It doesn't take much to imagine the following scenario: 'Cross my heart, I swear it's a low-yield,' as a Trident is launched! One wonders if the new low-yield W76-2 warhead advocated by Donald Trump comes with a broadcast tape identifying it .
Otherwise
it looks exactly the same, is delivered
by the same missile, and is made essentially by disabling the second
stage of
a Trident warhead. That restricts it to the 5 kiloton fission
starter which is about a third of the Hiroshima bomb. Still, a third of
the
Hiroshima experience might not be looked upon lightly by the victim.
The first of the new bombs has just rolled off the production line, the
initial operational batch to be delivered by the end of September.
The big question is how a country being attacked is supposed to know it's not the real thing, namely the massive hydrogen bomb of a regular Trident about to deliver a crippling blow. Under the use-it-or-lose-it MAD doctrine, the target country has minutes to decide whether or not to launch its own missiles. Who will want to wait and see the effects of the incoming Trident before responding? Worse still, if the smaller warhead makes use more likely, then the likelihood of Armageddon increases proportionately.
It could also have been designed for use in non-nuclear countries that one way or another are irksome to US power brokers. Iraq used to be on the list, now it's Iran, and who knows but the Taliban have been persuaded by it to negotiate and agree on a framework for an Afghan deal. Although, no matter what lipstick is put on that pig, it will not obscure the fact of another lost war.
In other news, the Midwest is colder than the inside of a freezer. The polar vortex normally spinning contentedly over the North Pole has been forced down into Canada and the US Midwest. Chicago, the worst affected major City, experienced colder temperatures than the Antarctic. The indoor-outdoor temperature differential was 94F, the outdoor low at -22F or -30C.
Too
much for President Trump to resist who tweeted, "In the beautiful
Midwest, ... coldest ever recorded ... What the hell is going on with
the Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!" Lipstick on a
pig does not change the fact its posterior is more valuable than its
brain.
It turns out a pool of intensely hot air formed over Morocco. As it rose, wind currents pushed it to the North Pole where it cleaved the vortex forcing one half down into North America. One can of course wonder about the causes of the hot air and its intensity, but such speculation is unlikely to be of interest to Mr. Trump.
Meanwhile new research reported in Science (January 11, 2019) finds an accelerated pace of ocean warming.
Using ocean heat content (OHC), which the authors claim is a more
reliable measure than surface temperature, they have collected data
showing a faster pace. Simulations of the future under three scenarios
show an accelerated rise from bad to worse. For Trump's
business-as-usual scenario they predict a sea level rise of 30 cm. At
present it's already 7 cm higher than in the 1990s.
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