Actually Skousen feels the western side of the range is better, as the hoards would die before reaching the western side coming from the east. The citi-folk have no mountain savvy, will be consumed by the eastern slopes. Sound thinking if you ask me. Skousen has a good brain.Pssss I just started trying to research Bryson city NC. it looks like a pretty cool little town in western North carolina
Actually Skousen feels the western side of the range is better, as the hoards would die before reaching the western side coming from the east. The citi-folk have no mountain savvy, will be consumed by the eastern slopes. Sound thinking if you ask me. Skousen has a good brain.
For one, Cuomo wouldn't get re-elected.
Read "First into Nagasaki". 800 or so Allied POW's were allowed to take shelter in a sewage ditch about 700 yards from where ground zero would be. The prisoners had seen the mushroom cloud from Hiroshima a few days before so they knew something was up. The dozen guys who stood up in the ditch to watch the show died. 700+ guys who sat in the ditch lived. Walked away from Nagasaki. Some lived long enough to be interviewed for the book which was written and published late 90's early 2000's. Similar story from Hiroshima of hundreds of uninjured survivors within a few hundred yards of GZ in a roadway tunnel that was not below grade. Soldiers smoking and joking and the ends of the tunnel died, everyone else lived. Walked away. No fallout from airbursts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fallout only from ground bursts. 1kt blast figure a magnitude 4 earthquake. There are some very robust heavyweight buildings in downtown Manhattan that would certainly have people survive the nuclear blast. The issue would be could they evacuate or be removed before the firestorm started a half hour after the blast. NYC modeled a 1kt going off down near Wallstreet. EMP people said we wouldn't be able to start a fire truck south of 14th Street.
But that was such a small bomb relative to what's possible nowadays.
If a terrorist wanted to unleash a more cost effective attack all they have to do is take some much more readily available nuclear medicine material and tie it onto a dog, unleash it in an Upper East Side playground, kill a dozen people and make a hundred sick. The property values for that neighborhood, plus the Homeland Security response would cost hundreds of billions $$$$$$$ and throw our economy into chaos. Rinse and repeat, very low cost attacks with huge effects.
What's surprising is they haven't done it yet.
But that was such a small bomb relative to what's possible nowadays.
If a terrorist wanted to unleash a more cost effective attack all they have to do is take some much more readily available nuclear medicine material and tie it onto a dog, unleash it in an Upper East Side playground, kill a dozen people and make a hundred sick. The property values for that neighborhood, plus the Homeland Security response would cost hundreds of billions $$$$$$$ and throw our economy into chaos. Rinse and repeat, very low cost attacks with huge effects.
What's surprising is they haven't done it yet.
The US is VERY cognizant of all nuclear material in the US. We have mapped radioactivity in every city in US and will know if anything new is in transit or introduced to US. This is public knowledge. Yes smash and grab, or quickly destroy a medical machine containing isotopes is a concern.
1kt was picked because there is lots of modeling and effects tables that are public knowledge, that are based on a 1kt bomb.( you can just multiply by 10 or 100, or God forbid a 1000 to see what the effects of different weapons would be). See "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" Gladstone and Dolan 1977 (used to be "effects of atomic weapons") Yes dirty bombs can change our world, but nothing compares to even a small nuclear detonation. As the "Yoda" of nuclear weapons effects told me, "You have to think to the scale of the event". He also dismissed mass fire for detonations under 10kt in NYC, but the people from MIT and Princeton that helped me disagreed and said definitely a firestorm 20min- 30min after detonation.
To get to the "city killers" of 300 kt the bomb must be a fission-fusion-fission type device which really only governments or scientific institutions can build. I don't know the yield limits of "guntype" bombs but off the top of my head I think it's 50 kt. The one that was dropped on Hiroshima was built from an old naval cannon and was considered so reliable it was never tested before it was used. It was also armed in flight to target.
.6 kt was thought to be the size of the Soviet "Backpack nukes" that were supposed hidden by sleeper cells in the US and Europe. 60 or so have never been accounted for by the Russian military after the fall of the Soviet Union. We had Special Forces in Europe who were supposed to use backpack nukes to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe through the Fulda Gap.
That's pretty interesting thx for sharing.
What are your thoughts on a physical attack/sabatoge of the power grid? (think Metcalf substation in San jose) but on a larger scale.
Is this a legitimate threat or concern for a specific localized region?
When the Mayor's rep asked me in 2002 what kind of attack we would face next I said "gun and grenade" . If you look at the training history of the bad guys we have been up against for 45 years, it starts with Skorseny, the nazi special ops guy, and goes to the Soviet "dark side of the house". These bad guys do basic infantry platoon size operations and that is their skill set. Raids, Prisoner Snatch, Reconnaissance. etc. Dropping power lines and towers, shooting out a transformer, definitely in their skill set. An EMP a mile up over Nebraska, that's a nation state. 10,000 guys coordinated in taking out ten thousand transformers,nation state.
It has been whispered for decades that Israel has told the Europeon heads of state that if they let Israel be taken out, Israel's parting shot will be to nuke all the capital cities in Europe.
I believe a similar message has been delivered to some world leaders by the US. At a meeting in Washington D.C. in 2003 I was told by a flag rank that if a certain incident had occurred "the Middle East would still be burning"
Don't they say that cockroaches can survive a nuclear attack?
The problem would be fallout. Cancer, bad food, bad water etc.etc..