Questionable Quidity: Swimming Pool Atomic Bomb Shelter -with- Nuclear Weapons Explosion Direction Finder.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1506

Part of the long series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons

At first this patent sounded somewhat reasonable--assuming that you were going to build an in-ground pool, and assuming that you thought that the Soviets were going to be bombing soon, and assuming that you weren't living in an area of the United States that would be pulverized by thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives, then it might actually make sense to build this thing.  At the very least, if you lived in Tornado Alley, the bomb shelter could be very useful in non-bomb but tornado-threatening scenarios.  Of course, you wouldn't have to build anything so substantial (with a pool attached) to survive a tornado attack, but if Uncle was in the cement business, you might as well. 

This next bit might not really belong in the Questionable Quidities department, as it doe shave some real utility for the survivors of nuclear holocaust.  After the explosions are done, and after the firestorms have burned themselves out because there's nothing left to combust and, well, also because the "local" oxygen in the vicinity of the intense fires has been used up, after people have determined that they have survived, it would be important to know from which direction the blast came.  If you know the direction of the explosion, and some of the atmospheric conditions at the time of the blast and immediately following, and had some tech equipment,and medical stuff, you might be able to figure out the coming effects of the attack. What you do with that, I'm not so sure. 

Another major conditional here is that there was only one blast. If the place that was being bombed was worthy of one warhead, it was worthy of more, usually; so the collapsable sphere might be bent in from all directions, if there were two or three blasts, which means I guess that the thing wasn't worth installing to begin with.  ALso, if you're in a vicinity that could require one of these buggers and you were just the recipient of, say, 200 megatons of explosions, and survived the blast, you could probably just reach for your KYAG Handbook to see how many hours you had left on the planet. 

Then again this really wasn't meant as a civilian app. 

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