For sale on eBay a while back was a piece of art supposedly depicting a nuclear rocket. A lot of it doesn’t make much sense, which leads me to believe that it’s probably not true aerospace concept art, but something out of a magazine… Popular Mechanix or the like. Anybody recognize it?
Fantastic Plastic has released the 1/200 scale model of the Deep Impact “Messiah” spacecraft that I mastered for them in CAD a few years ago. Took a long time to get here, but it looks like a really spiffy model. At 27 inches long and 200+ pieces including photoetch, it’s kind of a beast.
Yes, you too can have nuclear power in your own home. Seems to actually work. Only one problem…
In short, little sealed glass vials of beta-emitting tritium with a phosphor coating on the inside to convert the beta radiation into visible light are sandwiched between two PV cells. This leads to a battery that puts out just enough juice to power very small devices. Cool! The problem is that those tritium vials cost about $15 to $30 a pop, so you’re looking at more than $30 in parts to make said nuclear battery. Is it cost effective? Is it fundamentally practical? Mmmm… probably not. But for less than a hundred bucks, you end up being able to boast that your thermometer or some such is Nuclear Powered.
Here’s another, talkier video describing much the same thing:
An absolutely crappy copy of an old Lookout Mountain nuclear detonation compilation film. But even though the resolution is low and the original film is in terrible shape, it’s absolutely fargin’ amazing. Included are several shots of something I’d not recognized before… smoke generators. They’d shoot a plume of smoke into the air just before detonation, then the shock wave would come rolling by and… well, see for yourself. The rockets we’ve all seen before, but the smoke plumes are more rarely shown.
If someone were to get the original negative of this and do the Trinity & Beyond cleanup… shut up and take my money.
So, things seem to be getting interesting over North Korea way. NBC news is reporting rumors that the US may launch a military strike on the Norks if they pop off another one of their lameass fun-sized nukes; this, of course, would be an act of war, so Seoul would likely get a mighty artillery barrage and the war would be back on.
But here’s another ponderable: let’s assume that the Norks develop a functioning deliverable nuke *and* a functional ICBM. Now, if Lil’ Kim was a rational actor, he might issue a press release stating “Huzzah! We got us some ICBMs! Respect ma authoritah!” and maybe launch a sizable Sputnik into orbit just to prove what the Nork ICBMs are capable of. There is little else that they could do with a very small nuclear missile force… at least, not rationally.
So, let’s assume that Kim *isn’t* a rational actor. Let’s assume, instead, that he’s a nut, a nut in charge of a nation that is run more like a cult. So, let’s assume North Korea has *one* ICBM and *one* nuke… and his decision is to launch it straight into downtown Los Angeles. There are three immediate possibilities:
1: The ICBM fails and drops the nuke into the drink.
2: The ICBM works, but the nuke doesn’t, and the dud smacks into California leaving a small crater and a radioactive waste site.
3: KERBLAMMO. No more Hollywood.
Now it’s time for the US to respond. Let’s assume that the US has competent, rational political and military leadership when this happens. So what would be the right responses? Seems to me:
1: The US launches a full-scale but *conventional* military campaign to wipe out the North Korean leadership and military capability. Cruise missiles, carpet bombings and eventually ground invasion.
2: *Maybe* a nuclear response…
3: If the US loses a city to a nuclear attack from another nation, IMO it would be both insane and monumentally stupid for the US to *not* respond in kind. Realistically, it displays weakness and invites further attack from other sources. So, if the Norks nuke the US, the US would have to nuke the Norks. But just how much?
I believe most Americans would feel justified in unleashing a nuclear rain of ruin on any nation that destroys an American city. If the 21st century to date has taught us anything, it’s that a lot of people get all snippy about enemies in their “holy cities,” most of which seem to be dry, dusty hellholes with nothing to recommend them. Now, the US has little in the way of “holy cities,” but I’m pretty sure that even Hollywood would gain “sacred ground” status if it gets nuked. So…. North Korea nukes Los Angeles, we walk nukes all up and down Lil’ Kims ass. Lots of people would be damned happy about that.
Of course, a *lot* of people wouldn’t be happy with that. The fallout would undoubtedly unnerve the Chinese, south Koreans and Japanese. But beyond that, there just might be some *ethical* issues with evaporating North Korea. It is, after all, a nation full not of monsters but slaves, slaves to an idiot ideology (NOTE: We trashed the Nazis and Imperial Japanese and repaved their local cultures to suit out purposes… even unto making changes to their religions. Doing the same in North Korea would probably be non-controversial. But oddly, doing the same in some *other* combat zones I can think of… jeez, even mention that, and the SJW’s get all screamy.) and a maniac military/political hierarchy. Some people might say torching them all might not be entirely moral. That said, North Korea has a sizable military; if the military could be nuked out of existence with minimal civilian damage, I think most would see that as fair. But that would also be virtually impossible.
So: North Korea goes and does something… a little odd. How to respond?
Explosives are, in a way, like rocket engines: they reached a certain plateau in performance decades ago and haven’t really gotten much better. This is not due to relevant people and organizations not caring to develop new ones; the problem is that there are just so many ways you can stick unstable molecules together in a cost effective manner. Some years ago while working ordnance systems (shaped charges for stage separation, rocket motor initiators, etc.) news came down that a new explosive (Octanitrocubane) was being studied. A *more* powerful explosive. Yay! Then the details came out: it was a *few* percent more powerful than HMX (the current gold standard in high explosive, and it has been since the ’40’s) and was expected to cost more than gold even after the manufacturing processes were worked out. Bah.
But there’s hope of new explodey-sauce:
Links only to an abstract. But there’s a description HERE. Short form: at least theoretically, if you compress carbon monoxide, and compress it a lot, it seems it’ll form a polymer. It’ll turn into a solid. A solid that should remain a solid when the pressure lets off. But also… a solid with a whole lot of pent-up anger issues:
the team’s search found that the most stable cabon monoxide structure at ambient pressure and temperature would be a polymer, a repeating molecule with a backbone of carbon and oxygen rings called Pna21. But this stuff couldn’t form spontaneously—it needs to be made at high pressures, maybe around ten thousand times higher than sea level pressure. And unlike other carbon monoxide polymers discovered previously, Pna21 would be absolutely explosive, five to ten times more so than the same amount of TNT, thanks to the huge amount of energy it stores.
Five to ten times as explosive as TNT would be damned handy in an explosive. TNT is the standard; HMX has a “relative effectiveness factor” of 1.7. Octanitrocubane is the best at 2.38. But if polymerized carbon monoxide has an R.E. factor of five… that’s about three times better than HMX. Since HMX is what’s used to squeeze plutonium pits to make go “bang,” doing three times better would lead to the potential for smaller, lighter nukes.
Of course, this all depends on whether carbon monoxide really does form a metastable solid explosive at high pressure, and is stable enough to be safe. An explosive that goes off if it rises above, say, fifteen degrees kelvin is less than entirely practical.
I can well remember the justifiable fear that the Soviets were going to nuke the US into oblivion. That fear of course went away when the USSR went the way of the dodo (well, went the way of genocidal ideologically evil dodos), but the last 8 years of feckless “leadership” coupled with a couple decades of brainless idiocy regarding the US nuclear deterrent program have led to a situation where it’s becoming increasingly likely that people will have to start seriously contemplating nuclear Armageddon again. Not only do we have leaders with poor impulse control in the US and North Korea casually threatening to nuke the bejeebers out of each other, there’s KGB-trained psychopath in charge of Russia casually steamrolling his neighbors and carpet bombing civilians for giggles. Evenwhat passes for the medis are starting to take notice of the effect, if not necessarily the full set of causes:
This article gives some advice on the sort of building to hunker down in to provide some measure of protection against fallout. Oddly, the most obvious and important piece of advice about surviving a nuclear attack – “don’t live in a major metropolitan area” – was not provided. The data for the article was horked from a scholarly article from 2014:
Which is available for download as a PDF. It provides some complex math to determine when you should shelter in place, and when you should run like hell… math that the average schmoe is unlikely to do in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, but, still, potentially useful if converted into some sort of chart (perhaps one of those plastic-disk “computers” like the old nuclear bomb effect computers).
For years after the Evil Empire went kaput, the old civil defense efforts of telling people how to survive nuclear attacks – efforts that ranged from the generally ineffective to the outright laughable oftentimes – vanished. But they seem to be coming back… probably as ineffective as ever.
So… as long as I’m on the topic, anybody know of a good, reliable and *affordable* geiger counter or other form of radiation detector? I’ve always kinda wanted one. While it would of course be useful in the event of a nuclear attack to scan for fallout, I always thought such a thing might be nice to have in junk and antique stores as well as while hiking. Plus, there’s that well with the indescribable color coming out of it…
Most of the article deal with the threat of nanotechnological weapons. I’m personally not terribly concerned about them… in theory they’re nightmares, but in practicality the chances of a mechanism the size of a bacteria functioning for very long in the wild is low. “Nano-scale” metal is extremely fine dust… dust that will oxidize almost instantly in an oxygen environment. Dust that has such a vast surface area to volume ratio that thermal control would be virtually impossible.
I suspect it’d be possible to design nanites that will function in specific environments. But The “gray goo” threat seems to me unlikely.
The headline contains a reference to something else that interests me more than nanites: “mini nukes.” But here again, the description seems more sci-fi than practical:
Nanotechnology opens up the possibility to manufacture mini-nuke components so small that they are difficult to screen and detect. Furthermore, the weapon (capable of an explosion equivalent to about 100 tons of TNT) could be compact enough to fit into a pocket or purse and weigh about 5 pounds and destroy large buildings or be combined to do greater damage to an area.
“When we talk about making conventional nuclear weapons, they are difficult to make,” he said. “Making a mini-nuke would be difficult but in some respects not as difficult as a full-blown nuclear weapon.”
Del Monte explained that the mini-nuke weapon is activated when the nanoscale laser triggers a small thermonuclear fusion bomb using a tritium-deuterium fuel. Their size makes them difficult to screen, detect and also there’s “essentially no fallout” associated with them.
The description seems to be a miniaturized version of an inertial confinement fusion system… lasers causing a pellet of fusion fuel to implode. So far in order to get a pellet the size of a grain of sand to fuse has required a laser system the size of a warehouse; compressing all that down to the size of a briefcase seems… optimistic.
Still, *IF* that compression becomes possible, then these mini-nukes need to be put into production *now.* Not just for the military potential… but more importantly because they would finally make Orion propulsion clean and reasonably cheap.
What causes fear among the author and subjects of this article would cause great joy among people able to envision a wider view.
The next best thing to video of new atmospheric nuclear tests is previously unseen film of old nuclear tests. Sure, it’s not even close… it’s patently obvious that new atmospheric nuclear tests is something the United States needs to do, but I guess we’ll just have to take what we can get.
Lawrence Livermore National Labs has embarked on a project of finding and scanning and digitally restoring up to ten thousand films of above-ground nuclear tests. This is being done partially for the historic aspect, but mostly because nuclear weapons designers today have nothing to go on *but* old data, so, the more data they have, the better.
LLNL has set up a YouTube playlist of some of these.
And this one. HOLY CARP, this one.
If you’ve been wondering how the party of fear-mongering and authoritarianism was going to respond to the idea of private American companies going to space and the moon, I believe we have us an early test balloon:
One “Brianna Wu” scientifically embarrasses herself, but likely improves her standing with the Luddites, by claiming that “Rocks dropped from there have power of 100s of nuclear bombs.”
Now, on one hand this is true. If you fling a big enough rock from the surface of the moon, it could hit the Earth with kinetic energy similar to the total energy of a nuke. But there’s the thing: in order to do that, you need to *impart* damn near a nukes worth of kinetic energy in the first place. Simply chucking a rock from the lunar surface at lunar escape velocity (about 2.4 km/sec) will not put that rock on a trajectory to the Earths surface, but rather just in a very wide orbit , basically the same orbit the moon has. You’d need to cancel out the orbital velocity, another kilometer or so per second. From there the rock would “fall” to Earth, picking up speed and smacking down with no more than Earth escape velocity, or no more than 11.2 km/sec. So, by accelerating a rock to about 3.5 km/sec, you get it to hit the Earth at about 11 km/sec.
Sounds great for a weapons system. At 11 km/sec, the kinetic energy of one kilogram of rock (or anything) is 60.5 megajoules. One single kiloton of yield is defined as 4.184 terajoules. So to get a kiloton of bang out of a lunar rock, you’d need to launch (4.184 terajoules/60.5 megajoules) 69,157 kilos of rock. Lobbing a seventy-metric ton rock to 3.5 kilometers per second is a non-trivial act. Plus, you have to assure that the rock not only hits the target via accurate guidance, but survives passage through the atmosphere.
But Wu didn’t just say that a rock would have the power of a nuke, but “hundreds” of them. So… let’s say 100 times Fat Man, or 1.5 megatons. That would require the launch not of 70 metric tones, but 105,000 metric tons. The USS Nimitz displaces about 100,000 metric tons. So according to Ms. Wu, the threat posed by the likes of Elon Musk is that he will toss aircraft carriers off the surface of the moon.
Ms. Wu then went on to claim that any criticism of her rather unrealistic fearmongering was due to sexism, and to then decry the militarization of space. Because apparently a few tourists going around the moon will be able to grab chunks of moonrock the size of a carrier battle group and hurl it at Earth.
Silly as her fears are, I won;t be the least bit surprised if they gain traction, and this is used as the basis of an attempt to shut down private spaceflight in the US… or at least to nationalize it “for the children.”
Thanks to blog reader SE Jones for heads-up on this miserable little story.
As always, feel free to check my math.