Comments on: Jackals and HYDEsim

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:23:34 +0000

Dave: there's been work done since the Cold War that indicates authorities were wrong (or perhaps even deliberately untruthful) to omit thermal casualties, and that thermal effects would create mass fires that would kill far more people than blast effects. See Dr. Lynn Eden's "City on Fire", for example (text here) or her followup book, "Whole World on Fire" (see Chris Griffith's review).

By: Dave Sheddi

Dave Sheddi — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:59:34 +0000

Re. the thermal effects, Cold War-era modelling in the UK showed that, for typical military weapons in the 100kt-plus yield range, blast casualties dominate. Including thermal effects only adds ~5% to the casualty numbers, as most of the people killed by the flash would have otherwise been killed by the blast.

British civil defence models went so far as to omit thermal casualties entirely.

Ref: “Doomsday: Britain After Nuclear Attack” by Openshaw et al, ISBN 0631133933.

By: fallout » Young Anabaptist Radicals

fallout » Young Anabaptist Radicals — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:01:25 +0000

[...] a nifty little learning tool, but more interesting to me is his recent blog post about it, talking about various places it’s been used and various people’s responses to [...]

By: Carl Wood

Carl Wood — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:22:04 +0000

I agree the idea that this would aid terrorists is farcical. But what concerns me instead is that you admit, to a certain extent, that the tool has to be taken with a pinch of salt, that it isn't the whole story of the damage that might be done by a blast. Isn't it likely that the tool's audience will, for the most part, just exhibit blind faith in what the tool depicts, and assume that it is the whole story?

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:12:57 +0000

Curt: did you even read the post? I mean all of it? Please allow me to quote the relevant line:

It"s not like the terrorists can"t figure this stuff out anyway.

Anyone who can successfully bulid, or even operate, a nuclear device is going to be able to figure out where to set it off. My tool doesn't add to that risk, and doesn't make their plans any easier to implement. If anything, given that it's all based on public data and some mathematically convenient approximations, it's probably a misleading tool for anyone who might use it to do actual attack planning. (Let's just say that the Pentagon has yet to complain to me about it.) What it does do is make clear the nature of the threat for those of us who might be targeted, and many of whom do not have the ability to figure this stuff out. I'd think that if you're serious about fighting the bad guys, you would applaud anything that enables you to bring the magnitude of the threat home to the American people. Or any other people. HYDEsim, as I said, can be and has been used for exactly that purpose. As for the hometown question, no, I wouldn't feel any differently. When I developed HYDEsim, I had the default detonation point right over downtown. Well, after I moved it off of my house, anyway.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:58:19 +0000

Ole: thanks for mentioning that. I'll get it updated soon; fortunately, I didn't use anything undocumented, so it works under v2 without any code changes. Ben: Dang it, I was going to mention DEFCON. When it comes out for the Mac, I'm totally buying it. Hopefully I'll be better at it than I was at "Balance of Power", back in the day. Justin: oh, not to worry. I find the "useless" comments more sad than anything else. The day one of them says "this is useless, and here's something I created that's much better", I'll take that person seriously. I do try to pay attention to the reason someone says something I do is useless, if they give one, because that might be valid criticism, however badly expressed. The ones who just dismiss something as useless with no reason are just making noise, and not very well at that.

By: Curt

Curt — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:19:47 +0000

Why are you giving the terrorist another possible tool, to use against the american people? Don’t you think that something like this would make their “plans” easier to implement? Hmmm… maybe you would think differently if the “target” was centered over YOUR hometown…

By: Chris Hester

Chris Hester — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 08:35:01 +0000

Fascinating. I would like to know what the effects have been, globally, from all the nuclear tests done in the last few decades. Surely the fallout is a major concern? I saw a TV program about UK tests where they detonated bombs over an island, mid-air. They showed one blast going off. At one point, the film goes completely white for several seconds - due to the sheer amount of light from the blast. Then a delay before the sonic boom occurs. Then minutes where all you can see are spirals of clouds spreading out. I won't forget that in a hurry. My point is this: when Chernobyl erupted, the radiation literally went all round the world. Wouldn't an atomic bomb going off in a test generate similar radiation? Especially if it were in the air. It is unbelievable that we are poisoning the earth so willingly. Even underground tests will leak out into the soil and the rivers one day. In fact, Slashdot had a story yesterday about radioactive snails being found close to "where three hydrogen bombs were lost by US in 1966". I also think about humans digesting radiation from fish contaminated by oceanic tests. Small amounts maybe, but enough to cause cancer? It was the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that once wrote a story where Earth is rejected from a galactic club of planets because they've allowed nuclear tests on the land. I wonder if future generations (if there are any) will think of tests the same way we once thought cigarettes were good for you, lead in paint safe, and other things later to be found deadly and unnacceptable.

By: Lydia

Lydia — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:22:21 +0000

You’re brilliant Eric.

By: Justin Kerk

Justin Kerk — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 08:53:22 +0000

Don’t take the “useless” comment too personally – “this x is useless/worthless without y” is a commonly repeated Internet catchphrase that really means something more like “I wish someone would add y”. (The usual formulation is “this thread is worthless without pictures”.)

By: Ben Darlow

Ben Darlow — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 08:22:35 +0000

It’s funny, I’ve a strange fascination with nuclear weapons which I guess is somewhat akin to the whole watching a train-wreck thing. They’re simultaneously both astonishing in terms of their creation and what they’re capable of, and horrifying. I’ve had dreams before (more than once) where I’ve been standing in an open place and seen a nuclear weapon detonate somewhere on the – near – horizon, watching the fireball rush towards me, in something of a Sarah Conner moment. When I was younger (and I’m talking much, much younger) I went on CND marches with my parents – both were keen activists in the peace movement. I grew up having seen WarGames, and the film influenced me both in terms of my interest in computers as well as my fascination with the way we abstract such abhorrent terms as ‘global thermonuclear war’.

Yet my fascination prevails. We’re living in interesting times, what with the whole North Korean thing. The world’s outrage at a petty dictatorship testing a nuke underground makes me laugh bitterly given that one nation alone has ever used a nuke in anger, and if anybody’s likely to unilaterally declare war on somebody for kicks, it’s them. But still.

Have you seen Defcon? Clearly I wasn’t the only one influenced by WarGames…

By: Nat

Nat — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:58:45 +0000

(starts packing stuff and warms the car up)

How about a Maps mashup predicting the ozone hole expansion??

By: Chris Griffith

Chris Griffith — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:42:15 +0000

There already is a mashup of Google Maps, NASA terrain data, and the ability to adjust sea level, so we have a global warming map already. I'm using it buy future ocean front real estate ;) As someone who is versed in nuclear issues and has developed several scenarios of a nuclear explosion over a U.S. citie, I have heard all these statements before. Basically at some point, there are too many variables that come into play that unclassified systems can handle, so we typically stick to blast effects, initial thermal effects & initial radiation when building the sim. If you are interested in seeing our scenarios, go to www.atomicarchive.com/Example/ A great book on this issue is Lynn Eden's Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, And Nuclear Weapons Devastation (my review)

By: pauldwaite

pauldwaite — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:18:00 +0000

> “There”s actually an area around the explosion where there are no fires, because the shock effects snuff them out. Beyond that, there”s a ring of fire (cue Johnny Cash).”

And there’s our ending for Dr Strangemeyer (Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love HYDEsim).

By: Ole Begemann

Ole Begemann — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 19:09:09 +0000

You should upgrade to v2 of the Maps API soon. Google said two weeks ago on their blog that they would shut down v1 soon. Moreover, map quality in v2 is much better, especially for non-US locations.