OT: Nuclear War???

[deccan]

Randallw said:
ALthough it is true that human relics could be recycled for minerals, aLso consider oil. I do not know an exact figure, but say we have depleted oil supplies so that they will only Last another 50 years. ALthough our technology may well come up with an alternative power supply, a less advanced culture that develops after ours may find it difficult to have an industrial revolution if oil is sparse.

As an aside, Vernor Vinge's novel "The Peace War" describes a high-tech, low-energy civilization that I found fascinating. In that novel, high-energy technologies are actively suppressed by a global "Peace Authority", much like the Antareans in MOO, instead of being wiped out in nuclear warfare, but the result is a proliferation of extremely energy efficient, solar-power / geothermal energy based civilization focusing on super-efficient electronics.

[Raging Deadstar]

Renegade: If you're paranoid now I suggest reading "Hegemony or Survival" by Noam Chomsky. It's a book detailing American foreign policy and all throughout the book it paints a very scary picture about the possibility of Nuclear War and the Future.

As for Nuclear War, it will happen one day, Hopefully not in my lifetime as the longer we survive the longer perhaps we have to see the stupidity of Nuclear Weapons.

Speaking of Nuclear War, I was impressed by Stargate SG1 and the episode where Kinsey became a Goa'uld and Russia and America almost blew each other up.

[Randallw]

Once we develop fusion weapons (by which I mean ones that don't need a fission detonator) Nuclear war will become more likely. Correct me if I'm wrong but with Fusion there is no radiation. No fallout means no reason not to nuke the enemy as long as they don't have any.

[dogscoff]

The sooner we bukld ourselves permanent, self-sufficient colonies off world the better. THen, even if some idiot does fire a lazy gun at planet Earth, humanity will have at least a chance of survival.

[Slick]

Randallw said:
Once we develop fusion weapons (by which I mean ones that don't need a fission detonator) Nuclear war will become more likely. Correct me if I'm wrong but with Fusion there is no radiation. No fallout means no reason not to nuke the enemy as long as they don't have any.

Respectfully sir, none of the above is true.

[Phoenix-D]

Randallw said:
Once we develop fusion weapons (by which I mean ones that don't need a fission detonator) Nuclear war will become more likely. Correct me if I'm wrong but with Fusion there is no radiation. No fallout means no reason not to nuke the enemy as long as they don't have any.

The easiest way to see that is untrue is to look up. The Sun is a fusion reaction and produces and extreme amount of radiation of most types.

Fusion bombs are clean-er-, not clean.

[Will]

Clean-er- mainly because the radiation from fusing H -> He is more of a one-shot deal. The big problem with fission bombs is all the radioactive heavy metals that come afterward, which have a tendancy to be absorbed into the soil and water supply. As far as I know, there is no such Lasting legacy from fusion reactions, just a very quick burst of energy and radiation, a la our favorite star.

[Aiken]

There's always hard radiation - x-rays or gamma radiation. And it won't improve your health much. Also massed explosions of "clean" fusion bombs could easily destroy ozone layer in whole hemisphere.

[Slick]

I really don't know where the idea that fusion bombs are "clean" comes from. It doesn't come from facts. Maybe the idea is coming from the so-called "clean" fusion reactors being "cleaner" than fission reactors (fusion reactors still make lots of radiation and generate radioactive waste, it's just that they have a different public impression - and they aren't able to produce usable power yet so who knows how "clean" the final Version will be?).

However, there is absolutely no correllation between reactors and bombs.

No offense to anyone here, but it really bothers me when I see "junk science" being propagated. Someone says something that's completely wrong; either by being totally misinformed and not bothering to even check if it's correct, or by portraying themselves as an expert when they are not. Then other people read the junk and they remember it, and the next time the subject comes up, they believe it is a fact because they read it "somewhere". Then, when more than one person has this same wrong idea, it becomes "common knowledge". This is usually accompanied by "junk logic" in which preposterous conclusions are drawn from these baseless assumptions. I am flabergasted that, on the internet, anyone can say anything - true or not, and the very people who wouldn't believe the word from a total stranger on the street use the internet to find "facts". This is evidenced by a drastic move away from libraries toward the internet for "reasearch" as reported by many colleges and universities. Now, I do believe that there is a lot of good, easy to get truth on the internet; BUT, there is a lot of terrible, easy to get junk on the internet as well - and when you read either, they both kinda sound believable.

Let the reader beware.

[Aiken]

Probably it came from the most trivial fusion reaction: D+T->He+n+E. It doesn't have a decay products in form of radioactive isotopes, so it's considered "clean".