Posted on 02/03/2012 2:33:52 PM PST by patriot08
Strawman.
Remember the doctrine of "MAD" ?
Think it through, the possibilities are:
1) We only have a couple of nukes, the Russians only have a couple of nukes.
Not gonna happen. Once we disarm, the other people arm UP.
2) We only have a couple of nukes, the Russians have a sh*tload.
We lose.
3) We have a bunch of nukes, the Russians only have a few.
Not gonna happen on paper, but given Russian quality control, might've been closer to the truth.
4) We have a bunch, the Russians have a bunch
Yeah, that's the one.
Think of it this way. The reason we have a lot so that if anyone launches ANY nukes at us, we have the capability to go medieval on their heine (to quote Weird Al from Amish Paradise).
Why not just have a few ourselves, so if they EMP us, we EMP them back?
Cause Russians cheat.
And no guarantee EMP'ing *them* would work, given how primitive much of their society is anyway. EMP doesn't affect horses, nor yet diesels.
No need to destroy cities and manufacturing complexes and mines, just lob a single warhead and watch them die.
They die over time as all kinds of electrically dependent systems die and we (in the interests of squeezing the last few thousandths of a percent profit) don't bother to ware house spares, or to shield them ("just-in-time" supply chains -- which people apply to their own lives in terms of cash flow as well as food at home, compounding the problem).
So, either this EMP hysteria is born of ignorance or our military is just plain stupid and wating our money on extra weapons they don’t need.
No, you just haven't thought it through.
The technique you present that claims EMP would expand and become this nearly uncontrolled monster is the same one presented by those in the 1940’s that said an atmospheric bomb would continue to expand and destroy the Earth.
Source for that? I used to model nukes for the DoD and don't recall that one: I do recall reading that the nuclear scientists at Trinity were taking side bets about whether the nuclear processes set loose by a fission blast would be enough to start nuclear reactions among atmospheric components -- which was a reasonable fear, given their state of knowledge: nobody had verified fission in an uncontrolled chain reaction yet, let alone fusion: and the characteristics of fusion reactions, temperature dependence of reaction cross sections, etc. hadn't yet been worked out. Hans Bethe won the Nobel for his teasing out the fusion reactions in stellar cores, and showing the temperature, pressure, etc. necessary for fusion of heavier atoms. Think "curve of binding energy" and all that; Isaac Asimov in one of his short stories has a character exclaim, "I'll need a half-billion degrees to fuse carbon and oxygen atoms; probably a full billion."
And of course, the scientists running the Manhattan project knew their limitations: they were the cream of the cream of the Nobelists. E.g. once they had a *small* quantity of the fissionable material, they decided to start doing materials science type testing on it before proceeding. Which was wise, because they found out about a spontaneously-occurring phase transition in the bulk metal which could turn a sub-critical mass critical: not enough for detonation, but enough for a gamma-ray / neutron flux enough to kill anyone in the vicinity.
And *that* wasn't mere fancy: try Googling "Demon Core" for news of one of the workers who died from playing with sub-critical assemblies which he accidentally let go critical for just a couple of seconds by dropping a piece of metal.
They pleaded with President Truman to stop the nuclear test, claiming they had scientific proof that a single nuclear device would wipe out the Earth. Of course it didn’t and they hadn’t accounted for the fact that the very same nuclear particles were already present in the atmosphere and the Earth wasn’t getting destroyed. Same with the EMP idea you present. It is a wild argument not based in fact.
That is *very* different from the EMP: which is not only based on the results of observed results ("Starfish Prime" detonation which did have large effects on the grid 800 or 900 miles away in Hawaii), but on well-grounded and established theory known from outside the weapons community (Compton scattering).
If you had taken the time to read through the links I gave you in detail, you wouldn't have been saying this.
“Source for that?”
What’s the matter, Mr. Expert doesn’t know how to do simple google-foo research? Come on, guy, get it together. Anyone claiming to have been in the nuke industry would know that one off hand.
So far, you really haven’t said squat.
Lord, have mercy.
But, given your rude responses throughout the thread, you're more interested in thermal pulse than electromagnetism.
I'm making a sammich and chilling out.
Cheers!
“you’re more interested in thermal pulse than electromagnetism.”
Talk about a rude response. That was a bold faced lie you just made. I never talked about thermal anything.
Check your pun and sarcasm meter.
Cheers!
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