Re: Bill Joy on the CBS evening news

From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Sat Jan 06 2001 - 13:00:46 MST


"S.J. Van Sickle" wrote:

> Large scale radiological weapons can do a pretty good job. They are

There's a lot of Co-60 necessary to make the ground uninhabitable
for Deinococcus radiodurans. I haven't seen the studies, but intuitively
I would doubt it. Consider how many kg of pure isotopes were blown into
the air by Chernobyl, and it's impact was hardly felt. Most of it went
down within a 30 km radius of the reactor.

Stratospheric blasts would be more evenly distributed, but this would
reduce the local exposure. How many kg of pure isotopes does a fusion
nuke produce?

> possible, even relatively cheap compared to what was spent on
> "conventional" nuclear weapons, but were never built. Why? Because there
> is no *military* reason to sterilize the planet.

Similiar things said Dr. Strangelove.



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