From Russia with (tough) love: TrueSlant translates best-selling Russian newspaper Komsomoloskaya Pravda as they remind us that back in the Soviet era they used nuclear blasts to seal off oil leaks much like the one currently making a mess of the Gulf of Mexico [via SlashDot]. Five times, in fact… and only one of those five attempts failed. With odds like that, we’d be crazy not to consider it, right?
Some days I wonder how it is we’ve survived quite so long as a species.
Writing of post-WWIII alternate histories, the UK government have declassified the War Book – detailed plans of how Britain would cope in the aftermath of a nuclear attack:
Although some of the plans have been revealed before – including earlier this year the scripts that would have been broadcast by the BBC in the event of a nuclear war, instructing the public not to panic – governments of the period left nothing to chance, including the censoring of private mail.
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The country would have been divided into 12 regions, each governed by cabinet ministers with wide powers, aided by senior military officers, chief constables and judges and based in bunkers. Other senior figures would have retreated to a central government shelter under the Cotswolds.
As was pointed out in this article on Soviet invasions of the rest of the world far from the state collapsing in the event of a nuclear attack, the people would presumably become more dependent on whatever state remains. The War Book emphasises this point.
Thought ya’ll might get a kick of the old sensawunda out of these “rapatronic” high-speed photos of nuclear bombs exploding:
The exposures were often as short as 10 nanoseconds, and each Rapatronic camera would take exactly one photograph.
A bank of four to ten or more such cameras were arranged at tests to record different moments of early fireball growth.
They provide technical information about the device’s disassembly.
Some really awesome images captured here. More on rapatronics here.