Ww3

[Quest4Less]

So, with all that's happening in the world right now - what are the chances of a third world war?

China has threatened to use nukes... North Korea has nukes (and a nut as a leader), who knows where the USA will go next (deserved or not), Africa seems to always be having some war or other, and what if terrorists use a nuke somewhere - could that start it?

Who would win, or could there even be a survivor much less winner?

 

[holden]

The rapture will come for those that don't believe in God. There will be locusts, blood gushing, body remains, sarrow, disease and death.

Believe in God now or get LEFT BELOW!!!!!

 

[Esco!]

what if terrorists use a nuke somewhere - could that start it?

The only nuke they could get a hold of would be a 1 or 2 kiloton suitcase nuke.
Nukes are high-maintenance items. You can't warehouse them for years, pull them out of storage and then push a button to blow them up. They must be constantly maintained. This requires access to skilled technicians, and there aren't that many people out there with the required expertise.

Even if they do manage to light one up downtown Toronto they would have to rent a plane and detonate it in the air which is called an air-burst. Airbursts do the most damage. This will be very difficult but not impossible.

The most likely scenario is that one of these kooks takes this thing to the financial district and blows it up trying to take out as many people as possible.
Suitcase nukes have a complete destruction radius of about 1 mile with secondary fallout radiation.
But here's the catch, detonating this contraption near office buildings will limit its destructive radius because the buildings will absorb much of the shockwave. I'd estimate that the radius would be reduced to a hundred meters or so which means it can maybe take out a 4 or 5 skyscrapers.
Radiation will get caught up in the wind and that usually means its gonna go towards the lake.
You will also get a fireball that shoots up a mile into the sky

It will be horror but it wont affect all of Toronto
What worries me more is the panic effect that'll take over people

 

[buckminster]

The real danger is the airburst with only one nuke - lets say above NYC - has the potential to destroy every computer and electrical generating equipment in the range of its magnetic pulse - including car computers - and plunge the city into the stone age. Just remember the blackout last year, with no water pumps, no gasoline pumps, no nothing. It will be like that only a whole hell of a lot longer.

This is the real threat that is possible right now. That why Bush wants the missle system to destroy the nuke before it explodes over a populated city. Aside from a dirty bomb in Times Square or in the subway, this is the one everybody in power fears the most.

 

[Keebler Elf]

Are you sure the magnetic pulse comes from a nuke? I thought that was a separate weapon...

 

[Esco!]

Are you sure the magnetic pulse comes from a nuke? I thought that was a separate weapon...

He's right about it knocking out the grid

 

[l69norm]

....The most likely scenario is that one of these kooks takes this thing to the financial district and blows it up trying to take out as many people as possible. Suitcase nukes have a complete destruction radius of about 1 mile with secondary fallout radiation...

I thought the idea behind a dirty bomb was to take an old nuclear warhead and explode it using a regular explosive and spread contamination over a multi-block area. That is not to cause a nuclear explosion, but to spread the plutonium fuel around to contaminate a large area.

 

[ham2004]

Nukes are not THE BIG WORRY

Nukes are not the big worry, with the current state of terrorisim in the world, it is much more likely that there will be a more conventional warefare.

Landmines, bomb plants and snipers would more likely be the ordenace of the day.

 

[tboy]

Norm, you are correct. A dirty bomb is one that doesn't go to critical mass (which is a nuclear explosion) but one that spreads the radioactive material over a large area. This would do any number of things: render the area uninhabitable for up to 10,000 yrs, cause many deaths (slow deaths) from radiation poisoning, cause many birth defects for babies that will be born from parents exposed, (see info on chernobyl).

This radioactive material doesn't have to be pure uranium. It can be heavy water contaminated from use in a reactor, plutonium (most pure and most damage) just about any radioactive material.

there was a movie made about what would happen if a dirty bomb was detonated in london. Pretty scary stuff as they couldn't clean up the people fast enough as the fallout was spreading faster than they could clean.

BTW: if a dirty bomb IS exploded, you can survive unharmed if you don't allow any of the contaminated material to penetrate the body. A lot of the damage is caused by dust inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the skin if it isn't removed quick enough. Strangely enough, a thorough shower can prevent any permanant damage. If I remember correctly distribution and ingestion of iodide can prevent a lot of damage due to radioactive material ingestion/exposure.

In addition, to explode or create a nuclear explosion, two shaped pieces of purified uranium/plutonium have to be forced together precisely at extreme speeds to cause the pieces to reach critical mass. If anyone has ever seen the movie fatman and little boy you will know the real difficulties in creating this movement. If the pieces are out of alignment even .000001 mm critical mass won't be achieved and you now have a dirty bomb instead of a nuclear one.

Back to the original question: There will not be a wwIII unless some total lunatic of a major country gets their hands on a nuclear weapon. if it is just a terrorist attack, WWIII won't happen. This is called balance of power or mutual annihilation. If country A fires a nuclear weapon at country B (who also happens to have nuclear weapons) country B will retaliate and any damage caused by country A, will be inflicted on them by country B. This is the one thing that prevented the russians and us from getting into a major conflict during the cold war years. That is why we had wars like vietnam et al. They had others fight limited wars instead of them directly attacking each other.

 

[Esco!]

This would do any number of things: render the area uninhabitable for up to 10,000 yrs,

This is not true, the area can be cleaned up and decontaminated.
But its very expensive and time-consuming

 

[WhOiSyOdAdDy?]

So, with all that's happening in the world right now - what are the chances of a third world war?

China has threatened to use nukes... North Korea has nukes (and a nut as a leader), who knows where the USA will go next (deserved or not), Africa seems to always be having some war or other, and what if terrorists use a nuke somewhere - could that start it?

Who would win, or could there even be a survivor much less winner?

According to Nostradamus, the third world war will last 27 years.

Lets hear what the outcome will be according to Maryland!!

 

[tboy]

Esco: well, literally speaking yes you could clean up the area. One theoretically could remove all the buildings, concrete, pavement, lamp posts, every contaminated piece of material and move it all to a disposal site. Don't forget this includes wrapping the entire area in plastic so as to not throw any (and I repeat ANY) dust or dirt into the air to be dispersed.

Just like Chernobyl, they would have to remove the top X feet of soil over the entire area as well. If memory serves, chernobyl requires the removal of 1,000,000 sq km of top soil 12' thick?

 

[Esco!]

Sorry Tboy but you are wrong.
You are confusing a nuclear accident with a 'Dirty Bomb'.

Read this article:

http://www.sepp.org/NewSEPP/Nuclear-Terrorism.htm

Here's an excerpt:

The public seems to be more afraid of radioactivity than poison gas or even biological agents. This in spite of the fact that radioactivity is easy to detect, rarely lethal, and cannot cause epidemics like viruses or bacteria. This fear is being exploited by opponents of nuclear power who keep coming up with a multitude of scary scenarios.

Three general types of nuclear terrorism are much in the news: One is the so-called "dirty" bomb, which does not create but simply disperses radioactive material, packed around conventional explosives. Another concern is release of radioactivity from an aircraft impact or the internal sabotage of an operating nuclear reactor or of storage of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. [Green activists, who would love to shut down reactors, assiduously promote this particular fear.] Finally, we have the possible explosion of a nuclear bomb. Of the three, the dirty bomb makes no sense at all; impact or sabotage is extremely unlikely to succeed. Only a real nuclear bomb using fissionable uranium or plutonium poses a serious threat, but even there countermeasures can be taken.

The dirty bomb is mostly hype. A report based on a three-year study by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements claimed that contamination from such an attack would likely extend to several city blocks and that radiation would be "catastrophic but manageable." However, quite simple considerations show that such a bomb is merely a terror weapon without teeth; it would cause panic but it does not kill. And media stories promote such panic since the public fears anything that's even remotely connected with radioactivity.

To combat panic, we need to understand a little more about radioactivity. We need to know what kind of radioactivity is involved and its lifetime -- how long it lasts before it fades away.

The three kinds of radioactivity, conventionally labeled as alpha, beta and gamma, are quite different from one another and require different countermeasures. Alpha activity is generally innocuous; alpha particles (high-speed nuclei of helium atoms) have a very limited range, at most a few inches in the air, and can be stopped by a sheet of paper or by the skin. Atoms emitting alpha particles are dangerous only if inhaled into the lungs or ingested through food. The standard counter is to avoid eating contaminated food, decontaminate buildings and other spaces, and protect against inhalation by using ordinary facemasks worn against industrial dust and other kinds of pollution.

Beta particles are electrons moving at speeds close to that of light. While they are generally more penetrating than the more massive alphas, they present no problem unless their intensity is so high that the cumulative radiation dose becomes important. Gamma rays are massless and move at the speed of light; they are like x-rays, except more energetic and penetrating. Again, it is the intensity that matters -- compared with the natural background radiation from cosmic rays and the radioactive emissions from earth rocks. Even our bodies are naturally radioactive. The additional radiation dose would have to exceed 100 times that of the normal background before health effects could appear. Remember that every time you fly in the stratosphere you experience radiation levels up to ten times higher than those at the surface.

The lifetime of radiation is also important. We usually talk about "half-life," the time over which the radiation intensity drops by a factor of two. If the half-life is a week, then after one week the level has dropped to 50 percent, after two weeks by a factor of four, to 25 percent, by three weeks by a factor of eight, and so on. Anyone constructing a dirty bomb would choose radioactive nuclei with a half-life of days or weeks. If much shorter, say seconds, the activity would fade away before the bomb is assembled. If the half-life is much longer, say decades or even longer, the level of radioactivity would be extremely low in relation to the total amount of material assembled. But with a half-life measured in hours or longer, one could simply walk out of the contaminated region, preferably heading upwind, before accumulating a harmful dose of radiation.]

A dirty bomb makes no practical sense. To produce significant radioactivity over an area of, say, one square mile, the concentration within a small bomb would have to be roughly 10 million times greater and would quickly kill the terrorists trying to assemble the material. The radioactivity also creates large amounts of heat energy, sufficient to melt most containers. What's more, any such bomb would be easy to detect at long distance if it emits gamma rays. We therefore conclude that a dirty bomb is mostly hype.

 

[happygrump]

An accident is more likely

It much more likely that there'll be a nuclear accident. The list of US nuclear weapons accidents, and weapons that have been lost, some of which were never recovered, is a long list. Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_accidents

 

[tboy]

Esco:

While this article has a lot of interesting facts, I don't give much creedance to someone who writes an article with spelling mistakes.

Added: ok so now I can't find the friggin mistake! GRRR

and the following is pure bullshit...The soviet government has admitted that even though only 30 people died in the initial conflaguration hundreds if not thousand more have from radiation related illnesses and birth defects in the affected zones have increased 1000 percent.

In the extremely unlikely event of a total reactor accident, the consequences are less severe than generally pictured. We have already seen the worst scenario that one can imagine: Even so, Chernobyl killed only some 30 people -- those who were directly involved in putting out the fire. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the subsequent health effects have been minor: no increases in leukemia or birth defects; only cases of thyroid cancer that could have been avoided by taking protective potassium-iodide pills. Certainly, more people died from the panicky reaction to Chernobyl, including thousands of abortions by women in Western Europe who feared the consequences from the release of radiation.

There was a special on PBS (if memory serves) about "chernobyl" babies and how many with defects are dropped off daily at baby houses. If only 30 were killed then the babies shown with their: brains outside their skulls (parents lived 40 km from chernobyl) no arms or legs (parents lived 100 km from chernobyl) and the many others are all just "flukes".

No where in that article does he state how the affected areas will be cleaned. Again everything that was touched by this radiation will need to be thoroughly decontaminated.

Who says that a half square mile isn't bad enough? Explode a dirty bomb at queen and bay and 4 square blocks will expose probably 50,000 ppl. That's pretty bad I'd say...

Sure creating a dirty bomb may be difficult, if it wasn't, someone would have used it already. I can bet (and will bet anyone) that somewhere, there is a terrorist group who is dedicated enough to die building one.

BTW: to kill a large amount of ppl you don't really need anything but fertilizer (legal) and some diesel fuel (also legal) and a rented van....explode that at king and bay and take out the TD centre and 4 other large buildings. Anyone remember a small place called Oklahoma City?

And yet again, if the radioactive waste from our nuclear power plants has a half life of 10,000 years, all the terrorists would have to do is steal a couple of 55 gallon drums of it and use a crop duster to spray it around the downtown core.....Just remember: anything that the stuff touches and remains in contact for any length of time will also become radioactive for a good number of years.....

His arguments about the difficulty in hitting or attacking nuclear facilities is also ludicrous:

1)Protecting them with steel towers? Ummm we don't have any and I haven't heard about any plans to do so (therefore his argument is bs)

2) The pressure vessels are protected by 3 feet of reinforced concrete: umm the M80 sniper rifle will penetrate 12 inches of reinforced concrete so all you'd need is a bigger projectile (say........a MISSLE?)

This in spite of the fact that radioactivity is easy to detect, rarely lethal, and cannot cause epidemics like viruses or bacteria.

Sure, radioactive material is easy to detect, but so are 3 large passenger planes heading towards a fixed target but hey, that didn't stop 9/11 did it? LOL

I don't know if anyone has seen them but it used to be once a week along the 401 (wednesdays I seem to recall) that some spent nuclear fuel used to be transported. Know how much protection it had? LOL a bunch of flickering lights and one police cruiser. All one would have to do is stop the truck, drive it downtown a few hours later, and open the valve....

 

[freshbreath]

WWIII will start when China starts running out of natural resources to fuel their growing economy, and invades another country to survive

 

[buckminster]

I'm with Tboy. The Chernobyl accident destroyed a large part of southern Belaurs as well as the Ukraine where it was located. People will not be able to live there or eat the food grown there for a long while. But remember, that accident happened when the morons ran a SAFETY test and turned off all the safety devices, then lots of problems they couldn't control.

And then, they don't notify those nearby for two or three days. My sweet wife from there tells me that most of the children born in 1986 anywhere near that area have health problems. There is a good photograph book from a couple of years ago where they went in and documented the destruction in before and after pictures from offices, homes, hospitals, and the like - very disturbing - the destruction was unbeliveable. They just took those picture a couple of years ago - nothing has been touched there. Its highly radioactive still as they photographed a giger counter at these locations too.

 

[WhaWhaWha]

Now if elected, this the only kind of weapon i would deploy:
http://www.blam1.com/DiscoVision/Universal_Pictures/images/16-019_title.jpg