Via digby: Jorge Hirsch at UC San Diego has gathered a few of his friends — Nobel Laureates, Boltzmann and Fields Medalists, Medal of Science winners, and past Presidents of the American Physical Society — to write a letter to President Bush, urging him not to use nuclear weapons against Iran. The signatories are:
- Philip Anderson, professor of physics at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate in Physics
- Michael Fisher, professor of physics at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland and Wolf Laureate in Physics
- David Gross, professor of theoretical physics and director of the Kavli Institute of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Nobel Laureate in Physics
- Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego
- Leo Kadanoff, professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago and recipient of the National Medal of Science
- Joel Lebowitz, professor of mathematics and physics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Boltzmann Medalist
- Anthony Leggett, professor of physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Eugen Merzbacher, professor of physics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former president, American Physical Society
- Douglas Osheroff, professor of physics and applied physics, Stanford University and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Andrew Sessler, former director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and former president, American Physical Society
- George Trilling, professor of physics, University of California, Berkeley, and former president, American Physical Society
- Frank Wilczek, professor of physics, MIT and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Edward Witten, professor of physics, Institute for Advanced Study and Fields Medalist
In reality, winning a Nobel Prize doesn’t make you an informed judge of geopolitical affairs. But anyone in their right mind can see it would be a bad idea to launch a nuclear first strike against Iran or anyone else, and these folks are in their right minds. Hopefully they can lend some heft and gather some publicity for the cause.
Part of me wonders whether the administration understands perfectly well that a nuclear strike would be madness, but they want to give the impression of being reckless cowboys so that Iran will dismantle their nuclear program — that’s a hopeless plan, of course, but at least not wildly irreponsible. Then I remember that they have consistently acted like reckless cowboys in every previous situation, and my heart sinks a little. Remember DeLong’s Law: “The Bush Administration is always worse than one imagines, even when taking into account DeLong’s Law.”
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. If the Western powers in general and the United States in particular simply had a policy of putting any tyrant responsible for the deaths of, say, 100,000 people on their terminate-at-all-cost list, a substantial fraction of the 80 million lives lost to tyrants in the 20th century could have been saved. The tyrants would have been killed or deterred well before their pile of victims figured into the millions.
Absolutely. That’s America’s stock and trade — crusade and pillage. Just imagine how much better off countries like Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, not to mention the whole of western and central Europe, would be without American pillaging. And Africa, don’t get me started — one pillaging operation after another. Then of course, there was that attempt to conquer South Vietnam — no doubt for its oil. And we’re still looting Afghanistan and draining Iraq of all its assets without investing a dime in either place. Good thing we’re smart enough to divert attention from our pillaging ops with billions in foreign aid and World Bank subsidies.
Of course it would work, because in essence it did. Look at the historical record. Terrorism against blacks (and their white sympathizers) in the south continued for 100 years after the slaves were liberated — long after the northern occupiers withdrew. But blacks were still better off than they would have been had they continued to be enslaved for a century. And a fully inclusive democracy ultimately appeared.
The only difference your hypothetical example (black liberators/occupiers) would have made is that the intensity of terrorism by racist whites would have been higher. So the occupying power would have had to remain longer. If this black superpower were astute enough to understand that their occupation would need to last long enough for a couple of generations to grow up in the new environment, their success in installing a more inclusive democracy would be all but assured. This is because the most rabid racists (those most prone to commit terrorist acts) would die off to be replaced by successively less rabid racists who would increasingly accept the new reality that they would nevertheless continue to dislike. Meanwhile, the fraction of the population thriving in the new environment and fully familiar with it — having known nothing else — would continue to rise.
Count Iblis,
I don’t think that this is correct. Both the F-117A and the F-22 were designed to have radar cross sections on the order of that of a typical bird — about 0.01 square meters viewed head on. They’re even stealthier viewed from below, when they’re not directly overhead.
Check the claims in this article:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/floyd1.html
This, too, is worth reading:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/birchblog/index.php?entry=entry060421-181315
http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/0309096731?OpenDocument
Arun, the earth-penetrator base surge radiation studies you link to assume a large fission yield. The “Uncle” test at Nevada in 1951 was at earth penetrator depth and was 1.2 kilotons fission, available in declassified report DASA-1251. The fallout was slightly heavier than the 1.2 kt “Sugar” surface burst tested in the same series, with the serious hazards a few hundred metres around ground zero upwind and 1-2 km downwind. If you are using an earth penetrator you would need to tell people to take cover for from the base surge and fallout, or walk out of the area.
The time to walk away is short compared to the time taken to accumulate a serious dose for such a small weapon. The dose rises slowly, you can see the underground burst fallout hazard (not the radiation, the actual fused particles of fallout), so what’s the big deal?
I believe a large yield is going to be needed to destroy Natanz.
http://www.princeton.edu/%7Eglobsec/publications/pdf/10_1Nelson.pdf
Arun, the fallout dose takes many hours to accumulate, indded much of it is accumulated over a period of days. The authors of those papers assume that everyone over several square kilometres is a sitting duck. You can walk away in time to avoid a fatal dose.
We are all assuming that these nukes will even hit thier intended target, remember the “precision’ strikes in Iraq? I’m not sure about how subsurace bombs compare to thosse you would drop on a city .A ground penetrating explosion soaks up much of the thermal radiation and has a smaller blast radius, but does it make the air fallout worse? The blast site itself will also become hot, how long will it remain radioactive?
The fallout decay rate is approximately porportional to t^-1.2, so at 7 hours it is only 10% of that at 1 hour, and at 2 days it is 1% of that at 1 hour, etc. There are 210 radioactive fission products which decay in ‘chains’ of a few steps into 90 stable end products. These 300 nuclides consist of 36 elements, with isotopes ranging from zinc-72 to terbium-161. About 72% of the half-lives are under 24 hours, and only 4% exceed one year. It is also easy to sweep you or hose off fallout from land burst explosions:
‘A number of factors make large-scale decontamination useful in urban areas. Much of the area between buildings is paved and, thus, readily cleaned using motorized flushers and sweepers, which are usually available. If, in addition, the roofs are decontaminated by high-pressure hosing, it may be possible to make entire buildings habitable fairly soon, even if the fallout has been very heavy.’ — Dr Frederick P. Cowan and Charles B. Meinhold, Decontamination, Chapter 10 (pp. 225-240) of Dr Eugene P. Wigner, editor, Survival and the Bomb, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1969.
As a counterpoint for all the useful and unuseful academic, scientific, and humanistic ramblings above — I suggest everyone see the stunningly moving, sad, and brutally honest photo exhibit by Paul Fusco from Magnum currently on the homepage of Slate.com. http://www.slate.com
Those are the effects of nuclear radiation, ten years out.
Belizean,
I see you have been back, but still no comment on my idea of bribing Amhedinejad and his buddies to give up power. I still think it would be more likely to work than your idea of bribing Putin & Hu to allow us to foment a revolution. What do you think?
weichi,
This won’t work. Unlike the jaded leaderships of Russia and China, Ahmedinejad is a true believer. The only viable option is to depose or kill him. Moreover, because he is merely the current front man for the ruling clerical elite, this must be destroyed as well.
It looks like the Bush administration’s shortsighted fear of bad press will soon result in an age of unprecedented nuclear proliferation and blackmail against the West by scores of Islamic terror groups. If you think that the West was overly timid in the face of cartoon jihadists, just imagine how we’ll be once they’ve gone nuclear. Assuming that there’s a limit to our submission, the West’s inaction now will surely lead to WWIII later. I now have some inkling of what analysts steeped in common sense must have felt during the 1930s.
http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html
should be read.