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+--- Thread: The monster atomic bomb that was too big to use (/thread-4064.html)
The monster atomic bomb that was too big to use - C C - Aug 17, 2017
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170816-the-monster-atomic-bomb-that-was-too-big-to-use
EXCERPT: [...] Tsar Bomba was no ordinary nuclear bomb. It was the result of a feverish attempt by the USSR’s scientists to create the most powerful nuclear weapon yet, spurred on by Premier Nikita Khruschchev’s desire to make the world tremble at the might of Soviet technology. It was more than a metal monstrosity too big to fit inside even the largest aircraft – it was a city destroyer, a weapon of last resort.
[...] In order to give the two planes a chance to survive – and this was calculated as no more than a 50% chance – Tsar Bomba was deployed by a giant parachute weighing nearly a tonne. The bomb would slowly drift down to a predetermined height – 13,000ft (3,940m) – and then detonate. By then, the two bombers would be nearly 50km (30 miles) away. It should be far enough away for them to survive.
[...] the bomb created a fireball five miles wide. [...] The flash could be seen from 1,000km (630 miles) away. The bomb’s mushroom cloud soared to 64km (40 miles) high, with its cap spreading outwards until it stretched nearly 100km (63 miles) from end to end. It must have been, from a very far distance perhaps, an awe-inspiring sight.
On Novaya Zemlya, the effects were catastrophic. In the village of Severny, some 55km (34 miles) from Ground Zero, all houses were completely destroyed (this is the equivalent to Gatwick airport being destroyed by a bomb that had fallen on Central London). In Soviet districts hundreds of miles from the blast zone, damage of all kinds – houses collapsing, roofs falling in, damage to doors, windows shattering – were reported. Radio communications were disrupted for more than an hour. [...] 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War Two...
MORE: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170816-the-monster-atomic-bomb-that-was-too-big-to-use
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RE: The monster atomic bomb that was too big to use - elte - Aug 18, 2017
That was the one that they replaced some uranium inside the bomb with lead. Andrei Sakarov stressed that if they didn't, the blast could spread too much a load of radioactive fallout.
RE: The monster atomic bomb that was too big to use - C C - Aug 18, 2017
(Aug 18, 2017 12:48 AM)elte Wrote: That was the one that they replaced some uranium inside the bomb with lead. Andrei Sakarov stressed that if they didn't, the blast could spread too much a load of radioactive fallout.
Those enchanting hypocrisies of the Old Left. Regime leaders claiming to be champions of the proletariat, but casually putting them at risk and destroying their residences (Severny village and other districts) via spectacles like that, among a horde of other exceptions and outright persistent abuses over the decades.
The clockwork material analysis of how things worked as much provided excuse for contingently treating some humans as mechanistic automatons that lacked abstract rights and were expendable for the sake of the Marxist state... As it partly did for commercial-driven Imperialism patronizingly judging non-Western populations fit for servanthood and colonial exploitation. ("Animals don't actually feel anything, it's only outward body behavior." Or: "There's nothing special about these people as individuals; they're just more replaceable, biological machines.")
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Darwin's book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, contradicted supremacist 19th-century thinking. His contemporaries believed humans were superior to animals, whites superior to dark-skinned people, and males superior to females. They believed true emotion could be felt only near the top of the tree.
Masson traces theories about animal emotions through the age of modern science. In the 17th century, Descartes flatly said that animals were robots. They only appear to have feelings like ours. Nonsense, Voltaire said. Animals have anatomy like ours. They surely feel as we do as well. But his was a minority view.
To look for human attributes in animals has been branded with the word anthropomorphism. You no more endow an animal with human feelings than you do a rock or a tree. A tacit rule precludes applying science to animal feelings. Masson quotes an administrator at an animal training institute: "... if you talked to any one of us, we'd say, 'Sure they have emotions,' but as an organization we wouldn't want to be depicted as saying [that]."
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1340.htm
"Descartes' conception of animals as automata seems to make phenomenal consciousness superfluous at best — a connection whose philosophical development was traced by T.H. Huxley (1874). Huxley reported a series of experiments on a frog, showing very similar reflexive behavior even when its spinal cord had been severed, or large portions of its brain removed. He argued that without a brain, the frog could not be conscious, but since it could still do the same sort of things that it could do before, there is no need to assume consciousness even in the presence of the entire brain, going on to argue that consciousness is superfluous."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal