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March 16, 2011
Dear news media:
Remember back in '50s and early '60s, when we set off something like 900 atomic bombs in Nevada?And how we just let the fallout blow wherever and it landed all over the eastern US? And how it wiped out life as we know it and all that was left from Colorado to the Atlantic were six-legged rats battling two-headed cockroaches in the glowing ruins? -- View From The Porch :
Posted by Vanderleun at March 16, 2011 1:16 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
You just gave them a reason to eat all the iodized salt licks at the farm feed store.
Posted by: Peccable at March 17, 2011 3:16 AM
The only problem is that almost no one in the media or blogosphere (or public) actually knows what fallout is. Since I was a credentialed nuclear target analyst in my former military career, I shall explain.
US policy from the Eisenhower administration (or even earlier) strictly forbids employing atomic weapons in a way that produces fallout. Fallout consists of irradiated matter from the ground (or buildings or vegetation, etc) that are fused to radioactive remains of the nuclear detonation.
The only way that this can occur is for the fireball of the detonation itself to touch the surface of the earth. If this does not occur, there is no fallout. It really is so simple as that.
In my training course and in exercises, if a target analyst ever produced an atomic-attack solution that produced fallout, he failed, period. Since that kind of failure was potentially career ending, I assure you we took it very, very seriously.
Now, this is not the same kind of threat that the Japanese reactors may pose, but it's just for the record. The radiation threat to continental America is pretty much nil.
Posted by: Donald Sensing at March 17, 2011 8:38 AM