Manhattan Problem
Published 16 years, 2 months pastIt’s not every day I uncover a case involving the botched theft of information about nuclear weapons.
Here’s how it went down: in the infosthetics feed was an entry about a video regarding nuclear stockpiles around the world and the effects of a nuclear explosion in New York City. The video was produced by Chimp on a Chain for Good Magazine.
That’s a long-standing area of interest for me, so I watched it. When I got to the New York City portion, something started to bother me beyond the obvious horror of the scenario. The point of detonation, the explosive yield, the elapsed-time intervals, the radius distances—all seemed very familiar, like I’d seen them somewhere before. And I had.
They were nearly all taken verbatim from the New York City scenario found at the Atomic Archive. I could find only two differences. The first is that the total death toll given in the video is slightly higher than that in the Atomic Archive’s scenario. Otherwise, all the numbers matched up.
The second difference is really a major error on the part of the video’s makers: they dramatically under-represent the areas of damage. For example, the ten-second ring’s (found at 2:33 in the movie) radius is labeled with the correct distance (2.5 miles) but the circle placed on the map is much, much too small to be 2.5 miles in radius. The circle doesn’t even cover the breadth of Manhattan Island, whereas an accurate plot would have it stretch across the Hudson River on both sides into New Jersey and Long Island. You can see this in part 5 of the Atomic Archive’s scenario, or on a HYDEsim plot of the same scenario.
The video seriously misrepresents the area of damage that would result from such an incident, making it appear much smaller than it would be, and I just can’t fathom how or why they would get that so wrong. Even assuming they mixed up the meanings of “radius” and “diameter” doesn’t appear to explain it. The ring distances shown correspond to a three-kiloton explosion at most, not to 150KT.
That’s the botched part. So where’s the theft? There is no credit whatsoever given in the video for the material’s source. There is a reference to the Archive on the video’s page at Good in the “Resources” box, but the material in the video has been used without permission—I checked this with the custodian of the Archive—as required by the site’s policy. Even if one could argue this is a case of not needing permission on non-profit grounds, attribution is still required.
It would almost be worth subscribing to Good so that 100% of my payment could go to the non-profit of my choice, as the site promises, except I’m limited to their choices of non-profits and none of them appear to be charged with educating magazine publishers or video artists about the niceties of copyright law, intellectual property rights, or even just plain common courtesy.