At 6:48 PM -0700 9/9/97, rab@stallion.oz.au wrote:
Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Mon, 8 Sep 1997, Bill Stewart wrote:
However, we need to get off this "Nuke Washington!" kick, and on to something more realistic like "Wiretap DiFi!"
I'd like to ask that if anyone is planning to Nuke Washington, they politely let me know so I can go on an extended business trip to the Montana mountains. I mean, it's just common courtesy! Look on the bright side: You will probably never know what hit you :-)
Yes, the very, very, intensely bright side. In actuality, the damage radius of course goes approximately as the cube root of the megatonnage. The multimegaton warheads of some decades back are no more, replaced by 1 MT and even 200 KT warheads as the "workhorses" of MIRV and cruise missile delivery systems. And of course nuclear demolitions, designed to take out dams, close mountain passes, etc., are of even less megatonnage. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people survived the blast at a radius of several hundred meters, if they were not looking at the blast and were not in the open, or in residences ignited. (The Japanese houses were more easily ignited than modern American or European houses and apartments, for various reasons. These bombs were roughly 20 KT. A suitcase bomb might well be comparable, or even smaller. And even the "workhorses" I mentioned, at 200 KT, would have roughly the same survivability at 2 or 3 times the radius, i.e. at 1000 meters or so. Declan would be very unlikely to be in the lethal zone, unless he happened to be near one of the obvious targets. (Which in my opinion would be the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, or the densepack burrowcrat warrens. Using the above calculations, it is quite reasonable that big chunks of these buildings would survive a suitcase nuke placed a few hundred meters away. The Pentagon might lose a bite out of it, and thus look like some kind of mil-spec Apple logo.) --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."