irrational fears

irrational fear 1: oneday I will fall over and bang my head and wake up years later to discover a father and son team took over from an hollywood actor and destroted americas good name

Irrational fera 2: Oneday I will fall over and bang my head wake up years later and find that the western world interfered one too many times in the middle east and started the destruction of the world.

irrationanL FeAr 3' OneDay I will fall over and bang my head and wake up years later to dicover its all been a horrible fucking dream and bobby ewing is still alive.
 
Irrational fear 4: One day I will fall over and bang my head and never wake up again.
 
interesting, minx. i have always considered reading up more on this.

that was an irrational fear, too, i'll add at this late point. everytime i heard a distant fire siren i would think it might be a nuclear warning, from ages 12-16 or so
 
i think at nick's distance it doesn't depend on the blast radius so much as the way the winds and rains take the radiation in the weeks and months later. i think you will probably get all cancered up, pills or no, but it will take you years to die.

of course it depends on the tonnage of the bomb. the "Tsar Bomba" detonated in Manhattan would have had a blast radius reaching nearly to Boston, I believe. a 25 megaton bomb will (ignoring radiation) damage structures 30 miles away from the center. the "Tsar Bomba" was 100 megatons and would increase the distance exponentially.
 
okay, well say you are 40 miles outside of a 25 MT bomb, on a relatively breezeless day.

are you, say, instantly seiged by accelerated cancer? just plain radiation poisoned? and if so, how does that manifest itself?
 
if you take PI pills after an explosion you essentially won't affect your thyroid.
also, it's very hard to smuggle a bomb of that calibre, which is why i personally think a much smaller bomb would be used, if any. trust me, i actually mapped it out after 911
 
oh, yeah, the bomb will almost certainly be smaller--I don't even think an analogue to the Tsar Bomba even exists anymore. there actually really isn't a point to expending the extra effort to get a bomb in larger than 10-25 megatons...it'll still kill millions and render an enter economic zone (aka city) unusable and provoke a massive response.

in all likelihood, nuclear terrorism in American cities will come at the hands of a Pakistani nuke, or possibly an unsecured Russian one. (that could, of course, change in five years when/if Iran is a nuclear power or North Korea has assembled enough bombs to sell one to terrorists). Pakistani nuclear technology is not so advanced that they could size down an exceedingly powerful nuke to make it convenient to smuggle in...although, honestly, since shipping containers are huge and only 2% are inspected, they could build a giant truck-sized nuke and not worry about smuggling or anything.
 
they could easily smuggle it into a city in the US, but getting it out of another and INTO the US would be harder. it's a long road from one end to the other. that's why i imagine a smaller device would be used. with the calculations that i made, in fact, if one of the size i expect hit wall street, it would actually only knock down SOME buildings in west brooklyn and my apartment would be fine and maybe only covered in radioactive dust etc.

either way maybe nix should build a ditch to climb in just in case.
 
yea i mean... it is and it isn't. i should probably be more afraid of being gunned down in my neighborhood, since it has the highest crime rate of almost anywhere, but i have 0 fear of that. or of being mugged. or hurt. or whatever. i am mostly afraid of seeing other people hurt in bizarre incidences. if that makes sense.
if there is a nuclear attack i will beat up the bomb and make it leave nix alone anyway.
 
hm yea... i mean park slope is pretty big but for the most part it's only about a 10 minute bus ride from my house! i guess wear goggles to avoid brain splatter in the eye.
 
okay alex, according to that page... well, i don't know what i'm trying to elaborate, because of that page. because it's both poorly presented and brings up some things i didn't know. confuso.

basically:

Neutrons are heavy particles that are released from atoms' nuclei. These tiny "missiles" can easily penetrate solid objects. Another penetrating form of radiation is gamma rays, which are energetic photons. Both of these types of radiation can be deadly.

i mean, huh? okay, so they're little torpedos. there's no sense of scale or effect here. goddamn lousy reporting.

then:

You don't have to be close to ground zero to view the bright flash created by the exploding bomb. The flash from a bomb has been viewed from hundreds of miles away. In addition to being intensely bright, this radiation is intensely hot (hence the name "thermal"). If you're seven miles away from a one megaton explosion, the heat emanating from the fireball will cause a first-degree burn (equivalent to a bad sunburn ) to any exposed skin facing the light. If you're six miles away, it will cause second-degree burns. And if you're five miles away, the thermal radiation will cause third-degree burns -- a much more serious injury that would require prompt medical attention.

okay, so then, by that math, am i to believe that if i'm 175 miles away from a 25 megaton bomb, i'll still experience first degree sunburns? if NYC is torched i'll still be able to feel it?

yes, that's assuming that there is no extreme topography between here and there. but they are implying a 1:7 ratio and i'm not sure i'm buying it.

In fact, some of the particles rising up through the mushroom will enter the stratosphere, where they could remain for tens of years.

yeah yeah we all know that but then, okay, eventually it will fall, with the same effect? will it get diluted? and then seep into the groundwater? what?

man i hate that page.
 
i don't know how accurate that is. it would also have to be on a completely level area... and that doesn't really exist anywhere in the Northeast for any reasonable amount of landscape span.

i guess bring along some aloe just in case.