In 1957, the Air Force dropped a ten megaton nuclear
bomb outside Albuquerque. In 1967, two, twenty four
megaton bombs in North Carolina; five of six failsafes
were tripped on one bomb—the one with the parachute,
mind you. The other one they never found. The chute
didn't open and it went into soft ground. Somewhere.
It's still there. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was
one-fiftieth of one megaton.
Nuclear warheads do not eat through their own
containment mechanisms.
Three more bombs off Delaware and two in Texas the
same year. Another off Georgia the next year. Two more
on Spain in 1966. Four more on Greenland in '68…
Detonators have gone off. The same year we torpedoed
our own sub with two nukes on board. Classified for
twenty five years. It's still going on; it just hasn't
been declassified yet. The Russian record is, of
course, far worse.
As to reactors: Browns Ferry, I believe it was, nearly
burned to the ground because some idiot with a LIGHTER
or a candle was poking it into FLAMMABLE
insulation--AND the redundant wiring ran right
alongside the primary wiring. Windscale, Chernobyl,
Three Mile Island all released radiation into the
atmosphere. We release self-replicating nannites,
ONCE, and it's over.
We are not competent to control nanotechnology.
john marlow
"S.J. Van Sickle" <sjvan@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:
Really? And when have nuclear weapons been used by
mistake? I don't see
how simply increasing the possible consequences would
cause us to *reduce*
the current safeguards or make an accident more
likely. Quite the
opposite.
steve
On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, John Marlow wrote:
> I am 100% opposed to Mr. Joy's "relinquishment"
> attitude--but the man has a point. If the
consequences
> of mistakes with nuclear weapons (or nuclear power,
> for that matter) were as dire as those of mistakes
> made with nanotechnology, I assure you, we would all
> be dead already. Absolutely no question whatsoever.
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