Your Morning Dose of Cold War Insanity

Boys just like to blow shit up.

“I read the article hoping for some rational basis to this experiment, but was sadly disappointed…”

Have a look at

for some answers to that.

The rational basis is “to find out what will happen”. You may question whether that’s a moral basis, but it’s perfectly rational.

#5 “Why didn’t Reagan era C0ld Warriors blow up an H-Bomb in the sky?”

Because they were smarter than Democratic Cold Warriors?

The article: “The Americans launched their first atomic nuclear tests above the Earth’s atmosphere in 1958. ”

Though I guess that’s how contemporary conservatives view Eisenhower.

Can we agree that Reagan was constrained by international law, and also that whole fear of strontium 90 in your kids’ teeth?

P.S.
….assuming that treaty covered testing both in and above the atmosphere, which I’m not sure about.

This definitely needs to go into the origin mythology of someone’s Barack Obama as superhero comic.

Sounds like a fairly useful thing to do really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse
“In July 1962, a 1.44 megaton (6.0 PJ) United States nuclear test in space, 400 kilometres (250 mi) above the mid-Pacific Ocean, called the Starfish Prime test, demonstrated to nuclear scientists that the magnitude and effects of a high altitude nuclear explosion were much larger than had been previously calculated. Starfish Prime also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link.[7]

Starfish Prime was the first successful test in the series of United States high-altitude nuclear tests in 1962 known as Operation Fishbowl. The subsequent Operation Fishbowl tests gathered more data on the high-altitude EMP phenomenon.”

It’s one of the reasons we’ve got the internet, isn’t it? As a comms system which can route around damage from EMP and thus still function after such an explosion?

The myth of journalism

Over in another thread, folks are dissecting the corpse of what was supposed to once have been a vital and functioning “journalism”.

“N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling: Good View Likely”, from 1962, ought to pretty much put to rest any idea that such a thing ever was vital and functioning as any sort of objective referee on public discourse. The 1960s was supposed to be when this mythical beast was in its prime, after the era of Yellow Journalism, but before our current morass.

Tim, the idea that Arpanet was the basis of the internet is a bit too hyped. It was one of several experiments with packet switching in the late 60s/early 70s, but none of those lead to a full-scale network.

The internet dates physically from the late 1970s, and then people had to choose a packet switching protocol. They choose Arpanet’s, but without Arpanet they could have picked another and the result would probably have been the same.

Oh, let Z have his/her cake and eat it too, this is the internet, after all.

Does this mean that “without government R&D we wouldn’t have the internet” shouldn’t be taken all that seriously as an argument then?

Er, no. ARPA had to pick one of several different network protocols developed by different universities, projects, bits of the military-industrial complex. They decided on migrating their stuff to IP (in 1978 or thereabouts), which worked well, and led them to move the whole DOD internal network and all the other Federal research and education systems (so NIPR, SIPR, ESNet and friends) over (this would be about 1984).

Later, they decided to build a national Internet backbone network, NSFNet, linking up R&E (Research & Education) institutions – this was put in effect by the Gore Act of 1991. That, in turn, went so well they decided to let anyone commercial interconnect with it in 1994 (another decision heavily influenced by Al Gore) and passed the E-rate and special access provisions of the 1996 Telecoms Act, which basically created mass market dial-up.

Now, while the egg heads were getting online in the late 80s, other NRENs started to look at interconnecting with the nascent Internet, notably the UK’s JANET and the equivalents in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. JANET had had an Internet gateway at the University of London Computer Centre since 1975, but had mostly used the coloured book protocols like X25. Starting with ULCC and Kent University, through, they linked up with the Dutch and Nordics through what became EUNet, and by 1993/4, Demon Internet in London and Planet Online in Leeds were able to get a full route-view from Kent Uni and start offering individual clients (in Demon’s case) and businesses (in Planet’s case) dial-up service.

I do remember that as late as ’96, dial-up Internet service through Bradford University and JANET worked better than BT or Virgin would for quite a few years later.

Change my statement to “Reagan was smarter than both Ike and JFK.” Are we all agreed now?

Oh, sure.
EISENHOWER: planned largest and most complex operation in human history
REAGAN: starred in Bedtime for Bonzo