JFC, Croatia, get your shit together… and they tried to bring Bosnia into this, too.
To the mandatorium!
And when I try to delete something I’ve mis-posted and repost it properly, I keep getting the “post is too similar, not allowed to fix anything without breaking something,” bug…
When I run into that problem, I usually deal with it by undeleting the original post, editing it into something else (just a string of gibberish will do), and then redeleting it.
Or, if I can’t be bothered with that, I just add a few extraneous punctuation marks (e.g. add a gratuitous full stop somewhere) to differentiate the posts.
One of the lawmakers carried out, Eddie Chu, told the BBC: “If Hong Kong was a democracy, we would not need to start scuffles like this.”
I’m surprised he hasn’t done that. It’s about the only globally-destructive thing he hasn’t done.
He was hoping to use them for real, but now that the clock might be running out, gotta get that checked off the list.
I’m sure there is a pristine wildlife refuge he’ll find a way to use.
Project Chariot’s time has come at last!
In addition to the objections of the local population, no practical use of such a harbor was ever identified.
[…]
After a customer for the harbor project could not be discovered, the researchers decided to turn the project into a study on the economic impacts of nuclear fallout on the indigenous communities […], in particular “to measure the size of bomb necessary to render a population dependent” after local food sources have become too dangerous to eat due to extreme levels of radiation.
That does sound like something he’d be in favor of.
hmm.
The problem with “measuring the size of bomb necessary to render a population dependent” is that project plowshares was envisioned as a series of " Peaceful nuclear explosions", and a public acknowledgement to the contrary would cause significant diplomatic fallout.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time we had ‘peacefully’ slaughtered people, or the last time. If the diplomats didn’t know how to spin that into something positive, that was a problem with the diplomats, not the slaughtering of people, right? /s
If you have that Davis book-- feel free to quote the context. I found a couple of book chapters on project chariot through JSTOR.
Alaska and the Firecracker Boys: The Story of Project Chariot (Dan O’Neil)
Project Chariot: Alaskan Roots of Environmentalism (Peter Coates)
(possibly available in fragmentary form through Google Books)
Apparently, the most lasting legacy of Project Chariot was the environmental impact statement. To assess the biological effects of using nukes in the Arctic, biologists surveyed the region, and published a very long report, (see https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015095034875&view=1up&seq=3) which became sort of the benchmark for similar projects. It also galvanized the environmental community-- previously the non native Alaskan community centered around Fairbanks was quite gung ho on this sort of thing-- the major opposition came from Point Hope-- one of the nearby native settlements.
Apparently Teller had the bizarre idea that Alaskan Natives would become coal miners?
did he have any that weren’t?
The US government position is that Project Chariot only used about 26 millicuries. If this figure is true, far more ecological damage has been done by atmospheric testing. The original permit allowed for the use of 10 curies of radioactive material, so that’s a point of contention.
Unfortunately, the north slope website does not offer anything later than this 1996 proposal.
Here’s another insane use of nuclear weapons-- George Gamow was responsible.
Incredibly, the Air Force and the AEC had another nuclear-powered aircraft project, completely separate and independently funded, running in parallel with the ANP program. This one was a real bad boy. Although it was scheduled to carry up to 12 nuclear weapons, this alternate nuclear air vehicle did not even have to lug bombs to destroy civilization. All it had to do was deliberately fly into the ground, and the city under it was rendered uninhabitable. The project had the official name SLAM, or Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. It became known as Pluto, named for the Roman god of the Underworld. It was the weapons delivery system from Hell. Thoughts of this system started officially with a report from the Los Alamos atomic bomb lab in 1948 called, “Self-flying Atomic Bombs or the New Mexico Jumping Bean.”209 It was written by George Gamow, a Russian defector who had moved to the United States in 1934 and had worked on the Manhattan Project. Gamow suggested that an atomic bomb should be able to take off from New Mexico, running on fission, fly to Moscow, and then reconfigure itself mechanically into a bomb and drop out of the sky. Crazier things have been proposed. On January 1, 1957, which was a holiday, the Air Force and the AEC drew a contract for the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, California, to start serious work on Gamow’s flying bomb. The Air Force wanted a cruise missile missile that would fly low at Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, with a nuclear-powered ramjet. There would be no worries about flight crews getting lightly toasted by the engine, because there would be no flight crew. Pluto was designed to deploy and fly itself with minimal supervision. The vehicle would take off from some desert in the United States using chemical rocket boosters to take it up to trans-sonic speed. The boosters would then drop away, and the reactor would start up, at a point over the Pacific Ocean and not over taxpayers’ property. The aircraft would then loiter along the Western Pacific Rim at high altitude, running on nothing but fission and air, waiting for war to break out. Upon signal it would tear away to the target locations, running fast and below the radar. Although it would carry multiple warheads, it would cut a swath of destruction with its supersonic shock-wave alone, with half a gigawatt of naked fission taking down any living thing that remained standing. The engine design was admirably innocent of moving parts.210 Unlike the ANP program design, this one had no compressor, turbine, liquid metal pumps, or valves of any kind. It was simply a big air nozzle with a nuclear reactor in the middle of it. Air was crammed into the front of the engine by the leading shock wave, was heated in the white-hot reactor core, and left at higher energy out the back. Design parameters were tight. The reactor had to run at 2,500° Fahrenheit, but at 2,650° Fahrenheit the aircraft would catch fire. There were many questions, such as, if Pluto runs into a rain storm at Mach 3, will it come down in chunks or in powder form? A particularly interesting problem was the fuel, which bugged all of the nuclear-powered transportation projects. The operating temperature was so high, any normal type of reactor fuel would vaporize. A manufacturer in Golden, Colorado, the Coors Porcelain Company, agreed to build 500,000 pencil-shaped fuel elements that could stand the heat. The first complete engine, designed at Livermore, was named Tory-IIA. Another extensive testing station was set up, this time in the only spot in the United States that is more remote and barren of life than the Lost River Desert in Idaho, which is Jackass Flats, Nevada. Static testing of a large, nuclear ramjet is not easy. The test laboratory, built on eight square miles of desert, was named Site 401. The government had to buy a gravel mine just to make enough concrete for the thick-walled engine-disassembly building. To store the compressed air to simulate trans-sonic flight, 25 miles of steel oil-well casing were used as an air tank, which was pumped up with submarine compressor borrowed from the Navy. The engineers were not overly afraid of radiation contamination, but the site had a fallout shelter with two weeks of food and water, just in case the engine came apart during the test. Tory-IIA was successfully run for just a few seconds on the afternoon of May 14, 1961, at a fraction of its rated power. Excited by the results, the engineering team rushed to design a lighter, more powerful version, capable even of lifting itself off the ground. Three years later the Tory-IIC ramjet engine ran at a full 513 megawatts for five minutes, splitting the air with 150 decibels of noise. You could practically hear it running in Idaho. Engineering proceeded to fit the Tory-IIC into an airframe, and to design automatic flight controls. As an afterthought, the first test flight was going to be a problem. The aircraft was never supposed to land, so how could they get it back on the ground without spreading the hot reactor over 30 square miles of ground? It was decided to fly it in a figure-eight pattern over Wake Island, and then crash it into the Pacific Ocean when the engine failed.
Mahaffey, James. Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power (pp. 290-293). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
But in my view, Teller’s greatest tragedy had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. It was simply the fact that in pursuit of his obsession with bombs he wasted his great scientific gifts and failed to become a truly great physicist. Ironically he again shared this fate with his nemesis Robert Oppenheimer. Before the war both Oppenheimer and Teller had made significant contributions to science. Teller is so famous for his weapons work that it is easy to ignore his scientific research. Along with two other scientists he worked out an important equation describing the adsorption of gases to solids. Another very significant Teller contribution known to chemists is the Jahn-Teller effect, a distortion of geometry in certain inorganic molecular complexes that impacts key properties like color and magnetic behavior. In nuclear physics Teller again came up with several ideas including the Gamow-Teller rules that describe energy transitions in nuclei. Even after the war Teller kept on thinking about science, working for instance on Thomas-Fermi theory which was the precursor of techniques used to calculate important properties of molecules.
But after 1945 Teller’s scientific gifts essentially lay undisturbed, stagnating in all their creative glory. Edward Teller the theoretical physicist was slowly but surely banished to the shadows and Edward Teller the nuclear weapons expert and political advocate took his place. A similar fate befell Oppenheimer, although for many years he at least stayed in touch with the latest developments in physics. Seduced by power, both men forgot what had brought them to this juncture in history to begin with. In pursuing power they ignored their beloved science.
Note that the is supposedly the exact same goal of the Russian nuclear disaster that spewed fallout across the landscape a few months ago.