A Scenario
by Anne Jacobsen
When I was young I was very interested with the end of the world, how did the Dinosaurs die? What happens when we get hit with an asteroid? Or a nuclear weapon? Like many of you I grew up with duck and cover in schools and it was assumed we could be hit by nukes, we just lived with it. The reality of Armageddon never left my mind, and living within view of the Coronado bridge hosting 3 CVNs in the Bay is some what refreshing.
This book is very well done, a scenario that could easily be real, and without spoilers the entire scenario takes place in 72 minutes. All of the people interviewed and researched have decent credibility when in comes to Doomsday, maybe not the best but hell who is? One thing that I initially found annoying was her reference to the destruction of everything and every one of us, now I remember why. The following is a small excerpt of our fate if humans do human shit and start this, Cheers!
Radiation poisoning
Defense scientists have known what acute radiation sickness does to the body since the Manhattan Project years. Consider the May 1946 accident at Omega Site, at a secret laboratory hidden in the Los Alamos woods, the details of which remained classified for decades.
It was a cool spring day, three miles from the main lab, when a group of scientists stood hovering over a table, concentrating. The men were working on a plutonium bomb core, the first atomic test since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed.
The U.S. nuclear stockpile at the time was around four. The future of the nuclear arms race depended on this moment. The Los Alamos scientists, upon whom many jobs and fortunes depended, were under great pressure to get this plutonium core experiment correct.
The physicist handling the plutonium that day was a man named Louis Slotin. There were seven other scientists in the room. Slotin had recently decided to leave the Manhattan Project for moral reasons, he told friends. The war was over and he was done working on atomic bombs. Los Alamos officials said fine, but required Slotin to train someone to take his place. That someone was a scientist named Alvin C. Graves.
During this dangerous experiment—dangerous enough to be known as “tickling the dragon’s tail”—Slotin dropped one of the nuclear spheres he was handling, causing the material to go critical. Knowing the risk to himself, but hoping to save the others in the room, Slotin thrust himself in front of Alvin Graves, who was standing beside him. Eyewitnesses described a quick flash of blue light—a “blue glow,” others said—and a wave of intense heat.
People began screaming. The security guard assigned to protect the nuclear material fled the room, raced outside, and ran up into the New Mexico hills.
Someone called for an ambulance to come quick. The laboratory was evacuated, but Louis Slotin stayed behind, to begin sketching out a diagram where he and everyone else had been standing, for future study and use. So defense scientists could understand how radiation poisoning works. How it kills.
Slotin’s sketch was remarkably detailed for a man whose death by acute radiation syndrome had already begun. Years later, the laboratory made a mock-up of where Louis Slotin was when the accident happened. He was just thirty-five years old.
In the ambulance, Slotin vomited. His left hand, the one closest to the nuclear material when the accident happened, went numb. His groin began swelling. He had explosive diarrhea and vomited again, and again. At the Los Alamos hospital, more vomiting. More watery diarrhea releasing from his bowels. Prostrate and weak, watery fluid began collecting in his hands, which expanded like balloons. Horrible and painful blisters formed under his skin, then burst.
Doctors dressed the pustules on Slotin’s hands with Vaseline and gauze. They tried debridement (scrubbing the skin with a wire sponge) to remove damaged tissue. They plunged Slotin’s extremities in ice. Pumped his body with fresh blood. The days wore on. More ice baths. More blood transfusions. But nothing could alleviate the intense pain. A lethal dose of high-energy X-rays, gamma rays, and neutrons had penetrated Louis Slotin’s organs. His body was now failing to oxygenate its own blood. Cyanosis set in, bluish discoloration that spread across his chest, arms, groin, and legs. The purple patches covering his body split open and hemorrhaged blood. The same thing happened to the open sores in his mouth. With thick pieces of skin now peeling off Slotin’s hands, doctors considered amputation, but administered blood transfusions instead—one after the next, after the next.
As the end drew near, Louis Slotin was experiencing necrosis. Death of the limbs. All the bone marrow stem cells throughout his body were now dying or dead. He was experiencing necrosis of the blood vessel walls; jaundice; acute thrombosis in the small and large blood vessels; severe epithelial damage in the intestines. As his body began losing its ability to form antibodies, the cell lining in Slotin’s gastrointestinal tract began giving off products that began moving into neighboring tissues. Louis Slotin’s body was being invaded by bacteria in his own intestines. His adrenal glands were malfunctioning. Acute sepsis was setting in. He began experiencing extensive gangrene due to interruption in his blood supply. Then organ system damage. Tissue death. Circulatory collapse. Liver failure. Finally, complete organ failure. On day nine, Louis Slotin died from acute radiation poisoning.
Not long after Slotin took his last breath, Los Alamos doctors began slicing him open, eager to learn how radiation kills a human. Before 1945, the science of radiation poisoning did not exist. Now, in the spring of 1946, the very concept was less than one year old. With the first cut of the scalpel, doctors came upon a horror not observed in a world before the invention of the atomic bomb. The mess inside Slotin’s dead body was like a sea of rotten soup. His “blood was uncoaguable at autopsy,” one of the doctors wrote in a classified postmortem report.
The radiation poisoning had caused the near complete loss of tissue that once separated one of Slotin’s organs from the next. Without this lining, his organs had merged into one. And to think, just a few months prior, Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves had assured the public and Congress that death by radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.”
Yikes!
“Yay, a lunchtime, entertaining post!”
“Ugh…nevermind…”
I’m still drinking coffee, cheers!
Is this more, or less, disturbing than an episode of Joemala?
That remains to be seen upon the morrow…
The good news is that in a nuclear war there wouldn’t be that kind of medical care available to make you suffer that long.
*Pops Rad-X*
Agreed. With his dose he should have snuffed it in hours. They prolonged his torture.
Who knew?
They had zero experience
“His condition is the result of your profession, not mine.”
I have a feeling that with any new kind of hazard, the immediacy and lethality are exaggerated to the point where people really do believe that death is instant and painless. That’s how the gas chamber and the electric chair were sold.
The same mindset probably applies in that every “new” drug is immediately addictive on the first hit (bonus points for fentanyl killing cops who merely touch the package).
Look, addicts and junkies are really good at measuring out nanogram dose sizes.
War! What is it good for?
Absolutely nothingThe health of the state. Weapon sales. Money Laundering.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJRJpbGkG4
Speaking of dying horribly, why did someone think there needed to be a The Crow remake?
Because the only book that an entire generation has read appears to be the Harry Potter series?
The Drinker gave it a brutal review.
Yeah, I watched it.
Still, are goths back or something? And why release it in the summer? It’s in my standard Halloween rotation.
Goths go in cycles. Apparently they’re coming back a bit.
Will didn’t say it in so many words, but it sure looks like this remake was written by stupid people, for stupid people who need everything explained to them.
One (not kind) review said that it was an origin, and the majority of the film is before the murder of Draven with him only taking on the persona for the last 40 minutes of the film.
Can people please stop remaking classics and remake movies that had good ideas that were just implemented poorly?
/looks over at Strange Days being set on 12/31/1999
Strange Days was a badly underrated flick. One of my true guilty pleasures. It definitely had some weak spots in the story and writing, but I really don’t think it could be improved with a remake.
Incidentally, Michael Wincott played Philo Gant in Strange Days, and Top Dollar in The Crow, and absolutely stole the show in both roles (really the same character played with slightly different levels of malevolence.)
I haven’t seen strange days in 20+ years. I remember it being really cool, but turning into an ordinary murder mystery that didn’t live up to the promise of the opening of the flick.
I enjoy the movie as well, and that setting is my biggest complaint about the movie. Hell, it was dated when the movie was released, let alone now. It can be a hard sell to recommend a recent sci-fi movie that’s set nearly 25 years in the past.
Gonna party like it’s 1999.
“living within view of the Coronado bridge hosting 3 CVNs in the Bay”
Hey I know what this means! My son in law is on a CVN in Seattle but when they are near shore they turn on their ship tracker so you can see them stop by there to pick up their air wing when they’re out for training.
There are some nice live cameras in the Bay where you can watch the ships going in and out.
If you haven’t already, recommend the channel Growler Jams. It’s air ops, but man that guy could narrate buttering a slice of bread and make it sound interesting.
Bookmarked. I watched the takeoff video and I’m already hooked. Thanks!
Trump names RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to his transition team.
https://x.com/simonateba/status/1828471026604274121
Seem in the case of Gabbard he is doing a better job at picking people this time around. Making her the SECDEF would be a really big FU. Jr. needs to be watched closely.
This may be the forming of a new party and / or a major remake of the GOP. Gabbard, RFK, Elon… people whose deeds and words match up.
I sure hope the old Rino grift of campaigning as a conservative and governing as a liberal are done. My patience with them is done.
If Lindsey Graham is on the general ballot in 2 years, I’ll gladly vote for the Democrat just to get rid of him.
It really is something and I’m having fun watching the whole thing develop. This cartoon sums it up really well:
https://x.com/kylenabecker/status/1828276686170751241
That’d make for a fun t-shirt.
The Slotin story sounded familiar to me, but I remembered the date being prior to Trinity.
Blame Hollywood, John Cusack, and a wobbly screw driver.
“Depictions of the criticality incident include the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy, in which John Cusack plays a fictional character named Michael Merriman based on Slotin.”
Any late boomer or early Gen X SciFi fan has a lot of doomsday literature under their belts. There were tons of the stuff written and filmed during the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.
Good example of a fantasy book based on the end of the world. This made me a fan of his work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_the_Way_the_World_Ends_(novel)
It’s not his best novel, but an interesting concept. The last person on earth’s end was a bit haunting to a 14 year old.
By most accounts, Slotin’s own haphazard actions caused the accident, but his quick reaction saved everyone else in the room.
It also demonstrates that the range from the source is extremely critical in how deadly radiation can be.
Once it’s critical the source is everywhere relative to warhead size
Lickspittle lackeys
More than 200 Republicans who worked for former President George H.W. Bush, former President George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Mitt Romney endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, saying democracy would be “irreparably jeopardized” by another Trump administration.
“We have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable,” said the letter, which was first reported by USA Today.
The group, which put out a similar letter in 2020, said another four years of former President Donald Trump’s “chaotic leadership” would “hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”
——-
“You’re not voting for a Democrat. You’re voting for democracy,” Troye said. “You’re not betraying our party. You’re standing up for our country.”
Obedient servants of the Armageddon Industrial Complex.
If you think government institutions are sacred, then you worship the state.
Well there ya’ go. Comment of the day is usually the most succinct.
The Democratic party has been taken over by neocons, Big Tech, and Big Pharma. This is kind of funny.
The neo-cons were neo-liberals in the 60s. They have just returned home.
Ironic, from a bunch of sitzpinklers.
Which one might end your career if elected and which one would be voting your job?
Yup, yup, keep going with that noble, eloquent, statesmanlike concession speech.
I try not to toss around the word ‘cuck’ too much, but I honestly think that it’s the only word that applies here.
“saying democracy would be “irreparably jeopardized” by another Trump administration.”
I’m hearing this everywhere, but what the hell does it mean? No examples are ever given (except J6; that if elected again he will never step down). Does it mean Trump would allow the people in the states to decide on abortion laws? Or decide if men can infiltrate women’s sports? Or that illegal immigrants should not be added to voter rolls? Or that he expects the Pentagon to adhere to his constitutional role of commander in chief? It isn’t like he will be the first president to ever issue executive orders because he can’t get a bill through Congress.
It means they think he is a threat to their cushy lifestyle.
“More than 200 Republicans who worked for former President George H.W. Bush, former President George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Mitt Romney…”
I am having a hard time coming up with a group of asshats I would listen to less than this one.
Also nice writeup, Yusef. This kind of death should be called “Jelly Guts Syndrome” once the hammer comes down.
Gone over to the enemy
On Monday, Gabbard praised Trump for “having the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners alike in the pursuit of peace, seeing war as a last resort.” She condemned the Democratic White House for the U.S. now “facing multiple wars on multiple fronts in regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before.”
OMG that poor deluded woman. Joe Biden singlehandedly rebuilt NATO, world order and peace on earth.
I didn’t see in that article where Hillary and a bunch of other Dems have been calling her a traitor and a Russian asset for years. She has every right to hate that garbage party.
Long but interesting
https://topsecretumbra.substack.com/p/who-really-is-barack-obama-a-counterintelligence
Very interesting. Dude seems to have some legit creds in the craft.
A commie bent on the destruction of the United States? I don’t know what his party would be doing any differently.
Love the line about his friend predicting the exact mix of freaks that are terrorizing college campuses today.
Thanks for the read Yusef.
Your profession requires you also being a target, fare well my friend!
I try not to toss around the word ‘cuck’ too much, but I honestly think that it’s the only word that applies here.
Same here.
Gabbard has long signaled some level of support for Trump, even while she sat in the U.S. House as a Democrat. In 2019, she was the only lawmaker to vote “present” when the House of Representatives impeached Trump for his dealings with Ukraine.
Good sleuthing, AP. Trump and his Ukrainian pay-for-play shenanigans. What a scandalous betrayal of the public trust.
Well, that was horrifying, I knew radiation poison was a terrible way to die, but now I have details.
Thanks Yusef!
Unfortunately the only way for Minnesodans to win is if both parties lose.
But we still get Walz back. We’re losers…
Looks like next window for SpaceX is 0330ish EST tomorrow morning. Here’s waking up to some history and not tragedy.
Here’s a tweet that didn’t age well.
https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/855559494637674496
Her team sucks.
lulz
Ghaa!
Remember, we haven’t heard Harris reverse any of her policies out of her own mouth. It’s all secret from anonymous sources.
The more I see of this party’s MO the more disturbing I find them to be.
It’s immoral but it’s effective. She gets the news to run cover for her, and then when she wins she can deny everything because she didn’t say it herself. Evil but it works.
Jesus, Yusef.
I think I’m glad Denver is a likely ground zero.
The book was a reminder of just how close we really are, and once it starts it won’t stop. It scared the crap out of me and I know how it works, still.
Cheers!
They’re supposed to hit the heavy industry near me, and I’m right on the edge of the blast zone so I’d have jelly guts.
See we have bridges….nothing really strategic in terms of nuclear…conventional yes
If you live near anything of value it gets a nuke, launch on warning means all of it, now.
No one in the northern hemisphere get out unscathed.
Cheers!
I’ll just wait for Bessie to rise up and smash Toledo.
I think I’m glad Denver is a likely ground zero.
We joked about that in college. Cheyenne Mountain was definitely a high priority target. We figured we’d just grab some beers, go up on the roof, and watch the missiles come in.
Peterson, the Academy, the airport, all of Pueblo, you won’t miss a thing,
Cheers!
Not even listed in Sidney Poitier’s filmography. I saw this about 65 years ago. Great Armageddon movie
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/?ref_=tt_urv
Probably because that’s not Sidney Poitier, but Harry Belafonte.
Wait, Mr. Tibbs didn’t captain a banana boat?
Shit. Thanks TedS. My mind is trapped in the past.
Some day, some day, though
No, that was Carl Weathers.
I’m not as screwed as some other locations, but I have two ammo factories and army depots within 50 miles. So drink up and toast to the end for the next 20 min.
I’m fine with it really, maybe I can see the mushroom cloud before I’m obliterated.
On the Beach is one of those horrifying stories. No happy endings…….
Smart enough to create them,
Stupid enough to use them,
Maybe humans deserve it
Only two things scare me and one is nuclear war.
The other is SugarFreeing links?
And the other is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bIJV8gaBK4