We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Every time I see or hear the media talking about “dirty bombs” my teeth grate. Dirty bombs are nuclear weapons that are either too inefficient to “burn” most of their fissionables in the explosion or else are built intentionally to spread fallout. The media almost always means what is now being called a radiological weapon, something like a terrorist’s standard anti-personnel bomb, but packed with bits of radioactives lifted from medical equipment, old watches or what have you, instead of rusty nuts, bolts and nails.
Any idiot can build one, but they will probably fail to get more than local dispersal. Bad enough in fact; but by the time the SafetyNuts are done you’d have an entire city evacuated for years over the risk of a handful of extra cancers per year. So this is more mass disruption than mass destruction unless the enemy acquire some really nasty radionucleotides and manage a good dispersal within the desired target footprint.
The first type of real “dirty bomb” is what we will almost certainly get from the enemy. It is dirty because they don’t know how to make their fissionables fission before the plasma blows itself apart. When the fission process occurs there is a chain reaction in which a neutron splits one nuclei, which releases at least one more neutron and on average “a bit” that in turn cause another one or two atoms to do the same. This exponential growth happens so quickly it has no meaning on a human scale.
But on the bomb level it does. Each atom releases a great deal of energy; that radiated energy turns the fissionables and the bomb casing into a plasma racing outwards at an enormous speed… which is still slow relative to the neutron cascade.
If the cascade happens fast enough, virtually all of the Uranium 235 or Plutonium fissions and releases energy before the wisp of plasma blows the ghost of the bomb matter outwards. If the cascade is a bit slow the “flame” is extinquished and the cascade stopped because the remaining fissionables are too far apart to have much chance of a neutron hit.
Those unfissioned materials become a nasty bit of the fallout. It is highly unlikely that an “amateur” bomb will get things right the first time, so one expects 5% or less of the material will “burn”. The other 95% gets dispersed in the mushroom cloud. This is the scenario all of us “in the know” fear: a couple kiloton fizzle with a lot of very hot debris and a deadly cloud drifting down wind.
The second type of dirty bomb is even uglier. If you re-read your ’50’s literature, you’ll run across the “Cobalt Bomb”. This is a thermonuclear weapon packed with Cobalt or other materials that will generate nasty and long lived fallout. The Doomsday bombs of yore.
To my knowledge, no one ever built one. It’s not a terrorist likelihood as H-Bombs are out of range of the technology of anyone but a major state at present… without help that is.
A third type, which falls between the cracks of the definition, is the Neutron Bomb. This is an extraordinarily “clean” bomb with very low yield. It causes limited blast damage but it gives off an extremely intense pulse of neutrons. These kill everything (except roaches and Radiodurans bacteria) in a wide radius. The buildings are untouched and the people are dead.
These were tested but not deployed1. It is doubtful anyone could build one without extensive experience or testing.
Let’s pray none of us ever learn about these things first hand.
1= A clarification for those who want precision: a large number were built, but after a big political battle over deployment in the Reagan years, they were put into storage. They were perhaps disassembled during Bush Sr’s Presidency. I do not know if any of these tactical “Enhanced Radiation Weapons” remain in the US inventory.
There is more information here. It leaves you with a certain level of… uncertainty. Like “why was he writing a draft statement that said this in the first place?”
Time passes….
I’ve now read the original statement by Blunkett and am left wondering who hyped this whole thing into silliness. There does not seem to be any warning of imminent attack, only a general warning of what we all know already: we’re a target and the enemy is utterly ruthless.
Proposition 1, to end the Massachussetts income tax did not pass. Few of us expected it would this first try. But despite massive counter efforts by the entrenched interests, it came damn close:
With 2155 out of 2157 precincts reporting,
881,738 people voted Yes on 1 — 45.4%
1,060,525 people voted No on 1 — 54.6%
Despite a total news black out from the major Boston news outlets, Michael Cloud managed a respectable showing against the very senior “safe seat” incumbent John Kerry:
With 2155 of 2157 precincts reporting,
John F. Kerry (Dem): 1,596,350 – 81%
Michael Cloud (Lib): 368,304 – 19%
Richard Winger, Third Party authority and Editor of Ballot Access News, said the following: “This was the best U.S. Senate result for a Libertarian in Party history, and the best by any nationally organized Third Party candidate in a U.S. Senate race since 1932.”
Carla Howell only managed 1% on the hotly contested governor race between two indistinguishable candidates. Insiders feel she sacrificed her own campaign to push Proposition 1 ahead at every opportunity.
All of this was done in campaign efforts outspent by factors of 100 to 1 and higher by candidates whose campaigns were partially State funded.
“You done good”, guys. Or as Ms O’Hare said, “Tomorrow is another day.”
The BBC Protection Ministry (sometimes knowns as the ‘Independent’ Television Commission), has banned the US news program “The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board With Stuart Varney” and threatened CNBC with fines. As the Opinion Journal puts it:
“Let us see if we get this straight. The ITC thinks it is protecting viewers by refusing to let them hear the viewpoints of a roundtable of American newspaper editors? These same editors may state their views in a newspaper that bears the name of The Wall Street Journal, but if they utter them on a TV program that bears that newspaper’s name, their views are somehow tainted? That sure sounds like a free-speech issue to us.
Which leads to the question of what the case is really about. The answer–and we wish we could say this with the requisite plummy accent–is the BBC. The ITC’s actions against CNBC Europe and CNN amount to little more than the British government harassing private competitors of the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corp.”
I’ll be a bit less compromising than our friends across the water. What the bureaucracy really doesn’t like is the non-Tranzi slant of the WSJ. They don’t want the BBC to have to compete with ideas.
I hope our Russian ex-pat friend succeeds in taking the Beeb down a peg or two!
The laser testbed at White Sands has racked up yet another first. It has shot down an artillery shell in flight:
“This shootdown shifts the paradigm for defensive capabilities. We’ve shown that even an artillery projectile hurtling through the air at supersonic speed is no match for a laser,” said Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano, head of the missile defense command.
You can find out more about it here.
Tactical High Energy Laser Director.
Photo © TRW Inc. 2000. All Rights Reserved. Republished by kind permission of TRW Inc
While on one level it made little difference to me (someone as LP as a coalminer was Comm… er… Labour) which of the other American parties won seats, I must admit to some glee at watching the effect of Republican victory on UK correspondents. They are visibly shaken by the implications and I thought it great fun.
Channel 4 News had Michael Moore on for the Democrats and Laura Ingraham for the Republicans. She did rather well, but Mr. Moore had the last word:
“No wonder they win, they look better than us.”
I wonder what would have happened if such a really harmless joke had come from the lips of a liberal or a conservative rather than a Leftist?
Political Correctness is not a matter of what is said; it is a matter of who says it. The annointed are “allowed” freedoms of speech unavailable to the hoi polloi. Had it been myself on ITV news, making the same remark, I would be pilloried for it.
Do not get me wrong: I am not castigating Michael Moore for this remark. I am merely pointing out there is an inherent asymmetry and illogic to the Left’s position on Freedom of Speech. The fact is, I agree with Michael Moore. Laura Ingraham is better looking than he is.
Smarter too.
When I heard on ITV that a car blew up in Yemen, killing six al Qaeda, I just knew it had to be! According to CNN my best hopes have been confirmed:
“Video from the scene in Yemen’s oil rich Marib province showed the car blown part, with most of it reduced to black ash in the desert.”
You just can’t take those damned al Qaeda anywhere without them making a complete ash of themselves!
“Sources identified one of the dead as Abu Ali, also known as Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, a former bin Laden security guard who was believed to have played a major role in the October 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole that killed 17 sailors.
Walid Al-Saqqaf, managing editor of the Yemen Times, told CNN that Ali was identified by a mark on his leg, which was blown off in the blast and found nearby. “
Yep, that’s him all over…
I wonder when they’ll bring out a new Looney Tunes series? I’ve got this image in my head of Elmer Fudd getting help from a wascally wabbit for the al Qaeda Season… more fun than duck or rabbit or deer season, and no limits on how many you bag!
Election day is upon us and those of you who live in Taxachussetts have an incredible opportunity: YOU can end your State Income Tax and keep your hard earned $3000 a year out of the greedy and wasteful hands of the crooks who govern you.
Vote YES on Proposition 1 to end the Massachusetts income tax.
If you have found the two turkeys the Democrats and the Republicans are running for Governor simply too much alike and too much to stomach: VOTE YES for Carla Howell.
You might even consider voting straight Libertarian, but whatever you do:
Get yo’ ass out there and VOTE YES on Proposition One!!!!
It is with heavy heart I pass on the news of yet another death in the space activist community. Dr. Charles Sheffield, one of many Brit expats who chased the dream of space flight across the big pond died yesterday.
I have no photos of Charles,1 although I interacted with him on an almost daily basis in the mid eighties. I was “the Prez” of the Pittsburgh L5 Society chapter and ran a local and an international L5 Conference and other space events for which he came up from the Washington, DC area to attend, assist with and speak at. We both served on the board of directors of the L5 Society during that period, so I worked with him in that capacity as well. At times we felt like he was part of our crazy bunch of hard drinking, hard partying, Steeler and Penguin cheering Spacers at Pittsburgh L5.
He was one of those whose life was utterly dedicated to our goal of moving off planet. He worked on commercial satellites by day; he wrote great hard science fiction by night; in all his spare moments he was an L5 Society activist… and how he found time to also raise a family I have no idea.
Vaya con Dios, Ad Astra and “next year in L5” Charles.
1 = There might be 1987 photo’s of him here but I have not had time to look through them all.
Many Samizdata thanks to reader FeloniusPunk who pointed out an article in the LA Times on the state of the art in laser weaponry. I must admit to being technologically blindsided and slack jawed after reading it.
I have been following the USAF conversion of a 747 into a chemical laser gunship (below) and I knew great advances had occured in solid state lasers… but nothing like this
Photo: USAF
What with islamic snipers, bombers and hostage takers, I never did get around to this story while it was current.
It seems the recent ground based anti-ballistic missile test was quite successful. Keep in mind this test series is an engineering effort and not testing of a product to be deployed. I point this out because most journalists I read don’t know the difference nor understand that bugs, glitches, failures, mistakes and blowing things up spectacularly are all part of everyday engineering R&D.
I must admit my own most spectacular glitch was not in the same league as these lads can accomplish. My “best effort” caused a dump of a fifty thousand gallon water deluge into a helicopter hanger outside Denver late one night in 1976. Well… it probably does rate well up the engineering test bug Richter scale. Fortunately for my career and possibility of future procreation, no helo’s were in at the time.
But that’s life in the world of engineering. “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”, along with a good healthy dose of the totally unexpected.
I’ve decided to reply to the responses on my previous article “in-line”. Issues of personal choice and personal liberty are at the very heart of libertarianism. It is not a matter of whether you agree with a behavior or not. A libertarian society removes from you the “right” to use force and coercion, whether by self or by state proxy, against acts you do not like. You may either mind your own business or you may spend your own time and money to advertise and campaign to change people’s minds one at a time. If you are Bill Gates or Ted Turner and spend every last pence you have to make people stop being part of Group X and all but one person does – that one person may still freely go about their business as before and there is nothing you can do about it.
You could be an Imam convincing everyone to accept Shari’a, and if one person doesn’t you are stuffed1. Tough. They can shoot back if you annoy them too much, and likely large numbers of others who agreed with your initial ideas will turn on you for breaking the Meta-rule of non-coercion.
There is no libertarian argument which could support the status quo of the Drug War. Drug usage – THC, Ethanol, Nicotine or stronger – are issues of personal choice. The results of those personal choices are personal responsibilities. If someone drinks themselves into a gutter, it is not the State’s responsibility to pull them out. If someone injects heroin into their veins and kills themself it is likewise not a public issue.
The minimal libertarian position is the Minarchist state. One which is responsible for Defense, Police and the Courts – killing terrorists, shooting down nuclear missiles, rescuing hostages where possible… and finding, trying and locking up snipers.
There is no room in that description for “outlawing a behavior of Group X that Group Y does not like or that Group Z thinks is unhealthy”.
In a free society, you do what you want so long as you don’t directly harm others… and the consequences of those actions are fully your own to deal with, whether it be getting laid and having a great time or morphine addiction, lung cancer and liver cirrhosis.
T’ain’t nobodies business but your own.
1 = For some Imams in certain Medieval nations, the very ideas expressed here are a heresy. That’s why we leave the Minimal State with Defense. So we can get them first if they try to “Kill Infidels in the Name of Allah”. A liberal society assumes everyone accepts a very minimal social pact of non-coercion.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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