I was actually surprised how "small" a lot of the bombs we've used are. Combining SF w/ the largest Nuke designed in the USSR is maddening though - the entire bay area essentially gets flattened - hard to imagine that.
The explosive yield of the Tsar Bomba was purposefully reduced considerably, the fallout from a full yield test was too much even for the Soviets.
There's always the option of putting the energy released into a radiation pulse as opposed to explosion. A bomb which takes out a few blocks, but whose radiation kills for miles and miles.
Really? I've never heard of that. Fascinating. Can you go into more detail?
Kind of strange. I've done a lot of digging into nukes (as an amateur) and no one mentioned the radiation pulse tradeoff.
But it seems to had another use. The W66 warhead has been used in the Sprint anti ballistic missile, to intercept and destroy ICBM.
Future archeologists.
After you!
Really, bombarding things with neutrons is not what you want to do if you want to re-use something. Some elements become radioactive when they absorb a neutron and if if you want to re-use that infrastructure you'd probably be better off letting it take some blast and then repairing it.
Yes. This is because in the full yield version, you double the yield by adding a jacket of Uranium that is fissioned by neutrons from the fusion reaction. That makes it a very dirty extra 50MT, distributing those hot Uranium fission products far and wide.
Even sudden emergence of such superior shield in a random country with no offensive capabilities would be pretty destabilizing. The mere existence of it would put everyone on high alert, as all the nuclear powers scramble to replicate it before others do. And if said country where this technology emerged would even suggest they may be considering extending protection to one nuclear power and not the others, that alone would be enough to force others into striking first.
Nuclear powers (especially those who have already made first strikes) can't do this because (a) they would have to somehow retroactively do all the construction which we spent the whole cold war doing (it's much easier to put a shelter in before you build the rest of the building than after), and (b) as you point out, it would destabilise MAD.
(having no natural resources worth bombing us for is probably more effective. We don't want to threaten anyone, we would just prefer to make decisions, such as those concerning our bill denominations and our central bank strategy, by ourselves)
Tinfoil conspiracy theory: MAD explains why the US doesn't have decent subways :-) How deep are Warsaw's?
Not tinfoil: during the US/USSR cold war, it was the west- and east-germans who were most likely to get tactically nuked. In a hypothetical Oceania/Eurasia world, I'm guessing that distinction has moved to PL and BY. Luckily for you, the current two-minutes hate is directed to Eastasia.
On the brighter side: what do you think of Kongres Futurologiczny?
I think a lot of people overlook the fact that a majority of nuclear devices were created to act as triggers in an even bigger explosion - and those triggers, themselves, can be effectively deployed as a weapon as well as integrated into a higher yield system.
The man-portable nuclear arms that are fielded out there right now - can be carried onto the battlefield by a single soldier - started life as trigger components for bigger bombs. A lot of the fuss over strategic nuclear weapons usage in the last 2 decades is as a consequence of nuclear weapons getting smaller, not bigger.
If you put these numbers into the map, be sure to use the 'surface blast' option, not the 'air blast'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Hel...