In Search of a Bigger Boom (2012) | Hacker News Reader

In Search of a Bigger Boom (2012)

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

49 pointsempath7511 comments

I just listened to Dan Carlin's "Destroyer of Worlds" [1] podcast episode, and it was very enlightening. I was modestly familiar with nuclear history, but still learned a lot from this episode.

[1] https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-...

The nuclear armed forces and its supporting structure sure is a scary place.

Working with making new weapons capable of little else but genocide is not for those who think too much about the ethics of engineering.

Well, if you see that thing as the only one that stops people from killing each other, I can see how one could stretch ethics to be ok with this job.

That is a particularly naive view of the role that nuclear weapons have played over the past 75 years. It is also clear that many of the original designers thought very deeply, much more so than 99% of all the people who opine away from their armchairs today.

Nuclear weapons ethics are a very tricky subject to deal with in an informed, realistic, and even-handed way. Most people who give knee-jerk opinions haven't done a good job of dealing with them.

What a silly idea. Even at 50MT much of the energy was lost as it punched through the atmosphere and out into space. If you’re really a lunatic who wants to exterminate life, many smaller nuclear detonations is inherently more efficient than one large detonation. Giant nuclear weapons are heavy, dirty, inefficient, and pointless even if you’re the kind of person who wants to obliterate whole populated regions for some reason.

The reason is obviously "mutually assured destruction" (MAD). One aspect of strategy was appearing to be crazier than your opponent. But on the other hand, it's arguably what prevented global nuclear war.

MAD is still the dominant strategy. The threat of nuclear war is still an every day presence.

If your targeting isn’t very precise and you want to destroy a hard target such as the Cheyenne Mountain Complex 50MT doesn’t seem overkill.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex it was “built to deflect a 30 megaton nuclear explosion as close as 2 kilometers”.

Far easier to hit something with several single-digit-megaton weapons than with one 50 MT weapon.

The Tsar Bomba was completely impractical and was shown off as a display of technological superiority, or slightly more accurately, dick-wagging.

>> Giant nuclear weapons are heavy, dirty, inefficient, and pointless

Pointless yes, but as bombs scale in size they actually become more efficient, burning more of their fuel. The primary reason behind this is that the cores of larger bombs maintain critical mass for a longer period of time before blowing apart, resulting in more fission/fusion per weight of fuel. So they are less radioactive, less dirty, than an equivalent number of smaller bombs.

The burn is potentially more efficient, but the bigger it is past a certain point, you’re just blasting that energy out of the atmosphere. I suppose burying or submerging a massive device would deliver more energy, but it would be supremely dirty in that case. Airbursts are the best way to attack drag-sensitive targets due to the formation of a Mach stem, and as a bonus they’re cleaner than water or ground bursts. If you really want to destroy a target use MIRVed warheads of lower yield, in the 70kt-1mt range, with overlapping shockwaves. As a “bonus” that technology already comes standard and doesn’t require new testing or exotic designs and delivery systems.

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