h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What I found scary about the US is their government's budget. They spend about 10 times as much on their military than they do on education or healthcare? About 1/3 trillion dollars. How can the people of any country let that happen?

It also makes one wonder whether the Soviet Union could have actually worked if the US hadn't bankrupted them with the arms race. An arms race that the US still seems to think is well on by the looks of it.

Just a few thoughts....

Steve

How did the US gain from the fall of the USSR?

It certainly isn't more stable and it hasn't helped the US economy.
I am guessing it stopped people from voting to be communist thereby holding on to current trading partners in South America, India and Indonesia.

$ 333,333,333,333.00 I guess that would buy quite a lot of food in North Korea, Libya and other "Rogue States".

Who defines if my State is Rogue?

Proper Ganda: I felt that the earlier criticism of your posts was a bit harsh, but I'm coming around. As Two Bit says, the links you offer do NOT support your points. You're here just to inflame, by your own admission. I really don't see any need to pay any attention to any of your further posts.

That letter from the scientist was just a personal opinion from a single individual. And while you might credit the man for his scientific background, the subject of the letter is NOT scientific. It is about international politics, something which is completely outside his bailiwick.

The article about the Arrow missile system does NOT say anything about computer glitches causing bad statistics. It says that no Patriot was credited with a hit. That's all it says. If I were an expert on that sort of system, I would say that there were a lot of factors that made the Patriot system more than a bit unreliable:

- It was a brand new system, not fully tested and never before deployed.
- It was a land-based adaptation of the sea-borne Aegis missile defense system. There are special challenges to operating this on land, and in the desert especially, that the sea-borne system does not face... false radar returns from the high humidity and airborne dust, obstructions from buildings and geological features, high track load due to a much higher volume of air and ground traffic, all of which would require software upgrades in order to cope.
- The sytem on which it is based is designed to intercept low-flying, supersonic missiles with a very small cross-section as its primary threat. This profile does not come anywhere near the profile of an ICBM, which has a large cross section, and comes in from extremely high altitude. The number of radar dwells required to sweep a high-altitude profile (as opposed to directing most of your radar enerdy along the horizon), and the CPU time required to process those dwells, are much, much higher. The hardware is pushed to its absolute limit. When the missile is away, extra radar and CPU performance is demanded, in order to maintain the communications link with the missile in flight.

So, the engineering staff comes away from the Persian Gulf with a laundry list of improvements to make, and get to work. And why bother? Well... here's a link that actually DOES support a point... in fact, it makes my point all by itself, so I dont even have to go into detail... http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_138000/138364.stm

Ok Yes you are right.

1) The Head of the Federation of American Scientists talk nothing but bunkum and should be ignored even when he sends letters to the President.(FYI: "Bailiwick" is a small town outside of Austin Texas.)

2) The Partiot in the Gulf was new and complicated therefore shouldn't have worked.

3) There was no "Patriot Glitch", foreign media propaganda has bent the facts.

4) Small developing countries with food shortages are about to march on Washington with there Nuclear missiles any day now. Call out the Minutemen.

5) They all hate us and they are scheming behind our backs.

NMD

my big problem with NMD is that it is a waste of money. It doesn't change the balance of power, the only thing that could possibly displace US military superiority is China spending more than the US on defense/offense.
The NMD is only usefull (if it works!) against an attack with ballistic missiles, any other method of delivery would get through this, mail bomb, suicide bomb, briefcase bomb or planted on an aeroplane! These could easily be used by terrorists or rogue states against the US, and nuclear material is available on the black-market.

Kaboom!

Hence the NMD is just a way of bolstering the US economy and it's status of world policeman!

Z.

NMD is not only a threat if you're planning on attacking the USA, it's a threat if you think the USA might attack you. Previously America wouldn't launch a nuclear strike against China because a counter-attack would be launched, but with NMD there would be no such deterrent unless China increased their nuclear stockpile to a level where NMD no longer made any difference.

If China had started developing their own shield you can bet Bush would be opposed to it for the same reasons China opposes NMD.

NDM is almost working, 2 test failed, one was on target until a mechanical device failed seconds before impact (no problem with the software) and the next test is scedualed for sometime in this next month or the next.

Briefcase bombs, personal suicide bombs and mail bombs are limited to conventional explosives and/or biological weapons. Nuclear devices are very large and cumbersome, not to mention very heavy. Small airplanes would not be able to be of any use carring one, so said terrorists would have to use a medium to large plane or a fair sized ship to deliver it. Any plane coming from Mexico would be immediately picked up on radar, intercepted, and forced to land at a remote airstrip. Coming from Canada, they wouldn't make it through Canadian airspace except for maybe somewhere near montana. As for boats, there's always the Coast Guard. And after all this travel, you still don't know if the thing will work, nukes are fairly tempramental things.

If there is a choice of targets for destruction, where I live will be one of the first to go, DC.

Bush's election was close. He did not win the the majority of counted votes in this nation (not that there's really any reason to belive that he might have won the popular vote if all the votes throughout the nation were counted). He still won the electoral vote, which is what matters. Also, the republicans will no longer be the majority party in the Senate in a few days.

NMD isn't all that radical or new. We've been playing around with it for 15 or so years now. It was even being pursued by President Clinton's administration.

I have no idea who the Federation of American Scientists is (or should that be are). I fully intend to look them up at some point. I don't see any reason to take their opinion seriosly without knowing who they are. This is America, and any group can call itself whatever they want.

NMD would only be useful against ballistic missles. We already have other ways to protect ourselves against other delivery systems. In spite of being one of the most open nationas on Earth, we've had relativly few terrorist attacks within our borders.

Incidently, nuclear weapons don't have to be all that large. Our smallest projectile was only 8 inches in diameter and about two and a half feet long. They are obscenly heavy. I have a training round in my garage.

what was/would it be used for, that weapon of yours?

I was wrong. I went out and looked at it, and it's a 155mm round.

I'm not really sure what you would use it the trainer that I have for. I picked it up because the unit that had it was going to dispose of them, and we thought they'd make good souvenirs or trading material.

My best guess is that you could let the artillery crews use it to practice loading the round. The weight and packaging is accurate. It's not one of the models you can open up and practice maintenance on.

Ste was concerned that we spend 10 times as much on the military as we do on education and healthcare. That's not really accurate. I checked the Office of Management and Budget's web site to find figures for the new budget (I tried the Congressional Budget Office, but the site was too blatantly partisan). You can link to it through my Conversational Links page and see for yourself at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A568226.

Our 2002 budget provides for $325 billion on defense. Veterans affairs should really be part of that too, so the total is $377 billion. The Education budget is $98.5 billion, which is substantial increase over prior years. Most funding for education is done at the state level anyway. We are budgeting $205 billion for health care and $230 billion for Medicare (healthcare for the elderly). So our federal government is actually spending more on education and healthcare than defense. This doesn't even include what the states and individuals spend.

Secondly, warfare is one of the proper roles of our federal government. Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution (http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A472817) charges Congress, "To declare War ... To raise and support Armies ... To provide and maintain a Navy".

No where in the Constitution are they charged with providing health care or education. Education is primarily funded and governed at the local and state level. Our federal Department of Education doesn't run any schools or employ any classroom teachers. Health care is really an individual responsibility, but the federal government seems to be spending a lot on it anyway.

Hey Yowzupman!

I'd also like to disagree with you that nucleaer devices can't be small, you ever heard of 'dirty' bombs? conventional explosives packed with radioactive material, personally I've got the schematics for a nuclear bomb that would fit inside a suitcase, which would destroy a medium size city, all I reaaly need to complete it is several pounds of Uranium 235, which in reality is smaller than a golf ball!

Any suitcase any plane any body!!

And what about that fed building that got bombed by one of your own the other year?
Or the couple of jumbos that were blown up?

We don't really expect to hear about the small things really!

*drunk & offensive*

Z.

dirty bombs are listed under the conventional explosives in my book, sure it leave radioactive material around but it doesn't have the same effect as a nuclear explosion. How do you know what that bomb will do? To set off a nuclear reaction you need to send a nuetron at high velocity into the Uranium while simultainous explosions compact the Uranium. The nuetron must hit the compacted Uranium at just the time of maximum density and there must be enough nuetrons spliting off from the nucleouses to make a cataclismic chain reaction. If it was really as simple as those plans probably make it out to be why doesn't every nation with any access to uranium have nuclear weapons?
Nuclear weapons are difficult to make work!


.......fertilizer is a deadly thing.........

Making a nuclear bomb is only technically difficult if you're fussy about exactly when it detonates, otherwise it's ridiculously simple. All you need is a supercritical mass of U235, the size of which can be reduced if you fit a tamper around it to reflect neutrons. A sphere the size of a bowling ball would be more than sufficient. Once it's ready, just leave it lying around and sooner or later a chain reaction will begin.

*drifting*
Well, to get hold of U235 you've got to have a nuclear reactor, often called power stations, few industrialised countries have these and most supplies of U235 areheld by those governments.
Let's say you manage to get hold of enough U235 to make a super critical mass which would 'blow up' if kept together, there ae two methods of getting this to react on time and they do rely on conventional explosives to a small part to fire two un critical masses together to make a critical mass which would instantly create a nuclear explosion. one is firing a slug of U235 down a tube into another slightly larger mass surrounded by steel tamper rings. The other is called the implosion lens system which is a more complex method than the first and requires radium and plutonium to acclerate the reaction after the initial conventional explosion.

'Dirty Bombs' can be made with small amount os radioactive material, doesn't matter whether it's U235U238 or Pu239, if this goes off the surrounding area will be highly radioactive for quite a few years, look at chernobyl - only a relatively small amount of nuclear material was released and that contaminated thousands of miles.

The Oklahoma bomb, (remebered where it was now) Imagine if that had been a dirty bomb!

Z.

There is a third way to get the bomb to go off in a reasonably short space of time - just stick a neutron source next to it and it'll tick over that much faster .

Whatever the case, NMD makes little sense. If countries other than the existing nuclear powers can't get hold of U-235 then it's a redundant technology because all the existing ICBM-wielding nations have enough nukes to swamp NMD. If on the other hand U-235 is readily available then it's far easier and safer to smuggle a bomb into the USA rather than invest in highly visible ICBM technology so as to launch a missile at Washington and then have your country obliterated 30 minutes later.

If any one needs about 10-20 Kg of Weapons Grade Plute I have a friend in Kazakstan who would... (Nah just kidding before Col & JD have me sent to a McCarthy concentration camp)
(Respect to 2 Bit for not shooting from the hip with Col.)

I believe (albiet unsubstantiated) that the old USSR had a fairly successful briefcase nuke R&D. Perhaps we ought to have Geiger checks at customs. Does any one know if you can 100% shield 10 Kg of Plute from a G-counter? About terrorism, I think Israel, US & Russia receive most of the worlds terrorist attacks. Possibly followed by Spain & UK.

You can shield plutonium effectively in a relatively small space, but the weight of the package will be considerably more than most airlines permit for hand luggage . Some countries might have Geiger counters at customs along with their arrays of explosive sniffer devices, but anything that keeps gamma radiation in is also going to keep X-rays out, so it's going to be pretty conspicuous whether you look for radiation or not.

I don't think you can leave a mass of fissionables around and wait for it to go supercritical. The mass will be enough to go super critical or it won't. You have to trigger it. There are a variety of ways to do it, but I won't go into it because it's not important.

As for the ICBM's, as I understand it the only current potential threat that could really overwhelm the system would be Russia. I don't believe that China has a very many ICBM's capable of reaching the US. I think the number is around twenty or less. Those will only reach the west coast.

As other nations gain the ability to employ ICBM's, I would think that their capablity would be pretty limited. We're essentially talking about the ability to send stuff into space.

There may be other ways to smuggle the nuclear weapons into the United States, but our counter-terrorism efforts seem to be working fairly well so far. There have been a few high profile attacks, but we haven't had nearly the probelms that most nations have.

Of course, a lot of that comes from the fact that groups in the United States probably fund most non-governmental terrorist groups in the world. If someone really started messing with us, the money supply would probably dry up for most groups.

Incidently, the technical term for a "dirty bomb" is an Radiation Dispersal Device. I don't think it would be as devestating as y'all might imagine. Radiation is not as bad as most people think.

I'm not sure, but wouldn't X-Raying a device with radioactive matril pretty much wash out the X-Ray. X-Ray's and Gamma rays aren't all that far apart in the spectrum. That is if I'm recalling my physics right from EOD school.

No offense meant 2bit, but,

If a radioactive device is shielded from radiation being emitted, radiation wether it x or gamma rays would not be able to penetrate it.

And if you don't think radioactivity is dangerous, go and sit in a nuclear reactor for five minutes or move to chernobyl!!

Z.