Kat said:
> Second, and perhaps more importantly, "salting the land" has been
> considered something of a no-no since Roman times- and dropping an
> H-bomb is major salt.
Just a minor point: no H-bomb has ever been dropped on anyone. The bombs
used against Japan were both fission weapons: a gun-style uranium bomb
was dropped on Hiroshima and a plutonium implosion bomb on Nagasaki.
H-bombs are fission-fusion-fission weapons that have much higher yields
and were developed about a decade after the end of WW2.
On Friday, I was wandering around the Imperial War Museum at Duxford
(which is well worth visiting for anyone in the UK who's interested in
aviation). Among other interesting things (foremost among them an SR-71
Blackbird and TSR-2 and Vulcan strategic bombers), I saw a Polaris
missile. It was much smaller than I expected. The small nosecone
would've carried three warheads, each with a yield of 200kt (some
sixteen times that of a Hiroshima-style bomb). A little distance away
was a Blue Steel cruise missile of the type carried by Vulcan bombers.
The warhead for that would've had a yield of about 1Mt. There were also
freefall nuclear bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles on display.
It's staggering how many ways we've invented to kill each other and how
fast they've been developed. In another hanger there's a stark display
of this development: there are a B-17 and a B-29 (the type of aircraft
that dropped the atomic bombs) and both of them nestle beneath the
wings of a huge B-52. I felt a sudden thrill as I realised how much
technology had advanced in such a short time, but also a terrible
sadness that we had wasted so much effort and industry on the
machineries of destruction.
Rich
VFP Terrible Beauty
