If Nuke Goes Off During Huricane! No-One is Safe!

Since the "american heroshima" comments by Al Queada I have been studying Blast Damage and Fallout Zones for my area. The reason for my concern is that I live 10 miles outside of NYC, so i am just being paranoid.

What I have discovered is alarming to say the least. I am assuming that if the Terrorists have a nuclear device that it would be low yeild. Lets just say 1 Megaton. And lets also assume that the device is detonated on the Ground, as opposed to an Air Blast.

An Air Blast would do more collateral damage because the fire blast would reflect itself off of the ground creating more fire power. However there is a downside to a ground detonation.

When a nuclear device is detonated on the ground it has substantially more Nuclear Fallout.

Nuclear Fallout is an even bigger killer than the Blast itself. Fallout basicly is tiny dust particles that are highly radioactive that spread into the atmasphere. Where the fallout spreads after a detonation depends on the direction of the wind.

But I was thinking, why would the terrorists attack NYC with a nuke? With current wind patterns the fallout would most likely go out to sea, with a remote chance of it going north to Boston. A better target would be Washington DC because the wind would take the fallout over New Jersey and into NYC anyway. Two birds with one stone, right.

Then i was thinking... What if the terrorists wanted to create the most damage possible from 1 bomb... and that got me thinking.

What if... a nuclear device was detonated right before a Huricane hit North Carolina.

The Huricane's powerful winds would carry the fallout as far west as Kentucky and as far north as New York City. The entire East Coast would be covered with Radioactive Fallout. The loss of life would be staggering.


Has anyone ever seen a report on the effects of a nuclear device when coupled with a Huricane? I can't find anything. Am I the first person to ever consider using a nuclear weapon in this way?

If you want to avoid being hit by a nuke directly then hang around George Bush because he is unlikely to order an 'extremist nuclear attack' on his own person.

If one nuke goes off then we are likely to see the boys light up the whole bag of tricks and then we are all toast. . . .

Originally posted by Roy Robinson Stewart

If you want to avoid being hit by a nuke directly then hang around George Bush because he is unlikely to order an 'extremist nuclear attack' on his own person.

There are just some beliefs that go too far. This I think is one.

Oh yeah, hang around Bush. Before the "Al-CIAda" nuke goes off, he'll already be airborne on NAECP (kneecap). You can enjoy having tea and crumpets with him in the nose of the plane.

no posts? This is shocking to me... is it because this has already been considered before. This is taking the worst weapon that man has ever made and coupled it with the worst storm that mother nature ever invisioned to create 1 Super Weapon capable of killing Millions in Days.

I'm no expert on fallout but I'm wondering if all the rain associated with a Hurricane would help wash the fallout out of the sky. If this is true, then the effect would be substantially less than you expect.

Wonder if the nuke would break the hurricane apart?..Imagine if it was to happen over Florida.The whole state would be a wasteland.


I would think they would want to detonate on the west coast..let the fallout travel across the states..or would the mountains play a factor?




[edit on 14-8-2005 by LDragonFire]

The west coast has already been nuked... several times. Remember where we did all our testing :p

Right around 1945... which *coincidentally* is the same time that smoking started to cause lung cancer.... even though about 1 in 2 people smoked before that without getting enough lung cancer for them to bother to measure it.

I might be wrong but isn't there a finite amount of radioactive fallout material in a nuclear explosion? If there is then the hurricane would spread it much more thinly over a larger area, possibly making it much less dangerous than the concentrated fallout it a regular explosion.

Right around 1945... which *coincidentally* is the same time that smoking started to cause lung cancer.... even though about 1 in 2 people smoked before that without getting enough lung cancer for them to bother to measure it

When did they start putting nasty chemicals like heavy metals, arsenic and formaldehyde in cigarettes? I honestly don't know but I think those things would be more likely to be the carcinogens that caused the increase in cancers.

Originally posted by Snap
Right around 1945... which *coincidentally* is the same time that smoking started to cause lung cancer.... even though about 1 in 2 people smoked before that without getting enough lung cancer for them to bother to measure it.

That's actually before 1945 as even Hitler was already a diehard anti-smoking crusader. The Reichstadt imposed the world's most comprehensive suite of tobacco regulations, which included bans on cigarette smoking in workplaces, public buildings, and transit systems. In March 1942, Hitler went so far as to attribute his success to nonsmoking:

"I am convinced that if I had been a smoker, I never would have been able to bear the cares and anxieties which have been a burden to me for so long. Perhaps the German people owe its salvation to that fact."

Your assertion that "1 in 2 people smoked before that without getting enough lung cancer for them to bother to measure it" is further complete bogus.

www.iol.co.za...

Considering nukes, the effects are a bit exaggerated, Hiroshima is a populated and thriving city and in Chernobyl the amount of uranium, plutonium and other nasties that went into the air was tens of TONS, instead of tens of kilos for a nuclear weapon, yet it is possible to work - not live - in Chernobyl and live in the surrounding, although the number of cancers, children born with defects and other health problems has gone up staggeringly.

Originally posted by Simon666

Originally posted by Snap
Right around 1945... which *coincidentally* is the same time that smoking started to cause lung cancer.... even though about 1 in 2 people smoked before that without getting enough lung cancer for them to bother to measure it.

That's actually before 1945 as even Hitler was already a diehard anti-smoking crusader. The Reichstadt imposed the world's most comprehensive suite of tobacco regulations, which included bans on cigarette smoking in workplaces, public buildings, and transit systems. In March 1942, Hitler went so far as to attribute his success to nonsmoking:

"I am convinced that if I had been a smoker, I never would have been able to bear the cares and anxieties which have been a burden to me for so long. Perhaps the German people owe its salvation to that fact."

Your assertion that "1 in 2 people smoked before that without getting enough lung cancer for them to bother to measure it" is further complete bogus.

www.iol.co.za...

While entirely true that it was Hitler's personal authoritarian views against smoking that led to his state supported research and campaign against it (ultimately adopted by the rest of the world), Snap's assertions and the facts behind your own aren't as far off as you present.

Your own link to advanced Nazi research shows it was after Hitler's personal authoritarian stance against smoking that it became a state researched, public health crisis.

Tobacco was viewed as one of many threats to the health of the volk, and the research had the personal support of Hitler, a militant non-smoker.

It originally appeared in the German journal Z Krebsforsch in 1943, seven years earlier than the famous paper co-authored by Sir Richard Doll, the leading British cancer epidemiologist who is credited with being the first to establish the deadly effects of tobacco.

...a full 7 years before British scientists got the notion, and about 20 years before America took even the slightest position against smoking in 1964.

As a lucrative export, it made as much sense (and still does) for America to be anti-tobacco as it does to be militantly anti-cotton or computer chips.

Feel free to review the history of American tobacco from 1612 on, and it should be obvious the only people that even took an interest (besides Hitler ) through the 1950's was the American Cancer Society reportedly because of a "triple" in cancer death rates from 0.6 out of 100,000 to 1.7 out of 100,000.

Interestingly enough (to me), though smoking has been on the decline ever since, cancer incidence is now through the roof, with smoking having nothing to do with the most common occurances.

The most commonly diagnosed cancer in the U.S. among men is prostate cancer; for women, it’s breast cancer, according to the U.S. federal government’s latest cancer statistics.

Granted, if you get lung cancer, you're more likely to die (highest incidence of mortality among cancers), but how much of that is prejudice in research from the Hitler inspired propaganda of it as a "disease of choice."

I wonder what Christopher Reeve's widow (a non smoker with lung cancer and activist for stem cell research) thinks about selective and biased medical research efforts?

We know what Hitler and the American Cancer Society and Osama Bin Laden think. Don't smoke. No problem. Right?

Well, while abstinence-only "just say no" education has it's place in America (I suppose), there's simply more to it than just doing what the brown shirts say. Not to say that smoking, drinking, screwing, all-you-can-eat buffets, and using firecrackers indoors is good for you. But nothing any fun ever is.


[edit on 14-8-2005 by RANT]

Originally posted by RANT
We know what Hitler and the American Cancer Society and Osama Bin Laden think. Don't smoke. No problem. Right?

The opening question of the article I provided was : "Can good science come from an evil regime?" As your attitude indicates, you use the cheap guilt by association trick to give a "no" answer without doing any effort.

Originally posted by RANT
I wonder what Christopher Reeve's widow (a non smoker with lung cancer and activist for stem cell research) thinks about selective and biased medical research efforts?

Despite your insinuation otherwise, noone ever said non smokers don't get lung cancer. Fact remains though that ten to 15 percent of lung cancer victims are nonsmokers, while the percentage of non smokers in the general population is several times higher.

[edit on 14-8-2005 by Simon666]

You're debating "attitude" and "insinuation" but claim I'm the one not making any "effort."

I know tons of people think Islamic extremist might be working on a bomb somewhere in this vast world. Well in Iran maybe, but surely you must think that if Iran hasn’t been able to test a bomb yet, then how on earth would a terrorist cell. Why would they need a nuclear bomb anyway? They might be deadly but their very difficult. If all you want to do is kill people you can steal nuclear waist from an old hospital X ray, or just collect the stuff from several hundred smoke alarms, make it air borne and away you go.
Alternatively if you want to kill tens-hundreds of millions just use biological warfare which is very cheap and must really be the greatest threat. Nuclear bombs are expensive and only pay of when you want to destroy military facilities-vehicles as well as possibly the odd million civilians. Terrorists just want the civilians.
For reasons like these; talk of a nuclear Al-Qaeda is 99% rubbish. Even terrorists might be scared of the consequences for their own people just from a biological attack. Allah would not make them a Marta if Bush pressed the red button on the Middle East.
The fact you fall for the fear of a real life terrorist nuclear attack says a lot to me about you’re faith in the media (not to mention what you must to listen and tolerate).

if a nuke went off in a hurricane wouldnt it just dissipate the hurricane?
Hurricanes are fed by moisture, and the nuclear blast would just take all the weather out of the hurricane....so that would mean no more hurricane right?

Originally posted by truttseeker
if a nuke went off in a hurricane wouldnt it just dissipate the hurricane?
Hurricanes are fed by moisture, and the nuclear blast would just take all the weather out of the hurricane....so that would mean no more hurricane right?

Very likely. And as others have also pointed out, the winds would tend to spread and scatter the radioactive material to the point where it became pretty ineffective. So it would certainly disrupt the energy of the hurricane -- and weaken it -- at the same time the material would become far less concentrated thanks to the rains washing it away and the winds blowing it far away from the target.


As to the smoking debate -- you guys aren't comparing apples to apples.

The reason the deaths from cigarettes were lower early in the century is that this was before pennicillin and our modern drugs were discovered. People didn't live long enough to die from cancer. They'd drop dead from the flu and other things that don't kill us today.

The connection between cigarettes and dying was well known in folk knowledge -- as early as the 1950's they were called "coffin nails." People knew they would bring on an early death for most and that they were also responsible for emphysema and other problems.