“The world is heading into a major crisis,” said Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom in an Oct. 31 Twitter post. “I saw it coming and that’s why we moved to New Zealand. Far away & not on any nuclear target list.”
You do realise that On the Beach is a completely fictional account of the aftermath of a nuclear war? Fortunately nobody ever stockpiled cobalt salted H-bombs.
Mind you On the Beach is excellent, but not as a documentary on what might happen after a global war.
Yes, the book On the Beach is from the 1950s not long after H-bombs were invented - it is mentioned in the book that a lot of weapons used in the war it describes were salted with cobalt to create large amounts of long lived fallout. This is perfectly possible but fortunately was never actually done - I suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the direct effects of weapons.
I can't remember if the cobalt bomb element is mentioned in the film versions but was definitely mentioned in the book.
I suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the direct effects of weapons.
Not based on my understanding of H-bombs. For one thing, you need a tamper made of something dense, and depleted uranium U-238 is used if you want to roughly double your yield while massively increasing the fallout created, then it becomes a fission -> fusion -> fission bomb. Lead is substituted for weapons like the one off 50 Gt Tsar Bomba, even the Soviet weren't willing to damage that much of their territory, and there were minor details like pilot survival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba). That tamper could perhaps be made out of cobalt, or you could wrap the "physics package" in cobalt.
But it would be a fairly daft thing to do, cobalt-60 has, compared to normal fission products, a long half-life of 5 years, so that which would eventually fall out of the stratosphere would make things uncomfortable for you (normally it will decay to a de minimis level by the time it comes back down in quantity).
On the other hand, it was pure propaganda to suggest such weapons would kill all life on earth. Ignoring details like the impossibility of getting even enough distribution, and that the earth is big, really only issue for humans who want to survive it, who'd be in heavy fallout areas, and who had any time to prepare is having enough food until it decayed enough, more of a lifeboat ethics sort of thing instead of the all but explicit message that we should surrender to the USSR because we and they were so crazy we might do something like that (and evil; if we, the far more evil nuclear power after JFK and McNamara changed our policy to MAD, weren't going to do it, there was no danger).
> the conflict has devastated the Northern Hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout, killing all life there. Air currents are slowly carrying the fallout south; the only areas still habitable are in the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere.
on the beach is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. I'd strongly recommend the book over the film, as the film doesn't hold up at all. The book, on the other hand, has an intro that sounds eerily similar to our current geo-political situation and does a great job of painting an emotional spectrum for the people awaiting their inevitable doom.
It will probably ruin his day but the good thing with nuclear fall out is it's globalized nature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29