nuclear weapons

Chris Knight's avatar

Eighty years ago today, in the early morning at a place called Trinity in the desert outside Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert, a new star arose from the landscape.

It was not a natural phenomenon.  This unprecedented display of light and heat, brighter than two suns as one observer said, was a thing engineered by the minds of men.   It was seen for hundreds of miles in every direction.

“I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” project lead Robert Oppenheimer uttered when he beheld the culmination of years of research.  Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge perhaps summed it up better: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

Man had at last seized the power of God in the palm of his hand.  The atomic age was upon us.  And nothing would ever be the same again…

Remembering the first nuclear explosion, July 16th 1945....

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

One of the things I’ve always wanted to do with this blog is post interesting stuff.  Or at least those things that are intriguing to me.  Admittedly, that has slacked off a lot in the past several months.  Between writing my book (a project that devoured most of 2014) and then Dad’s passing a month and a half ago, this hasn’t  been the best of times to even look for neat/odd material, much less post about it.  Maybe I can do better about that in the coming year.

And fortunately good friend Scott Kelly has come to the rescue with something to kick it off with:

Cue James Earl Jones voiceover: “THIS… was CNN.”
I first heard weird stories about “the CNN doomsday tape” around the time of the Gulf War in 1991.  Allegedly, CNN founder Ted Turner has made a video that would be the very last thing that
...
Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Working on a few things behind the scenes, but felt like posting something tonight. And that’s when I discovered that YouTube is hosting Threads.

Sure, why not.

I first saw this movie in July of 1986 but it wasn’t until I was in college a long time later that I found out the title. We were visiting family in Florida and playing a game of Monopoly in our motel room with my cousins and we thought we’d put some TV on. It was a PBS station showing… some very dark and gritty film about nuclear war in England.

I was 12 years old. I soon lost all interest in Monopoly and became transfixed to this film. The image of the young woman chewing through her newborn baby’s umbilical cord is something that has haunted me to this day.

Threads originally aired on BBC Two in Great Britain in September ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

So declared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today in Tehran on the occasion of the 31st anniversary of the revolution that put the current regime in power.

Ahmadinejad’s basis for this announcement is that Iran is “capable” of producing weapons-grade uranium.

By the same token, the fact that I used to launch Estes model rockets as a kid means that I can declare myself to be a space-borne superpower.

(I’m just sayin’…)...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

The brilliant minds at Carlos Labs have put together this neat app using Google Maps and Javascript. Ever wonder what would happen if a nuclear weapon went off in the heart of your hometown? Just enter the address (city name or ZIP/postal code works fine) into Ground Zero. Then select the explosive yield: anything from the Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima, to the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb (the most powerful detonation in recorded history). Or if you’re feeling particularly genocidal, select an asteroid impact. Ground Zero calculates the thermal damage and projects it outward from your given hypocenter…

So according to this gimmick, if a device on the scale of Tsar Bomba were to go off in the middle of downtown Reidsville, North Carolina, it would not only destroy all of Rockingham County, but it would also effectively sterilize an area stretching from Martinsville across the line ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Three times today I’ve been sent or otherwise directed to the following from Investor’s Business Daily…

“Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq? No? Why should you? It doesn’t fit the media’s neat story line that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed no nuclear threat when we invaded in 2003. It’s a little known fact that, after invading Iraq in 2003, the U.S. found massive amounts of uranium yellowcake, the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel, at a facility in Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad. In recent weeks, the U.S. secretly has helped the Iraqi government ship it all to Canada, where it was bought by a Canadian company for further processing into nuclear fuel — thus keeping it from potential use by terrorists or unsavory regimes in the region. This has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Yet, as the AP

...
Read more