Nuke 'em 'til they glow (then shoot 'em in the dark)

[digitaldiscipline]

Remember WarGames?

mighty_man turned me on to a basic reproduction of it, called, simply enough, DEFCON: Everybody Dies. Fun, if simplistic.

By a completely different set of directions (photography links shared by jaylake), I wound up on the Trinity site, which discusses the real deal, and answered a question I'd wondered about for a long time, but had never looked up the answer.

Q: "How much fissile stuff would you need to lay your hands on to make a bomb, anyway?"

A1: "The complete fission of 1 pound of uranium or plutonium releases as much explosive energy as does the explosion of about 8,000 (short) tons of TNT."
A2 : "The fusion of all the nuclei present in 1 pound of the hydrogen isotope deuterium would release roughly the same amount of energy as the explosion of 26,000 tons of TNT."

[source: http://www.abomb1.org/nukeffct/enw77a.html]

More neat info about Uranium, along with a primer on Depleted Uranium munitions, can be found here.

Comments

Hmmm

[yokes1971.livejournal.com]

A Game I could get in to :-)

I'm still playing Tecmo Super Bowl afterall

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

Nifty thing is that you can buy Uranium on the commodities exchanges (I forget which one).

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Or, small samples for personal use: http://unitednuclear.com/uraniumnew.htm

a chunk the size of a dime is ~5g. Impressively dense.

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

I don't know about impressively dense. 5g means it's about twice a dense as a dime. I have customers that are far more dense.

But seriously, when I said you could buy it on the exchange, I meant in far larger quantities for a far more reasonable price. According to the wik: As of September 2006, uranium sells at US$52/lb and the price is rising fast.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Only $52/lb? Holy Crap!

I mean, you need a permission slip (so to speak) to have > 15lbs (only $760)... who knew that becoming a threat was so affordable? ;-)

However, the capitalist in me is looking at this and thinking, "Investment opportunity, and a hell of a lot closer to my price range than Au...."

[mighty-man.livejournal.com]

Well, aside from the permission slip, you probably need some time -- most of those contracts involve delivery several years into the future.

Clearly, the capitalist in you isn't thinking in today's day and age -- everything can be done in 1/10,000ths. If you can't afford pennies, you shouldn't be playing in the markets.