Would a sane sysadmin let any luser get the root passwords to his systems? Now would you let any of those lusers carry a gun?

Similar plan was developed by the Dept. of Transportation to clear a mountian and make way for a freeway in California during the '50s.

Didn't pan out, but this was all part of the "Atoms for Peace" program of the Eisenhower administration. The long-term environmental effects of nukes were unknown, and the thinking of the day was they could be useful tools in large scale mining/earthworks projects.

It wasn't so much that it didn't pan out, as that the Atmospheric nuclear Test Ban treaty was signed before they could carry out the plan.

Well, we can see you would never make it in the nuclear arms business. In the day, Teller would have denounced you as a traitor for such soft-heartedness.

No, what you want is to set off a bomb designed to release a big load of neutrons deep in a salt mine. That shoots into the atmosphere an enormous jet of vaporized radioactive sodium. Short half-life, high, high radiation level, plus, sodium being such an active ion the uptake in organisms is really really good. That'll teach those f*&^ing Roosians to f%$# with Hungary!

Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

It isn't necessarily dangerous. A deep slit trench will protect you from prompt radiation, thermal and blast effects. Next step, be upwind or evacuate to avoid the fallout footprint. I've seen films of troops advancing to "ground zero" shortly after a test, that is really stupid.

In a similar vein, I've got a great idea for the next extreme sport! Thermonuclear Shockwave Riding! See, we get these 40-foot diameter balloons, fill them with helium until they're neutrally bouyant. Rig each balloon with bungee cords from the surface which connect to a (tinted, at least) passenger compartment in the center. Array them in a mile-radius circle, and set off a nuke in the center. Then the people in the balloons literally ride the shockwave! *smack* Oops... Sorry... I'll go away now...

--Fesh
Neo: "There is no spoon." Spoon: "There is no Neo." My email has been /. encoded.

And a new canal across Nicaragua. Crazy stuff, they must not have appreciated how bad surface blasts are.

James

everybody's dying of cancer in the surrounding villages ... LOL

What the fuck is wrong with you? People dying of cancer... LOL!!! Real funny.

Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.

Would a sane sysadmin let any luser get the root passwords to his systems? Now would you let any of those lusers carry a gun?

I never heard of the Russian project, which is hardly a big surprise considering the top secret Soviet culture, but if I remember right the USAEC version of this was called "Project Plowshare." There was a scheme to dig a second cross-isthmian canal in Nicaragua which would have required about sixty nuclear explosions. God DAMN technologists sure are stupid; give them the plans for a great big bomb and the first and last thing they "think" is "Woweee, where can we set this thing off!"

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, "the most obscene word in the english language is..... Nagasaki"

TomV

Furthermore, the use of nuclear weapons was perfectly justifible as a means of doing one thing: end the war with the minimum number of US casualties. The US government rightfully had little concern for the loss of Japanese life. They were, after all, the enemy. There are plenty of other, more political, motivations that you are free to disagree with. Specifically, that the people will not long tolerate a war where their country is suffering horrible losses, and that in turn is bad for the political future of that nation's leaders.

I suppose the part you most clearly forgot is expressed well by an author who I have forgotten: "It is good that war is so terrible, or we would become too fond of it."

I'm going to live forever or die trying.

People don't often mention this, but the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities was a bluff. Truman told the Japanese government that we had a limitless supply of bombs which we were prepared to drop on a weekly basis until Hirohito surrendered unconditionally. Truman was lying; in four years of maximum effort we had only come up with enough U235 for one gun bomb and enough Pu239 for three implosion bombs. After Nagasaki we had exactly one Pu239 core left, and then the cupboard would have been bare for several months.

I believe that if we hadn't bluffed those Japanese political leaders into surrendering before an invasion, then in the course of that mass infantry invasion of Japan the U.S.A. would have committed a slaughter against the Japanese civilian population that would have left us, before the eyes of history, down in the same abattoir of brutality with the Gestapo. Some time before the nuclear bombings, the U.S. Air Force had officially declared that "there are no civilians in Japan," that every square foot Japan was an appropriate target for massive aerial bombardment; and that on their side, all the adult women in Japan had been drafted into their Army.

Before the Allies could get their hands around Hitler's neck they had to hack their way through millions upon millions of German civilians whom that coward had interposed between himself and his foes. That's the true nature of twentieth century war: those big hero leaders, the ones with all the fine insipiring phrases, the ones depicted in martial poses in the statues at war memorials, cower behind hosts of slavedriven draftees, and behind them, hosts of civilians. While the working class get starved, shot, gassed and bombed, their glorious leaders enjoy port and cigars, glory and fame down in their safe bunkers. As this century began, we were fighting a world war about every generation or so, by which timetable we should now have fully recovered from WWIII and be in the opening stages of WWIV right now.

Old Doc Oppenheimer put an end to that shit but good! Thanks to his marvelous invention, not only was death in war democratized, but far better, the leaders who might start such a war suddenly became target #1. It took six years of combat to get to Adolf Hitler's bunker. An Adolf Hitler who dared to start a World War Three today would be radioactive dust twinkling in the stratosphere before the first day was through.

To the ruling class, people like you and me were, are, and always will be merely disposable things, and that's why they light-heartedly wasted seventy-five million of us in the first two World Wars. So proud and bold are they that they'll fight, for their honor, to the very last one of us. But when a shift of technique changed the rules so it was their own gilded asses first and foremost on the dying line, well, just look at the results! No more World Wars. No more ever.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Would a sane sysadmin let any luser get the root passwords to his systems? Now would you let any of those lusers carry a gun?

If Germans had been encouraged to be feeling and caring, rather than brutal and cold to their children, the Kaiser might never have risen to power, and Hitler might never have become a sadistic mass-murderer, hell-bent on getting revenge.

All in all, there WERE plenty of ways that humanity COULD have stopped World War 2, and even World War 1. Humanity chose paranoia, domination and abusive punishment, instead. It got the only reward that was possible.

Before people look to violence and arms to resolve their differences, they need to look to themselves to see why the differences even exist. Violence is not only the last resort of the incompetent, it's also the first. If war is the price of incompetency, may whatever God that exists PLEASE make humanity competent. Now.

2. The Kaiser didn't rise to power, he was born to it.

3. Even aside from the inaccuracies, that has to be the silliest thing I've read in a while. Oh yeah, Hitler just needed to be hugged.

I'm sure you've read sillier. Nobody's excusing the national socialist regime, but it's fair to say that the Versailles Treaty was in itself probably the paramount cause of the Second World War.

One of the major problems was that the treaty was never properly negotiated. The German government of the day agreed to an Armistice ('ceasefire') but by the time the treaty was up for negotiation, the Social Democratic revolution in Germany (led by Rosa Luxembourg) had led to the Kaiser's abdication, and there were no effective German negotiators at Versailles. The revolution fell within a year, after amputating the existing power structure of Kaiser, Junkers military families and assorted princelings and barons, but in the meantime the French, in particular, made sure that the Treaty's terms were basically a license to gouge the German economy. The Reparations far exceeded the costs of the War, and were more akin to Punitive Damages than proper Reparation.

Furthermore, at various times between the two wars, the French either insisted that the terms be tightened, or refused to allow any lightening of the burden. This was despite frequent efforts by the other victorious Allies to persuade them to show some magnanimity.

Effectively, Versailles handed the entire German economy to France for an indefinite period. Thus even though the Weimar Republic was at first a paragon of culture and good national behaviour, the German people's good behaviour was not rewarded, but rather was met with ever harsher demands. The harder the germans worked, both industrially and morally, the more they were punished. In these circumstances, their subsequent behavious is perhaps less surprising.

Given what happened to my family, it's a bit odd that I should be defending this, but it's pretty much indisputable that the Germans were gouged by the Versailles Treaty out of all proportion to what their former Kaiser had done.

TomV

All leaders rise to power, EVEN those "born to it". Any hereditary ruler can find themselves out of power, any time the "ruled" choose. If you read English history, you might want to take a squint at King John (who tried to supplant his brother as King, several times, and who faced all-out rebellion by both peasents AND nobles).

Hitler didn't "just need to be hugged". That's a pathetic attempt to twist some well-known history. Hitler was beaten regularly by his Jewish father. Not for any particular reason, just because his father believed kids should be beaten. (I wonder why Hitler hated Jews so much... Couldn't be any connection, could there?)

Then, Hitler fought in Wold War 1. Suffered horribly, there, like many Europeans. Americans have no concept of how destructive that war was for Europe. EVERY family lost at least one son to that war. More often than not, all of them. The death-toll for EACH SIDE at the Battle of the Somme, over a period of a few days, exceeded the entire death toll on ALL SIDES COMBINED through the ENTIRE Vietnam War.

Poison gas, generals as keen on shooting their own men as they were the "enemy", nobody knowing who was fighting or for what, the firing squad at even the slightest excuse (or none at all, if the general decided that the troops needed encouragement), shell-shock was rife, bayonet charges through barbed-wire fences, in mindless attacks on heavily-fortified machine-gun positions...

And after the war, Germany was stripped of much of it's land. the Treaty of Versaies was punative more than anything. With no money, virtually no men (most died in the war), minimal industry, senseless deprivaion by the ruling elite in Germany, morale didn't just hit rock-bottom, it went through the floor, out the other side, and was living in Hell.

Under those conditions, Hitler (suffering from many ailments, both physical and mental) offered a way out from this living death, the only way he knew how. Through power and terror. Just like his father, and just as he'd seen in the war. The examples set were all ones of might making right, and fear & terror were the ways to discipline and maintain "order".

That's not the mark of someone who is evil. That is the mark of a seriously sick mind, that badly needs a LOT of treatment. Maybe, by the time anyone realised Hitler -was- that sick, it was too late to do anything, given the lack of understanding back then.

However, that is not the issue. The issue is that monsterous actions come from sick people, who get sick from the mix of fear, hate and violence. The whole of both World Wars, the Cold War, and the strife in the Middle East exist because people still brew that evil mixture.

IMHO, there's a simple enough way out. Don't Mix Them. If the USA had done that from the get-go, there would have BEEN no Cold War. No Korean War. No Vietnam War. And the former USSR would have had no control over any of them.

By now, we'd have Orion rockets commuting between here and Alpha Centauri. We'd have a space program to be proud of, not this debris.

Oh, and hospitalization for several years at least.

You're missing the point. It's irrelevant what Hitler needed. There will always be charismatic nutcases. The critical factor was the miserable state of the German people, who were all too happy to accept Hitler as their way back out of "hell". Without them, Hitler would have been just another firebrand shouting on the streetcorner.

Hmmm... and you say this is "well known history"?

First of all, Hitler was not Jewish. This is a myth. Ask any specialist in European history. In fact, other than his lineage (which can be traced through church records) very little is known of Hitler's early life (he was a peasant in Austria, no one paid all thet much attention to him). At various times people have claimed that he was Jewish, or came from an abuseive home, or a number of other things largely based on his own (conflicting) reports and and a desire either to excuse or explain his latter action.

World War One was certainly a horrifing experience for a young man, and this certainly affected Hitler's outlook, but the other side of that arguement is that a remarkably large number of people lived through it without becoming phsycopathic, power-mad killers.

Conditions in Postwar Germany and the insane reparations required by the Allies make a strong arguement for the inevitability of WWII. I will not fight that fight here, and I really don't know which side of the fence I fall on. The Holocaust on the other hand was totally unnecesary and should be the shame of Germany for the rest of time (No I don't think the United States has a clean concious either, We have our own shames to bear). Many of the Jews that died were loyal Germans who would have happilly died getting retribution for Germany's defeat and humilation. Hitler tried to wipe out a race for ABSOLUTLEY NO REASON, and Germany followed him like puppies. I mean no direspect to current Germans. What is past is past and you cannot change what happened in your country's past anymore than I can change what happened in mine, but the fact is unchanged. No matter how poorly Gemany was treated, no matter how terrible Hitler's life before power, there is no excuse for the Holocaust. The Jews did not occupy land that Germany wanted, they did not represent enimies Germany had to defeat, they were Germans.

Argue all you want about the validity or invalidy of every other war the US has every took part in, World War II had to be fought, and we should have joined from the beginning.

BTW John eventually became king after the death of his brother, which kind of invalidates him as the example of someone born to power but no weilding it. He did face rebelions, and was eventually forced to sign the Magna Carta, but had retaken most of the power he gave up by the time of his death (In a flash flood). Although by no means a popular historical king, John I was most certainly a king, and weilded considerable power.
UNIX: Because you want to USE your computer

Well, of course there was a reason. Hitler rose to power when the world economy was very bad (early 1930s) and Germany's economy even far worse. Due to the treaty of Versailles, the German people had suffered from the bad economy (tremendous unemployment and inflation) for a long time. And now comes this man saying it is not your fault, it's their fault; and to support his claims, at the same time the rights of the Jews are restricted, the economy gets better. No wonder he gets lots of supporters. Communications and press weren't quite the same as now. Furthermore, countries that could have made a difference, like the US and Brittain were more concerned with themselves that with foreign politics.

And why blame the Jews and not some other group? Simple. Blaming Jews had been common practise all over Europe for the past 1900 years. Jews as an oppressed group wasn't unique to Germany at all.

-- Abigail

*** Get the facts on evolution at fellow hacker Do-While Jones' excellent SAGE site.

Are you kidding?
Being a product of American Public Schools, my familiarity with non-Occidental history is.. spotty, at best. However, some examples I am aware of include:

• The Rape of Nanking - Japanese troops slaughtered everyone in a fairly sizable Chinese city - without mercy, without compassion, almost without provocation.
• The Emperor Chin (chen?) - ,who built the Great Wall of China. Also killed rival's families, burned literally every book he could find, and used up a large number of human resources on the Wall itself.
• Where do you think the 'Mongol hordes' came from?
• The Aztecs of South America were an people of great cultural advancement, with a beautiful, complex society.. which required the occasional human sacrifice.

I hardly mean to exonerate the West in any way by this -- I just wish to point out that It Ain't Racial -- It's Special (i.e. species-wide).
Human beings, by and large, are savage and brutal and cruel. It's what we are. It's a fact that we should accept the way we accept that we will all die -- not with joy, but with a calm acceptance that we cannot purge this from ourselves; we have to live with it, a rational determination to ameliorate the consequences as much as possible, and a certain appreciation for the fact that we have a choice in the matter.

"We've secretly replaced these cadmium control rods with dark, sparkling Foldger's(tm) crystals.. Let's see if anyone notices."

I disagree. I think what you mean to say is that some human beings are brutal, and that all human beings could become brutal under the right circumstances. But I daresay 99.99% of the population is at least not actively violent at any given time... it's just the other .01% that given everyone a bad name.

(sorry if I'm stating the obvious here)

Second, picture this. The Russians discover that a quadrillion-tonne nuclear warhead has been fitted to a rocket. Their spy-planes discover that the rocket is on the launch pad, target unknown. The Russians have a total xenophobia of America (and likewise in reverse). The Russians are aware of American military leaders advising an attack on Russia, before Russia got too big. The only weapons you have, capable of stopping an attack by America on Russia are nuclear missiles. If you were in the Russian's shoes, what would YOU do?

The Americans miscalculate the position of the moon, and the rocket goes into a free return path. Space debris, radiation and other nasties, by this time, have destroyed any self-destruct system. (Assuming any was installed. This WAS early on, remember!) The rocket detonates on impact with Earth, wiping out whatever continent it strikes. Because of a total clamp-down on any information regarding the missile, surviving nations declare all-out world war, using whatever conventional and nuclear weapons that existed. Life on Earth is obliterated. For ever.

Another possibility. Terrorists capture the warhead, and threaten to detonate it. Because of the secrecy involved, the security forces involved in negotiation and/or attack are NOT advised that the warhead is nuclear, OR of the capability of the warhead. The forces storm the terrorists, who detonate the bomb. The world dies in unspeakable agony. The End.

The size of the warhead is miscalculated. The missile strikes a fissure in the moon. (The moon cooled VERY quickly, when it formed, maybe in less than a year. That's going to make for very low-grade rock.) The moon is literally blown apart. Earth is struck by massive rocks, wiping out half the population. The loss of the moon destabilises the Earth, which wobbles wildly. Seasons cease to exist, and all life dies in a catastrophic ice-age.

The Americans succeed in hitting the moon. The moon survives. The Russians (who, at that time, had vastly superior space technology) launch an even bigger rocket and an even bigger nuclear warhead into space. Repeat all of the above.

The Russians and Americans get into a huge space-based arms race, contaminating all solid planets in the solar system with a thick layer of uranium 235 and plutonium. Space science is set back a hundred years, due to radiation affecting radio astronomy, planetary destruction rendering space probes useless, and the impossibility of ever landing humans on any other world. Humanity is confined to Earth and dies of stagnation and/or over-population and/or exhaustion of resources.

In the end, humanity has only reached the year 2000 because of the FAILURE of projects like this.

But aside from that, some of your other speculations just don't work. In the 1950s, most of the Soviet strategic forces were based on bombers, not missiles. If the US had tried this "lunar-nuker" they might have been rather public about it prior to launch. Even if the Soviets had panicked, there would have been plenty of time for them to realize Moscow hadn't been nuked and to turn back. Considering all the other things going on at the height of the cold war, a nuke to the moon would have been much less destabilizing than some of the other nonsense NATO and Warsaw Pact enjoyed!

It's really unlikely anyone would have miscalculated the position of the moon. Astronomers have been doing it for hundreds of years, and it's a big, close target. Even if the missile somehow went astray and missed the moon, the chances of it actually coming back at the Earth are really small. But even if it did come back at us, any damage that took out a self-destruct mechanism would almost certainly disable the explosive. Nukes are very delicate, precise mechanisms. A small amount of damage would likely interfere with the precise timing necessary to force critical mass. So if some space junk hit the rocket hard enough to knock out a self-destruct, it probably disabled the nuke.

But even if the explosive was still intact, it would still have to survive re-entry. The force of hitting the atmosphere would probably destroy the thing more effectively than a self-destruct. And if it didn't, the impact would probably cause the thing to explode at the fringe of space anyway.

But even if it did make it to the surface, most of the planet is covered by oceans, meaning the warhead would detonate far away from people. But if it did hit the ground, then it would still probably hit somewhere remote, and again not hurt anyone (no one has yet made a continent-busting explosive). But I guess if it did go through all of that and still explode over New York, then that would suck.

The size of the warhead miscalculated and blows up the moon?! Sorry, even a matter-antimatter warhead wouldn't even do that! The energy released would have to be enough to cause all the pieces of the moon to reach lunar escape velocity (otherwise the pieces would just reclump and the moon would continue along with different surface features). And these guys figuring out the yield of a nuke have been doing it pretty accurately ever since Trinity.

Of course, if the plan had gone ahead and worked (doubtful, since I gather this was more just a pie in the sky idea, not very seriously considered), you're right, the Soviets would have tried to do the same thing. And it would have gone back and forth a few times. But "contacontaminating all solid planets in the solar system with a thick layer of uranium 235 and plutonium"?! Where is all this material going to come from? Tell me you just had your tongue planted somewhere in your cheek!

More than likely, this would have gone back and forth a few times until one side had a mishap (probably the Soviets, but the US slipped up too), at which point both sides would slap their foreheads and reconsider. Or the nuclear test ban treaties would have gotten in the way. It would have been one of those weird quirks in history, like the nuclear artillary shell or the Pluto nuclear cruise missile. Played with and then abandoned. It's even possible that this goofy contest could have accelerated our space program by encouraging bigger rockets earlier.

Y'know, I was considering adding a qualifier to that statement about how it would suck if New York got clobbered. But I decided that wasn't the best path to better kharma.

What's wrong, son, did I not espouse a sufficiently PC fear of nukuler teknology to satisfy somebody's agenda? Or was I too quick to satirize some of JD's very commonplace but still misplaced misconceptions? Or maybe, with those classes and janitorial experience at Ames under your belt (I'm josh'n ya, boy!) you think I was somehow treading on your turf? You're standing on the wrong side of that degree to be getting in my face over this stuff...and you don't seem to have been paying attention in class. Now about your 'rebuttal' -- let's tango:

"As for the miscaculation[sic] of the position of large celestial objects, actaully[sic] small solar-system objects, ask NASA what the current record for on target hits is." It's pretty good. Discounting hardware failures, NASA almost always puts things where they want them. As I've said, the math has been available for centuries. Even the screw-up with Mars Lander still hit the target, albeit a little too steeply, and at a much greater range and with more variables involved than in getting to the Moon. "The Moon is big, but not so big when you consider it is farther away than you think, and moving at a good clip." Farther away than I think, eh? I'm an amateur astronomer, friend, and you can rely on me to give you a pretty good estimate on it's distance. The Moon has an average distance of around 385,000 km from Earth, although that will vary from perigee to apogee. It has an orbital period of just over 27.3 days and from this we can (after adjusting for eccentricity) calculate an orbital speed of about 1 km/sec. This is fixed, PK, it isn't going to appreciably speed up or slow down, at least not during the life of a missile headed for it's surface, so that 1 km/s isn't enough to make the problem any harder.

"For the chances to it coming back to the Earth if it missed the Moon, this is almost 100 percent. To keep the rocket from having to carry 100 times the fuel, or arrive at the Moon in 2-3 years, they would launch in into a trajectory that that takes advantage of the Earth's orbit." WHAT? You're describing Hohmann Transfer Orbit used for an _interplanetary_ mission, PK, one in which two different orbits must be matched. The trip from the Earth to the Moon (with apologies to Msr. Verne -- see below) is much simpler, since the Moon essentially revolves around the Earth (okay, they have a common center of mass around which both revolve, but for our purposes, the simplification is sufficient). You then go on to say, "This would unfortunetly make a miss orbit back to the Earth. " Um, no. Actually, I'll concede that it is _possible_ it could come back to Earth, but it is by no means a sure thing. Here are some possibilities:

• 1) It could miss the mark but still hit the moon some place else.
• 2) Given that the moon has a Hill Sphere (that's the point where the Moon's gravitational influence outweighs that of all other objects in the universe) of around 38,000km, there's a fairly good chance that a near miss would trap the missile in a bound orbit around the moon.
• 3) If it was launched at more than around 11,000m/s (not at all unreasonable), anything other than a near miss would mean the missile keeps going and going and going (11,182m/s is Earth's escape velocity).
• 4) It could pick up enough speed from lunar gravity to reach escape velocity.
• 5) It could be flung into a stable orbit around the Earth.
• 6) It could be flung into a stable, complicated orbit around the Earth and Moon (I forget what this is called, but there are lots of natural objects in this orbit).
• 7) It could hit the Earth...there, ya happy?

"As for dissabling the explosive, I would personally hope it would still detonate. A large nuke is bad, but the gamma would be quickly gone and other than first kill, we would only have to worry about fallout and residual radiation. If the warhead instead burns up in re-entry, then you would have a large west-east cload of plutonium in the upper atmosphere along the equator, just where the gulf stream, el nino, and all the biggies are. There'd be a good chance of tremendious killoff from inhaled plutonium, with centuries for it to filter out of the atmosphere." Check your history, boy. In fact, since 1961 there have been numerous reentries of satellites carrying a plutonium payload used for power. Remember Apollo 13? Some of its experiments were powered by RTGs using plutonium. What do you think happened to them after Tom Hanks and Co. got safely home? If you guessed anything other than slamming into our Big Blue Marble at 20,000km/hr you're wrong.

In fact, let's ignore just the return of plutonium-powered vehicles...let's look at nukes themselves! No fission or fusion process convert's 100% of the core into energy. Most of the core get's smashed and released as particulate matter. Between 1945 and 1970, tons of plutonium were released into the atmosphere through this very process. Now, I admit I might be mistaken, but the last time I looked out my window, there were still people walking around, birds chirping, and other inconvenient contradictions to your "rebuttal".

The fact is, you've bought into a very popular urban legend about the "toxicity of plutonium" and the damage it would cause "if you released a grapefruit-sized ball of it into the atmosphere." That last little lie is complements of Helen Caldicott and one Karl Grossman who loves to work his readers into an unjustified hysteria. If you want another point of view, consider Ilya Taytslin's Truth About Plutonium. It's nicely referenced with plenty of supporting commentary.

"P4 - Most of this paragraph is rebutted above [Hah!]. But please recall, an explosion visable[sic] on the Moon from the Earth would be the same if reversed; Visible on the Earth from the Moon. Nasty."What? Would you kindly go back and _read_ the original article before you flame me? Those Wacky Guys were talking about something at least as large as the one "used on Hiroshima at the end of World War II." Now that bomb was around 20KT. Where JD got his 250MT figure, I have no idea -- I don't think anyone detonated anything bigger than 60MT since Hiroshima. But for the sake of argument, let's be generous and make the sucker ten times more powerful than Hiroshima. 200KT. It would be plenty visible on the Moon from the Earth. Especially if the lunar phase was new (what I believe the author meant instead of "the dark side"). Especially through a telescope.

P5 - What a frigin euro-american centric view of the world. Draw a 100 mile radius circle on the Earth...[yadda yadda]"Excuse me...why such a large circle? See above. Try a two-mile circle and draw it randomly on the globe. You might hit something inhabited with it, but you're more likely to miss everyone.

"P6 - For figuring the 'fallout escape velocity' a lot would have eventually rained down on Earth, remember you only have to put a piece of fallout into an orbit around the Moon...[blah blah]"Alright, I was going to write something caustic here, but I'm not quite clear on what you're saying so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. My point was that there are no weapons, even in today's arsenals, that could shatter and blow up the Moon as per JD's original rant. Now, if you agree with that statement and were just nitpicking about smaller debris raining down on the Earth after the blast, then sure, I'll let you go. But I will point out that the much more energy is released every time a big meteorite hits a planet than even the largest of our H-bombs. And in all those impacts, not very much makes it down here to ol' terra firma in a form that would hurt anyone. Once in a while, sure. But I'd sooner worry about Shoemaker-Levy 9 than an A-bomb on the Moon.
(On the other hand, if you seriously thought JD's statement had merit, then please change your majors before you graduate...the humanities might be your better choice!)

P7 - As for contamination of planets, it doesn't take much plutonium suspended in an atmosphere to render it contaminated."Um...it looks like AC already beat me to most of my refutation of this statement. Except I'd go on to point out that if you take the radioactivity of a one tonne mass of plutonium and distributed it evenly across the planet (an engineering feat right there!), the resulting radioactivity would be substantially less than the background radiation found in nature. I don't know if you get out much, but if you don't you should know that most planets are pretty big with an awful lot of surface area. That has disasterous consequences for proclamations of doom.

Look, PhilosopherKing, I don't want to get in a flamewar, but I'm on reasonably firm ground here. If you want to discuss the math and physics, then that would be fun. On the other hand, if you keep posting snotty remarks about "Midvale School for the Gifted", I will continue to be happy to respond in kind.

Truce? (Oh! I almost forgot! Since you're an SF buff, check out Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon". It was written somewhere in the 1860s and eerily forecasts the Apollo program right down to the size and mass of the capsule, the number of people on board, the launch site (Florida), and the time the trip takes. Verne did the math and understood the problems well enough to come up with solutions that seem precognitive today!)