Comment by dandotway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dandotway | Hacker News Reader

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  However, a study from 1963 suggested that, if detonated 28 miles
  (45 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, a 10,000-megaton
  weapon could set fires over an area 500 miles (800 kilometers)
  in diameter. Which is to say, an area about the size of France.

If thousands of such gigaton bombs were developed then MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) would be more taxpayer efficient because we could simply stop funding expensive rocket and submarine weapons delivery systems, as they would only add an unnecessarily complicated step to the process. Just detonate your gigaton arsenal on your own nation's soil. When an animal is in great pain and cannot be saved, we usually consider the most compassionate course of action to euthanize. So in the event of MAD, just instantly vaporize your own population to spare them a few months of clinging to life with radiation sickness, starvation, cannibalism, and the lawless raping and murdering of the earth's final warlords. The multiple gigaton bombs detonated on your own soil will ensure the agonizing death of all your enemies that don't similarly self-euthanize.

I presume that this is facetious, but it's not too far off the mark. See this other great Nuclear Secrecy blog post, "In Search of a Bigger Boom":

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-big...

The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.”

I guess "truth is stranger than fiction." ;-) Blog comment from the link you posted:

The 10GT weapon really would have been BACKYARD. At 6MT/tonne (the upper bound for thermonuclear weapons) it would have weighed 1667 tonnes.

When your nuke uses kilotons as a pre-detonation measure of weight, you've done something wrong.

> if detonated

The article is a brilliant piece of writing, but scattered through it, you can gather the bits and pieces of math that would describe why it's not strategically practical.

- Bomb weight / size scales roughly linearly with bomb yield. How are you going to get that massive bomb over to France? The aircraft required to haul it over would be exceptionally vulnerable. If you want to use a rocket, you'd need something on the order of the Apollo Saturn-V rocket to lob it over (especially for 1960's technology), and that rocket would as well would be vulnerable on the launch pad. Good luck hiding it while you fuel it up. Defending nuclear weapons (cough silos / subs cough) was/is no small task.

- The troposphere (which accounts for the main density of the atmosphere) is only about 13 miles in height, on average. It's thinner near the poles and thicker near the equator. But anyhow, past a certain yield, you literally really do blow a hole in the atmosphere. At that point, the atmosphere acts like a tamper, channelling much of the additional yield into outer space.

To which end, Sakharov was right. The big bombs were massive publicity stunts, and to the degree that the Soviet leadership pursued them, they were wasting money on propaganda projects.

More or less the plot of The Mouse That Roared, which predated Dr Strangelove.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared

That's a great movie! Also with Peter Sellers.

>So in the event of MAD, just instantly vaporize your own population to spare them a few months of clinging to life with radiation sickness, starvation, cannibalism, and the lawless raping and murdering of the earth's final warlords.

Life tends to not want to die. And somehow they seem to survive enormous catastrophes against all odds. The dinosaur killing asteroid was ~100 million times more powerful than the Tsar Bomba. Yet we're here.

The bigger threat is from the firestorms that throw so much soot into the atmosphere that it's ruined for our kind of life. But that probably still wouldn't get rid of life on Earth.

Radiation is a significant factor.

It's radically different surviving in a hostile environment (limited sun, cold weather, limited food) than one that will literally kill you by interacting with it.

Similar idea to the doomsday device described in Dr. Strangelove!

Indeed, from the other comment about Teller's "Backyard" bomb it seems Kubrick's satire was more truth than fiction. The cigar smoking Ripper in the film was based on the real life Curtis LeMay, who it was later revealed really did want to start WWIII by bombing Russia, reasoning that America should strike before the Soviets developed effective retaliation, nipping the problem of Mutually Assured Destruction in the bud as it were.

Euthanization of humans generally happens with consent.

No one consents to nuclear war though, unless we imply consent through the actions of the elected government. In which case I don't see how that's different.

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