Talk:RAF Lakenheath nuclear weapons accidents

Mistake in text

"Together, the conventional explosives in the three Mark-6 bombs alone had the potential to produce an explosion greater than all of the bombs dropped in the Second World War."

That's obviously not true, but I don't have access to the cited source to be able to bring it into line.

2A02:C7F:7A4D:C300:D45F:4B4E:E96C:B5EE (talk) 00:49, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

That's what the source provided says. It states "...underlined by the fact that, together, the three Mark 6 nuclear bombs stored in the Lakenheath igloo had the potential to produce an explosion greater than all of the bombs dropped in the Second World War". See here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0YXSBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=three%20mark%206&f=false (the first search result). Snugglewasp (talk) 11:15, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Nonsense claim in the text

The text claims that an explosion involving depleted uranium would have caused a "Chernobyl-like incident." This has no factual basis, reads like the worst kind of tabloid journalism, and if no-one objects, I propose to delete it. Chernobyl involved an explosion at a nuclear reactor using ENRICHED uranium (2%) that scattered radioactive by-products of a nuclear reaction in that uranium (including Iodine-131 Strontium-90 and Caesium-137) across the northern hemisphere. This has absolutely no similarity with an explosion involving depleted uranium.

I agree the sentence should be altered; I think it may be appropriate to re-word the sentence so as to merely say: "Had any of the bombs exploded, the resulting explosion would have scattered depleted uranium over a wide area." and remove the Chernobyl reference. Done Us All Good (talk) 11:02, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

That would be a reasonable (and much more accurate!) conclusion Theeurocrat (talk) 11:14, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Reverted edit

Done Us All Good explains: "The lede is there to summarise the existing content in the body". Yes, but this sentence is not a summary, it is the same (frankly nonsensical, given the science on DU) quote repeated. Moreover, if you wish to have this in the lede, the citation/ end note should appear there as well. Theeurocrat (talk) 10:43, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

No, leads should not have references or citations in them, if it can be avoided. It doesn't need to be referenced again when it is already referenced in the body. It doesn't matter if it's the same sentence that's in the body, the lede is a short summary and overview of the most important parts of the body content, so some repetition is inevitable. Done Us All Good (talk) 10:58, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough on the cite, but I can see no justification for giving such pre-eminence to a quote that doesn't come from a scientific source, and appears as patent nonsense to anyone with even basic knowledge of the consequences of nuclear explosions. For instance, the Polygon in Kazakhstan has been subject to more than one hundred above-ground nuclear tests, with many being high-yield ground bursts, and it is very far from being a desert; there are larks and steppe eagles in the sky, many kinds of grass, shrubs, lichens. Nuclear weapons have terrible effects on people and the environment, but emphasising remarks that simply don't make sense will do neither human understanding nor the anti-nuclear cause (which we shouldn't really be promoting here) any good.Theeurocrat (talk) 12:22, 3 July 2021 (UTC)