The N-word
Rule 1 of superpower geopolitics: don't drop the N-word.
I’ve been planning to drop this one for the entirety of last year 2022, yet never got around to actually finishing it. Luckily, the events have not overtaken me yet either, so I am not too late to make calls before everyone learns the truth the hard way. So, let’s talk about the N-word.
One of the, in public consciousness at least, most important doctrines of top-level geopolitics is the one of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The premise is simple; a full-out armed conflict between global superpowers is, in theory, off the table, as any military power holding an arsenal of N-words has capability of turning such a conflict into complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.
There are several points that can be raised against this premise. First of all, this assumes that leaders will take rational actions – which is, truth be told, quite a hefty assumption. Indeed, happenings are almost exclusively triggered by actions that seem irrational or at least grossly misinformed – very rarely does a system get thrown into chaos simply from adiabatic evolution, a quantum tunneling kick out of local equilibrium is required.
However.
Anyone who has at least some knowledge of N-word power, is well-aware that the public hysteria surrounding it is massively overblown. The rules and regulations are ridiculously strict given actual danger; consider for example that commercial flight crews are regularly exposed to larger doses of cosmic radiation than the absolute maximum allowed for N-word plant workers. And yet, while panic about n-word waste (and let’s not forget the horrible N-word fallout!) is widespread, there is no related panic about banning flights at 10km altitude.
N-word blast
It is well-entrenched in public awareness that, if it comes to the situation where you’re in the blast zone of a N-word explosion, you might as well do nothing, for everything in its path is instantly evaporated, and if you somehow manage to survive that, there’s no hope for N-word radiation has irreparably destroyed your cells and you will die a horrible death. And, if that’s not all, the N-word fallout created by the explosion will spread tens of kilometres away, slowly killing everyone in its path with its terrible N-word rays. In general, if you’re in the general area, you’re already dead. After all, we all know well what happened in Japan, 1945, right?
This, however, is blatantly false, and the myth is perpetuated by fallacious arguments of appeal to fear of unknown and pointing at cases which, however, on closer observation, reveal themselves to be exceptional, and conflating first, second, and third order effects as if everything is already doomed the moment N-word blast occurs.
Let us therefore actually examine the reports coming from those two unfortunate Japanese cities after the event.
The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission has published a general report in the aftermath in 1947. The most relevant section for us lies in the appendices: the Appendix 9, Chapter 3 contains a detailed report on observed damage to buildings. The first thing you should notice is the statement: “Outside a radius of 1km from the ground center, there are almost no damages in a concrete building.” The massive widespread damage from the pictures waved around as evidence of horrific destructive strength of dropping the N-word are entirely a consequence of that majority of buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time were flimsy constructions of wood and paper, not just easy to blow apart but also highly flammable.
The damage therefore is of the same nature as that caused by the conventional firebombing of Tokyo 5 months earlier. What should be noted here is that the firebombing of Tokyo accomplished a much more widespread destruction – and more casualties – with “only” 1510 tonnes (that’s 1665 in freedom tons) of explosive. Not TNT, but compare those numbers with the values of 16kt and 21kt yield for Little Boy and Fat Man, respectively. This is to be expected; a higher intensity blast will be an overkill near ground zero, but cannot deliver spread out damage – due to inverse square law (a scaling directly derived from geometrical facts). [erratum: in fact, the blast wave diminishes with inverse cube law, as the pressure wave is a space-filling effect, not a surface-covering effect]
And what about the people inside concrete structures? The report goes on to name a couple examples. Most deaths are noted to have occurred where people worked close to windows facing the blast. However, even just 1km away, the percentage of those who died or suffered from radiation sickness afterwards was in single digits. And in Nagasaki, the N-word was dropped basically on top of a prison, where at the time, workers were digging a hole for sewer construction. 7 out of 50 survived the blast – basically right in ground zero!
From other sources we can also find a story about a church in Hiroshima, slightly less than 1km from ground zero, which “miraculously” protected the Jesuits inside from the blast and radiation. I am sorry to inform all the faithful here who want to soyface at this, but a construction of brick and concrete being impervious to the N-word rays is to be expected.
Steel constructions, however, fared worse – not as badly as wood and paper, but their roofs and walls were blown off and frame deformed, twisted. Workers in factories were not shielded by the structure as well as those inside concrete buildings.
There's of course a big difference between being outside and inside when the N-word is dropped. Why? Because most of the radiation release is blocked by structures. Thermal radiation – which is the cause of burns – is blocked by solid walls instantly, so just duck and avoid being irradiated through the window. And concrete is also a fairly good shield from γ-rays; not as good as lead but still, 15-20% per cm (depending on wavelength.), and similar values for most comparable materials. So your typical 30cm exterior wall will shield you from those pesky N-word rays thousandfold. As long as you stay inside you're good. Even better if you can go further inside so you're also shielded by another interior wall.
But what of the blast itself? How powerful is the pressure wave? Here, we can perhaps draw best comparison by looking at massive volcanic explosions.
Not long ago, a volcano in Tonga spectacularly blew up in a krakatoan explosion. The blast was so enormous that the sound was heard not only in Fiji and New Zealand, but (well, according to a single report) all the way north to Alaska. The pressure wave of this boom was so large that it amplified the tsunami in its wake – and even created a secondary tsunami in the Caribbean Sea when it reached it.
The explosion itself was equivalent to about 30Mt (megatons TNT). On the island of Tonga itself, 60km away, the explosion arrived as a deafening sonic boom – yet no actual direct physical damage to structures was reported from the blast itself. Now, a typical N-word warhead today has yield in the range of several hundred kt – the few very largest in a couple thousands. Assuming a 300 kt yield N-word, for a factor of 0.01x, according to inverse square law (again), the same effects would be observed at 0.1x the distance. In other words, as long as you’re more than 6km away – the blast itself will be harmless.
N-words as area denial
A lot of ideas on N-word strategic use involve using them as an area denial tool. In popular perception, dropping the N-word results in instant glassing of a large area and also turning it into wasteland that kills you if you try to pass through it. Such perception is laughable and based on hysterical fears of N-word radiation (something that has also been detrimental to N-word power generation.)
So, let’s look at N-word testing sites for some on-ground data.
The Sedan Crater in Nevada was the site of an underground N-word explosion experiment conducted in 1962. The main reason for the experiment was exploring the possibility of using N-word power for large scale excavations - mining or large scale engineering, whenever you have to blast away a mountain quickly and efficiently. But, you may ask, wouldn’t that make whatever you blasted away permanently tainted by that pesky N-word radiation and unusable for humans? Well… if one hour after the blast, the radiation at the edge was still 500R/h (Roentgen per hour – quite terrible I’d say), after 27 days that was down to 500mR/h (that’s almost 10x less than 4.6R/h, which is not great but not terrible), and after 167 days, even the ground zero at the bottom of the crater had measured radiation levels of 30mR/h (at which point we can convert the received dose in that hour into the more casual units, and see that it is amounts to about ~350μSv, or equivalent to 3500 bananas). Within 7 months, the bottom of the crater was considered walkable without any protective equipment. And that’s ground zero!
Russians, not to be outdone, followed with their own equivalent test (“Chagan”), in what is now Kazakhstan – of course, aiming for a slightly higher yield of 140kt over Sedan’s 104kt. As if that were not enough, in 1971, three 15kt N-words were detonated along the proposed Pechora-Kama Canal (“Taiga”), which would re-route one of the rivers in the far north of Russia southwards towards the Volga. On both sites, locals are unfazed by the hysteria surrounding N-words. Lake Chagan is a popular fishing spot, and Lake Taiga was visited by a group of environmentalists 30 years after the N-word detonation: they noted that the locals pick up berries and mushrooms (which seemingly love to grow in N-word fallout), as well as scrap metal left around the site, and were appaled at the fact that nobody told the locals that it’s dangerous and that they should all be dying of cancer by now! A more serious report based on measurements from 2009 instead measured N-word radiation levels of between 9 and 70 μSv/week – barely above the average background dose which is estimated to ~3mSv/yr. Even just living at higher altitude (due to cosmic rays) or close to natural geological sources of radiation would be a bigger risk factor – Denver, for example, has background radiation levels of slightly over 10mSv/yr.
So, from both above examples we can see that the extinction of remaining radiation after the blast is relatively fast. We can also learn the same from the case of the two unfortunate Japanese cities, which were rebuilt and became more or less normal functioning cities again by 1949, mere 4 years after N-word holocaust. This is way earlier than hysterical predictions made right after the N-word drop, that “no living thing might grow and live there for at least the coming 70 years.” (There’s more information in the Chapter 4 of that same aforecited appendix.) And what of the cancers, which we’re told would surely befall anyone that dares tread the unhallowed clay? Well… Aside from thyroid cancer caused by absorption of iodine-131 immediately afterwards, no detectable increase has been found anywhere in Ukraine or Belarus.
And, let’s not forget that even though fallout from N-word reactor failures tends to last longer due to longer-lived isotopes, the dreaded Red Forest is today de facto one of the largest nature reserves in Europe – wildlife thriving (unaware of looming N-word threat? or perhaps just unperturbed by myths?) – and so are some villagers who have returned to “The Zone” – seemingly unaffected by the calamity they are exposed to by not only living there but actually consuming fruits and vegetables they grow.
N-word winter
It’s a sick twist of irony that this danger, while arguably possible, is completely unspecific to N-words, as it is instead a consequence of firestorms that would be triggered by massive scorched earth bombing. The exact same effect would be achieved by a widespread enough conventional incendiary weaponry. In fact, it is possible that such man-made climatic disaster has already historically occurred – the 4.2-kiloyear Event.
4200 years ago, during the XXIIth century BC, there was a massive climatic catastrophe that delineates the Northgrippian Age from the current Meghalayan Age. This coincides generally with the start of unbroken written history – as well as downfall of the first civilizations we have records of. This is when the Old Kingdom in Egypt fell, the end of Sumerians, and in China the age of the legendary Xia dynasty that triumphed over the floodwaters.
A paper, however, posits that it is possible the correlation is backwards – that it was the Gutian invasion itself that triggered this climatic catastrophe! The premise is simple; prolonged burning of Mesopotamia has altered the atmosphere enough that snow patterns in Iran and further in Tibet have been disrupted, and this in turn affected the monsoon pattern.
All in all, it doesn’t take a N-word specifically to cause the “N-word winter” – any sufficiently large fire will do the trick. But how large?
Let us now look at the original studies that introduced the idea of N-word winter. There is more than just a single paper related to the model, but most of the work was created by five authors, so the model is usually referred to as TTAPS as an acronym of surnames: Richard P. Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James B. Pollack and – Carl Sagan. It is quite likely that the idea would never become so popular were it not for the S. The ideas were roughly based on correspondence between Sagan and Georgii Golitsyn, who was more interested in how atmospheric dust affects Martian climate, and the model was directly transtaled to Earth’s stratosphere. The first paper came in late 1983, using a simple 1D model, but the model was upgraded to 3D and used to produce quantitative forecast in a 1990 paper. Those predictions were already considerably scaled down – producing media headlines such as “N-word Winter Theorists Pull Back“.
Then, the next year, a combination of circumstances led to an unexpected chance to put the model to a test. As already mentioned, it does not take a N-word fireball to produce this effect; any sufficiently large fire will do. The 1990 paper reiterated the 1983 prediction that as few as 100 oil refineries set on fire could cause a noticeable global cooling effect. Saddam Hussein, apparently intrigued by the predictions of the paper, and highly inquisitively minded, did what every proper scientist would do: design an experiment. So, in order to test whether N-word winter would actually happen according to the TTAPS predictions.
As the Operation Desert Storm rolled in, several hundred oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire by the defending Iraqi army – and yet, as it turned out, the effects on global climate were far off those catastrophic predictions, and hard to even measure. (Though, it needs to be mentioned that later that year, Pinatubo produced a spectacular eruption, which on other hand did produce a measurable drop in temperatures for the next year.) Sagan, who received airtime in January scaring people about prospect of a repeat of post-Tambora Year Without Summer as a consequence of the Gulf War, has soon admitted his predictions were – perhaps a little overblown, though the popular “science” media still regularly reiterate the N-word winter idea to this day.
N-word order
Indeed, it turns out that the biggest deterrent of N-word powers against the use of N-words is not their mythical destructive potential – but, quite contrary, the lack of it thereof. As long as the mystique surrounding their perceived exceptionalism is maintained, they are a far better deterrent than if that illusion was dispelled. The MAD doctrine merely throws dust, not only at the enemy, but at the leaders and politicians of your country themselves – you do not even have to explain to dull-witted administrators the technicalities of the truth, as they are not likely to demand you to demonstrate that show of force anyway.
Only when the benefit that can be gained in a war from dropping the N-word outweighs the cost of revealing that it is a hollow spook, does dropping the N-word become a strategically sound decision.
Took me too much to realize this isnt about the nigger word
But could be a similar essay