a realistic look at the aftermath, I’d suggest the novel War Day (which is set after a very limited nuclear way, but that’s already pretty bad), and the online alt-history timelines The Cuban Missile War and Protect and Survive.
No, it is highly unlikely that life on earth would cease to exist. There are too many places where extremophiles or other similar creatures are surviving beyond the reach of nuclear radiation, fallout or nuclear winter;
* We have found caves that have been closed off for millions of years, there might be more
* Extremophiles are living around thermal vents at the sea floor
* In the Russian Permafrost, Microbes have been found in suspended hibernation since a couple million years ago
In general, even if we were to nuke this dirtball to shit and back, something would be likely to survive
Well, the real danger in a "launch every nuke" scenario would be the resulting nuclear winter. The radiation itself would cause a lot of unpleasant cancers, but the existential danger would be the debris thrown into the atmosphere causing global famine from the combined results of ruined crop yields and massively damaged ecosystems.
Those models have shown to be consistently wrong. Just quoting other parts of that article:
> Russell Seitz, Associate of the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, argues that the winter models' assumptions give results which the researchers want to achieve and is a case of "worst-case analysis run amok".[180] In September 1986 Seitz published "Siberian fire as 'nuclear winter' guide" in the journal Nature in which he investigated the 1915 Siberian fire which started in the early summer months and was caused by the worst drought in the region's recorded history. The fire ultimately devastated the region burning the world's largest boreal forest, the size of Germany. While approximately 8 ˚C of daytime summer cooling occurred under the smoke clouds during the weeks of burning, no increase in potentially devastating agricultural night frosts occurred.
“It’d be wrong of us to forget that we dropped 23 atomic bombs on a coral reef to see what would happen, displaced all those people and created scars on the planet that will never heal,” he says. “Can we please not forget what we did here?”
Of course, the whole article amounts to a description of how the island has healed, but let's not let that get in the way of a good finger-wagging exercise.
"Of course, the whole article amounts to a description of how the island has healed"
While life has continued there it's more because of the absence of humans. And likely despite the radiation which makes the island inhospitable for humans. I wouldn't say 'healed' is the way to describe a place that continues to have poisoned water and food for decades to come.
It's important to say that though. Public research findings, and public statements concerning anything political, tend to downplay the initial effects of very bad decisions, to sort of wash it under the radar. When it comes to nuclear testing it is especially important that such bad decisions are at the forefront of analysis, even when something good is discovered. It is possible to derive something helpful from every terrible situation, which is why we can learn from them, but to learn we must be aware of the context of the mistake.
This "finger wagging" is chronic in any article related to some kind of environmental change made by people. There's really no disaster here. Far more nuclear bombs were exploded in California. Far more rocks and soil were disturbed for construction, land reclamation, mining, canal digging, farming, etc. all over the world. There's nothing sacred about the ground which says we should feel sad or shameful about modifying it. I would say blowing up some islands just to see what would happen is fantastic for both fun and science.
People displaced? Being displaced isn't, on its own, a tragedy. I'm sure those islanders didn't become some stateless, homeless street urchins. They probably did just fine in their new home. I will probably never be able to live in my childhood neighborhood because I've been priced out of the property market. That's a common story, but so what? I have no complaints at all about it and wouldn't want to suppress other people's economic activity just so I can feel familiar about my surroundings.
If people experience it as a tragedy then it is a tragedy. Just because something isn't bad in some situations does not mean that it is ok in all situations.
> the armada of sunken warships, including the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier the length of a Manhattan avenue block that lies on the lagoon’s bottom.
Ughh, More "Journalist-SI units of measurement." Would it kill him to actually describe the mass displaced in kg or lb, and say the actual length of the warship? I get that he's trying to to dumb down measurements so they are understandable to people who don't know what pounds and feet are, but by using Manhattan-specific units, he even fails for people outside of NYC. Further, he's using one of his JSI units incorrectly: "Empire State Building" is typically used as a unit of height rather than mass. So much fail, avoidable by just using standard units of measurement!