Re: [SLUG-POL] (FWD) The "Real" Deal about Nuclear, Bio, and Chem Attacks

From: Bryan-TheBS-Smith (b.j.smith@ieee.org)
Date: Wed Oct 17 2001 - 20:11:01 EDT


Paul M Foster wrote:
> This was sent to me by an old friend. I can't vouch for the person
> writing this, but I suspect he's probably right about most/all
> of it. If it cuts the panic factor, all the better.

It's really good stuff. I add a few comments below ...

> ----- Forwarded message from <elided> -----
> Lesson number one: In the mid 1990's there were a series of nerve
> gas attacks on crowded Japanese subway stations ...

To clarify a point that I didn't see directly made, subways are
cramped, enclosed, no ventilation areas. That's where chemical
weapons work best. Had these chemicals been released outside, they
would have done only 1/1000th the damage, and _no_one_ would have
died (nor probably permanently injured).

> It can harm you if you get it on your skin but it works best
> if they can get you to inhale it.

Inhaling and/or injestion is the quickest way for an agent to get
you, by far. Your skin is tough, and even its pores don't directly
connect to your vital parts. But if you injest or, worse yet,
inhale these particles, you've collected them in your most sensitive
membranes.

> If you see a bright flash of light like the sun, where the sun
> isn't, fall to the ground! The heat will be over a second. Then
> there will be two blast waves, one out going, and one on it's way
> back. Don't stand up to see what happened after the first wave;
> anything that's going to happen will have happened in two full
> minutes.

Yes, the pressure of the wave is very deadly outside of the blast,
but reaches much farther. Although it is over in a dozen seconds or
so (depending on the yield), 2 minutes is a "safe" estimate for even
megaton yields.

Non-nuclear, but massive destruction weapons like the fuel-air
explosives use this same principle. I create a temporary, but
powerful windstorm of hundreds of miles an hour that literally tears
everything apart even over a mile away from the actual, much smaller
blast radius. Even aircraft must be careful when dropping
conventional bombs at low altitude.

> These will be low yield devices and will not level whole cities. If
> you live through the heat, blast, and initial burst of radiation,
> you'll probably live for a very very long time.

One-time radiation intake is what kills most people, even if the
effects don't get you until a week later. Otherwise, you're body is
fairly good at taking radition over a period of time.

> These will be at the most 1 kiloton bombs; that's the equivalent
> of 1,000 tons of TNT.

It's hard to get multi-kiloton (let alone the 100 megaton, that's
100,000x more powerful ones) yields out of a portable nuke.

> Here's the real deal, flying debris and radiation will kill a lot
> of exposed (not all!) people within a half mile of the blast.

After two minutes, get up and indoors as fast as you can.

> EMP stands for Electro Magnetic Pulse and it will fry every
> electronic device for a good distance,

EMP is why we need national missile defense (NMD). A rogue state
could launch a nuke into space and fry all the electronics in major
city causing trillions of dollars worth of damage. Only NMD
inteceptors with EKV (exo-atmosphere kill vehicles) can stop them,
TMD (theater missile defense) is not exo-atmospheric (or don't reach
high enough altitudes).

Now "nuclear deterrence" might keep one nation from using nukes on
civilian populations. But what about nukes used to cause trillions
of dollars worth of damage, but doesn't kill anyone? How do we
respond to that? Even if we respond in kind, what if the nation
sponsoring it doesn't have much technology? How can we do
"equivalent" damage???

> First; your skin will stop alpha particles, a page of a news paper or
> your clothing will stop beta particles, you just gotta try and
> avoid inhaling dust that's contaminated with atoms that are emitting these
> things and you'll be generally safe from them.

Alpha and beta won't get you from the outside. Like chemical
weapons, you'll need to inhale them to get you.

> Gamma rays are particles that travel like rays (quantum physics makes
> my brain hurt) and they create the same damage as alpha and beta
> particles only they keep going and kill lots of cells as they go all
> the way through your body.

It takes some seriously think metal and/or water/earth barrier to
stop Gamma. The fortunate thing is that they don't live long before
decaying. You'll usually only get them in the initial blast.
Direct fallout of radioactive by-products from the actual
fission-fusion will be the only things producing them after the
blast is over (and they will only be around the blast area where
people are probably already dead or dying anyway).

> The radiation poisoning will not effect plants so fruits and
> vegetables are OK if there's no dust on em (rinse em off if
> there is).

I actually didn't know this. I assumed that any carbon-based
material, from water to skin, can be affected by ionizing
radiation. Hmmm, I need to research out more.

But he's right about the after-blast radiation. It's in the
fallout. It's just like dust settling, which you can move. The
dust is not as radioactive as the original material, so you're
fairly safe unless, again, you inhale or injest it.

[ Side note: Radioactivity and half-life are inversely
proportional. The more radioactive and dangerous, the shorter it
lasts, sometimes nanoseconds. The radioactive fallout isn't nearly
as bad, but it lasts much longer. ]

> Finally there's biological warfare.

As he goes into, biological warfare is almost too dangerous for
people to deal with. They'll usually kill themselves before they
even get close to their targets which means containment is too
costly for most groups to invest in.

-- TheBS

-- 
Bryan "TheBS" Smith    mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org   chat:thebs413
Engineer  AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc.  http://www.linux-wlan.org
President     SmithConcepts, Inc.   http://www.SmithConcepts.com
----------------------------------------------------------------
The US National ID is an enhanced Social Security Number.  It
will give those who abuse it more information than ever before.
And just like the SSN, they will ignore all the regulations.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:56:59 EDT