View From the Bushes

World of Warcraft was released today, and unlike most computer games and nearly all games of this genre (MMORPG), it's available for the Mac. The whole thing makes me want to cash in my 401k and run out and buy a Mac G5 with a 30 inch cinema display (I get weak in the knees just thinking about that big of an LCD). I guess this would be a good time to admit that I was wrong. Quite a while ago I predicted that World of Warcraft would not be released until spring of 2005 -- obviously I was wrong, but I think it's safe to call this a Winter 2004 release, in which case I wasn't off by much.

I was directed to the site nuclearterror.org by Boortz. Of particular interest is an application that will show the effects of a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion on any zipcode. I entered my zipcode, and I have to confess that I was kind of surprised by how small the blast radius was and then I realized that they were only talking about 10 kilotons which is about as small a nuclear weapon as you can get. One feature I would have like to seen is the ability to enter the zipcode and the size of the bomb (and in fact I e-mailed the site maintainer with a suggestion to that effect).

Certainly I'm no nuclear terrorism expert but a 10 kiloton bomb suggests a crude, terrorist manufactured bomb. And while that's certainly one possible scenario, I think equally if not more likely is the scenerio where the terrorists acquire a bomb from a state, possibly one of the Soviet nukes mislaid during the fall of the USSR. One of those bombs is far more likely to be in the 250 kiloton to one megaton range, and believe me, if they showed the radius of effect of one of those bombs no one would be surprised by how small it was.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross