What conspiracy theories do you believe in? - Put your tinfoil hats on

[Bonesjones]

I don't believe in nuclear bombs. I think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with fire, like the rest of Japan was, and then doused with chemicals to get the kayfabe started. I think the supposed test footage is of big conventional bombs and special effects, and I think that personnel in the range of the tests were hit with chemicals to make it believable.

Trinity is observably a dirty bomb and not a nuclear one.

same problem with moon landing deniers: you wanna tell me the sovs were in on it?

A useful lie is better than the truth, every politician knows.

It’s a bit of circular logic to say that they don’t exist because they haven’t been used and then to ask why they haven’t been used while denying the only time they have been used against a target. Nukes are devastating. The historical context of their use against Japan is one of complete assertion of authority.

The firebombing of Tokyo was way worse than the atomic bomb. The real trick is to explain the observable difference between a dirty bomb (a large explosion doped with nuclear material to spread fallout/radiation) and an atomic/nuclear bomb.

 

[Meriasek]

Trinity is observably a dirty bomb and not a nuclear one.

How so? The flash seems pretty hard to reproduce with a conventional bomb of that magnitude, and the measured 20 kt are also pretty steep to fake with conventional explosives.
There's pre-Trinity footage where they tested 100t of Composition B and while it creates a similarly shaped fireball, the flash is much less pronounced. That one was a dirty bomb, actually, with a bit of radioactive material stuffed into the pile of Comp B to disperse it for testing purposes.

 

[Bonesjones]

How so? The flash seems pretty hard to reproduce with a conventional bomb of that magnitude, and the measured 20 kt are also pretty steep to fake with conventional explosives.

There's pictures of the test that shows huge piles of explosives in boxes. Also a lot of footage is models (the houses being blown up). Measured by who exactly?

 

[Meriasek]

There's pictures of the test that shows huge piles of explosives in boxes. Also a lot of footage is models (the houses being blown up). Measured by who exactly?

The huge pile of explosives is from the earlier rehearsal test I mentioned with 100t of Composition B. There's video footage of that as well and there's a clear difference.
Don't know about model footage, some footage looks like models due to the cameras having a narrow depth of field and odd combinations of field of view and so on, which is because they use weird optics since the cameras were in protected bunkers and so on.
The yield was measured/estimated via proxy, using radiological samples to estimate the efficiency of the fission and thus the yield. That's the most common method of measuring weapon yield, although other methods exist like measuring the strength of the shock wave, the brightness of the fireball (used by satellites), or seismological data. The Trinity test was obviously measured by the Los Alamos people. They recently brought out some Trinitite from storage and tested the samples again, now estimating 24 kt yield for Trinity.

 

[Dang dirty Pidgeons!]

Trinity is observably a dirty bomb and not a nuclear one.

A useful lie is better than the truth, every politician knows.

The firebombing of Tokyo was way worse than the atomic bomb. The real trick is to explain the observable difference between a dirty bomb (a large explosion doped with nuclear material to spread fallout/radiation) and an atomic/nuclear bomb.

In October 1947, a local health care provider raised an alarm about infant deaths downwind of the Trinity test, bringing it to the attention of radiation safety experts working for the US nuclear weapons program. Their response misrepresented New Mexico’s then-unpublished data on health effects. Federal and New Mexico data indicate that between 1940 and 1960, infant death rates in the area downwind of the test site steadily declined—except for 1945, when the rate sharply increased, especially in the three months following the Trinity blast. The 21 kiloton explosion occurred on a tower 100 feet from the ground and has been likened to a “dirty bomb” that cast large amounts of heavily contaminated soil and debris—containing 80 percent of the bomb’s plutonium—over thousands of square-miles. (See Figure 1.)

I think you've read the same article but never heard about the concepts of ground-and airburst.
So, I, for one, now have a conspiracy theory about your reading comprehension.

The firebombing of Tokyo was way worse than the atomic bomb.

Agreed. Nothing rivals it's scale.

The real trick is to explain the observable difference between a dirty bomb (a large explosion doped with nuclear material to spread fallout/radiation) and an atomic/nuclear bomb.

Bright blinding flash, emp, Gamma burst... The works. As mentioned above.
The actual equipment, like those old satellites, to measure and detect nukes might be something of interest to you.

 

[Osmosis Jones]

The firebombing of Tokyo was way worse than the atomic bomb. The real trick is to explain the observable difference between a dirty bomb (a large explosion doped with nuclear material to spread fallout/radiation) and an atomic/nuclear bomb.

The difference is show of force (we only need a few atom bombs or one dirty bomb to do the work of dozens or hundreds of firebombs) vs the use of a dirty bomb which would’ve had devastating consequences for Japan and likely would have escalated the war.

We’re really reaching on this whole nuclear bombs aren’t real thing. I’m open to any ideas but the conjecture doesn’t illustrate a world where they simply don’t exist. There’s a big difference between nukes being played up and not being real at all. If it’s all special effects and conventional weaponry being misrepresented, that’s all the more reason for countries at war to use them as a show of force given that they wouldn’t actually have the same devastating consequences as what is claimed. If the implication is that the real threat is dirty bombs, then we’re kinda back at square one where nukes do exist but now we’re calling them something else with no other facts of the matter changed. We’re both talking about a weapon capable of total destruction on an unimaginable scale. The general idea of nuclear war doesn’t really change whether it’s high yield, low fallout atomic bombs or dirty bombs. We are both speaking of the threat of - essentially - extinction. Just on different timelines.

 

[Dang dirty Pidgeons!]

which would’ve had devastating consequences for Japan and likely would have escalated the war.

No offense, but for the japs there wasn't anything left to escalate with. It was only about the mentioned show of force to the rest of the world (not only the japs) and they didn't want soviet aligned or ... gasp... neutral japan happening. I'm not sure about the detes anymore but I know that the japs were already doing peace talks with the sovs and then kaboom: "better talk to us, if you want peace, suckers!"

The general idea of nuclear war doesn’t really change whether it’s high yield, low fallout atomic bombs or dirty bombs. We are both speaking of the threat of - essentially - extinction. Just on different timelines.

Hm, maybe high yield, air burst fused nukes are way less "toxic" than we are lead to believe, maybe our governments are palying up the "extinction" thing because, well, on the short term scale wiping cities like tokyo or L.A. with one shot is basically enough to trash the respective nation which to the leaders is pretty much their extinction event ... but maybe, just maybe nukes actually aren't as dangerous as we are ought to believe ... maybe it's just convenient to have public perceptions that way. Maybe the real danger are nuclear plant meltdowns and dirty bombs (and ground burst fused ones). That would explain why they, in fact, are always playing with fire to degrees which aren't really understandable, if we are really looking at the total extinction of every living thing.
Think bay of the pigs or that ongoing ukraine insanity.
Hey, gotta pay thread tax somehow.

 

[Screamer_2]

Nukes not being real seems like a conspiracy that would only come from ignorance. There's plenty of evidence of nuclear bombs being blown up beyond the ones dropped in Japan or early US tests.

 

[Fek]

I adore this thread when we land on a topic that really tests the limits of people's ability to humor it. It's actually matured a great deal from the early days in how it gets handled, too.

 

[Osmosis Jones]

I adore this thread when we land on a topic that really tests the limits of people's ability to humor it. It's actually matured a great deal from the early days in how it gets handled, too.

Anything real and provable can withstand any amount of skepticism, therefore anything deserves the maximum amount of skepticism. Reality is supposedly infallible. What you see is what you get. For all I haven’t seen and have been told of in this lifetime, I have many reasons to ask and few reasons to answer. Those who are not open to skepticism and questioning are living in the false reality while the rest of us live in the unending ebb and flow of the truth. So much is ephemeral in this era and perhaps it has always been for man to be so concerned with inhumane things. I don’t really entertain the conspiratorial outside of conversations online; occasionally I have enough drinks to have light discussion. I stick to this shit here.

My point, I suppose, is that everything is good in moderation except skepticism which should be wildly applied to everything. Skepticism teaches, it grows ideas, reinforces objective reality, and brings us all to a place of individuality. What is more raw than one’s own perspective of our shared experience?

 

[Meriasek]

Nukes not being real seems like a conspiracy that would only come from ignorance. There's plenty of evidence of nuclear bombs being blown up beyond the ones dropped in Japan or early US tests.

Not to mention that if they didn't exist because they can't work, then we must also assume that every single nuclear power plant doesn't work, since fundamental principles of criticality and chain reaction apply there as well. Not quite the same, a nuclear power plant mostly relies on delayed and thermal neutrons, while a bomb uses prompt and fast neutrons.

How does on explain the Tsar Bomba if nuclear bombs don't work? The fission stage was relatively small, but measurable, and the total yield of it was far beyond anything possible with conventional explosives. The shock wave was measured at different stations all over the world, and the sheer size just couldn't be faked.
No, nuclear bombs are real, although numbers of functional weapons in arsenals might be lower than officially stated. They're a deterrent, and official numbers do that job as well as actively working bombs. But I don't doubt that a significant number of functional bombs still exist.

 

[Bonesjones]

The yield was measured/estimated via proxy, using radiological samples to estimate the efficiency of the fission and thus the yield. That's the most common method of measuring weapon yield, although other methods exist like measuring the strength of the shock wave, the brightness of the fireball (used by satellites), or seismological data. The Trinity test was obviously measured by the Los Alamos people.

Someone complained about circular logic but there it is again, "the people who did the test claimed it, so it's true".

The huge pile of explosives is from the earlier rehearsal test I mentioned with 100t of Composition B. There's video footage of that as well.

I've spent the past few hours casually watching nuclear test footage and it all seems to start after the explosion. Which I find suspicious. There's proof they were doing film editing with a car appearing behind a house.

The yield was measured/estimated via proxy, using radiological samples to estimate the efficiency of the fission and thus the yield. That's the most common method of measuring weapon yield, although other methods exist like measuring the strength of the shock wave, the brightness of the fireball (used by satellites), or seismological data.

So how does any of that differ from using a conventional bomb doped with radioactive material, exactly?

The Trinity test was obviously measured by the Los Alamos people. They recently brought out some Trinitite from storage and tested the samples again, now estimating 24 kt yield for Trinity.

So a bomb even more powerful than the ones that hit Japan didn't damage the wooden buildings half as much?

think you've read the same article but never heard about the concepts of ground-and airburst.

I think you are talking out of your ass.

So, I, for one, now have a conspiracy theory about your reading comprehension.

I have a conspiracy that retards post in this thread because their inherent belief in a world that constantly lies to them can't believe that they would lie to them.

The actual equipment, like those old satellites, to measure and detect nukes might be something of interest to you.

You mean the ones that started popping up about the time they stopped doing above ground

The difference is show of force (we only need a few atom bombs or one dirty bomb to do the work of dozens or hundreds of firebombs) vs the use of a dirty bomb which would’ve had devastating consequences for Japan and likely would have escalated the war.

Hey look at you not knowing what words mean.

We’re really reaching on this whole nuclear bombs aren’t real thing.

Because you said so?

I’m open to any ideas but the conjecture doesn’t illustrate a world where they simply don’t exist.

So find a nuclear explosion that starts with bomb and continues through the whole process. Not an underwater or ground test.

If it’s all special effects and conventional weaponry being misrepresented, that’s all the more reason for countries at war to use them as a show of force given that they wouldn’t actually have the same devastating consequences as what is claimed.

Or it's a useful lie to keep everyone in line and not questioning what's happening.

If the implication is that the real threat is dirty bombs, then we’re kinda back at square one where nukes do exist but now we’re calling them something else with no other facts of the matter changed.

How old are you? You can't be old enough to live through the cold war.

We’re both talking about a weapon capable of total destruction on an unimaginable scale. The general idea of nuclear war doesn’t really change whether it’s high yield, low fallout atomic bombs or dirty bombs. We are both speaking of the threat of - essentially - extinction. Just on different timelines.

Without nuclear weapons the political landscape of post world war 2 is entirely different than what we've been taught.

Nukes not being real seems like a conspiracy that would only come from ignorance. There's plenty of evidence of nuclear bombs being blown up beyond the ones dropped in Japan or early US tests.

Ignorance of what exactly? Just because you start from a position of forcing the government and associates to prove their claims is the opposite of ignorance.

My point, I suppose, is that everything is good in moderation except skepticism which should be wildly applied to everything.

Unless it's distrusting the government, then you'd be a moron to do so.

Not to mention that if they didn't exist because they can't work, then we must also assume that every single nuclear power plant doesn't work, since fundamental principles of criticality and chain reaction apply there as well.

Nuclear radioactivity doesn't preclude nuclear weapons being real.

Not quite the same, a nuclear power plant mostly relies on delayed and thermal neutrons, while a bomb uses prompt and fast neutrons.

Hey look you contradict yourself.

How does on explain the Tsar Bomba if nuclear bombs don't work?

Thermobaric weapons have been known and used since World War 1.

The fission stage was relatively small, but measurable, and the total yield of it was far beyond anything possible with conventional explosives.

Or they just lied, who was there to know?

The shock wave was measured at different stations all over the world, and the sheer size just couldn't be faked.

Why would you need to fake a pile of explosives?

No, nuclear bombs are real, although numbers of functional weapons in arsenals might be lower than officially stated. They're a deterrent, and official numbers do that job as well as actively working bombs. But I don't doubt that a significant number of functional bombs still exist.

Seems like you are trying to convince yourself more than anything.

I don't disbelieve in them but I find how lacking everything is when you start with the attitude "prove it to me". Look at how self referential all of your explanations are.

 

[I'm a Silly]

FWIW I don't need to definitively prove or have it proven to me that the conventional understanding of nuclear deterrence is based on a lie since I don't believe in the Holocaust. Once one sheds the biggest lie of the 20th century, everything else is dwarfed by that shadow. As has been argued previously, the variations on if or when a moon landing might have occurred are similar to the variations on exactly how much of a threat nukes are. There is nuance, but the bottom line is that I don't accept anything whole cloth.

 

[JustSomeDong]

We're getting close the flat earth levels of stupid in this thread ...
Like if /pol/ and /x/ had a gay, retarded baby.

And I'm enjoying it.

 

[Meriasek]

So how does any of that differ from using a conventional bomb doped with radioactive material, exactly?

Specific decay chains that only happen during fission reactions, not during natural decay.

I've spent the past few hours casually watching nuclear test footage and it all seems to start after the explosion. Which I find suspicious. There's proof they were doing film editing with a car appearing behind a house.

I think I know what you mean. That's not Trinity, though, that's Apple 2 from Operation Teapot. The common footage is cut together of sequences when they were setting up the test houses and then from actual test footage. You can also see how the lighting/exposure changes drastically, from clear skies being visible to the sky being pitch black. The flash is extremely intense and the fireball remains very bright for quite a bit, so the cameras have to run very low exposure.

So a bomb even more powerful than the ones that hit Japan didn't damage the wooden buildings half as much?

Trinity didn't have any test houses. Again, those famous video segments of houses being blown apart were from Operation Teapot in 1955.
And the surviving houses were like 3km away from Ground Zero (with Apple 2 detonated around 150 m above ground).

Nuclear radioactivity doesn't preclude nuclear weapons being real.

It's not just radioactivity, it's chain reactions, neutron cross sections, decay chains, mass defect. There's a shitload of nuclear physics in there that is not secret at all that feeds both nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs, and if nuclear bombs don't work, then nuclear reactors don't, either.

Thermobaric weapons have been known and used since World War 1.

Not on that scale, see below. Also, pretty sure proper thermobaric weapons came to be after WWII.

Hey look you contradict yourself.

Not a contradiction. The same principles apply, it's the same nuclear physics, but nuclear reactors use a different spectrum of it than nuclear bombs because you want to control the reaction, while in a nuclear bomb you want as much material to go through the chain reaction as possible. It's still all about neutron budget and cross sections and reaction chains, reactors and bombs just use different spectra. Delayed neutrons in a reactor, prompt neutrons in a bomb. Moderated/thermal neutrons in most reactors, fast neutrons in a bomb. Low enriched uranium in a reactor, highly enriched plutonium in a bomb. It's like, dunno, an LED lamp and a computer chip. They work on fundamentally the same semiconductor physics, but the details and applications are quite different.

Or they just lied, who was there to know?

The effects of the shockwave were measured all over the world, the glare was visible in Alaska, and the overall size of the mushroom cloud and ionising effects were just too large to be anything but an absolutely massive thermonuclear bomb.
Speaking of glare and clouds, you could see those from the Nevada test site in Las Vegas. They actually made it a tourist spectacle.

Why would you need to fake a pile of explosives?

I meant that you can't create an explosion of that scale without nuclear energy. The largest conventional explosion on record is the Halifax Eplosion with around 2.9 kt TNT equivalent. That's in the range of some tactical nukes and even suitcase nukes. Trinity was nearly 20 times as large. Tsar Bomba, at 50 Mt, was like 15000 times as big. The big pile of explosives you saw in the pre-Trinity test footage, that's 100 t. The Halifax Explosion took a big-ass freighter full of ammunition. And while any large explosion will create a mushroom cloud, no conventional explosion can replicate the very distinct and significant flash of a nuclear weapon.

Seems like you are trying to convince yourself more than anything.

I don't disbelieve in them but I find how lacking everything is when you start with the attitude "prove it to me". Look at how self referential all of your explanations are.

Nah, by gut feeling I'd say the official numbers are true, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're exaggarated at this point in time.
As for "self-referential", I don't know what to tell you. Nuclear physics involves a lot of indirect measurements due to the nature of what you're trying to measure (for example: neutron flux in a reactor core. It's actually quite complicated to get a good 3D reading throughout the reactor, and one method currently employed in EPR type reactors uses nickel balls slowly going through tubes through the reactor, and measuring their neutron activation, because it's actually surprisingly hard to measure neutrons [because, well, they're electrically neutral, so all the usual fancy ionisation tubes and shit don't work that well]), and it's all quite complicated in terms of safety as well. Measuring nuclear weapons is worse, because those fuckers are quite destructive to any measurement equipment close enough for good data acquisition. It's kinda in their nature.

 

[Perun]

We're getting close the flat earth levels of stupid in this thread ...
Like if /pol/ and /x/ had a gay, retarded baby.

And I'm enjoying it.

for once it's something a little different than "the thing TPTB claim happened totally happened but slightly different" and you complain.
ETA you didn't complain lmao sorry I didn't read the spoiler
anyway I thought questioning the nukes was common, i came across sites for that when i was a kid, wasn't there also a book by a japanese dude questioning the nukes, i forget the name.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

As mentioned earlier, what if crazy theories -- like "moon landings were faked", "earth is flat", "coof is 5G", "reptilian aliens are ruling this world in secret", etc -- were cooked up to make more realistic "conspiracy theories" look more ridiculous by association?



To me it's dubious that crazy theories are always made up that way though. People can easily make up really crazy stuff on their own.

 

[12345]

We live in a historical apocalypse simulator and the apocalypse is social media.

Usually in end of the world media whatever killed everyone didn't exist, until it did. Most zombie outbreaks have similar rules; regardless of how infectious, or how people turn into zombies shoot them in the head and they die. But right at the start people don't know it, and they die.

Look at how technology has exploded lately. I am writing this on something that used to be the size of a room and has a version I can read it that fits in my pocket.

Anyone of a certain age remember what it was like before the internet and social media?

 

[MAAAD]

One of the ways to determine how likely a conspiracy might be is to consider its scale factor: in general, the more people supposed conspiracy involves, the less likely it is to be because sooner or later, someone WILL spill the beans. E.g.: the Earth isn't flat even if we assume all the evidence of otherwise is fake because for it to be flat, it'd have to imply that every single person to ever interact with space both theoretically and in practice is in on it - every single employee of every single space agency along with all of the independent astronomers and other scientists to have ever existed throughout history. That's hundreds of thousands of people if not millions all over the globe, which makes the conspiracy unrealistically bloated and thus debunked via extreme unlikelihood.
This is exactly the case with "nuclear bombs don't exist" conspiracy: even if you discard all of the evidence that says otherwise like a stubborn retard, you're still left with millions of soldiers, scientists, engineers and politicians to have ever lived throughout the last ~70 years, often from the countries that opposed/oppose each other, supposedly scaremongering each other and their fellow countrymen about stuff that doesn't even exist.
To back my words up with a non-hypothetical example: as of 2013, NSA has only been spying on the US citizens for maybe a decade and employed only ~35k people at the time yet already had a whistleblower (Snowden) appear and ruin the secrecy.

 

[AnOminous]

Reality is supposedly infallible. What you see is what you get.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” Phil Dick