Actually, in Ben Rich’s Book Skunk Works, there’s a reference to Powers (or possibly another U2 pilot) accidentally popping the glass cyanide pill into his mouth in leiu of the lemon drops he carried in the same pocket.
Said it was a near thing, that he hadn’t bitten down on it.
Don’t know about the destruct for the cameras and film- One might logically assume that a crash from 100,000 feet would pretty well render 'em unrecognizable.
Hrmpf. I’m the only one who read the title and thought “Windows XP”?
As I recall reading in the book MiG Pilot, the MiG-25 that Victor Belenko flew over when he defected in 1975 had a button in it that Belenko and other MiG pilots were told to press before ejecting, should they ever need to. They were told that it would detonate self-destruct charges after the pilot had safely ejected…of course, the MiG pilots all wondered if the Soviet brass were really telling the truth about the “Safe Delay” part. :eek:
Ranchoth
I have a friend who was a cryptographer for the US Army in Viet Nam. He worked in a sealed van with several other guys, and they were not allowed outside during their shift. The van was inside a compound inside a base, and they were surrounded by armed guards. He has told me that all of their equipment was wired with explosives so that everything would be completely destroyed if the base were overrun.
He was telling me about this one day, and one of our other coworkers said that as an MP he guarded one of those crypto vans while stationed in Korea. To the surprise of the first guy, he said that if the base were being taken, their orders were to kill any of the cryto techs that tried to get out, to prevent them from being captured.
I can’t swear to this information, since all cops tend to be bullshitters and one of these guys was a master in that art.
I think DMark may have been referring to Flexplay’s disks, a new attempt at one-time use DVDs. I believe they have a coating that oxidizes within some time after opening the package, so they’re almost completely pointless. (And despite the company’s claim to the contrary, not very innovative – as Tapioca Dextrin pointed out, they were preceded by DivX ( not to be confused with DivX;-) ).
Just to tie in with the whole spy thing, there was a test run of them with Die Another Day, though I don’t know how well it did.
Minor nitpick - the Air Force doesn’t have any model of P-3 Orion in its inventory. That’s a Navy aircraft. The base model is an antisubmarine patrol aircraft, and the EP-3 is the same airframe with some antenna blisters and a lot of electronics crammed into it. “Self-destruct” seems to pretty much consist of corrupting the hard drives, shredding the print-outs, and doing whatever physical damage you can to the equipment.
Of course, for the Chinese Air Force, self-destruct apparently consists of doing something stupid and smacking your supersonic jet fighter into a huge, slow, lumbering, prop-driven electronic surveillance aircraft over international waters…
Funny you should mention that. Beta/Trial/Demo software applications have a time bomb mechanism in them. In the older days, it was simply shutting down after a certain date so you could get around it by changing the date on your computer, but the newer ones are designed to time out, for example, after 30 days from installation. If you try and use it after that you’ll get an alert “This 30 day trial version has expired. Please buy the full version blah blah blah.”
In the “I Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny” department, there was an interview in Discover magazine some years back with a scientist who was working with a substance that when cooled to something like -180F could be used in place of magnetic media in computer harddrives. While the scientist claimed to be only in the early stages of research on this substance, the interviewer pointed out that the scientist had been working on classified projects for the military for some time now, and that the rumor was that military aircraft already had these harddrives installed. The beauty of this system is that if the plane crashes, the harddrive heats up to ambient air temps and erases itself utterly. The scientist mentioned he’d heard of that rumor, but pointed out that due to reasons of national security he couldn’t comment on it.
It turns out that Enigma machines did have a self destruct mechanism (of sorts). The machines were pretty much useless without the code books, and the code books (at least in the Navy) were printed using water soluble ink.
Well im no nuclear scientist, but my B.S. meter went way off when i read this post. There is not a chance in hell that every human on this earth has traces from 2 lbs of radioactivity. This radiation would be affected by wind currents and yes dispersed especially in the upper atmosphere but 2 lbs is such a tiny amount in terms of the massive mass and surface area of the planet that this seems fundamentally absurd. I mean yes its part of everything in the same way that if your creamated and you dump your ashes in the lake your part of “everything” again but in no real measurable sence.
Is P-238 naturally occuring, even in tiny amounts? If so how could you measure the difference ? Also hasnt P-238 ever been blown up before in testing and/or manufacturing process or whatever? If so how could you differentiate the seperate events? Sounds like alot of oversimplified hooey to me but if i could hear from someone who has some inside info on this would be appreciated.
Administrators of the SDMB have an extra button at the top of their screen.
Let’s hope they’re never forced to use it.
There’s no element after uranium on the periodic table that’s naturally occurring–and plutonium is well after uranium on the table. It’s formed by the absorption of neutrons from uranium fission, which is the reason breeder reactors work and why we’re so nervous about Iraq’s nuclear program–even if they only have uranium, they can make plutonium, a much more dangerous element. And it’s been blown up a lot, in nuclear testing and so forth, but no accidents I’m aware of involved it.
Uranium is 92 and Plutonium is 94, if you consider 2 to be well after, then I would have to agree with you.
For an interesting read on how deadly plutonium is check out this paper from the Lawrence Livermore Lab
Thanks, Kilt-wearin’ man. Everything you said is right, except for the shredder. The Navy owns the EP-3, and I can tell you from experience that the one that went down in China had no magical self-destruct devices on board, and not even a shredder. Everything is done manually. So in light of the OP, I wouldn’t put this aircraft on any list of things having an autodestruct capability.
Just a thought…but as I understand all US nuclear warheads have an amount of plastique built into them, so that if the proper codes aren’t given, they blow up rather than launch.
D.
It’s the Ford Crown Victoria. Ford’s being sued over the police deaths.