A question from a non-science person: Just what should we expect

[Mist]

from the huge bomb "test" in June? Dust, like from Mt.St. Helens? Worse? The tsunami was said to have such force that the angle of the Earth's axis was actually moved a bit. Is this likely to happen due to the big blast the * admin. is planning? I guess what I'm asking is, how scared should we be?

[Catch22Dem]

1. What test?

I mean, we tested hundreds...thousands of nukes in the Navada desert for years. I don't necessarily condone it, but it's not going to tip our axis or blanket the planet in dust or anything.

[Mist]

2. My understanding is, it's not a nuclear bomb, but a bomb of enormous

weight, biggest ever dropped on the surface. I wouldn't be surprised to see at least some dust afterwards, as I did after Mt.St. Helens.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. It is not going to go unnoticed by the rest of the planet.

[Waya]

4. Are you talking about the....

..700 ton (or pound?) bomb they're supposedly dropping on Western Shoshone Land?

[Mist]

6. That's the one, scheduled for June. Apparently the reason being given

is the force of the bomb, and will such force be able to penetrate to underground facilities in Iran.

[Waya]

12. Indian Tribe, Downwinders: Stop Nev. Blast

That's the latest on this ...It doesn't say whether it might be able to knock the Planet of its axis or similar stuff.......but what they are describing is scary enough for me.......

Indian Tribe, Downwinders: Stop Nev. Blast

LAS VEGAS -- Members of an Indian tribe and two nuclear fallout "downwinders" are asking a federal court to halt plans for a huge non-nuclear explosion that is expected to generate a mushroom cloud over the Nevada desert in June.

"This is a worst nightmare come true for downwinders," said Robert Hager, a Reno-based lawyer representing four members of the Nevada-based Western Shoshone tribe and two residents of Utah.

He said the June 2 detonation of a 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb at the Nevada Test Site would kick up radioactive fallout left from nuclear weapons tests conducted from 1951 to 1992.

Test site and federal officials have said the blast, some 280 times larger than the ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, should not disturb surface contamination at the Test Site.

The 21-page request for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction predicts a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud, and calls the blast a "clear and present danger" to the health of people living to the east, or downwind of the vast Nevada Test Site.

The document names as defendants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Linton Brooks and James Tegnelia, the directors of two federal agencies planning the test.

More at link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/AR2006042002031.html


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[Mist]

16. Hard to see how it --wouldn't--disturb the surface contamination. nt

[Toots]

18. They have dropped similar bombs in the past

While I was in Vietnam they dropped a ten thousand pound bomb just to clear an area for an LZ. It became LZ Jane... so a fourteen thousand pound bomb shouldn't be all that big a deal..

[3waygeek]

15. Dropped?

Seems unlikely to me. Divine Strake is a 700 ton bomb -- the carrying capacity of a B-52 (our biggest bomber) is 35 tons and our biggest cargo plane (C-5) carries only 145.5 tons. Numbers are from Randi Rhodes' show (she served in the USAF, so she knows a thing or two about military aircraft).

[flobee1]

7. I'm not a scientist

but I did stay at a holiday inn express last night:)

I can see a slight diffrence that might cause some problems

from what I understand, nukes are detonated in the air, not from impact with the ground

This test will be detonated on the ground because of the immense weight of the explosives
it may shake the ground a little more and kick up a little dust

but wtf do I know, I'm just a computer tech:-)

[Ian David]

5. Oh, not even CLOSE!

Though I have to wonder if any of that sand is still radioactive from the old nuke tests.

[central scrutinizer]

9. the entire earth is covered with radioactive cesium

from previous nuclear testing and its radioactivity is used for research purposes. A friend of mine got his Ph.D. recently colecting data on erosion from various farming techniques in countries in Africa and South America. By measuring the amount of radioactivity he was able to determine accurately how much erosion had occurred at each site.

[leveymg]

8. A 400 ton conventional explosive is dwarfed by the H-bombs that were

tested in the atmosphere during the 1950s and early 1960s. The largest was a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb (equivalent to 50 million tons of TNT) exploded in Siberia by the Russians. If that didn't spin the earth off it's axis, this sure as hell won't.

[Mist]

10. OK, thanks! nt

[Ian David]

11. But it might unleash the crab people from the center of the Earth. n/t

[acmejack]

13. Divine Strake: Global Strike Low-Yield Nuclear Simulation

The Department of Energy is readying the Nevada Test Site for a large-scale, open-air, high explosive detonation on a tunnel complex. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the DOE customer which is conducting the test, is stressing that the test is not a nuclear blast and the Russian government reportedly has been notified to avoid misunderstanding about the event. "The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets," the Washington Post reported on March 31st.

No one - with the notable exception of Andrew Lichterman and John Fleck who first reported on this - seems to have tried to dig deeper than the press release from DTRA. I too have monitored the preparations for Divine Strake; It is much more than was reported (for media reports about Divine Strake after publication of this Nuclear Brief, click here).

Divine Strake is neither a bomb nor conventional. Instead, the test is a detonation of a pile of chemical explosives to simulate a "low-yield nuclear weapon ground shock" effect to "improve the warfighter’s confidence in selecting the smallest proper nuclear yield necessary to destroy underground facilities while minimizing collateral damage."

Divine Strake, moreover, is an integral part of STRATCOM's new Global Strike mission, which is otherwise said to provide mainly non-nuclear means of defeating time-critical targets. Divine Strake is the first nuclear effects simulation of this kind against underground targets since President George W. Bush in Summer 2004 directed STRATCOM to "extend Global Strike to counter all HDBTs to include both tactical and strategic adversarial targets." (see guidance overview here)

http://www.nukestrat.com/us/stratcom/gs-divinestrake.htm

[Waya]

14. Test that sucker in the White House Rose Garden...if they must....

...leave Western Shoshone land alone....

[DesertRat]

17. test it in Crawford n/t