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Whole World on Fire
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Whole World on Fire focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war?U.S. bombing in World War II caused massive fire damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later war plans took account only of damage fr
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Paperback, 384 pages
Published
March 30th 2006
by Cornell University Press
(first published November 21st 2003)
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We can only imagine the damage that a nuclear weapon can cause, we can read articles and hear news about it but we not fully understand all the effects of a nuclear weapon. We are not scientist and we are not military so it is ok for us not to understand completely the damage that it cause We believe that the military and the scientist involved in that area (that study the effects, that design the weapons, etc.) know.
In the book ‘Whole World on Fire’, Lynn Eden shows how the US government undere ...more
In the book ‘Whole World on Fire’, Lynn Eden shows how the US government undere ...more

"The rapid scale-up of thermal radiation has strong implications for damage prediction. Because thermal radiation increases more rapidly than does blast overpressure, in higher-yield weapons mass fire ignition and resulting damage would occur to a distance beyond that of significant blast damage. For nuclear weapons of approximately 100 kilotons or more, fire damage would occur far beyond the perimeter of the blast damage; blast damage would be engulfed by the effects of mass fire.
However, the d ...more
However, the d ...more

Useful examination of institutional knowledge systems, and particularly the self-reinforcing way certain topics can gain traction at the exclusion of others. Read in the context of wildland fire, it tells a very peculiar side of the story (e.g., not surprising that wildland foresters weren't terribly interested in modelling Eden's pet topic, nuclear firestorms, given they were mostly interested in different kinds of fires), but one that will be of interest to nuclear weapons buffs.
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