Be Excellent To Each Other

I'd love to see a nuclear explosion.
Not Hiroshima close, obviously.

Paypal me £50, I'll go to the pub rather than do anything constructive and be on webcam when MrsA gets home to find me drunk.

Buy me a Dhansak.

but not just wearing Sunglasses!

Erm. Wut?

Makes sense to me.

Sunds a plan.. £2 each

Oh I see. Hi MrsA!

Not as vulnerable as that blimp though.

Some of this lot seemed to enjoy it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOwH55lnA8M

Yeah, true. Of all the pointless exercises, that one really akes the biscuit. What did they do after that, see if a kitten could withstand napalm?

There was something rather amusing about the second blimp pic. It needed an 'Oh, bugger' caption or something.

Great photo collection - there's something eerily beautiful about them.

Hey, guys, anyone want to find out if a NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS can light this barbeque?

What did they think was going to happen exactly?

For some reason, the nuclear blast proof blimps they created after that experiment were not a success. The 4 inch steel plating made them highly durable though.

Should have made them out of cockroaches, the fools. Why aren't I in charge of shit like this?

Heh.

I also quite like the NUKULAR CANNONZ one. It almost looks like a model.

I'd heard about those before - "Atomic Annies" I think they were called.

Its predecessor, the Honest John, was a battlefield nuclear missile with only about 4 miles range, so the operators would be blowing themselves up. MR BOGGLY FACE

I haven't actually seen the pics yet but on the same subject, I did read this article once about how the US Navy (I think) had researched dropping nuclear bombs from prop-driven fighter aircraft.
They'd "throw" them by starting a loop, releasing the bomb half way around so as to put as much distance as possible between the hapless pilot and the detonation.

Didn't manage to google it but it's the type of thing you know about?

Bwa hahahahahaha

Lego Universe:

Is this Lego World of Warcraft?

The US also experimented with a little portable nuke launcher, the Davy Crockett. Launching a nuke from a weapon with the range of 2km? I'll pass on that one, thanks.

If it's Lego Minecraft we're in trouble.

Yup - it's called "toss bombing" (heh heh), and they also tried doing other things like retarding (heheh) the bombs (with parachutes, airbrakes, that sort of thing), to help - even the early 1950s jets weren't that fast, so needed time to get away from the blast zone.

Either paranoia or a sense of humour. Good old American toilet sign.

Squirt - the warhead on that was only fatal out to about 400m from the blast point, so says Wiki. Why even bother? Just use a bomb, for christ sakes.

It does seem odd - I guess the plan was to launch it at massed commie hoards as they came charging over the West German border. I'd imagine that for the extra expense and problems with nuclear weapons you could just get another battery or two of artillery though, and not have to worry about turning a small patch of central Europe into a poisonous wasteland.

Shirley that should be "immediately fatal" to 400m. I expect quite severe burns/radiation would be the trouble after that.

That was the problem with all of the short range nuclear weapons (short in this instance being up to a few hundred miles) - the West Germans were extremely antsy about the Yanks using them as it would be the country they were immediately fighting over (i.e, theirs) that got utterly destroyed.

I read a very interesting history of the Cold War recently, and there was an entire chapter on what would have happened in Europe in various nuclear escalation scenarios.

Fallout 3 would have been at the good end of the spectrum.

Dimrill - it said instantly fatal does out to 150 metres and "probably fatal dose" up to 400m, so I guess it means at all. Outside that you'd just get the Poorlies and take some RadAway.

If used against an force of an men, I doubt they'd just shrug and carry on charging with their spears if they were outside that 400m though.

Actually that's morbidly fascinating - apparently this thing only had a 'yield' of 10-20 tonnes of TNT (0.01 kilotons), which is tiny. I sort of assumed that the minimum possible yield for an A-bomb was two orders of magnitude greater than that, at around 1 kiloton. (Hiroshima was tiny by 'modern standards', yet was still approx. 15 kilotons, or 1,500 times more powerful than the Davy Crockett warhead).

Mind you, nuclear weapons = bleugh. I'm for CND, personally; they're obscene, indiscriminate, utterly dreadful things, conceived by amoral human beings IMO.

Germans, you mean.

My wife is of German descent, I'll be sure to mention it.

Is she also a big fan of corgis?

I recently read a history of the Manhattan project, and it was an interesting read. Many of the US scientists working on the project were convinced that the Nazi's were just as close as them to getting a working bomb, and therefore getting there first was vital. As soon as Germany surrendered, and it was clear that Japan had no chance of creating their own, lots of them actively campaigned for it not to be used, or to put a "no first use" policy in place.

LOL.

(Hmmm. actually, that would make me the Duke of Edinburgh, gahhh!..... )

Are they any worse than chemical weapons or biological weapons or just really big conventional explosives though?

Well, yeah, in that conventional explosives don't render an area of land uninhabitable for 50,000 years, or whatever.

But I know what you mean.

It's a fair point Doc, but there again, I believe there was (supposedly) a ban on developing chemical weapons by the various main protagonists of the Cold War and beyond for that matter, on the grounds of their being obscene, inhumanane, hugely dangerous and above all indiscriminate, upon which most of us will agree. (Whether or not they *did* stop developing them in practice is another matter).

That being the case though, it's hard to imagine are more indiscriminate, more environmentally damaging, less humane weapon than the 40 MT H-bomb, so surely the same moral argument applies? As for the 'deterrent' argument, I don't think anyone said 'we must have vile chemical and biological weapons for deterrent effect, else someone might use them against us', did they? And as for the supposed deterrent effect of having nuclear weapons, well, Japan, Germany, Finland, Norway and much of the rest of the world seems to have managed quite well without them, so it's bollocks as far as I'm concerned. It's all about 'prestige', although what it is exactly that is so 'prestigious' about developing and holding Cold War, entirely useless WOMDs, at the cost of hundreds of billions of pounds while other legitimate areas of public expenditure are left sorely wanting, in the face of our telling other powers such Iran to 'do as we say, not as we do', is anyone's guess.

Sometimes I seriously think the world would be a far, far better place if women ran things.

Germany supposedly *was* not far off getting them though..

Christ no. Think of all the cushions.

That would explain quite a lot.

_{margaret thatcher}

Agree with the sentiment though, and we shouldn't be "renewing Trident" either. It's all quite morbidly fascinating to look back on though, both the bomb / delivery technology as well as the civil defence stuff that was supposed to deal with the consequences.

Ooh, that's a low blow.
No matter, I've got you down as one of Fred the Shred's evil little footsoldiers, which would also explain quite a lot, I feel.

You love nucleur weapons too. You monster.

Ironically though, MT was more masculine than most blokes I've ever met; clearly, this was the only way that she was able to succeed/operate. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em etc.

I am a great admirer of her in many ways, but would never claim that she was even remotely typical of women in general. I was thinking about 'real women' running the world - would we seriously even consider spending billions on Trident? Would we have gone blundering into Iraq/Afghanistan? Would not the country's finances be in vastly better shape, cutting the cloth to suit the pocket etc.? Would we not have vastly better things that actually *matter* but are not considered that sexy, like social housing, more jobs for people to do, better schools and hospitals? Would they not sweep aside the centuries of arcane bollocks that besets our entire systems of power/politics?

I'm an unlikely feminist, but I seriously believe this.

Or would we be at war with various superpowers because they wore the same dress as us to the UN?

Coff Sarah Palin Coff.

Well, we should certainly have had women running the banks, eh.

Rubbish. If Simon Munnery has taught me anything it's this:

It's not a huge leap to be fair though.