Tunguska Event - a blast from the past [ Meteroite hit on Siberia 1908] | Hacker News Reader

Tunguska Event - a blast from the past [ Meteroite hit on Siberia 1908]

todayifoundout.com

2 pointspwrfid4 comments

A quote: "Today I found out about the Tunguska Event, which was a 1908 explosion estimated to have been nearly 1000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 and about 1/3 as powerful as the largest ever detonated atomic bomb, the Tsar Bomba."

The Tsar Bomba was not an atomic bomb, it was a hydrogen bomb with an fission trigger.

A quote: "The U.S. had originally planned a series of much larger nuclear strikes that would happen in quick succession after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, wiping out most of the major cities in Japan, had the Japanese at that point not agreed to surrender."

Yes, except that this ("quick succession") wasn't possible -- after Nagasaki we could assemble just one more bomb:

Source: http://www.warbirdforum.com/third.htm : "The Third Bomb"

Quote: "Timing was important, Tibbets said: 'It was vital that [the Japanese] believed we had an unlimited supply of atomic bombs and that we would continue to use them. Of course, the truth was that we only had one more bomb on Tinian. Delivery of the third bomb was several weeks away.'"

The problem was the plutonium supply -- breeder reactors in Hanford, Washington were being used to generate the plutonium, and they could only produce so much material per month.

"atomic bomb" is often used generically as a stand-in for 'nuclear weapon'.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atomic%20bomb

Yes, in dictionaries, but as explained here --

http://arachnoid.com/wrong/index.html#Dictionary

-- dictionaries don't define words, they only report how people choose to use words, however irrational those uses might be. Consider the word "literally", which dictionaries define as meaning in accordance with reality, or the opposite, depending on who is speaking:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

But among educated speakers, an atomic bomb is a fission weapon, and a thermonuclear bomb is a fusion weapon -- opposite physical processes to convert energy from one form to another.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon

Quote: "The first fission ("atomic") bomb test released the same amount of energy as approximately 20,000 tons of TNT. The first thermonuclear ("hydrogen") bomb test released the same amount of energy as approximately 10,000,000 tons of TNT."

Clearly distinct meanings.

'Atomic bomb' for any kind of nuclear weapon is historically inaccurate but it's a (relatively harmless) generalization - after all, in a more technical context one can still avail oneself of 'fission' and 'thermonuclear' and 'implosion device' and 'Teller-Ulam design' and so forth, to the desired level of detail.

I understand your point about dictionaries but they do also describe what passes for acceptable usage. In other words, a dictionary can also be viewed as a record of a definition and usage battles lost. 'Atomic bomb' seems to belong on the same pile as 'literally' and 'begs the question'.

I'm completely with you on holding the line at 'less' and 'fewer', though, futile as that likely is, over the long term!

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