World War III is coming

[Pekka]

Well... 100 fighters from the US and UK attacked Iraqi AA.. so maybe that was act 1. We'll see what's gonna happen, I need to buy few channels more, BBC shows the war live, so I might consider that.

[Kassiopeia]

Originally posted by TheStinger
Wouldn't their be blast of energy though for the shields to deal with.

Depends on the type of the charge. The shockwave produced by a nuclear bomb needs a carrier substance to travel in. In an atomic explosion on earth, either the water (in an underwater test for instance) or the air is pushed aside by the pressure wave with immense strength. The energy will be thus released in heat, radiation and kinetic energy, and the kinetic energy can't advance from one molecule to another in the vacuum of space.

This does bring the question - if we set a giant vacuum sphere afloat in the air and blow up a nuke inside it, what will happen?

[TheStinger]

Originally posted by Kassiopeia


Depends on the type of the charge. The shockwave produced by a nuclear bomb needs a carrier substance to travel in. In an atomic explosion on earth, either the water (in an underwater test for instance) or the air is pushed aside by the pressure wave with immense strength. The energy will be thus released in heat, radiation and kinetic energy, and the kinetic energy can't advance from one molecule to another in the vacuum of space.

This does bring the question - if we set a giant vacuum sphere afloat in the air and blow up a nuke inside it, what will happen?

well that seems to answer why they don't use nukes then. The shields are gonna stop a bit of radiation and heat aren't they.

[Ned]

Yeah, the Arabs seem united against an invasion. But what about Kuwait and Q'tar? If these are not in our camp, the military situation would be much more difficult.

I think the following from the AP story is telling as to why the Arab states are so opposed to an invasion:

Mideast rulers fear a U.S. attack could create a precedent for their own removal; few can boast the kind of democracy and freedoms that U.S. officials say they want for Iraq.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Originally posted by Ned
Nukes would have, for example, vaporized a Borg cube. So the only way one could have an enormously powerful hostile "race" would be to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Yes, if one can teleport into a Borg cube, why not teleport in there with a 5-MT nuke, and leave without it? That would be hard to regenerate.

Things like that keep me from watching action movies.

[Kassiopeia]

Blah, the point could be dismissed with some technobabble, like the radiation of the nuke interfering with the transporter beam or something else sounding impressive enough... *SoD*

[Kepler]

Star Trek came out at the height of the cold war. The last thing anybody wanted to be reminded of was nuclear weapons, when they figured there was about a 1% chance every morning that everybody would be dead by dusk.

[Q Classic]

besides, they have antimatter (photon) torpedoes... and that genesis project... and that metagenic stuff. it's not like they need nukes when they can make up more powerful stuff...

[Ned]

I think the fact that they wanted to call the ship "Yorktown" speaks enormous volumes. That ship did take a lot of damage but continued to fight on. (But the Enterprise ended up being a "battleship," not an aircraft carrier.)

This put the timeframe of the writer's inspiration squarely in WWII - prior to nuclear weapons.