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: