Victoreen CDV-700

Victoreen CDV-700 Geiger counter. Working condition off Ebay. User Manual [PDF] I've wanted a geiger counter ever since I took the Atomic Energy Merit badge as a Boy Scout.

Book Review: "In Mortal Hands"

In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age

I firmly believe that all practicing engineers should read at least one 'engineering disaster' book a year. It's been a little while for me.

The first ~100 pages are not worth reading. It's a poor synopsis of Richard Rhodes and I liked the original better. You need to skip to about the 1970's before the book gets worthwhile (although the Israeli bomb chapter is excellent).

The author was a journalist covering the nuke industry and once she gets closer to what she directly covered in her interviews with first-hand witnesses, the book improves dramatically. The best parts is her coverage of the regulation of the civilian nuclear industry. For example, Victor Stello over-protected the industry (to its detriment), while others at the NRC did their jobs.

Some of my other favorite stories:

* The (sad) story of a Chernobyl firefighter and his pregnant wife.

* The cataloging of the costs of failed experiments in reprocessing and breeder reactors.

* The story of Remy Carle at his graduation from Ecole Polytechnique.

* Western nations really only care about nuclear proliferation when it's convenient (and because of that, have, in the past, helped out 'rogue' states like North Korea and Iran much more than they'd like to admit). For instance, the United States KNEW Saddam was using a $500 million agricultural loan to fund his bomb program, but, despite please from those overseeing the program, continued funding it (not necessarily out of nefarious intentions, probably just bureaucratic laziness).

Overall, I got what I was looking for out of it. Even the book's biggest flaw (the beginning) is not much of a flaw, because I'm comparing it to a Pulitzer Prize winning book.

UPDATE- One of the stories from the book is MOSSAD's theft of uranium from Pennsylvania. Apparently, that story can now pretty definitively be but in the "True" column.

Bunch o' Book Reviews

It's been a while since I did a book review, but since I finished the P.E. exam and don't have any grad school (yet), I've been filling my time with book and depleted my "to read" pile.

Here are a whole bunch of quick reviews (with covers from Good Reads):


The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.
Loved it. Exhaustive technical coverage of the making of the bomb. It teaches lots of physics and project management. I wish I had read this book when I was in college. Rhodes has a writing style I really like. I've picked up Dark Sun and The Twilight of the Bombs. I've read Twilight of the Bomb and that one covers more of the political side (although the part where the IAEA tracks down the pieces and parts of Iraq's nuclear program is fantastic). Nuclear Renewal is dated crap and is to be avoided.


Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans by James Gill.
Fantastic. A must-read to understand New Orleans history and why New Orleans society is structured the way it is. There was a speech in one of the last Treme episodes where the old plutocrat describes how each successive generation tried to keep the next one down ('until the Standard Oil men left for Houston').


One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander by Sandy Woodward.
The Falklands War was a surprisingly nasty little war that everyone has sort of forgotten about (partly because the US was incredibly embarrassed by it; the Reagan administration loved the staunchly anti-communist Junta and the Brits, of course were Robin to our Batman). Woodward gives a lot of credit to the 'Argies' ("We should have realized a country that made great Formula One drivers also made for great fighter pilots"). Had the Argentinians either waited for the British to scrap their carriers or waited for the assembled fleet to fall apart from rust and overdue boiler maintenance, they would have won.


Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 by Leo Marks.
Candice read it and then got me to read it. It's all about SOE's operations and field ciphers. Note that you always hear about Bletchley Park's cryptography, but never allied codes (except for maybe the Navajo codetalkers); that's because the allied codes were crap. One of the German cryptographers wrote a book about "Operation North Pole." The book itself is a bit frustrating at first. There's a lot of discussion about the confusing nature of SOE's command hierarchy. Leo Marks doesn't really understand it (which is the point), but it slows the beginning down. A lot of reviewers also thought it was way too technical, but I thought that was the best part of the book (explaining WOK's and one-time-pads). A very sad ending as well.


The Control of Nature by John McPhee.
I firmly believe that all engineers should read 1 'engineering disaster'-type book per year. I thought that To Engineer Is Human would do it, but I hated the explanation of fatigue failure, so I gave up on the book and moved on. I found the Control of Nature thanks to XKCD and loved it. Like a combination of Rising Tide, Bayou Farewell, and Inviting Disaster. It covers 3 topics: the Atchafalaya/Old River Control Structure, volcanic eruptions in Iceland, and debris flow in Los Angeles. The only drawback was the analogies (5 million gallons per minute is like ______) droned on too many times and I didn't like some of them.


The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer*.
A French/German kid from Alsace-Loraine enlists into the Grossdeuchland Division of the Wermacht. You rarely read histories of the losing army. This is another one Candice got me to read. This is, despite 50 years and the stumbling block of translation, one of the greatest war accounts ever written. Starkly anti-war. Almost the entire book is the long, slow retreat from Stalingrad. You'll be reading the book and you'll get to a part that really just reaches out and grabs you and shakes you. In one part of the book, he remarks how reading war accounts shouldn't be 'in the comfort of your own home, in a nice cozy chair, but instead in a field, cold, starving, tired, standing for hour after hour.'

UPDATE- More random thoughts.

On The Control of Nature: geologists must get pretty cocky around engineers. Geologists study mountain chains being worn down by erosion and here are the engineers proposing 'taming' a river.

On Silk and Cyanide: There's a great quote where Marks is visited by another cryptographer and they talk about political matters and then, as Marks writes, "He paid me the greatest compliment: he got technical." LOVE THAT QUOTE!

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* There's a little controversy about Sajer. Some think the book is a forgery, but I don't find that view very credible, although Sajer admits that it's more of an emotional book than a strictly factual reference. Guy is apparently still alive in Paris.

Nuclear Weapons Testing

After the introduction, the next 5 minutes of the video is an animation of global nuclear explosions through history (over 2,000).

I've been reading through Richard Rhodes' fantastic series of nuclear history. I've read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and I'm rapidly working my way through the "Twilight of the Bomb" book. I've got "Dark Sun" and will get to "Arsenals of Folley." Richard Rhodes is a fantastic writer and a great researcher. The first book, about Trinity, Little Boy, and Fat man, was written in the early 80's, and the last book was published just last year. That's an amazing stretch of attention to one topic.

Just wanted to post the video for now.

Notes on the Nobel Committee

So, Obama has won the Nobel prize. Here are a couple of reactions I'd like to highlight:

I tried to get Oprah an Olympics and all they gave me was this lously meaningless medal. Warmongering, pro-torture, U.S. President inexplicably awarded a prize for "Peace"

It's the last thing he really needs.

It's a joke.

I'll point out that there's a big divide between the hard science-based Nobels and the awarding of the "soft" category (economics, politics) awards. Albert Einstein never won a Nobel prize for relativity. The science panel wasn't sure the theory was valid, so they awarded it to Einstein for his work on the photoelectric effect.

The "soft" awards tend to go for "trendy" subjects. Probably the worst overall call was giving the guys behind Long Term Capital Management a Nobel Prize in economics (they almost took down the entire global marketplace not long after). As many on the right have pointed out, giving the award to the likes of Yassir Arafat didn't exactly help out the award's prestige. To their credit, there was a brief time that it looked like the Oslo Accords could be the equivalent to the Camp David Accords. Not long after that, though, Arafat was back to blowing up school buses.

Many on the left screamed when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. "Irony is dead," was the quote. Christopher Hitchens has demolished anything that was left of his legacy (other than horrible, pointless bloodshed).

We'll see how this award turns out in a few years.

UPDATE- More to ponder:

Why Obama's Nobel Prize is Good for America. By Bill O'Reilly.

Why the Nobel Peace Prize Should Go to Nuclear Weapons

Book Review: Limits of Safety

The Limits of Safety : Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons


It's the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bombers sit fully armed at the end of the runway, awaiting the order to penetrate Russian airspace. At night, a sentry sights a man climbing over the fence. He shoots at the saboteur and sounds the alarm. Linked alarms go off at several nearby airbases, except one alarm isn't the sabotage alert klaxon, it's the alarm to launch the bombers. Crews pile into their aircraft and the bombers trundle down the taxiways. All of a sudden, lights appear on the runway. It's the base commander in a jeep flashing its headlights. He's called over to the other base and found out the situation and stops the bombers.

The saboteur was a grizzly bear.

This true story (I'm paraphrasing actually, you can read a sample on Google Books) starts a very interesting book analyzing US handling of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. How the Air Force (and Navy) handled The Bomb is used to teach all sorts of aspects of Safety/Reliability Engineering, from High Reliability Theory, to Complex Systems.

For a book primarily aimed at academic audiences, it's pretty readable. True stories of how we almost set the world on fire keep it interesting. There's also plenty of examples of robustness in the system, too. Taleb in the Black Swan mentioned the one group he's come in contact with that had the most robust view of risk was military officers (far better than bank officers).

I'm now working for a new client and the book should prove useful. This client is so anal-retentive about safety they have pee coloration charts above the urinals to tell whether or not you're dehydrated. This isn't for offshore workers, either. This is for downtown officeworkers.

Note: Image and title link lead to Good Reads.

The Letter of Last Resort

Facinating article in Slate about a "Doomsday Letter" given to each nuclear submarine commander.

This letter was written by each Prime Minister of Britain. It was to be opened only in case of a surprise, all-out attack by the Soviets. The question is, what did it contain?

The very presence of the letter undermines the Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence strategy. If there's a 50/50 chance of escaping retaliation, an enemy might risk an attack. The author claims that Thatcher and Reagan were committed to launching a retaliatory strike no matter what.

If you were writing the letter, would you say, "Nuke 'em" or "Let 'em Live?"