What changes can we make to our lives to deal with the economic and energy crises ahead? Have you already started making preparations? Got tips to share?
clv101 wrote: ↑13 Apr 2023, 23:01
So what are your specific, detailed memories of living through the 1980s?
Living at a near subsistence level in Appalachia isn't the glorious "return to the land!" that some pretend it is. The hunting and trapping were the best parts, and trading labor for riding other farmers horses was a nice memory. Living through Jimmy's residual stagflation wasn't very noticeable to poor people more worried about where their next meal comes from than getting a mortgage with higher interest. New technology came along and suddenly the party line phones up the holler had individual lines instead of having to share. Small motorcycles at first, bigger ones, then breaking my back crashing one, and becoming a racetrack junkie to learn better.
Never worried about nuclear war much, other than feeling at the time that the US should have glassed Tehran over the hostage thing. Never thought much of what a college education was worth back then either other than a way out, but it was certainly cheaper then than when I had to pay for the kids in this century.
The 80s were definitely dominated by Thatcher and her obsession with the 'self' over anything 'community', which she saw as 'socialist'...
The closing down of vast swathes of heavy industry and manufacturing, particularly in the North, the flogging off of virtually every public asset that wasn't nailed down... All funded with the North Sea Oil bonanza...
Most individuals felt themselves get richer, so were happy to go along for the ride... The unemployed, poor, sick, disabled, elderly, etc. were left to fend for themselves the best they could... Personally, I found it quite depressing watching it all happen, powerless to do very much - quite a few similarities with the 2020s really...
The fears of the day were very much nuclear armageddon and AIDS....
The threat of nuclear armageddon is still very much with us, but who would want to survive after a nuclear war....?
HIV is now manageable/treatable - we've now moved on to COVID, but more pandemics will be on the way soon enough....
I am not sure that the unemployed etc in Thatcher's Britain were left to fend completely for themselves. About one third of government expenditure was/is on social security I think. As far as I know the old age pension was never scrapped and although unemployment benefit was made more difficult to get - I know as I found out the hard way one time when my career in the Chemical Industry came to an end - it was never abolished during Margaret's tenure. She sure made lots of mistakes in her quest towards monetarism and supply side economics, ably assisted by the efforts of the EU and the UK civil service but she should take the most blame.
On the subject of prospects of nuclear war in the 1980s I remember someone in two years above my year in school bringing a map showing the effects of a nuclear detonation above Nottingham but since this person, who could be best described as a w**ker, also said that the death of Brezhnev was the greatest blow to world peace in many years I didn't give him much credence. I put my faith in MAD (mutually assured destruction) in that if the Soviets/Russians attack then they will be attacked in retaliation. Where MAD falls down is if the person in control of a country's nukes is actually mad which might make use of them a bit more likely. Iran and North Korea are probably two states where this may be a risk.
I don't recalling being afraid of AIDS as I was probably too young to be running a risk of getting it until the causes and preventions were well known. Not being blessed with Film Star good looks and being short and fat was also a good means of AIDS prevention in my youth but I digress.
Potemkin Villager wrote: ↑07 Mar 2023, 19:13
Ah yes the tritium Achilles heel!
My understanding is that a nuclear bomb would still detonate in the absence of any Tritium, but that the explosion could be delayed by a random interval of some seconds.
For a weapon delivered by air, this could be important, if detonation was planned at one kilometre altitude, then the bomb might be destroyed by impact before it went off.
A nuclear weapon works by a rapidly increasing chain reaction, but requires a small radiation source to provide the first reaction in the chain. Tritium is often used. In the absence of any tritium, the chain reaction would be initiated by natural background radiation, this could take some seconds.
"Installers and owners of emergency diesels must assume that they will have to run for a week or more"
According to Wikipedia tritium is a neutron source as well as a booster. It's a source of neutrons which initiate the fission of U-235 or Pu-239. More neutrons more quickly from tritium means more fissile material gets fissioned (a bigger bang) before the bomb blows itself apart.
I think an incomplete nuclear explosion is called a fizzler in industry parlance. North Korea had quite a few in their testing. I would expect the scientists behind the North Korean fizzlers were probably executed.
Nothing in a nuclear bomb takes seconds. All the nuclear physics has to happen *faster* than physical forces blow the thing apart. It's quite a thing to get your head around. A nuclear bomb involves first a chemical explosion, then before the device is destroyed a fission explosion occurs, then again, before the physical shock wave of that has even travelled a foot or two along the bomb's structure the fusion explosion occurs.
Supposedly the 'implosion' type fission weapon had to be perfected for precisely those reasons. The plutonium core would fizzle if it was rendered critical by the 'gun' type mechanism. As it was, the Uranium weapon used at Hiroshima, was very inefficient in its fissioning percentage as it used the gun type mechanism and this was never used again for US nukes.
