tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13632227288877468702024-03-13T04:35:58.631-07:00The Uranium BurgerEverything fantastical and obscure about the Nuclear Age.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-4327558124487077992019-01-19T23:17:00.002-08:002019-01-19T23:17:54.605-08:00Stick her in H!
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<span lang="EN-AU">The broad pattern of life in on either side
of the Iron curtain wasn’t that different. Slums in working class areas were
replaced with grim, cheap and poorly made high-rise concrete housing. People
went to work, played with their children and ate family meals. It was the
details that were different – people had increasing access to new technology in
both blocs, it just tended to happen a lot faster in the West. This became more
noticeable as the information age dawned; while the soviet union excelled at projects
requiring crude heavy industry, churning out robust machinery designed to
withstand its harsh climate (such as trucks and tanks), it was hopelessly
behind the West in the production of more delicate and complex consumer items
such as home computers. UK citizens could purchase a ZX Spectrum home computer
for £175 in 1982 (the equivalent of around £550 today). By contrast, the Soviet
equivalents were produced in such small numbers that they could only be found
in businesses or research institutes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Cars are an interesting illustration of
this. Could there be a more potent symbol of the crass individualism of the
western way of life? The very concept of ‘owning’ a car posed numerous problems
in a communist country that seem quaint to a capitalist reader, as Lewis H.
Siegelbaum points out in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cars
for Comrades; </i>“Court cases resounded with the ambiguities of car ownership
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could one citizen legally swap his [car] for a Jupiter motorcycle and Astra
tape recorder?”</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">While western drivers could stroll in to a
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hour later, their communist brethren had no such luck. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Instead of commodities to be purchased,
cars were used as a method of control, allowing the government to prevent the
‘wrong people’ from gaining freedom of movement and to reward to workers who
exceeded their quotas. (“If you build 100 tractors this month, you could go on
the waiting list for a car!”). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Even if you could actually get your hands
on a car, you had to contend with the fact that this was definitively not a
society set up for private ownership of automobiles. Siegelbaum observes that
service stations could not find enough work just from repairing cars – they
also had to work on washing machines and refrigerators. The government
prioritised allocations of fuel to truck drivers, which inadvertently
incentivised them to re-sell the fuel to private drivers on the black market on
a scale that “dwarfed legal sales” – 7.5 billion litres in 1984.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-AU">Spare parts were so rare that the most
feasible way to obtain them was to steal them from another car. This lead to
paranoid motorists taking any removable items off their cars each night,
keeping them in their apartments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-AU">The quality of communist automobiles is
memorably parodied in The Simpsons episode “Mr Plow”. After Homer crashes his car
in a snowstorm, he visits ‘Crazy Vaclav's Place of Automobiles’ in search of a
replacement. Vaclav attempts to sell Homer a car which he brags "will get
three hundred hectares on a single tank of kerosene." When Homer inquires
where the car comes from, Vaclav responds that "the country no longer
exists" and implores him to "stick her in [gear] H!" as he pulls away for a test drive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4hFQ46PMVT4/XEQgPiycNtI/AAAAAAAAAx4/CFrMy4PUovQcyRSEtMhcJU7RVPsj091bACLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-01-20%2Bat%2B19.53.30.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="535" data-original-width="704" height="302" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4hFQ46PMVT4/XEQgPiycNtI/AAAAAAAAAx4/CFrMy4PUovQcyRSEtMhcJU7RVPsj091bACLcBGAs/s400/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-01-20%2Bat%2B19.53.30.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-AU">While this might seem like a ridiculous
parody, you can see the inspiration in real vehicles such as the Invacar, a
single seat vehicle provided to disabled people by the UK government and
designed to give them more independence without the complexity of a full-sized
car. While the original model was only powered by a 147cc engine, later ones
offered 600cc and were capable of up to 80mph, which sounds a bit terrifying in
a vehicle this size. This idea seems to have caught on in the east as well,
with communist governments offering their own models. However, it fell out of
favour in the west when governments realised it was much cheaper to offer
disabled people grants to modify normal production cars, which they would then
maintain out of their own pockets. This option also significantly reduced the
risk of immolation – the BBC quoted one user who recalled that "I had a
few go on fire on me, so you'd stop and other motorists would drag you out as
the thing went up in flames." (<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-23061676">https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-23061676</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment--><br />Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-43171493493654550452018-05-13T23:05:00.005-07:002018-05-15T21:42:42.436-07:00Miniature tanks and existential dread - the Cold War through the eyes of children<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US">As I was born in 1989, I can only remember
the world after the Cold War, a world culturally dominated by the USA. As a
child I saw wars on the news, but the Western Europe I grew up in was one untouched by
conflict. The threat of violence on an international scale happened to other
people, in other places.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Conversely, my parents were 12 and 8 years
old during the Cuban Missile Crisis, definitely old enough to understand the
implications of what was happening. Children at the time seem to have reacted
to the situation by resigning themselves to living in a constant state of
low-level existential dread. In this video from 1966 posted by the BBC, school
children were asked for their predictions for the year 2000.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US">While their plummy accents sound quaint to
modern ears, they make some quite astute forecasts, such as the increasing
problems posed by overpopulation and automation. They also assert that:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">"If something's gone wrong with the
nuclear bombs, I may be coming back from hunting in a cave."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">“All of these atomic bombs will be dropping
around the place…there’s nothing we can do to stop it. The more people get
bombs… well, somebody’s going to use [them] one day.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">“I think there will be no life at all
really, on the Earth.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">“Some madman will get the atomic bomb and
just blow the world into oblivion.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">This last point deftly skewers the
absurdity of the era’s fragile balance of power; that it could be shattered at
any moment by an accident, a misunderstanding or the compromised mental health
of any of the many people with access to nuclear weapons.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The central ambiguity of the time was that,
while technology threatened to end human civilisation, it simultaneously
offered the promise a world where all things were possible. This is rather
neatly summed up in this American model kit for a ballistic missile mobile.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vDGvd_OelEY/Wvj_LoexgVI/AAAAAAAAAT0/FUx9u97VT6kJgecYvxk51jU_3IUCSrOxACEwYBhgL/s1600/Monogram%2BPD43-98%2BMisMobex%252B%252B%252B.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="273" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vDGvd_OelEY/Wvj_LoexgVI/AAAAAAAAAT0/FUx9u97VT6kJgecYvxk51jU_3IUCSrOxACEwYBhgL/s320/Monogram%2BPD43-98%2BMisMobex%252B%252B%252B.JPG" width="134" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">(picture found at oldmodelkits.com) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">While at first glance this might seem like
a peculiar thing to hang in a child’s bedroom, the Atlas missile was also used
to launch satellites into orbit. It was at the cutting edge, imbued with a taste of the
space-age future that awaited the USA.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Anything to do with nuclear energy or space
was an obvious part of that future and saturated the childhood imagination of
the time, as exemplified by these “atomic space pistols”. I found these at the
<a href="https://www.orau.org/ptp/museumdirectory.htm">Oak Ridge Associated Universities' Health Physics Historic Instrumentation Museum Collection</a> website, and I thought they were quite charming. (If you're interested in Cold War technology and electronics, this is a fascinating if rather old website).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A_36kbygE6E/Wvj_ilqPauI/AAAAAAAAAT8/yNdreLIgWg4xB-2crYLsS_qMH1wwtiMmwCEwYBhgL/s1600/atomictpistols.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="500" height="298" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A_36kbygE6E/Wvj_ilqPauI/AAAAAAAAAT8/yNdreLIgWg4xB-2crYLsS_qMH1wwtiMmwCEwYBhgL/s320/atomictpistols.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">(picture found at
https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/atomictoys/atomicpistols.htm)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Meanwhile, on the other side of the iron
curtain, there wasn’t much time for such frivolities, as </span>Ukrainian writer Katya Soldak recalls in an article about her childhood in the 1980s for <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/katyasoldak/2017/12/20/this-is-how-propaganda-works-a-look-inside-a-soviet-childhood/3/&refURL=&referrer=#5587d1201206">Forbes magazine</a>. Considering that she is writing about the ninth decade of the 20th century, the
deprivation she experienced is quite extraordinary – she recalls “the exciting
memory of receiving an exotic fruit from my grandmother – a [single] banana – which
sat in the kitchen cabinet for days, ripening in the dark.” Any kind of
consumer product was hard to come by, with her mother making dresses out of her
father’s old shirts.</div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Like the majority of children in the Soviet
Union, Katya was expected to join the pioneers. This was a sort of
semi-militarist scout organisation, with activities including the “Zarnitsa”, a
“mandatory national military sports game in which school children would play
war games and learn basic field combat”. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US">However, it seems that the East
Germans really took this indoctrination to extremes, issuing their pioneers
with “pionierpanzer”, 1/3 scale miniature tanks crewed by two children. Based
on the designs of actual tanks, they could travel at 15kph and fire blank
ammunition (some sources claim that they could fire live rounds).<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<!--EndFragment--><br />Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-61761876980599813082015-11-12T05:19:00.000-08:002015-11-25T10:31:05.699-08:00"We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture..."<br />
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<span style="color: red;"><b>This place is not a place of honour.<br /><br />No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.<br /><br />Nothing valued is here.<br /><br />This place is a message and part of a system of messages.<br /><br />Pay attention to it!<br /><br />Sending this message was important to us.<br /><br />We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.<br /><br />The danger here is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.<br /><br />The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.</b></span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YPemEilL15Q/VlTQOBlMcCI/AAAAAAAAAMU/QxCnlOnWzvs/s1600/spikes%2Bthrough%2Bgrid.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YPemEilL15Q/VlTQOBlMcCI/AAAAAAAAAMU/QxCnlOnWzvs/s320/spikes%2Bthrough%2Bgrid.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Picture above – Spikes bursting through grid, view 2 (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi)<br />
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The philosopher Timothy Morton adopted the term "hyperobject" from computer science to describe objects or processes that "stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or [are] massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience." Examples include nuclear weapons and global warming. Now you don't have to worry, I'm not a big fan of philosophy and academic theory, so this article won't be drowning in jargon, but I did think this was a really interesting concept. As Morton points out in a blog post (http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/hyperobjects-and-end-of-common-sense.html), the temporal reach of hyperobjects into the far future poses fascinating questions - this is the first time we have really had to consider the impact our actions will have in a hundred or a thousand generations. Certain types of nuclear waste could easily be hazardous for "twice as long as the whole of recorded human history thus far [approximately 10,000 years]." - Will the people they affect in the future "even be human in the currently defined sense?" Will they have the cultural or intellectual framework needed to understand our actions?<br />
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Nuclear weapons and nuclear waste cannot be "destroyed" in the conventional sense. Once they're created, they will exist far into the future in some form, perhaps only just as an idea - even if we achieved total global nuclear disarmament, and intentionally destroyed all information on the manufacture of nuclear weapons, their re-invention could occur at any time. Whichever way you spin it though, in the few decades that nuclear energy has been exploited, we've already generated huge amounts of waste that aren't going to stop being dangerous for a LONG time. Nuclear waste doesn't just consist of the used fuel itself - that's referred to as "high level" waste. In fact, there's a lot more "low level" waste, meaning any protective clothing or machinery that has come into contact with nuclear fuel, which can remain radioactive for 24,000 years. <br />
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How to safely store this waste is a huge problem, which the USA attempted to solve with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). This facility in the New Mexico desert buried waste 2150 feet underground in salt formations that had been tectonically stable for 250 million years. The technicalities of the facility aren’t the concern of the article, but instead the question it gave rise to – how to warn people of the future that its contents were dangerous. A task force of linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, materials scientists, science fiction writers, and futurists was commissioned by the US government to pool knowledge and create a system of warnings. They faced a formidable set of challenges –<br />
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“The culture of earlier centuries becomes incomprehensible when it is not translated into new languages every few generations. National institutions do not exist longer than a few hundred years. Even religions are not older than a few millennia and do not typically hand down scientific knowledge.<br />
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The written historical tradition of humanity, in contrast, is only about 5000 years. Warnings in cuneiform script could be interpreted by some specialists, but others, such as the writing of the Indus Valley civilization, are already illegible after a few thousand years.” (From the Wikipedia page on the WIPP - I know Wikipedia is a crappy source, but whatcha gonna do)<br />
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This might all seem a bit dramatic – after all, industrialised civilisation has spread across the world. How could people forget how to read English? To put it the other way – how well can you read Latin? The Roman Empire was just as sure of its infallibility. It existed for about a thousand years, considerably longer than the industrial age, and still it crumbled to dust. We’ve convinced ourselves that we are at the apex of history with very little justification.<br />
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Seldom do we have to think across such time scales. As Peter Van Wyck points out in <i>Atomic Culture</i> -“The ability to engineer materials for this unprecedented duration is and remains hypothetical at best”. So self-assured is our civilisation, so certain of its own greatness, so focused on short term gain, that it is easy to forget how new and fragile it is. In terms of the history of the human race, it has arisen in the blink of an eye. <br />
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Accordingly, as they had no way of knowing if the discoverers would come from a civilization more or less advanced than our own, the team designing the WIPP decided to adopt a four tier approach to warning future interlopers of the danger at the site.<br />
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I<br />
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The first of these was to make the surface area above the WIPP feel unwelcoming. On the assumption that things that we find emotionally unsettling are based on primal responses (fear of bodily attack, fear of illness, fear of pain etc.) that are deeply engrained in the human experience, this was achieved through incorporating “shapes that hurt the body… and communicate danger” into the surface structures themselves. This is where it really starts getting weird. Proposals included: <br />
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• Acres of stone spikes, several times taller than a person, emerging from the ground at peculiar angles<br />
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• Giant concrete thorn trees<br />
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• Earth berms in the shape of lightning bolts emanating from the centre of the site<br />
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The fascinating element of the whole undertaking is that I can’t think of any other structure in human history that has intentionally been designed to be terrifying. Certainly castles and bunkers are intended to be imposing and discourage approach, and places such as concentration camps can be become retrospectively imbued with terror. However, it seems that when we build a structure intended to last a long time, the concordant outlay of skill, time and resources needs can usually only be motivated by some kind of religious or political ideal (to build cathedrals or monuments like Mount Rushmore). Ours is not a civilisation that readily acknowledges negative emotions, least of all shame. For it is shame that created the warnings at WIPP – shame at the legacy we were leaving for the future. <br />
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II<br />
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The second level of warning consists of images and simple text, written on freestanding stone walls, consisting of the easiest way to visually convey revulsion and horror to a potentially illiterate audience – human faces.<br />
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III<br />
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The third level features more detailed written messages, like the one at the start of the article. The messages would be recorded in the six official languages of the UN (English, Spanish, Russian, French, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic) as well as the Native American language of the region, Navajo, in the hope that at least one of them would remain intelligible for some period of time. Space was also left for the discoverer to translate the message into their own language, if they spoke one as yet to emerge.<br />
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IV<br />
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The fourth level of warning would assume the discoverer was part of a civilisation at least as advanced, or more so, than our own. It would feature detailed, scientific explanations of why the waste was dangerous, along with diagrams such as a periodic table with the dangerous elements present at the site circled. This data would be presented in a roofless room, so it was not mistaken for a place of shelter. <br />
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………………<br />
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Something that occurred to me, and that the design teams also acknowledged, is that innate human curiosity might override any sense of foreboding generated by the unsettling atmosphere of the site. There’s no way to know how people will think in 5000 years time – consider how different we were just 200 years ago, a pre-industrial society without telecommunications or motorised transport. Perhaps the most definite method of communication would come from a rather unlikely source – French authors Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri proposed the creation of a breed of “radiation cats”. They noted the long historical record of cats cohabiting with humans, for reasons that would still apply in many possible futures – in a more primitive civilisation, they would be useful for pest control, whereas in a more advanced one they would likely still be valued for companionship. The cats would be genetically altered so that they changed colour in the presence of radiation, and the importance of this warning would be re-enforced through fairy tales and myths.<br />
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Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-67584896845095364212015-08-11T11:52:00.000-07:002018-03-27T07:29:49.614-07:00A peculiar nightmare.There's not many situations where you could conceivably find yourself relieved that a nuclear bomb HAD gone off. But that is exactly how Kenneth Bainbridge found himself feeling shortly after 05:29:21 on July the 16th 1945. He had just witnessed the first ever test detonation of a nuclear bomb. In the preceding few days, he had been entertaining a peculiar "personal nightmare" - if there had been a misfire, as the director of the test, it would have been his job to drive several miles over to the device and attempt to identify what had gone wrong with the potentially still armed weapon.<br />
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Obviously the importance of this exact instant in history cannot be overstated. It can be painted as so many things. I see it as the first time that our intellects allowed us to truly exceed the bounds of nature. In all other arenas of life we were still bound to nature in some way. We had learned to fly, but always had to land after a matter of hours. We had developed industrialised society, but it was fuelled by coal - essentially a more complex way of obtaining energy from the burning of wood, and ultimately from the energy of the sunlight that had grown those trees. <br />
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Now however, in the blink of an eye we had demonstrated mastery of power on a scale that was previously the preserve of gods - to destroy entire cities at will. 6 KG of plutonium in the core of the bomb had unleashed an explosive force equivalent to 18600 tons of TNT, representing 3.1 million times the power on a kilo for kilo basis.<br />
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Some participants in the test had been worried that the bomb could set fire to the whole atmosphere, but the team were <i>almost</i> certain they had proved this was impossible. Even so, going ahead with the test still sounds like an outrageous risk to take, but on reflection isn't too different from the contemporary example of people being <i>almost</i> certain the Large Hadron Collider wouldn't create a black hole and destroy the planet. However, there were some more prosaic concerns to contend with, among them fears that a lightning strike could prematurely set off the bomb, or that the air force could accidentally conduct bombing practice on it (they had already overflown a nearby target range and bombed the site of the scientists' dormitory).<br />
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Whilst the test was in about as isolated a place as it was possible to find in the continental United States, it was inevitable that people nearby would see evidence of the test, even if they didn't understand what they were seeing. The unearthly nature of the event is conveyed by a navy pilot flying nearby who thought he was seeing "the sun coming up in the south". A man and his son waiting at a train station 50 miles away thought a locomotive had exploded. A young woman took shelter under her bed with her grandmother, who was convinced they were witnessing the end of the world.<br />
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While the bomb's power would later be viscerally demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the detonation over the desert of New Mexico altered the landscape in a unique way. It left behind a crater filled with bottle-green glass, made from sand that had been fused by the unimaginable heat, a material relic of the birth of the nuclear age<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KkKGq7aNEp4/VcpD9vi02nI/AAAAAAAAAK4/63HyuD8WCco/s1600/600px-Trinitite-detail2.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KkKGq7aNEp4/VcpD9vi02nI/AAAAAAAAAK4/63HyuD8WCco/s320/600px-Trinitite-detail2.jpg" /></a>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-46195726743915707182015-05-31T07:18:00.000-07:002018-05-10T15:17:40.663-07:00Living in an ideaWhile the internet has its problems (it is slowly drowning the intellectual capacity of the human race in a deluge of cat videos for instance), it can occasionally present you with a moment of epiphany. Perhaps you can find it in a music streaming service, in the feeling you get when you hear that perfect song for the first time and it slots into your brain like you've always known it. Sometimes you can come across the visual equivalent of this sensation, as I did with the artwork of Geebird and Bamby.<br />
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Their prints create a dream-like, idealised mid century architectural space, uncluttered by anything as messy as humans. This gives you time to fully appreciate the purity of the designs, architecture that is not afraid to stand on its own and to mean something.<br />
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For the purposes of this analysis, I'm pursuing my conviction that mid century architecture is all about living IN an idea, whereas the architecture of today, postmodernism, is about the idea living on top of you, the space forcing you to conform to its version of reality. Perhaps the best example of this is the shopping mall. I'm sure many people have written much more articulate studies than I could of how the shopping mall represents capitalism's attempt to completely dehumanise and homogenise every town in the western world, so I'll try and avoid generalisations and offer an example from personal experience, the mall in my local town of Watford. <br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WGpu1JR-Qu0/VWo-QSbcxhI/AAAAAAAAAJk/KGcrrBtHNIU/s1600/Harlequin_Mall.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WGpu1JR-Qu0/VWo-QSbcxhI/AAAAAAAAAJk/KGcrrBtHNIU/s400/Harlequin_Mall.jpg" /></a><br />
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This is a fantastic illustration of postmodern architecture planting itself on top of the "real world". It was literally built over the town centre, whole streets being demolished to make way for 727,000 square feet of retail space. Its antiseptic white floors and acres of glass roofs attempt to create an entirely neutral space, not threatening or stimulating in any way, the international semiotic vocabulary that says "this is a shopping mall". <br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d--kKaoLAao/VWsX3G8UmAI/AAAAAAAAAKI/UIKYjOmbVcU/s1600/trans%2Bpacific%2Bterminal.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d--kKaoLAao/VWsX3G8UmAI/AAAAAAAAAKI/UIKYjOmbVcU/s400/trans%2Bpacific%2Bterminal.jpg" /></a><br />
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By way of contrast, it's undeniable that the buildings in Geebird and Bamby's prints are functional, but they also engender aesthetic pleasure while employing the absolute minimum of meaningful elements. For instance, in the airport terminal above, the textured brick frontispiece sits as a piece of pure decoration, dynamically extending out from the main building in two dimensions, having the courage to bear no direct relevance to the environment or to semiotically "advertise" it. Can you imagine something like this at a modern airport, which so often conspire to disguise themselves as warehouses? On a side note, the tail fin of a plane protruding over the top of the building is a nice touch - it doesn't give away the identity of the airline or the destination of the flight, echoing the mystery and glamour of travel in the jet age. <br />
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I suppose what it really boils down to for me is that, while these are structures that all serve a purpose, they have a bit of fun with it. For instance, while it's a very simple feature, the slanted roof of the diner below makes it stand out against the flat desert background. You're not just eating eggs and bacon here - you're eating eggs and bacon inside an embodiment of the dynamism of an era that was literally and metaphorically reaching for the stars. This was a time when it was perfectly reasonable for a roadside diner to imply "you're going to be the spacemen of tomorrow, and your architecture must reflect that!" <br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KeDpP1C4RSY/VWpDxSsG2zI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/Xaot32k3S7Q/s1600/oasis%2Bdiner.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KeDpP1C4RSY/VWpDxSsG2zI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/Xaot32k3S7Q/s400/oasis%2Bdiner.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-76328116467206856562015-02-03T11:37:00.000-08:002015-02-08T14:19:57.083-08:00Destroying the world before it was cool<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_0a8zPDwUII/VNZxqZ19bHI/AAAAAAAAAG8/5f4kAAVLXKE/s1600/10984874_10152612898890950_2075522313_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_0a8zPDwUII/VNZxqZ19bHI/AAAAAAAAAG8/5f4kAAVLXKE/s400/10984874_10152612898890950_2075522313_n.jpg" /></a><p>(Illustration by James Wragg, <a href="http://thrustingpens.com/">http://thrustingpens.com</a>)</p><p>THERE will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,<br />
And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;<br />
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And frogs in the pools singing at night,<br />
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;<br />
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Robins will wear their feathery fire<br />
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;<br />
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And not one will know of the war, not one<br />
Will care at last when it is done.<br />
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Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,<br />
If mankind perished utterly;<br />
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And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,<br />
Would scarcely know that we were gone.<br />
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There will come soft rains, Sara Teasdale, 1920<br />
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When Teasdale wrote this extraordinarily prescient poem in 1920, the memory of the First World War was still an open wound. People had seen for the first time what the unstoppable progress of technology was leading to - the ability to undo whole landscapes, for civilisations to grind each other to dust. Interestingly though, while most artistic responses to the war reflected on horror, loss and anguish, Teasdale drew a form of positivity from the experience. Inverting the masculine narratives of pride and bombast that had led to the war, she imagined a world that was glad that we had destroyed ourselves, that was breathing a sigh of relief at our absence. <br />
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In a slightly incongruous link (its my blog and I'll mash what I want into a post thank you very much), M.P Shiel imagined the post-human future from a very different perspective in his 1901 novel "The purple cloud". Presaging much of what popular audiences would find appealing about nuclear war fiction, Shiel revelled in detailing the aftermath of the apocalypse in brutal detail, deliriously smashing down the edifice of civilisation. His fantastically peculiar novel, infused with a palpable sense of menace, sees the protagonist awaken an ancient, evil force on an expedition to the North pole. Unbeknownst to him, the force he encountered spreads a poisonous cloud across the globe. The cloud moves at walking pace, slow enough to allow people to flee and create a wave of refugees that spread terror before themselves. As he sails back to the inhabited world, he comes across drifting boats full of corpses, and seaside villages inhabited only by the dead. He cannot accept that he is the only man left alive, and begins a desperate search for other survivors. <br />
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In the same way that nuclear war awakens irrational fears, the very stuff of nightmares (an unstoppable force that is coming to kill you, the ultimate sanctuary of the home becoming a tomb) so Shiel too taps into primal fears of inescapable death. It's the same thing that makes a theme park ride enjoyable, fear by proxy. Just as you're strapped into the ride, able to experience the adrenaline of fear in the knowledge that you're actually safe, so the reader can experience the thrilling fear of the apocalypse through the lens of the novel. <br />
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The narrator deduces that Mineshafts must be the most likely place to find survivors. However, in a reflection of the later common fears about fallout shelters, he soon discovers that "the notion of hiding himself in a mine must have occurred to every man alive", creating horrendous crushes of suffocated crowds. In the same way, fallout shelters became a metaphor for the pointlessness of attempting to plan for a nuclear war - anyone who had built one would surely find themselves quickly under siege from their less prepared neighbours, desperately trying to force entry to their only hope of survival. <br />
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The narrator comes across the aftermath of one such attempt at forced entry in a tunnel where the occupiers fought back, finding "three hermetical holes in a plaster wall... [from which projected] the muzzles of three rifles, which must have glutted themselves with slaughter". Faced with such scenes, he gradually loses grip on reality, to the point where he embarks on an epic orgy of destruction, devoting himself to burning the world's great cities to the ground. Here again tropes of nuclear fiction are foreshadowed - nuclear war destroys the present, poisons the future with fallout and erases the past. If London were to be struck by multiple hydrogen bombs, it would not be just the physical city itself that was destroyed, but all the evidence of its history, the monuments, art works, museums and cathedrals. Thousands of years would be undone in seconds.<br />
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This is what makes nuclear war a unique form of anti-narrative - only in its most basic sense is it a war between states. It is, amongst many other things, a war against the narratives we tell ourselves of our own importance. Given enough time, rain will erode anything, and there'll be plenty of time...Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-68674983531284862412014-05-23T17:36:00.004-07:002014-05-24T02:00:45.234-07:00So its a bit of a lazy post on my part this time, but also a slightly unusual one...<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GZjly_68kEU/U3_qFaAirbI/AAAAAAAAAF0/EJ9Fo4IGZ8U/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-05-24+at+01.39.17.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GZjly_68kEU/U3_qFaAirbI/AAAAAAAAAF0/EJ9Fo4IGZ8U/s400/Screen+Shot+2014-05-24+at+01.39.17.png" /></a><br />
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Nuclear weapons have become something more than just physical objects. They are metaphors for the end of the world and for humanity's self destructive tendencies. However, whilst their use en masse <i>could</i> cause the end of the world (or the human race, or just civilisation; because there's never been a nuclear war, no one can predict just how much it would mess things up) it's worth remembering that even in the worst case scenario there would be parts of the world pretty much untouched. Whilst Hollywood would have you believe the world would become uniformly uninhabitable, it seems rather unlikely that any of the major nuclear powers would have missiles programmed to fire at Iceland, or Norway, or most of the Southern hemisphere. (There are currently no nuclear powers in the southern hemisphere, thus no countries there present a threat in this scenario, although South Africa is the only country in history to have developed nuclear weapons and then gotten rid of them).<br />
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Even within the target countries, the blasts would not be evenly distributed, as the things worth destroying aren't equally spaced out. Again, it's unlikely that anyone is going to want to nuke Cornwall for instance, and because the prevailing wind in the UK tends to be towards the east, it's very likely that the cornish wouldn't receive much radioactive fallout from surrounding areas, raising the rather charming prospect of a post apocalyptic west-country where everyone goes back to farming the land and sunning themselves on the beach. <br />
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On the other hand, major cities and military installations would likely be pummelled with multiple, large yield weapons. The yield of a nuclear weapon is a way to quantify its explosive force, and is measured in its equivalence to tons of TNT explosive. To give a sense of scale, the largest non-nuclear bomb currently available in western arsenals, the American MOAB, contains the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT, whilst the bomb that flattened Hiroshima had a yield of 16 kilotons, or 16,000 tons of TNT. The largest nuclear weapon ever tested, the Russian Tsar Bomba, had a yield of around 50 megatons, or 50 MILLION tons of TNT (it could have been up to 100 megatons, but the Russians thought that was probably a bit much). So there's a bit of a sliding scale here - whilst the destruction of Hiroshima was horrific, it was on a par with the damage that could be dealt by hundreds of bombers dropping conventional bombs on a city in a single raid, whilst weapons in the megaton range are completely beyond human experience.<br />
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And so, eventually, we arrive at the point of this article. It's something I've always been interested to know; how would my area fare in a nuclear war? Well thanks to this nifty overlay for google maps, you can nuke anywhere in the world with bombs of varying yields. For instance, the nearest likely target to me is the navy headquarters in Northwood, from where the UK's nuclear submarines are commanded. As most warheads these days tend to yield around 0.1 to 1 megatons, a strike on Northwood actually wouldn't cause as much destruction at this distance as I thought. It would shatter windows but leave houses intact and cause burns to exposed flesh equivalent to being splashed with boiling water. Probably a slow painful death instead of an instant one then. Why not try nuking your town at href="http://stationsixunderground.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/nuke-your-city.html#axzz1RABfMaSd"? Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-2658013847325731422014-04-22T12:52:00.001-07:002014-04-22T14:40:02.039-07:00Mid-Century Modern Part 1 - ArchitectureThis post is the first in what will hopefully be a series, covering a topic that has always fascinated me - the aesthetics of Mid 20th century design, in all its forms. I'm aware that this is a very broad subject so I'll try and stop myself rambling if I can. <br />
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I'm going to put a disclaimer in here - this is a purely amateurish appraisal, in that I'm not claiming to have any academic understanding of architecture! Indeed, I would say that my first impression of this style was formed from the neutral perspective of a child, through the lens of cultural touchstones like the James Bond movies. I remember finding sets like the villain's lairs incredibly evocative, appearing futuristic whilst also clearly being a vision of what the <i>past</i> thought the future was going to be. Most importantly, they didn't look like anything I had ever experienced - these were not cosy, familiar spaces to live in, but spaces where your existence seemed rather incidental; clean and spacious, perhaps a little cold, but intriguing. They were spaces you wanted to explore. <br />
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The architecture of the 1950's and 60's is the inhuman channeled through the agent of the human; its shapes and materials (hard lines, concrete, steel and glass) are as far removed as possible from the organic materials and forms of traditional construction, and as such it reflects a fundamental contradiction within us. We are imperfect creatures of flesh and blood who make mistakes, but strive to create perfection, for example through mathematics or music or electronics. It seems natural that this process should reach its ultimate distillation in an era defined by polarisation - east vs west, capitalism vs communism, annihilation vs life.<br />
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In completely rejecting natural forms and materials, these structures seem to counter-intuitively compliment nature through the fact of their otherness. Take for example the Milwaukee Art Museum pictured below.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h-hnRg0ALCo/U1WMhD0Nd8I/AAAAAAAAAE4/E3uMfYMSn3o/s1600/00266r.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h-hnRg0ALCo/U1WMhD0Nd8I/AAAAAAAAAE4/E3uMfYMSn3o/s400/00266r.jpg" /></a><br />
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As it occupies the crest of a hill the viewer must see it imposed, from any angle, against the sky, where the absence of any other artificial forms starkly highlights its geometric nature. However, whilst at first it seems to dominate the horizon, on second glance its monolithic banks of windows reflect the sky, creating the illusion of transparency and incorporating a simulacrum of the surrounding natural environment.<br />
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From my perspective as an amateur photographer, mid-century modern buildings are fascinating subjects. Their profusion of angles and cleanliness of form means that they catch light and shadow in ways that are supremely satisfying to the human eye, as becomes apparent in this shot of the General motors technical centre in Warren, Michigan.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eYQLuyOHlzw/U1bBhbmZORI/AAAAAAAAAFI/-Nz64oJwEbc/s1600/00095r.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eYQLuyOHlzw/U1bBhbmZORI/AAAAAAAAAFI/-Nz64oJwEbc/s400/00095r.jpg" /></a><br />
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The same applies to this fantastic building, which is no other than the Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield, where I studied. Incidentally, it's the tallest University building in the UK. (The photo is my own). <br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YepJ5-w9JDc/U1bCxokse3I/AAAAAAAAAFU/A4RfSBaWhJc/s1600/225606_7143215924_3783_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YepJ5-w9JDc/U1bCxokse3I/AAAAAAAAAFU/A4RfSBaWhJc/s400/225606_7143215924_3783_n.jpg" /></a><br />
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I've lost track of the amount of photos I've taken of this building - every time I walk past it a new idea pops into my head. As part of the post-war construction boom in UK universities, it could have easily become a cheap and shabby monstrosity, but again its purity of form turns it into something more than the sum of its parts. The very simple pattern of the facade, uninteresting in piecemeal, creates an entirely different effect when seen in totality. (photo credit - wikipedia). <br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JUnvqysjTr0/U1bGdLCn7KI/AAAAAAAAAFg/TRVv_ys-oJM/s1600/Arts_Tower_S_2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JUnvqysjTr0/U1bGdLCn7KI/AAAAAAAAAFg/TRVv_ys-oJM/s400/Arts_Tower_S_2013.jpg" /></a><br />
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So there you have it. If I've managed to interest you, I hope you do have a deeper look at some buildings from this period, they capture a moment in time very poignantly. Good places to start are the Barbican centre in London, which conveniently has its own tube station, or the Southbank centre on the Thames, both of which boast fascinating architectural flourishes that merit repeat viewing.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-19559606614428658852013-09-08T15:09:00.002-07:002013-09-08T15:13:05.496-07:00Two birds with one (radioactive) stoneSo you're a super power, you've got all those expensive nuclear weapons sitting around, and no one wants to play ball with the whole "let's fry the planet" idea. What to do? It really boils down to variations on one thing; making bloody big holes in stuff (see picture, credit wikipedia: the largest man made crater in the US).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HfqCMj-acKk/Uiz1nZGq4bI/AAAAAAAAADo/wPOcBqTuknA/s1600/Sedan_Plowshare_Crater.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HfqCMj-acKk/Uiz1nZGq4bI/AAAAAAAAADo/wPOcBqTuknA/s1600/Sedan_Plowshare_Crater.jpg" /></a></div><br />
There were various schemes for using nuclear bombs to make artificial harbours and canals, but the idea that beautifully sums up the bare faced hubris of humans is using nuclear detonations in a process I understand to be vaguely similar to todays fracking. I think you would be hard pressed to come up with a single better example of why humans do not deserve stewardship of the planet. <br />
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The concept was to use the force of an underground nuclear blast to crack open gas bearing rock and mine the results. Just the symbolism alone is enough to make you wonder how this actually got to the testing stage; "hey guys, lets poison our soil and water so we can get at this natural resource and use it to poison our air!"<br />
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I may not be a mining engineer, but it also strikes me that the possibility of radioactive natural gas burning out of control isn't something you want to be messing around with? Anyway, people realised after a while that this probably wasn't going to end well and gave it a miss, going back to desecrating the ecosphere in more conventional ways.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-56773097072805830492013-08-23T09:06:00.001-07:002013-10-07T12:20:28.352-07:00Turnstile: or, in case of nuclear apocalypse, please find tea trolleys and fish forks provided...One of the fascinating things about the Cold war is the way it formed an underlayer to everyday life, in a geographical and psychological sense, having effects in the most unlikely places. The constant paranoia that typified the era was in some senses justified: in 1961, a ring of Russian spies was discovered in an unassuming bungalow in Ruislip, a commuter area just down the road from me in North West london (see below). They were found to be in possession of information regarding Britain's first nuclear submarine, and a high power radio transmitter for contacting Moscow.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TZUs4sUL6k0/Uhd6bO2-jhI/AAAAAAAAAC4/1GL7CR1QMuU/s1600/ruislip+spies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TZUs4sUL6k0/Uhd6bO2-jhI/AAAAAAAAAC4/1GL7CR1QMuU/s320/ruislip+spies.jpg" /></a></div><br />
In fact, it seems that my area was a bit of a hotbed for this sort of thing. Just the other side of my local park in another suburban street in Cassiobury is a vets surgery, which I have been to on many occasions, never noticing the semi sunken nuclear bunker in the back garden! This was a Royal Observer Corps outpost, which would have received and relayed information regarding Russian bombers as they approached UK airspace. <br />
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Incredibly, every day thousands of train passengers on the West Coast Mainline sped past one of the most important Cold War sites in the country, known variously as Turnstile, Subterfuge, Peripheral and Site 3 (got to love some good spy novel style codenames). This huge 240 acre bunker, hidden under the same hill which the railway's Box tunnel passed through, was officially named the Central Government War Headquarters, and would have housed whichever parts of the Government made it there in time in (dubious) safety in the event of a Nuclear attack. This was effectively a small town, equipped with everything necessary to house 4000 people for three months, featuring 60 miles of roads and its own subterranean lake to provide drinking water. The BBC has a great interactive map of the bunker (see below) the full version of which can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/articles/2005/11/22/underground_city_interactive_map_feature.shtml.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8YKPWgQVLCc/UheDs6N3HUI/AAAAAAAAADI/jfVvBnM6Cd8/s1600/map_2.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8YKPWgQVLCc/UheDs6N3HUI/AAAAAAAAADI/jfVvBnM6Cd8/s320/map_2.gif" /></a></div><br />
Going into detail about the contents of the bunker is a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but some of its features mark it out as a charmingly British preparation for the apocalypse. A pub was considered in the original plans, but was dismissed on the grounds that it might be a bit weird to be sipping a pint when everyone you love had probably been burnt to a crisp above you. As I discovered at www.burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk/wp/part-2/, the inventory specified that 1160 table forks should be provided, and an equal number of fish forks (God forbid being forced to eat fish with incorrect cutlery). A potato chipping machine and 11 tea trolleys were also provided. I'm being semi serious when I say most British people would, in all probability, give up hope if deprived of tea.<br />
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One final item of interest, again noted from burlingtonandbeyond.com, is the wonderfully eclectic literature requested by the BBC for use in its on site broadcasting centre. As well as the obvious choices like the Bible, the OED and Roget's Thesaurus, the dear old beeb also asked to be provided with "Cassell's guide to literature", the "Guide to the House of Commons", a volume named "Titles and Terms of Address" and a copy of "Who's Who". So, if any Lords, Dukes or Senior church members requested shelter from the Nuclear inferno raging on the surface, they could politely be denied admission with use of the correct title, and the survivors would emerge into the blasted nuclear wasteland with full plans for re-establishing a working House of Commons. <br />
Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-55594681353363028172013-05-21T14:47:00.000-07:002013-05-22T07:33:24.461-07:00Appendix: Soviet arcade gamesThe subject of this week’s mini post didn’t really fit into consumer products, but I thought it was too charming to pass up. The device you see in the picture below is the “Morskoi Boi” (sea battle) arcade machine, and as an avowed video game geek, I can say that they sure don’t make them like this anymore. <br />
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It’s not what we would recognize as a modern arcade machine, being more like a traditional fairground machine in function. Instead of an electronic display, the player peers through a periscope viewfinder and fires “torpedoes” at metal cutouts of ships moving back and forth on a chain. It’s the little touches that really make this something special. At the bottom of the cabinet is a pull out podium, so that even the shortest and youngest comrades can have their go at sinking some capitalists. When you fire a torpedo a trail of coloured lights shoots off to the horizon, and if you score a hit you get a blazing flash of fire and a satisfying crashing noise. <br />
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However, the rather stern soviet government would never commission something as frivolous as an arcade game without an ulterior motive. As noted in the fascinating “unsung icons of soviet design”, edited by Michael Idov, the game was issued by the Orwell-couldn’t-make-it-up Committee on Amusement, which I can vaguely imagine tying people to chairs in basements and forcing them to laugh on pain of electrocution. The manual claimed that the game was no mere exercise in frippery, but would raise the next generation of soviet sailors, improving “visual estimation and shooting skills”. An interesting parallel can be drawn here with western attitudes towards video games. The communist state embraced the medium as a way to help the young develop skills that would be useful in the future, whereas western media has tended to ignore any possible positive effects of video games and sensationalise the negatives.<br />
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You can even play a simulacrum of the original game at http://morskoy-boy.15kop.ru/en/, and find pictures of other soviet arcade games, all of which look pleasingly industrial and unbreakable. <br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zplUwVrCv80/UZvraMwcCvI/AAAAAAAAACU/8Oljg8frC4U/s1600/seafight-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zplUwVrCv80/UZvraMwcCvI/AAAAAAAAACU/8Oljg8frC4U/s320/seafight-1.jpg" /></a>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-71804403988930981432013-05-08T10:02:00.000-07:002013-05-08T11:28:14.238-07:00Cold war consumer products part I, the Soviet Union; Optimism and indestructibilityRussia seems to elude definition in many ways. It occupies an ancient cultural and geographical intersection between east and west. The Cyrillic alphabet is a wonderful, enigmatic emblem of this cultural confluence. It doesn’t look as alien to western eyes as, for example, Chinese, sharing as it does several recognizable characters with the roman alphabet. Some of the letters appear to be reversed roman characters, such as я and и, and some are intriguingly outlandish, like ж and д. Spoken Russian is at once familiar, infused as it is with a soft, lilting cadence sounding vaguely like a lullaby, and full of romantic mystery. So, Russia is not as separable from western culture as the oriental nations, rather it occupies a gradated space of difference. <br />
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In the midst of this cultural maelstrom Russians share a surprising amount in common with the English, our mutual love of tea being the most obvious thing. They also share our slightly mythological stoicism, but instead of our rather meek ethos of “make do and mend, musn’t grumble” they display an entrepreneurial knack for adaptation to limited resources. Essentially, most Russian consumer products are a bit crap but completely indestructible, creating a wonderful plethora of devices that forgive the owners optimistic attempts to modify them out of crapness, and will carry on functioning to a completely mediocre level long after their delicate western counterparts have fallen apart.<br />
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All of these items embody an enchanting creed of minimalism, practicality and an often ruthless disregard for the safety of the user, the extent of the latter defying belief. This made perfect sense in the context of a poor, developing country like the Soviet Union that sought to quickly transform itself into an industrial society. Indeed, to ease production, consumer products were often made in the same factories as heavy machinery or military equipment, by workers used to constructing trucks designed to run for hundreds of thousand of miles in the most hostile environments imaginable; thus durability and functionality were the orders of the day. The boiling wand (see below) is a perfect example of this- why charge the workers for an entire kettle, when they can have a bare electrical element on the end of a handle? The variety of ways you could harm yourself with such a device is truly mind-boggling. It seems the soviet citizen had a penchant for exposed pieces of red hot metal, as also found in the “reflector” heater, which used a polished metal dish to project the heat of an element into a room with fearsome force. The utilitarian, rugged nature of Soviet design was often dictated by the environment itself, as seen in the Vyatka scooter. Whilst it vaguely mimicked the styling of Italy’s Vespa, there was no room for the graceful, light bodywork of the original in a country where roads were often little more than mud tracks and winter temperatures plunged well below zero. Due to the need for a heavier, more damage resistant chassis, most russian vehicles became squarer, slower and more angular compared with western equivalents.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4JsPBzWyKNc/UYqCmkhcTMI/AAAAAAAAABw/q8ZRW-zvSCo/s1600/MadeinRussia_04_0311-md.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4JsPBzWyKNc/UYqCmkhcTMI/AAAAAAAAABw/q8ZRW-zvSCo/s320/MadeinRussia_04_0311-md.jpg" /></a><br />
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The soviet drive for simplicity sometimes produced whimsical results though, as in the case of “krugozor” magazine. Noting the popularity of western magazines that included vinyl singles on their front covers, its creators decided to make their publication out of nothing but records, filling it with an eclectic collection of exotic music and programs from around the world. This magazine is a truly fascinating artifact, conceptually and materially; some garishly bizarre examples of the cover art can be found at http://www.krugozor-kolobok.ru/. In the covers from 1972 onwards, Technicolor workers labor in psychedelic socialist wonderlands. However, even this most light hearted of Soviet enterprises serves as an exemplar of the ways in which Russia defies understanding by outsiders. As gaily coloured as the images may be, they can't help but seem slightly earnest or sad, reflecting the hardship that was an undeniable part of Russian life. <br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZpiBF2XLFf0/UYqFBCjYLjI/AAAAAAAAAB8/ljBl6--ptaw/s1600/krugozor_1973_04.preview.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZpiBF2XLFf0/UYqFBCjYLjI/AAAAAAAAAB8/ljBl6--ptaw/s320/krugozor_1973_04.preview.jpg" /></a><br />
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Whilst Soviet citizens had to make do with dull, second rate or often downright dangerous products, Americans were revelling in a consumerist orgy. Americans in the 50's lived in the richest nation the world had ever known. They drove the most powerful and ostentatious cars, danced to the sexy, driving rhythms of rock and roll and brought the space age into the home, more of which next time...Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-32854041568903244612012-10-15T11:38:00.003-07:002013-05-08T11:33:02.174-07:00The weak linkOne of the things that is fascinating about the cold war is the absolute primacy that nuclear weapons took in military minds over all other considerations, and the ever more intricate measures designed to compensate for various weaknesses of the human body that could compromise the delivery of said weapons to their targets. The crews of the bombers were very much secondary considerations, in monetary and strategic terms far less valuable than their cargo. The most striking example of this is a piece of equipment issued to RAF bomber crews, to be worn in the event of a real bombing run into Soviet territory. Although the crew was in no danger of being adversely affected by the bomb they were carrying, as they would turn away on releasing it and be far enough away when it detonated to avoid the flash and blast, their route over Europe at the outbreak of war would become a morass of smaller explosions. Landmines, artillery pieces, rockets and tactical bombs would all be emitting blinding nuclear flashes, which could disable bomber crews and render them useless. To combat this eventuality, pilots were issued with an eye patch, so that in the event of being exposed to a nuclear flash they could remove the patch from their unharmed eye and continue to their target. Of course, once the weapon had achieved its objective of flattening a Russian city, in a strategic sense the crew became worthless. Whilst a conventional bomber would return to base to be used for another mission, it was widely accepted that the bases the RAF’s Vulcan, Victor and Valiant bombers had departed from would have become radioactive craters. Indeed, due to the UK’s small size, high population and density of high value military targets, it would be amongst the first NATO countries to be hit, and would definitely be hit the hardest. It’s debatable whether these men would have had anything of a country to come back to. They knew that if they ever had to do the job they were trained for, their families would almost certainly be dead, and the crews back on the airbase would be incinerated minutes after they had seen the bombers off.<br />
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Indeed, with the advent of the ICBM, warning times were cut to minutes, and the incredibly valuable weapons and bombers suddenly became incredibly vulnerable. Ever more drastic measures were devised to cut launch times, and at the 1960 Farnborough airshow RAF bombers demonstrated the ability to board all crew, start the engines and get in the air from a standing start within 1 minute and fifty seconds. Our American cousins, in their time honoured tradition, took a rather more brash approach to the problem, namely strapping a shitload of rockets on to their bombers so they could make much shorter take off runs (see picture. I guess if you’re going to go and flatten a city, subtlety doesn’t matter that much).<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hP1uCmZjgxc/UHxWcka8DdI/AAAAAAAAAA4/0TM-eg3u8bE/s1600/Boeing_B-47B_rocket-assisted_take_off_on_April_15%252C_1954_061024-F-1234S-011.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="252" width="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hP1uCmZjgxc/UHxWcka8DdI/AAAAAAAAAA4/0TM-eg3u8bE/s320/Boeing_B-47B_rocket-assisted_take_off_on_April_15%252C_1954_061024-F-1234S-011.jpeg" /></a></div>Pretty soon, however, the US air force received enough funding that it could keep a significant portion of its forces in the air AT ALL TIMES. Its quite hard to explain how monumentally expensive this process was, and how much of a logistical challenge it represented. The B-52 carries 40,000 gallons of fuel, and getting that fuel up to the bomber in itself incurs massive costs, as a fully crewed refueling plane must precisely rendezvous with it, which has its own running costs, and so it goes on. This mid air wizadry was just one example of the exploits of a country at the peak of its self-belief and technical prowess. B-52s constantly circled the North Pole, ready to pounce through the Soviet Union’s back door at a moment’s notice. The US air force kept at least one EC-135 airborne command post plane in the air from 1961 until the collapse of the Soviet union in 1991, with an air force general on board to take command of nuclear forces in case his ground based colleagues were taken out in a sneak attack. In the American system, the human body was the weak link. This was because the cold war was unlike any other in history. Whereas the tempo of previous wars was dictated by human needs (soldiers cannot fight 24 hours a day and must sleep, eat and find shelter), missiles, satellites and computers are subject to no such restrictions. With the capability to refuel a plane in the air anywhere in the world, the only thing stopping the US air force keeping bombers in the air for weeks at a time was the amount of fatigue its pilots could tolerate – as this link points out (http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/AandB-AS06.html?c=y&page=3), it was de riguer for crews to spend 24 hours in the air. Such was the drive to extend the endurance of bombers that nuclear propulsion was looked into, and the soviet and American air forces both fitted test planes with nuclear reactors. A plane equipped with a reactor could stay in the air for months at a time. In reality however the idea turned out to be ludicrously impractical, the massive weight of the reactor severely decreasing the weight of bombs that could be carried, and the huge amounts of radiation generated requiring the crew to be shielded behind several inches of lead. Once again the vulnerability of the human body became a limiting factor. <br />
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These innovations helped to give rise to the merging in popular culture of the tropes of nuclear apocalypse and the usurpation of humanity by its mechanical creations. Part of the reason that the iconography of the Terminator series resonates so deeply (forgive the fanboy proselytizing) is that it reflected trends in the real world. The real kicker though, is that we don’t need an omnipotent machine à la Terminator's Skynet to turn nuclear weapons against us, because by definition a nuclear war would be a war removed from human agency, needs and objectives, a war for wars sake. You can’t put the lid back on Pandora’s box.<br />
Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-29761259082971486722012-09-19T14:02:00.001-07:002015-08-05T09:39:51.395-07:00EffectsI’m going to get a bit in depth this week and take a look at the effects of nuclear weapons. What does it say about us as a species that we created, or even conceived, such things?<br />
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More to the point, what would it actually be like to experience a nuclear attack? This a question that tickles the human interest in the macabre. On detonation, a nuclear weapon produces what is known as a “thermal pulse”, a wall of heat that travels out from ground zero at the speed of light, instantly setting fire to any flammable material within line of sight. Houses, trees, grass, rubbish in bins and human beings would burst into flames. Jonathan Schell, in his fascinating book “the Fate of the Earth”, cites that after the detonation of a twenty megaton weapon (with the equivalent power of 20 million tons of TNT) “people caught in the open twenty three miles from ground zero would be burnt to death”. In concentric circles further away from the point of detonation, people would receive burns that would later prove fatal, and many miles further out would be blinded if they happened to be looking in the wrong direction. <br />
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After the thermal pulse comes the blast wave. This is the air displaced by the energy of the detonation, pushed away at hundreds of miles an hour, much faster than a hurricane. Buildings made of anything less substantial than re-enforced concrete don’t stand a chance. Anyone who managed to evade the thermal pulse in the open would be picked up and bodily hurled with lethal force. Those who had taken shelter indoors would either be crushed as their houses crumpled like paper cups, or in more sturdy structures be eviscerated as windows erupted into razor sharp fragments. Cars, buses and train carriages would fly hundreds of metres. Although the blast would extinguish the initial fires started by the thermal pulse, others would reignite in its wake as ruptured gas mains spilled out into every street and petrol tanks under garages burst open.<br />
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Next is the firestorm. When enough material within a certain area is on fire, the volume of inrushing air feeding the fire becomes so great that it enters a positive feedback cycle, only putting itself out when all flammable matter has been exhausted. Those who had survived the thermal pulse and blast wave would have to escape quickly or be sucked into the firestorm, as again winds reached hundreds of miles an hour, but this time in the opposite direction. <br />
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Finally comes the fallout. Fallout is any material, generally buildings and earth, which is vapourized and sucked up by the initial explosion and thus made extremely radioactive. It then falls back to earth with the prevailing winds and can render wherever it lands uninhabitable for weeks, hence the need for “fallout shelters”. So, anyone who had somehow survived the previous three effects and sought refuge downwind of the blast would be subjected to potentially lethal radiation. It must also be remembered that even if the area you are in did not receive a direct hit, depending on the winds fallout can travel many hundreds of miles, so that in a large scale attack there would be very few places unaffected. Thus there can be no outside help, because every city is just as burnt, blasted and irradiated as any other.<br />
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There are many, many less immediate effects of nuclear weapons, the most important of which are the social effects. All the comforts of modern life would evaporate. There would be no electricity, no gas, no running water, no working toilets, no rubbish collection, no petrol left in the pumps. There was mass panic buying in the UK recently at the threat of petrol shortages. Imagine the scenario of millions of terrified, hungry people trying to take to roads to find some modicum of safety. Petrol would become worth its weight in gold, and people would easily kill for it. <br />
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Food supplies would be drastically cut, as modern farming depends on petrol driven machinery and artificial fertilizers. Regaining even a subsistence level of farming would be difficult, as traditional non-mechanised methods have essentially been forgotten. What few doctors survived the attack would find their hospitals in ruins, their supplies buried in the rubble, each one overwhelmed by hundreds of horrendously wounded patients. It’s very unlikely that any new supplies would reach them. They would soon find themselves trying to treat people without clean bandages, antibiotics or drugs. Not only this, but millions of human and animal corpses would lie rotting in the streets and fields, spreading disease amongst a catastrophically weakened population. <br />
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Whilst all of this was going on, the ecosystem itself would very probably be dying, as what trees and plants weren’t irradiated would be denied sunlight by the billions of tons of smoke and soot filling the atmosphere. Day would become twilight, and ash from millions of incinerated trees would settle on everything like snow. Respiratory ailments could become endemic for years afterwards. So, as Schell points out, both manmade and natural systems would breakdown irrevocably.<br />
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As President Jimmy Carter put it in his farewell speech, “the survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide”. Not only might we kill civilization, but our race and our planet as well. Pretty bleak stuff really, isn’t it?<br />
Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-32042606459939182552012-09-11T16:05:00.000-07:002012-09-11T16:09:12.055-07:00Space probes, light houses and pacemakers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tHQ9Qcn0xUI/UE_EA0AMucI/AAAAAAAAAAk/2_Kq5BtsfwY/s1600/762px-Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator_plutonium_pellet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="252" width="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tHQ9Qcn0xUI/UE_EA0AMucI/AAAAAAAAAAk/2_Kq5BtsfwY/s320/762px-Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator_plutonium_pellet.jpg" /></a></div>Bit of a lengthy post this week folks, but bare with me, it’s going somewhere… <br />
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You might think of nuclear energy as being used in only two ways; in a nuclear reactor in a power plant helping you boil the kettle, or in the core of a nuclear weapon. However, it turns out nuclear energy can be used, and produced, in some more unusual ways.<br />
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Not only do radioactive isotopes constantly give off radiation at a known, steady rate, but they also give off heat, sometimes for many years. Some of them are warm to the touch, and plutonium 238 will actually begin to glow red hot if you cover it with an insulating material (as seen in the picture above). This property is exploited in devices known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators (or RTG’s), which convert this heat into electricity for powering systems that must function for long periods of time without maintenance, such as space probes. <br />
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As with many other areas of nuclear history however, the deeper you look, the more peculiar it becomes. It turns out that plutonium batteries were used, in a very limited number of cases, to power pace makers. Its pretty hard to think of an element more hostile to life than plutonium; massively radioactive and poisonous, and a key component of most nuclear weapons, yet here it is playing a role in preserving life.<br />
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RTG’s were utilised for one more unlikely task; powering lighthouses in remote regions of the Soviet Union. It was a bit much to ask someone to man a conventional lighthouse on the vast, icy wastes of the north Russian coast, so they were instead fitted with RTG’s that would require no maintenance over their lifetime. <br />
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This though gives rise to a very frightening possibility. Because the RTG’s are in such remote locations, someone could nick a cheeky bit of radioactive material and nobody may ever notice. What’s the big deal you say? Surely no one can make a nuclear bomb out of that? Well, not strictly speaking, but they could make a crude, so-called “dirty bomb”. This is a conventional explosive strapped onto a quantity of a radioactive isotope, which spreads it over a given area and renders it uninhabitable. Imagine what would happen to the UK economy if one of those went off in the city of London’s “square mile”…<br />
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Indeed, the whole of nuclear history is fraught with fears of weapons or nuclear materials going missing. The fact remains that it’s actually pretty easy to mislay a nuclear weapon. The US alone has 5113 of the things, so they’re bound to drop one behind the sofa occasionally. It is believed that they have lost eleven, often in tragically comic circumstances, such as when a jet armed with a 1 megaton bomb rolled off the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1965, immediately sinking to the bottom of the ocean and taking its pilot and its lethal cargo with it.<br />
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Perhaps even more sinister than the possibility of these weapons getting into the wrong hands is the possibility of computer error in missile warning systems. The most chilling example is the so called “Norwegian rocket incident’ of 1995. American scientists had informed the international community they would be launching a research rocket that would follow a trajectory similar to that used by nuclear missiles, but apparently not all parts of the Russian military had been told. The appearance of the rocket on radar screens caused a mass panic, and the briefcase containing Nuclear launch codes was presented to then president Boris Yeltsin, who had seconds to make a decision. Blind luck prevailed as Yeltsin decided not to launch. I leave you with the cheerful thought that this situation could recur at any time, and not end quite so well…Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-28621514562395662382012-08-23T16:00:00.000-07:002015-05-27T07:47:18.016-07:00Grandma’s pre-apocalyptic interior decorating spree.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pq6kFD6AzUU/UDa2EGjWJxI/AAAAAAAAAAQ/_TgP8h8JZCM/s1600/Las-Vegas-Bomb-Shelter-Jay-Swayze-Design.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="248" width="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pq6kFD6AzUU/UDa2EGjWJxI/AAAAAAAAAAQ/_TgP8h8JZCM/s320/Las-Vegas-Bomb-Shelter-Jay-Swayze-Design.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
Not to get all literary theory on everyone, but have you ever stayed in a relatively cheap chain hotel and found yourself vaguely unsettled, unable to escape the notion that this is not a space actually designed for people? Walking the identical, silent, endlessly right angling corridors is an experience akin to the more unpleasant types of dream, the ones where you’re convinced you’ll never wake up. The toilets come shrink wrapped in plastic as if no one’s ever used them before, and the meticulous cleaning of each uniform room between occupancies ensures that no trace of previous guests remains.<br />
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Finally, the colour scheme is formulated to in no way stimulate any kind of emotional reaction. These are not spaces to live in, they are spaces that carry out the task of keeping a human being alive without any pleasantries. They are an un-house if you will.<br />
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But there is a touchstone amongst un-houses, the “Über-un-house”, a fallout shelter designed by an architect named Jay Swayze and located in Las Vegas (it couldn’t be allowed to exist anywhere else). It is, simultaneously, a concrete realization and unintended pastiche of all the paranoia, fear and denial that drove the American cold war psyche. It also looks a bit like how your granny would decorate her house if you slipped some acid in her tea.<br />
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The most striking feature of the shelter is that it is actually a space within a space; a ranch house with an adjoining patio and “garden” of AstroTurf, the whole enclosed within a concrete shell painted with clouds and alpine scenes. Bizarrely, the garden includes a guesthouse (who’s going to be dropping in?), and is also furnished with a barbeque disguised inside a fake boulder and a small swimming pool. Fibreglass trees merge into the ceiling, and there’s even a fully kitted out Christmas tree in case the end of the world happens to fall during the festive season (those sneaky godless commies!) It’s sort of like the bastard love child of Walt Disney and the American plastics industry.<br />
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Once you get inside though, the kitsch goes off the Richter scale. The dining room is covered floor to ceiling in tasseled fabric, and comes with a full set of crockery including a gravy boat. The bathroom looks like the set of a 70’s porn film, sporting a pink bidet and sunken bathtub surrounded by mirrors and Greek columns. And there are chandeliers EVERYWHERE. It’s like a particularly camp, hallucinogenic hell. It manages to be at the same time utterly banal and somehow massively offensive – there’s something that rankles about the image of the occupants indulging in such (admittedly tacky) luxury whilst the world burns above them.<br />
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See this <a href="http://launch.newsinc.com/share.html?trackingGroup=90277&siteSection=lvrj&videoId=25134073">video</a> for a tour of the house.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-52907828713614629522012-07-27T05:10:00.002-07:002012-07-27T05:18:13.844-07:001989As late as the year of my birth (1989) Europe was still poised to be the first battleground in the final showdown between capitalism and communism. There seems something bizarre about fully mechanized war raging across what we would recognise as essentially the Europe of today, a Europe of Motorways, shopping malls and suburban housing developments. It's fascinating to speculate what form this war would have taken; retreating armies setting fire to civilian petrol stations to deny the enemy valuable resources, tank battles raging across farms and parks, soviet parachutists descending on the Champs Elysee and perhaps even, in the latter stages, Parliament Square and the Northwood Naval Headquarters just down the road from me.<br />
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The armies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced each other over a vast frontier from the Norwegian Arctic circle to Turkey’s black sea coast, and they both knew two very important facts. First, there could be no stopping the Warsaw Pact forces if they closed those two thousand mile wide pincers. They outnumbered NATO in every respect, able to mobilise millions of men and countless thousands of tanks and combat aircraft. Although there were hopes that NATO’s superior technology could stem the tide, it seemed inevitable that the sheer momentum of Warsaw pact armour would smash through. Secondly, NATO would attempt to counter this eventuality by using tactical nuclear weapons as a “force multiplier”, a brilliantly conceived, and rather brazen euphemism meaning that they would multiply the effect of the sparse men on the ground. In a way, the fact that both sides possessed tactical nuclear weapons made it both impossible to lose and impossible to win, as they functioned as a form of “get out of jail free card”. It would be far too tempting to let fly if the situation became desperate, with Soviet tanks rumbling inexorably towards the Brandenburg gate. The exhausted allied commander in the field, stretched to the limit of his mental resources, in command of trailer mounted missiles that could be deployed at very short notice, might have to make a split second decision to cut off an enemy offensive at the vital moment, without waiting for an order from the top of the command chain. <br />
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However, once that precedent had been breached, there would be no turning back. At the very least, the floodgates would be opened on the use of tactical weapons in all their variety, with nuclear torpedoes, depth charges, rockets, artillery shells and even landmines going off all over the shop. This in itself raises the issue that its kind of hard to run a conventional war with nuclear munitions mixed in- if a division of tanks could be erased by one landmine, or a massively valuable aircraft carrier battle group, equating to billions of dollars of hardware, sunk by a single torpedo or a bomb from a single aircraft, why not just get it over with and wipe out a few enemy cities? It seems highly unlikely that the Warsaw Pact forces would have gamely accepted NATO’s use of tactical weapons to make up for numerical inferiority without throwing something bigger back in return... <br />Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-15374752684963145982012-07-12T16:10:00.000-07:002012-07-12T16:10:15.584-07:00Project Horizon, or: Let's Nuke the Moon!<p>Have you ever noticed how a bad idea often seems to make sense at the time? Like a kebab after a night out, or firing a nuclear missile at the Moon? Yes, that’s right, both the Soviet Union and the USA seriously considered hurling an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile at the moon as a show of technical prowess and an attempt to cow the other into submission. The USA’s idea, known as project A119, was to detonate the warhead just on the dark side of the Moon’s terminator line, throwing a cloud of dust deep into space to maximise the visibility of the explosion.</p><p>Combine testosterone with egotism (which, when you get right down to it, are the driving forces of most history before women could vote) and this is what you ultimately end up with. Much as I am willing to defend many of the qualities of my gender, I seriously doubt a woman would have come up with an idea this patently stupid. Not to mention the fact that the moon is a traditional symbol of femininity; make what you will of the image of a missile plunging into its pristine landscape, untouched since the creation of the earth.</p><p>But project A119 simply scratched the surface of the bizarre lengths a country love drunk for nuclear weapons was willing to go to. In the same year, the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency tendered a proposal for a base on the moon, under the name “Project Horizon”, to house twelve soldiers. So far there’s nothing too crazy about that, apart from the dubious ethicality of the first human contact with an extraterrestrial body being militarised.</p><p>But then the craziness really ratchets up a notch. What if the Soviet Union established its own moon base? A Moon Base gap couldn’t be tolerated. The American base would be defended against Soviet infiltration by Claymore mines specially modified to puncture space suits and Davy Crockett rockets armed with 0.01 Kt yield nuclear warheads. Apart from the obvious explosive effects, these would apparently generate an instantly lethal radiation dose of 10,000 REM within 500 feet, and a probably fatal dose of 600 REM within a quarter of a mile.</p><p>The scenario can’t help but become a parody of the cold war as a whole. In the event of a Nuclear conflict on earth, what possible good could one country’s astronauts being in control of the moon do when their homeland was reduced to molten radioactive slag? They would be in possession of a dead world, devoid of the means of sustenance or any hope of rescue (just like their commanders back on Earth marooned in subterranean bunkers).</p><p>Perhaps the final word on the speculative confluence of space and nuclear war should go to Philip Wylie and his 1963 novel Triumph. In the novel, the houseguests of an improbably well prepared millionaire take refuge in the luxurious fallout shelter he has built in the mountain beneath his mansion when the sirens sound. Their attempts to make radio contact with the outside world are responded to only by astronauts stranded in an orbital weather station, desperately requesting orders. One of the characters posits that at least the astronauts are in “a box seat. But at what a cost”; the radiation-drenched earth above the bunker might as well be the vacuum of space for how hostile it has become to life.<br />Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-6189601918257349672012-07-09T10:15:00.003-07:002012-07-12T15:36:05.349-07:00This kiss you give<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So, here we find ourselves in 2012. It’s a bit boring really,
isn’t it? We put petrol in our cars, we shop at Tesco every week and we go to
work, all without the constant looming threat of fiery nuclear annihilation. Oh
sure, North Korea is launching a few rockets for shits and giggles, but to be
honest they’re just a schoolboy pariah nation. It seems we sadly can’t rustle
up monolithic empires of terror these days like the good old USSR. Now there
was a conglomerate of socialist republics that really knew how to scare the
shit out of you! Thousands of missiles, submarines and bombers on hair trigger
alert, ready to obliterate every single living piece of matter in the western
world. It must have added a certain frisson to life. Pondering whether to order
dessert or not? Fuck it, could get nuked
tomorrow! Want to buy a Porsche instead of sending the kids to private school?
Well what good will knowing Latin do them in a Post-nuclear waste land where
they have to learn how to eke a bleak, hollow existence growing crops from
irradiated soil whilst defending themselves from gangs of roving cannibals bent
on feasting from their emaciated flesh?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But I digress. Let us look back to October 1980. This was a
time when “Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manoeuvres </span><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> in the Dark, a song about the
nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, could reach number 8 in the charts. Imagine
trying to sell that in the age of Simon Cowell! “Well, what we want to do,
right, is record this subversively dark and multi-faceted homage to the B-29
bomber that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Uh, that’s right; it's going
to be about the plane. Only it's kind of not, because the plane was named after
the pilot’s mother, so there’s a whole undertone regarding the male
appropriation and thus inadvertent perversion of matriarchal imagery. And it’s
going to have an upbeat melody with a slightly sinister synth backing”.</span></m:defjc></m:rmargin></m:lmargin></m:dispdef></m:smallfrac></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Now, as I write this, the UK number 8 is “Starships” by
Nicki Minaj, which I have nothing against and indeed have found myself humming
along to on several occasions. However, I can’t help but draw a detrimental comparison
between these two songs when Ms Minaj enthuses the listener to</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">“Fuck who you want and fuck who you like”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Indeed Nicki; an apt if stark indictment of the cultural
concerns of our time. Of course, I’m not
claiming that the 80’s were a strenuously righteous and intellectual decade,
festooned as they were with coke addled hair metal bands and manufactured pop.
It does seem though that the eminent possibility of the skies raining death at
any given moment sharpened creative vision a little. One of the most
immediately obvious (and geeky) examples would have to be James Cameron’s conception
of the Terminator as the primeval foe, a skeletal hand rising from the flaming
rubble of nuclear conflict (definite future posts ahoy!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As Andy McCluskey’s lyrics point out, the “kiss” that Enola
Gay gives “is never, ever going to fade away”. He’s reminding us that even if
nuclear weapons are never used, even if they never do any physical damage, the <i>possibility</i> of their use is enough to
draw a scar across our creative imaginations. That we now know the darkest
depths we can plumb as a race. We know that we could, if we felt like it, undo
every living man woman and child on the face of the earth and all that humanity
has achieved. That those warheads are locked away in bunkers and submarines and
bomb bays, gently oozing the warmth of radioactive decay, biding their time. </span></div>
</div>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1363222728887746870.post-13313240493830051832012-07-09T10:11:00.000-07:002012-07-09T10:11:00.668-07:00Everything's in the air<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It would seem that defining elements of a nightmare are
imminence, inescapability and paralyzing horror. You’re riveted to the spot
whilst <i>something</i> is creeping closer,
just out of your field of vision, or you have to give a presentation at work in
ten minutes but you’ve prepared nothing and you’re suddenly standing in your underwear.
Watching Lucy Walker’s documentary <i>Countdown
to zero</i> made me realise that being the premier of a major nuclear power
(for our purposes Russia or the USA) presented with definitive proof of
incoming, nuclear armed ICBM’s more acutely concentrates these qualities than
any nightmare could. An ICBM is imminent because its atmospheric re-entry speed
is 2.5 miles per second, or 150 miles per minute. It’s inescapable because no
existing force can impede it once it has left its silo. It’s horrifying
precisely because of these qualities, there is so little time for a response,
and neither option is promising; refuse to fire back and allow your citizens to
be sacrificed, or retaliate and drag the rest of the world onto the funeral
pyre.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The further you look
into the mentality inculcated by the existence of ICBMs, the more tense and
nightmarish the whole enterprise becomes. To make sure you extract full use
from your force, it makes sense to maintain your missiles on a “launch on
warning” posture, meaning launching your own missiles before waiting for what
you <i>assume </i>to be an enemy missile
hits your soil. Even worse, an attack would not be indicated by thousands of
missiles arcing over the horizon in a definite indication of hostile intent.
Instead, it would be started by a single missile detonated at high altitude in
order to generate an electro-magnetic pulse and destroy all unshielded
electronics in the enemy country; a detonation at 300 miles altitude would in
one fell swoop wipe out the communications of almost all of the US and Canada.
Thus, there would be seconds to detect a single missile, interpret whether it
was a civilian rocket launch or even just a radar error, and determine what your
own ICBM force should do. Even assuming communications remained intact; the
president would have between thirty seconds to twelve minutes to make a
decision. You can’t make a cup of tea in thirty seconds and I can barely pick
something off a menu in twelve minutes; imagine deciding the fate of the world
in that time! There’s no way a human being can make that decision. It is the
quintessential nightmare situation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And if you do decide to strike back, there must be a brief
interval where everything is in the air. The missiles of the two opposing
states will (figuratively at least) pass each other in flight, tracing
essentially the same route in opposite directions, completely irreversible. Not
only that, but ICBMs even correct themselves in flight, their onboard computers
taking star sightings as they surge out of the atmosphere and reach the top of
their brief parabola to correct their course in the extremely unlikely event of
navigational error. There’s something really quite sinister about the idea of
that mechanical eye, faultlessly calculating velocities and trajectories in the
unimaginable cold of space, aiming to within a handful of metres...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Still, there’s just about time for that cup of tea though. </span></div>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398292360243753251noreply@blogger.com0