Posted on 07/19/2012 7:42:23 PM PDT by moonshot925
their colonel walked into the O’club and asked “who wants to go out to a party in the desert tomorrow. It’s going to be a real blast.” and these 5 guys, probably half snockered, volunteered.
I liked how the fins deployed ( see 1st pic at link ). They were spring loaded. All four were held down by an x cord at the back. When the motor fired it burned through the cord and all four fins deployed. No other missile was like it as they all have non retractable fins.
All USAF weapons troops trained on this missile until it's retirement in 1988, even those who didn't work on the F-106. Many of us wanted to work on that plane at the time.
With that many neutrons available you’d get quite a stew from soil or concrete. There are n-gamma activation reactions for N, C, O, Si, Al, Fe, K, Ca.....
The fallout from an air shot will have bomb debris, what’s left of the Pu or U, the U casing, and any structural stuff, probably Fe, Al, B, others, plus all the isotopes you get by neutron irradiation of these materials, and fission products of the pit. Consider that the casing absorbs a big fraction of the neutrons, so it will be very activated. Most of the activated material will have a short half life, which is part of the glow of the debris cloud, stuff with a half life less than a second wildly decaying.
The fission components are as you say Sr, and there would be Ba isotopes, Kr, Cs, I, Zr75. These all have relatively long half-lives.
The B-57 was the American-built version of the English Electric Canberra light bomber. The main recognition points between RAF and USAF versions were: (1) the offset bubble canopy and circular escape hatch of the RAF model (no ejection seats) and (2) the tandem seating, long canopy, and ejection seats on the USAF version. The last B-57 units retired in 1983.
May I ask an impertinent and uniformed question...
We’ve all heard about how a single upper atmospheric nuclear detonation could wreak havoc due to EMP (electro-magnetic pulse, if I have that right).
This device is detonated about 2 miles overhead, and directly underneath are cameras and a tape recorder to record the reaction of the men on the ground.
Why doesn’t the EMP from the blast wipe out the tape recorder, at least? Or the camera along with it?
No, tape recorders back then did not have microchips, and were relatively basic devices, yet the signal from recording head to tape should have been susceptible to an electromagnetic pulse of that size at a relatively close distance? If not, why not?
My point is — looking at the results of this test, it makes me wonder if all the talk about “an EMP attack” is just so much more hype and nonsense, lots of speculation with little to back it up?
Educate me....
EMPs are fairly complex (there are actually multiple kinds, there are EMPs from SURFACE bursts, called SREMP (Source Region EMPs) which are quite powerful but have limited range.
In this case the issue is that you sort of need to be at some sort of boundary to generate the currents an EMP - an explosion in the middle of the atmosphere doesn’t generate an EMP - but you do get one in the upper atmosphere (HEMP, High-Altitude EMP) or right at the surface, but not in-between.
It’s much more complicated than this and I’m not a physicist. Recently came up at work though.
And if you are wondering if EMP is real, Google the “Starfish Prime” nuclear test.
From what I have read about EMP weapons, the warhead would need to be encased in a heavy iron casing to produce a large pulse.
The weapon used in this test was a 1.7 kiloton W25 nuclear warhead detonated at 18,000 feet.
The explosion was not powerful enough and not high enough to do any damage.
But the EMP theory was proved true by Operation Dominic in 1962.
On 9 July 1962 a Thor IRBM carrying a 1.44 megaton W49 nuclear warhead detonated 248 miles above Johnston Atoll in the Pacific.
The EMP from this explosion sent power line surges throughout Hawaii, knocking out street lighting, blowing fuzes and circuit breakers, and triggering burglar alarms.
Pffft... Indiana Jones survived a much more powerful nuke while hiding in a fridge.
Col. Sidney C. Bruce (USAF, Ret.) is following up a distinguished military career with another equally effective career in religion. A leader for eight years in military applications of nuclear energy, he has thus spanned the gamut from atoms to the infinite.
http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/deaa2/cgi-bin/display.pl?id=77
Each engine had an impulse starter, a black powder starting cartridge, that allowed the B-57 to start its engines without the use of an APU cart. The problem was the huge amounts of thick smoke generated made it appear the engines were on fire. Crews soon learned to start engines with the canopy closed, even in SEA lest some over zealous crash crew try to put out the fire with foam (with them in the cockpit).
The B-57, like the F-105 Thunderchief, had a rotary bomb bay door. Ordnance was attached to the door itself. In flight, the door would rotate and the bombs were pickled off the bomb bay door. The rotary bomb door eliminated the drag caused buy conventional doors when it came to weapons release. On the F-105, the rotary bomb bay door option was rarely used and the bay was taken up by a long range fuel tank for raids over North Viet Nam.
Between visiting B-57s and our own K-135s both doing cart starts big black clouds of smoke that could be seen for miles were common at Plattsburgh. The FB-111s had the capability for a cart start but they rarely used it. Sometimes the heavy black smoke formed into mushroom clouds, not exactly what anyone wants to see at a nuke bomber base.
During the time the B-57 was being heavily engaged in SEA, there was a plan to mount several GAU-2B/A Mini-guns on the bomb bay door to turn the B-57 into a ground strafer. A prototype was tested but the idea never went anywhere.
Re: your post # 21 — Roger, that.
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