Bring it On

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States plans to let a landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia expire in 2009 and replace it with a less formal agreement that eliminates strict verification requirements and weapons limits, a senior U.S. official says.

This would continue President George W. Bush's practice of repudiating arms control as a means of curbing nuclear weapons while relying more on countermeasures like export controls, interdiction and sanctions.

This approach makes many arms control experts uneasy, but the Democratic-led U.S. Congress has shown little interest in the START treaty's fate...

Per capita thyroid doses in the continental United States of Iodine-131 resulting from all exposure routes from all atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site.

That's because what's good for General Dynamics, General Electric, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed, and dozens other corporations who might profit from new nukes is good for Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton and the $ycophants in Congress.

The real reasons why the American and the Soviets called a ban on testing may have been that the bombs were getting so very large. The last American test yeilded a blast almost 4 times greater than what was expected, the 15 megaton (one megaton is equivalent in energy to one million tons of dynamite) Castle Bravo blast.



The Soviets, of course, had to one-up us. They did, and from all accounts, the results of their own test scared the living shit out of them. The 50 megaton Tsar Bomba blast.

The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen and felt 1,000 km away. The heat from the explosion could have caused third degree burns 100 km away from ground zero. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 60 km high (nearly seven times higher than Mount Everest)and 30–40 km wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, even breaking windows there[citation needed]. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage up to 1,000 km away. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth. Its Richter magnitude was about 5 to 5.25.

Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was a power of about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4 yottawatts. This is equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun. The detonation of Tsar Bomba therefore qualifies as being the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity...

That's my Bu$h, bringing the Apocalypse home to the Faithful.