Inefficient compared to a B-29 dropping a bomb over a city but not inefficient compared to whatever other means (if any) Germany had of attacking an east cost city like New York.

Rest assured that if this alternate history scenario had occurred historians would not be talking about the inefficiency of the attack, they would be talking about the most devastating attack that Germany was able to conduct against Americans on their own soil during the war. It would have completely changed the American mindset and culture forever.

I'm not sure, water is very good at conducting shockwaves. If you had an aquarium the size of an olympic swimming pool you could kill all of them by dropping a hand grenade in it.

Why did Churchill want it shut down?

That would be a false similarity in some important ways.

This was a very specific single technical problem, requiring a silo from basic science to theoretical physics to advanced engineering, etc., with each layer having its own space of failure modes.

Something like the reverse is true with sufficiently-capable and sufficiently-efficient AI, which we are rapidly evolving to.

In our current situation, the attack surface is quite literally our entire highly interdependent civilization and its components. AI does not need to be autonomous, it just needs to employed, either will wilful bad intent, or, poorly stated goals, or, poor alignment, or, simple mistakes and errors, to break things.

The challenge with security is always that the attacker need only succeed once.

This does not mean doomerism has it right, especially in narratives based on poor understanding or extapolation beyond what is now konwn. The chance of "extinction" in particular is overstated.

The chance of one or more compounding "Chernobyl scale" gray swan events however is ever increasing.

Personally I don't think that's remotely contestable.

As a civilization and society and industry we need to have process, and public process at that, about the nature of the risks faced.

That process has not yet emerged in any coherent way; a hundred letters have been signed and such but to no actual effect, bar one performative "executive order" this week.

Yup. The race-to-AGI-because-China in particular. I’m basically a China Hawk and generally in favor of AI development, but I can recognize the same pattern.

Germany just wasn't the kind of industrial powerhouse that the US and USSR were. Their whole blitzkrieg strategy was based on the knowledge that they could not win a war of attrition.

The word "algebra" comes from Arabic al-jabr - so it's Muslim math to them I guess would be the talking point?

With his seeming love of certain periods of German history, I think it's appropriate to observe that Tucker Carlson has a backpfeifengesicht.

Fake math? Does he know that all the electric circuits in the equipment that is used to broadcast his program are designed using algebra?

Wait until Tucker hears about imaginary numbers.

I was mocking the Nazi attacks on the work of Jewish scientists which branded that work as "Jewish Science" and declared it inferior, because this whole story is a Reverse Uno card on that narrative.

Yes, but it would have been a better world if the Nazis had never invented the idea of Judenphysik in the first place. It stopped Gentile German physicists from working on whole areas of research!

[dead]

And they mostly hated the Nazis and were glad to be rid of them. Plus secercy obviously no longer mattered now that a bomb had actually been used. Nothing they had to say could materially advance an enemy’s nuclear program.

I've learnt that flat out statements aren't always the best way. I suggest curious minds consider the evidence laid out in Palmer's book, which is not only free but also a true pioneering work, to then “come to their own conclusions” (if they're into that kind of thing – not everyone is).

I had never really understood why in the early 90s “nuclear weapons” ceased to be “a problem” (a media talking point) moreless overnight “when the Wall came down”, as the arsenals still existed. A dozen years later I realized the Russians kept talking about them, and I was worried about “stability”.

And there were other things I couldn't make sense of – such as what does it mean for an aircraft to be “nuclear-capable”? I mean – there's a payload, and there's speed and altitude, and there may be safety concerns, but nothing really seems to fit when you look at what's considered “capable” and what's not.

And why did we have barrages to stop tank armies entering “from the East”?

And why spend so much on military in the first place when the bomb dwarfs everything? Why all this insanity?

Another dozen years later I found that same Swedish naval engineer whom Palmer would later also find in the exact same way, and whom he mentions in the preface. It was a bit like “tolle, lege” although of course I don't compare to Augustine.

And then the insanity started making sense again, but in a very different way.

But there's something else that strikes me profoundly when I read discussions such as these. It's not about the topic, it's about the participants. It's the way they talk about it – the way “the Bomb” has become an object of both erudition and veneration. “The Bomb” is studied and idolized, intellectually hugged and worshipped – while the victims are a mere projection screen for the greatness of “the Bomb”.

How can that be?

To me, the psychology of things is often the most interesting aspect. And I think what we have here is a cover story, a self-serving cover story, and that is not an accident.

Heat alone is not insufficient, the heat generated is so intense that is turns the surrounding air into a plasma which then absorbs the x-rays emitted creating a stupendous over-pressure in the air which drives the shockwave.

Reactors don't explode because the amount of heat then generate is carefully monitored and matched the the rate at which that heat can be pulled from the reactor and converted into work.

The extreme radiation of the bomb almost instantly vaporizes everything near it (water in the air, earth, parts of the bomb, etc), expanding it in volume.

That’s what causes the shockwave.

As a corollary, having more material around the bomb that can capture some of its radiation means a bigger shockwave, but less radiation further away from the detonation.

They rebuilt Tokyo that fast already ?

  The strikes conducted by the USAAF on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history. Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.

Perhaps that "third bomb on Tokyo" fear was a bit made up and ahistoric.

Well the effects of radiation were still poorly understood, but also there wasn't that much radioactive material left over in any concentration. And the gamma ray blast would appear superficially like normal burns from being near a firebomb until atleast a few days later.

Contrary to Fallout lore, most nuclear bombs dont leave much concentrated radioactive material unless it was done on purpose. You either need a shittier and smaller explosion with the same material, or you need a ground burst which reduces the effective blast area.

The US was on ground zero in under 2 weeks in Japan and couldn't detect anything over the background in radioactive isotopes.

> Today, Japan is considered to be a latent or threshold nuclear state, capable of developing weapons in a short timespan. It is unique among non-nuclear weapons states in that it possesses a full nuclear fuel cycle and plutonium stockpile, as part of its civilian nuclear energy industry, and advanced developments in the industries necessary to make nuclear weapons.

Japan has a large inventory of plutonium recycled from used power reactor fuel:

https://www.aec.go.jp/bunya/04/plutonium/20260805_e.pdf

As of the end of 2025, the total amount of Japan’s separated plutonium managed both within and outside Japan was approximately 44.4 tons, of which approximately 9.9 tons were held domestically and approximately 34.5 tons were held abroad.

Despite the nomenclature, weapons grade plutonium is not necessary to make nuclear weapons. Reactor grade plutonium has more problems with predetonation ("fizzle") and decay heat management, but both obstacles can be bypassed by design changes. In particular, "boosting" with a mixture of deuterium and tritium overcomes predetonation problems and can ensure repeatable high yields even with plutonium containing a high fraction of Pu-240.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon#Gas_boo...

The fusion reaction rate typically becomes significant at 20 to 30 megakelvins. This temperature is reached at very low efficiencies, when less than 1% of the fissile material has fissioned (corresponding to a yield in the range of hundreds of tons of TNT). Since implosion weapons can be designed that will achieve yields in this range even if neutrons are present at the moment of criticality, fusion boosting allows the manufacture of efficient weapons that are immune to predetonation. Elimination of this hazard is a very important advantage in using boosting.

This design hardens weapons against neutrons from nuclear interceptors and against neutrons generated within the core itself, e.g. spontaneous fission from "dirty" reactor plutonium.

Gas boosted bombs are more mechanically complex than the bombs of the 1940s, but the US started building them in the 1950s. Japan could easily manage the complexity today. Japan has also operated its Tritium Process Laboratory since the late 1980s, with capacity to handle 16 grams of tritium at a time. That's not much, but an individual boosted warhead may need only 3 grams of tritium.

A more reliable account is "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes.

Mostly Britain, though Maxwell did also very briefly control both Prentice Hall and the American side of Macmillan from 1988/9.

Some of the (rather convoluted) history is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macmillan_Inc.#Mergers_and_end - but there's not much evidence for any conspiracy GP may have been hinting at.

(Cap'n Bob Maxwell was essentially the left-wing Rupert Murdoch - big on tabloid journalism and building media empires through fair means and foul. A hugely controversial character, but his involvement in textbook publishing was fairly incidental)

How so?

> That's why it's notable. If it were part of the original quote [without square brackets], it wouldn't be.

happytoexplain rightfully expands on the importance of square brackets as orthographic signifiers inside quoted text, marking a temporary suspension of the literal quoting context.

What they fail to address though, is that while "[square-brackets are] notable", this convention turns out to be problematic when dealing with markdown, or other structured text with unusual semantic orthographic markers. Square brackets "work" (scare-quote!) because they are unusual.

But what to do when dealing with an original text that contains square-brackets, such as a comment about square brackets, or computer source code? There are also some forms of art revolving around unusual punctuation, especially from the 20th century!

And this doesn't even touch the fact that the spellings "square-brackets" and "square brackets" both seem to be considered acceptable, notwithstanding the question whether minimizing the square-bracketed portion of quoted and editorialized text should include whitespace, such as in

> If it were part of the original[ non-square-bracketed] quote[...]

Also, [...] is seen as offensive and insensitive quoting by some scholars.

Quite a conundrum!

The more I learn about that fella, the less I like him.

>>> pretty sure he's turning Iran to sand after the elections, he'll have nothing left to lose and US is only country to ever use nuclear weapons on a million innocent civilians, twice, so why stop now?

I think it's pretty clear that ck2 was talking about using nukes.

What law did it break? Crime has a specific meaning different than "bad thing"

What odds would you give it?

The termination of USAID caused no casualties.

If you genuinely believe this nonsense you can probably make millions on Polymarket, go ahead.