Tuesday, December 26, 2023

A Dose Of Stupidity

 

Case in point:

Poseidon Nuclear Torpedo: An underwater drone designed to carry a nuclear warhead, potentially causing radioactive tsunamis.


 But! But! But I found it on the internet, so it has to be  true!











Point of Order for the Common Core grads on the Internet:

You can put a nuclear warhead on a torpedo. We figured that out 60-70 years ago.

Everything else in the above excerpt is horseshit of such a quantity that it cannot be measured with existing instrumentation. Except perhaps a truck scale.

To wit:

1) An underwater drone is going to be about as hard to find as a lit flashlight in a dark field at night for any first-world navy. Unless it's the size of a submarine. Which, cleverly, probably wouldn't be called a torpedo nor a drone. In which case it'll be as hard to find as a brass band carrying  lit flashlights in a dark field at night while playing the 1812 Overture. With artillery percussion.

2) A torpedo is going to have a range of a several miles. Like ten. Twenty maybe. Not, for instance, hundreds to thousands.

3) To cause a tsunami, it would have to be a very large warhead. Which, first of all, shoots range capabilities right in the ass.

4) Second, to actually cause a tsunami, it would have to go off deep. Like way down at the bottom of the ocean, to displace enough seawater to create a tsunami.

5) If you do that, the tsunami isn't going to be radioactive. The sea floor at the explosion site is. And all that heavier-than-water radioactivity is going to stay right down at the bottom of the ocean. Because of this thing called gravity. Stop me if you've heard of this concept. I have an inkling that the density of sea water, at about a ton per cubic yard, is going to tamp things down a wee bit too.

6) You can make radioactivity up near the top of the water column. Which is going to make radioactive fallout just like any other nuke. Most of which is going to fall right back down, downwind, but fairly close to the detonation site. Like with every other nuke on the planet since 1945. Because of this thing called gravity. Yet again, stop me if you've heard of this concept.

7) If you detonate it near the surface, you also aren't going to make any tsunami. And the only thing radioactive will be the airborne fallout cloud, not the wave that results.

8) Tsunamis travel hundreds and thousands of miles. Radioactivity in water from deep subsurface explosions is going to travel distances measured in yards, not miles, and probably not even reach the sea surface if it's deep enough. Bubbles, maybe, perhaps a small amount of radioactive gas. What it isn't going to do is send a wall of radioactive water rocketing hundreds of miles away. Don't believe me: Google the results of any of dozens of air-, surface-, and sub-surface nuclear tests prior to 1963, FFS. Much of the info has been in the public domain for decades.









9) You can make nuclear blasts that cause fallout. You can (theoretically) make nuclear blasts that case tsunamis. But you only get to pick one or the other. And they aren't likely to be either drones, or torpedoes.

Classically, the concept of tsunami-causing nuclear weapons was described in print in 1972 by Martin Caidin in When War Comes (brighter readers may know him as the guy who wrote the book Cyborg, which was the basis for the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man. He is thus no stranger to science fiction with a heavy dose of future realism, rather than science fantasy.) a well-thumbed hard-cover copy of which has sat on my shelf since the late 1970s.

In his version of the tsunami-causing nuclear blasts, he had Russia sink several cargo ships, with monster nuclear bombs the size of the hold of a cargo ship, sunk strategically off the US continental shelf, deploying long cable antennas, and awaiting the Doomsday detonation command off of, in his scenario IIRC, Seattle, Portland, Frisco, and L.A. To be used just-in-case.

So yet again, you can have torpedoes or drones, or you can have nuclear weapons large enough and deep enough to cause a tsunami. Pick one. Both is not an option. Even he knew this 50 years ago. We haven't made nuclear weapons that much smaller with the capabilities advertised in the excerpted stupidity above.

Physics is still a thing, and actual smart people have been studying on things like this for more than 50 years. When you slap-dash cobble together three or four mutually contradictory things in one sentence like they were real, it just tells us you know the flavor of the windows on the short bus. And/or spent more time listening to George Noori than working a slide rule or a TI calculator. Sorry if that's too on-the-nose.

Given the level of stupidity necessary to concoct that one pull quote, we're not even bothering to fisk the gaping flaws in the rest of that wagonload of horse cobblers. Caveat emptor: there is no recommended safe amount of bullshit in anything you're going to swallow from that piece. Insist on bullshit-free, for your own palate and self-respect, if not safety.

People pulling together Popular Science-levels of Russian vaporware, and endowing it with National Inquirer or Weekly World News-level scare quotes and mythical and epically stupid levels of science fantasy capabilities are simply pulling their underpants down on the internet, and waving their asses to everyone in sight.

Don't be That Guy.

Be like Timmy:



13 comments:

  1. I was on the B-57 load team for four years. Hated. It.

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  2. The amount of energy needed to move enough water to cause a tsunami is on at least an order of magnitude greater than any technology we possess, probably more. This "doomsday" weapon Russia claims to have is just MORE of their never ending propaganda bullshit. Propaganda is one of the few things the Russians are true masters of.

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  3. I agree with what you said, with a couple notes:
    - a long range nuclear torpedo would have to be an unmanned submarine. It would difficult to make it useful because it would require as much maintenance and training as a manned submarine - and it would have all the shortcomings as well, if not more, given the demonstrated state of Russian submarine technology.
    - While a nuclear weapon could theoretically start a tsunami, it would have to be very large and in exactly the right place with local undersea topography of the right layout.
    While my understanding of geology is thin, what I know seems to indicate that most of the US coastline is the wrong topography for a tsunami to be an issue.
    Jonathan

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  4. I was curious if any of the bomb tests on Bikini a toll produced tsunamis? The one in 46 did but it doesn't seemed to ha 've been too eventful.

    https://www.history.com/news/nuclear-bomb-tests-bikini-atoll-facts.


    "At the bottom, it carved a 30-foot-deep, 2,000-foot-wide crater in the surface of the sea floor. On the surface, it burst through like a geyser and created an enormous dome of water that eventually reached more than a mile in height. The blast triggered a tsunami with a 94-foot-high wave, so powerful that it lifted up the Arkansas, a 27,000-ton ship. The surge of water swept over many of the target ships, coating them with radioactivity. Eight of the ships were sunk,"

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  5. Thats quite a fan youve got over there at NC R.

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  6. What if I used my TI-85 to calculate optimum antenna length for my local AM station that broadcast George Noori/Art Bell? Do I get half a point for that? Anything?
    I bet next you're going to tell me this pyramid won't sharpen my razor blades.
    --Tennessee Budd

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  7. Some light reading:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20130513232544/http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/845485.pdf

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  8. @Skyler,
    Misuse of the word "tsunami" doesn't count as having produced one.

    "The blast triggered a tsunami with a 94-foot-high wave, so powerful that it lifted up the Arkansas, a 27,000-ton ship."
    Hate to break it to the author of that bit of factual horsesh*t, but a 1-foot wave would have lifted a 27,000 ton ship too. That doesn't make it thereby a tsunami. That's just how water displacement works. All ships are lifted by all waves. That doesn't make any of them tsunamis. It's just how ships work; they float on waves, up and down.
    Anyone could look it up.

    @Jonathan,
    The weapon in question is in fact purported to be a satellite-guided unmanned submarine with a small nuclear reactor and a warhead substantially smaller than blasts we detonated in our own Cold War-era nuclear weapon tests. There's still plenty of holes with that description, but it's what there is that isn't utter science fantasy.

    It's basically thought to be simply a very dirty area-denial/persistent fallout weapon, made to take out a port, ideally one of the two SSBN bases, or concentrated naval bases like Norfolk or Pearl Harbor.

    It has, in no way, the mission nor the capability to create tsunamis, nor is a torpedo.
    It's simply a dirty surface-burst bomb, not a "radioactive tsunami-making torpedo".
    Which is why the original article is so much rose fertilizer, wrapped in a veneer of ignorant hysteria.

    @CZ,
    Mikey's m.o. is to instigate on other blogs, offer no original nor relevant information, ask questions he could research on his own, not do that research, duck any questions in reply he can't answer (which is most of them), then wave his hands, set his hair on fire, and gainsay everything. Then start all over again.
    He's getting his own post this time, because apparently if he isn't being rhetorically beaten about the head and shoulders, he feels neglected.
    And he did ask for it expressly.

    Giving him another excuse to scrape out his diaper to form replies is my way of sending him the belated Christmas present he really needs.

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  9. Gojira is more likely than this vaporware, mostly since Gojira would be a new application of science versus one with 70 years of study and practical testing.

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  10. @JW,
    That actually is "light reading", because their conclusions are summarized as
    1) air bursts have no effect.
    2) surface bursts have no notable effect
    3) Deep-water bursts might, maybe, eventually, somewhere, produce something that looks like a wave.

    Nowhere, in any way, shape, nor form, do they suggest that anything like an actual tsunami will predictably be generated, to any degree, for any distance, for any known amount of explosive device.

    And this was a after two decades of detonating dozens of nuclear weapons in, above, and under the ocean, which cumulatively produced no wave hitting shore anywhere bigger than an inch in height.

    In the trade, that's known as what you get when a fat kid does a cannonball off the diving board.

    Putin could have saved money and just pushed Joy Behar or Rosie O'Donnell off a bridge somewhere, and naming the weapon "Shamu" or "Bellyflop".

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  11. @Vitaeus,

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfVCZyeVfbo

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  12. Su57, "stealth"
    When we figured a truck (F15EX) thats faster, more reliable and proven, with a Radar that rivals AWACS, can find it. Far away. Is fast and maneuverable ENOUGH to catch it, and send more missiles at it, at once, than it can carry flares.
    T14, still waiting. Been 20 years, havent seen any battelfield footage. And pointless when someone with tech from the mid 80's can make you lose more aircraft than all of the Coalition forces BROUGHT to a higher density of air defenses to Iraq in the late eighties.
    Ythose weapons will work...work about as well as a near peer war in the 21st century...

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  13. The Russians would be more successful if they just smuggled the parts for bombs across our Southern border then reassembled them in various capital cities of these United States.

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