Season 8, Episode 1: This Is Not a Place of Honor (Patreon)

Season 008(3) has begun as we revisit Episode 1 of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, 「終わりなき追撃」/ "Endless Pursuit," the episode so nice we podcasted about it twice.

Show Notes

Comparing the 60,000 Megaton Colony-Drop to Bomb Yields

• Prior MSB episode that touched on similar questions.
• Wikipedia page about the Tsar Bomba, the largest bomb ever detonated at 50 Megatons, and several articles:
  
  Alex Wellerstein, An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world's biggest nuclear bomb, published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 29, 2021. Available at https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-story-of-the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-bomb/
  
  Tsar Bomba, by the Atomic Heritage Foundation, August 8, 2014. Available at https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/tsar-bomba/
• Articles about US Bomb Tests and Craters:
  
  Cold War Craters, published by the United States Geological Survey, available at https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/cold-war-craters
  
  Nuclear Bombs on the Coral Reef, published by the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, available at https://ocean.si.edu/holding-tank/technology/nuclear-bombs-coral-reef
  
  Mindy Weisberger, Enormous Craters Blasted in Seafloor by Nuclear Bombs Mapped for the First Time, published by Space.com, December 11, 2019. Available at https://www.space.com/mapping-reveals-bikini-atoll-nuclear-craters.html
• How blast craters form:
  
  Shock Effects of Surface and Subsurface Bursts, from The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977). Compiled and edited by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan. Available at https://atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasstone-dolan/chapter6.html
  
  H. F. Cooper, Jr., Estimates of crater dimensions for near-surface explosions of nuclear and high-explosive sources, published by U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information, September 1, 1976. Available at https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6696719
  
  Harold L. Brode, Review of Nuclear Weapons Effects, published by the RAND Corporation, 1968. Available at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ns.18.120168.001101
• Wikipedia's list of impact craters, and helpful articles for comparing the 500km crater to other large craters on Earth:
  
  Donavyn Coffey, What are the largest impact craters on Earth?, published by Live Science, February 15, 2022. Available at https://www.livescience.com/largest-asteroids-to-hit-earth
  
  Bevan M. French, Target Earth: Present, Past, and Future from Traces of Catastrophe, published by the Lunar and Planetary Institute, 1998. Available at https://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/books/CB-954/chapter2.pdf.
• Articles specifically about the Vredefort impact structure:
  
  Kathryn Hansen, Vredefort Crater, published by NASA's Earth Observatory, June 27, 2018. Available at https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/92689/vredefort-crater
  
  The Largest Impact Crater on the Planet, by GeologyHub on YouTube, available at https://youtu.be/py5r5pdg-I0
  
  David Fleminger, The Vredefort Impact, published by South Africa Online, https://southafrica.co.za/vredefort-impact.html
  
  Robert S. Dietz, Vredefort Ring Structure: Meteorite Impact Scar?, published by The Journal of Geology, September 1961. Available at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/626768
• And the Chicxulub Crater:
  
  Sharpton, V L, and L E Marin. “The Cretaceous-Tertiary impact crater and the cosmic projectile that produced it.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences vol. 822 (1997): 353-80. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1997.tb48351.x
• On estimating the number and power of nuclear weapons in the world:
  
  Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance, published by the Arms Control Association, January 2022. Available at https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat.
  
  Wikipedia articles listing nuclear weapons, and discussing historical nuclear weapon stockpiles and nuclear tests by country.
  
  Joe Phelan, How Many Nuclear Weapons Exist, and Who Has Them?, published by Scientific American, March 22, 2022. Available at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-many-nuclear-weapons-exist-and-who-has-them/
• American nuclear bombs:
  
  William J. Broad, The Surprising Afterlife of Unwanted Atom Bombs, published by the New York Times, November 17, 2022. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/science/retired-nuclear-bombs-b83.html
  
  The B83 (Mk-83) Bomb, published by the Nuclear Weapons Archive, November 11, 1997. Available at https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/B83.html.
• Russian nuclear bombs, including rumored mega-nukes:
  
  Seth J. Frantzman, What nuclear weapons does Russia have in its arsenal?, published by the Jerusalem Post, October 1, 2022. Available at https://www.jpost.com/international/article-718698.
  
  H. I. Sutton, Russia’s New ‘Poseidon’ Super-Weapon: What You Need To Know, published by Naval News, March 3, 2022. Available at https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/03/russias-new-poseidon-super-weapon-what-you-need-to-know/
  
  Steven Weintz, Status-6: Why Russia's 100-Megaton Nuclear Torpedo Is Truly Terrifying, published by the National Interest, October 17, 2018. Available at https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/status-6-why-russias-100-megaton-nuclear-torpedo-truly-terrifying-33661.
  
  Alex Hollings, Russia's Massively Powerful Nukes are Strategic Duds, published by Sandboxx, December 6, 2021. Available at  https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/russias-massively-powerful-nukes-are-strategic-duds/.

The recap music is “80's Synth Rock (Guitar Improvisation)” by Zombie-Fish.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

You can learn more about Lenapehoking, the Lenape people, and ongoing efforts to honor the relationship between the land and indigenous peoples by visiting the websites of the Delaware Tribe and the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. Listeners in the Americas and Oceania can learn more about the indigenous people of your area at https://native-land.ca/. We would like to thank The Lenape Center for guiding us in creating this living land acknowledgment.

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