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“The Story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” —Winston Churchill
this atomic weapon, code-named Little Boy, detonated over Hiroshima at an altitude of 1,900 feet—an airburst, as it’s known. This was the first nuclear weapon used in battle. Its burst height was based on a figure that had been precisely calculated by the American defense scientist John von Neumann, whose assigned task was to figure out a way to kill the most people possible on the ground below with this single atomic bomb.
The year 1952 saw the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, also called the hydrogen bomb. A two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.
Twenty miles north of the coral-ringed Kure Atoll, floating in the vast North Pacific Ocean more than 1,500 miles from Honolulu, the SBX radar station is a sight to behold. This one-of-a-kind, stadium-sized, seagoing, self-propelled radar station weighs 50,000 tons, requires 1.9 million gallons of gas to run, can withstand thirty-foot-tall waves, is larger than a football field, rises twenty-six stories out of the ocean, requires eighty-six crew members to carry out its mission, and claims to be the most sophisticated phased-array, electro-mechanically steered X-band radar system in the world.
Eighty. Then one hundred. Then 150 million of X’s users log on all at once. The site buckles under the strain. Crashes in entirety. X is now permanently and forever down.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
petaflops
1000 million million. 10 to the 15th.
petabytes
1 million gigabytes.
Après moi, le déluge.
