- cross-posted to:
- noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
I literally posted the same suggestion in this community three days ago as a joke!
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Some facts about newt Gingrich in case you’re ever unsure if he’s genuine or not:
Newt Gingrich married his former geometry teacher (honestly, it sounds like he was a victim here- they married at 19 and 26, shortly after he graduated), then divorced her for his mistress when she got uterine cancer. After marrying the mistress, he divorced her for his new mistress when she got MS.
He chronically underpaid child support for the first marriage and his ex wife had to raise funds from her church to support their two children.
Gingrich has a PhD in history. His half sibling is a queer lesbian. At the same time that he was trying to impeach Clinton for his Lewinsky affair, Gingrich was cheating on wife #2 with at least wife #3.
21 thermonuclear warheads and you can get a channel as wide as the empty space between Newt Gingrich’s ears.
He’s not one of the dumb ones. He’s one of the smart lying evil grifter ones.
And we can finally show those stupid lefties that we need oil during a nuclear winter. Not much solar power during nuclear winter now, is there? /s
As usual, noncredible proposals become noncredible reality
We make fun of bad fiction because it has to be realistic… but reality has no such constraint.
IIRC soviets planned something like this in the 60-s and the program was named like nuclear explosions for better economy.
You should stop posting jokes, some brainless politician with access to nuclear devices might take them as serious suggestions.
That orange idiot doesn’t have the attention span to find lemmy.
Project plowshare all over again.
Put every politician in the world on top of the pile of bombs first, and we have a deal.
Even if you ignore the radiation, that material doesn’t just magically go away. It just shatters the rock. You still have to clear the channel and build the infrastructure.
Well, sorta kinda. Look at the Sedan crater, which was a test for nuclear mining (which we don’t do, for many many many good reasons). It’s a very clear crater.
The problem is, that works great the first time, because the gigantic nuclear blast throws out all the material and scatters it over a wide area. The second time, said area includes your first crater. The third time, it includes your first two craters, etc etc.
But most of the stuff will scatter itself over an area that’s dozens of kilometers, with parts of it drifting for hundreds if not thousands of kilometers. And ALL of that stuff is radioactive for at least weeks, and to a lesser degree years.
But’s not what the Minecraft Nuke mod does…
I would be surprised if Newt Gingrich even knows what Minecraft is. At best, maybe he will have heard the word and guessed enough context to make a Hillary-esque out-of-touch joke about it.
I think we can safely assume he isn’t getting his ideas about how nukes work from the game.
Oh…
Oh no.
Oh dear god.
… Operation Glass Cannon appears to be on the drawing board, the irony consultants were I guess all DEI hires and got fired by DOGE.
… god fucking DAMNIT.
the same guy that divorced/ abandoned his wife when she had cancer, and started the whole movement in the seante to never work with DEMOCRATS on any bills until they cave to your demands. yes hes the ones that started “the whole we will not work with the otherside,” which was co-opted by Mitch mcconnell.
Wait, is this a real tweet? I figured this had to be a fake.
Is it? I honestly can’t tell and at this point I’m too tired to verify.
Even if you’re a 30%-lead boomer with decades of severe alcoholism, and think this is a good idea of geoengineering (it is not).
There’s no way that intentionally irradiating large key trade areas of several middle eastern and north African countries for hundreds of years could have any negative blowback on the US now, is there?
trade areas
Check a map. Try major population centers. Dubai? Meh, fuckit, they won’t mind…
(edit: replaced with original source image)
NukeMap is giving me this, if you go with a surface detonation and 10 or so W-88 Trident D5s, about half a megaton each.
I… moved the entire concept south of where you had it, as where you have it is… more or less right in the middle of an extended metro area…
So yeah.
If the wind is blowing to the North East… yeah you’ve basically just irradiated Dubai, basically most of the UAE, and Northern Oman… like 10 to 15 million people, probably essentially immediately (to within a week) killed a couple tens of thousands, minimum.
So basically… imagine a haboob.
But… its extremely radioactive.
… This is actually an… unimaginably extremely worse scenario than what is depicted in Spec Ops: The Line, which is the only point of reference I can think of.
Problem is, in order to build a proper canal, you’ll need more and/or bigger explosions. Supposedly there are still a couple W53 warheads stashed away, they wouldn’t exactly make short work of it, but significantly shorter work than that all that weak newfangled stuff.
For a rough estimate, how many and how powerful explosions you might need, check out this brilliant idea from the 1950s
Double post, but uh, also kind of worth noting that roughly the border between UAE and Oman…
… is a mountain range.
So you’d have to go through the passes, which of course already have highways and towns.
… and basically everything south of Abu Dhabi is a nature preserve.
Also, not sure how out of date this is, but:
Presumably, you would not want to nuke an already existing oil pipeline.
… which my NukeMap ‘path’… does, basically.
… is a mountain range.
More nukes are surely going to solve that problem.
Presumably, you would not want to nuke an already existing oil pipeline.
Why not? Just fill the canal with oil instead of water and make it the new pipeline. This will also save money by not requiring ships to transport the oil. Or you can drive a ship filled with oil on the canal filled with oil, giving you twice the oil in one go. (certainly no insane troll logic here)
Real life ideas involving nukes to make canals through the desert aren’t that much less insane, and also give a rough estimate of the amount and size of nukes required.
Excuse me while I bang my head against a wall enough times that it approximates the level of brain damage as a lead-lined boomer brain.
Yep, that’s entirely correct.
I was trying to do a more low end, ‘what would the damages be to the human environment,.at minimum’ kind of thing.
And as best I can tell, yeah, it gets worse with bigger nukes, because more stuff gets vaporized and turns into fallout.
So you end up with radioactive sandstorms for… a decade or two?
Its insane, its like, intentionally trying to turn that penninsula into the fucking zone from Stalker… maybe Fallout Dust, the New Vegas mod?
Sorry for the video game analogies but I … I have no other frame of reference.
I cannot overstate how insanely bad of an idea this is.
This boomer idea came straight outta the atomic golden age
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The ships passing through get upgraded to spicy ships, that’s a plus.
(“Plus” as in premiums so high it’s practically uninsurable)
You’ve heard of sweet crude and sour crude. Now introducing new spicy crude!
Still hasn’t gotten better. That witch has a lot to answer for.
Still asking, how bad would it be? Old craters are safe enough to walk through, and modern nukes can be rendered less radioactive, right? So how much less would it have to be that this would go from an environmental and geopolitical catastrophe that future generations will condemn us for to merely an unbelievably bad idea?
Sure, the future canal would be mostly safe, especially after decades. But there’s a rather big problem in that making the canal very much wouldn’t be.
Using nukes for mining was actually tried, it left a very impressive crater you can visit today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)
It also caused more fallout than any nuclear bomb ever. And the crater is “only” about 450m. So you’re going to be blasting a LOT of highly radioactive dust into the surrounding several countries. Even with more efficient nukes causing less fallout, that’s probably not going to be very popular.
The material doesn’t go away by magic. It gets ejected and scattered over a wide area, after being in a nuclear explosion and getting highly irradiated. The blasting a canal would throw an entire canal’s worth of fallout around the area. That will go away mostly eventually, but it won’t be fun living within several hundreds of kilometers for a for decades.
And of course, even with the decades old Sedan crater, there’s a giant radiative ball underneath.
That test made a 450 meter wide crater, and they want to make a canal on the order of 100km long? I think that might take a bit more than a dozen detonations…
Well, bombs are MUCH bigger now. Of course, using fewer larger bombs creates MUCH more ejecta than more smaller bombs.
That’s true, but crater width doesn’t scale linearly with bomb yield so I don’t think you could get it down to a dozen even with the largest bombs we have available today.
That’s true. But that’s very much the least of the problems with this moronic idea. Newt would give zero fucks about making it 1200 bombs instead of 12.
Also, unless you’re dropping the bombs from a B-1, you have to actually take nukes to the middle east, on the ground, and trust that no-one wants to steal them.
You need to drill a hole and lower it down, or you won’t get such a good crater. Most ground-level blasts create very shallow craters, because (and this will surprise nobody with more braincells than brainworms) air is much easier to move than rock.
“Safe”
