The ‘Tsar Bomba’ Was a 50-Megaton Nuke
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No seriously... MUCH MUCH bigger then you think.
it was 10 times the combined power of all the conventional explosives used in World War II
it was 10% of the combined yield of all nuclear tests to date.
and mostly.... It was the equivalent of over 1kg of antimatter going up. 1 ^#%$ing kg.... of ^#%$ing antimatter.
It broke windows in Norway and Finland and its shock wave was VISIBLE in the air 700 km away.
It is impossible to get people to understand how much of a monster it was. AND.... and this was it dialed down to 1/2 its maximum yield.
No one has been crazy enough to test another nuke of its size. Even in the height of the cold war no one was crazy enough to test something like that again.
The takeaway is that, as long as it is just a single nuke, the damages are rather underwelming, except for the Tsar bomba.
These days you can just about crush an individual ant with a missile fired from the other side of the planet, but it wasn't always like that. Accuracy used to be much worse, especially on the Soviet side. At the time the Tsar Bomba was developed, you might be lucky to get your bomb within a mile or two of your target. Even bombers were frequently way off target.
Then consider that a lot of the targets are hardened military targets, not cities. Destroying cities was always either incidental (they contained or were near military/political targets) or a last resort (convince the enemy not to attack by threatening his population in retaliation). Primary targets were (still are!) things like airbases, missile silos, and command centers. Many of these are hardened targets. A more normal-sized nuke going off a mile or two away from the intended ground zero will still wreck a city, but a missile silo can take it. If you want to be sure of getting targets like that, you either need to be a lot more accurate or you need much more powerful bombs. Accuracy wasn't possible at the time, thus huge bombs.
If you look at the evolution of nuclear arsenals, it was a race to bigger and bigger bombs until sometime in the 60s, at which point accuracy started improving greatly and the bombs got smaller again. For example, the US fielded lots of 9 megaton bombs in the 60s, but now the typical weapon in the US arsenal is under one megaton.
I guess it will get you on a list of nuclear history enthusiasts. Apart from that, this sort of thinking is really just mild paranoia. While I recognise that the NSA monitoring is a big deal, I don't think that it can be extended to mean that ordinary people accessing sites like this will become targets.
So, don't worry, and go ahead and access the site, and also read the guy's blog - it's very interesting.
Not sure I would agree with that - a single 800kt detonation over Manhattan looks pretty bad to me and a realistic attack would probably have had many tens of warheads used.
Here is a rather jolly 1980's BBC documentary that spends a lot of time looking at the effects of a single 1Mt warhead on London:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vejorfkdgwU
Of course, it does finish by noting that a real attack would have multiple ground and air bursts.
[NB UK("pretty bad") == NonUK("utterly appalling")]
And yet if you are just 30 miles from the target the first time you are going to notice is when you turn on the TV.
Mind you, although the Soviets did have 25Mt warheads on ICBMs they were targeted on key bunkers - Cheyenne Mountain, Raven Rock Mountain etc.
The area of severe damage and less instant fatality is maybe twice as wide.
Outside of that there's another ring of significant damage, but the probability of survival increases (as long as you're not near a window when the shockwave hits.)
The map also doesn't show fall out or the effects of a possible firestorms.
It's an option you can select - you can also set wind speed and direction (drag the windsock icon about). You also need to make sure it is a ground burst as an air burst won't produce much fallout.
No—no it's not. See "What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan?" (http://thebulletin.org/what-would-happen-if-800-kiloton-nucl...). Notice this:
No survivors. Within tens of minutes, everything within approximately five to seven miles of Midtown Manhattan would be engulfed by a gigantic firestorm
Furthermore:
The fire would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else. Tens of miles downwind of the area of immediate destruction, radioactive fallout would begin to arrive within a few hours of the detonation.
Manhattan has a daytime population of more than two million people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetab...
my head cannot fathom what 100% yield would look like.
If Pb-204 absorbs a neutron it turns into Pb-205, which isn't stable but its half life is ten million years so it's only very weakly radioactive. The -206 and -207 turn into other stable isotopes, of course. So those don't matter so much: about half of your neutrons enter lead nuclei which can safely absorb a neutron.
The other half, the Pb-208, turns into Pb-209. Pb-209 is radioactive with a surprisingly short half-life of 3.25 hours, so that's gone in a matter of weeks.
The nasty stuff is the lead atoms which happen to absorb two different neutrons during the explosion. This becomes Pb-210, which has a half life of 22 years: short enough that it's going to be emitting a bunch of radiation, long enough that it won't be gone after a few weeks.
So the answer is probably "it's very rare in these sorts of explosions to have two neutrons hitting a single lead nucleus." There are other possibilities (maybe they got the lead from spent nuclear fuel or centrifuges or something and it's all Pb-206) but that sounds like it's the most plausible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_cross_section
http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/resources/n-lengths/elements/pb.htm...
A kilton of TNT is said [0] to be equivalent to a cube 27.8 feet on a side. 50-Megatons would be a cube over 1000 feet on a side.
and thanks to the test we know for sure that ignition of the atmosphere with even such a bomb still wouldn't happen :)
My guess is that the heat/EM could induce a state change in atmospheric gasses into plasma. Would this be a chain reaction that ultimately encircles the world? Also, what are the implications of that (locally or globally)?...
There is another sci-fi book by the same author, "Faetians", where he depicts the fifth planet of the Solar System, Faeton (a hypothetical planet between Mars and Jupiter that could be the source of the asteroid belt), destroyed by nuclear fusion of its ocean hydrogen after several powerful nuclear explosions. The author gives even less explanations there.
So, I think the atmosphere explosion is a myth rooted in sci-fi books, at least in Soviet culture (I have not yet encountered such plots in American literature/movies of that time, but maybe I'm just not familiar enough with it).
Hah! I remember reading this as a kid and absolutely loving it.
Of course, most of the geopolitical stuff whooshed right over my head.
When you're exploding bombs using a new principle you might cross the activation energy of stuff that you'd rather keep around.
Is that possible?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/crown+fire
There is so much energy in the system that the burning crown of one tree dries out the matter in the crown of the next to the point where it can be combusted in an extremely short time, contrary to ordinary conditions when lighting 'wet wood' appears not to work.
The whole point was that Teller thought that the reaction might be self sustaining once the activation energy was reached.
Think about it: someone made the call to ignore that possibility and pull the trigger on deployment even if they weren't sure about the outcome. Possibly the single most irresponsible deed in the history of man.
Actually, they did the calculations and verified that it wouldn't happen. It was Richard Hamming who did the calculations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming#Manhattan_Proj...
I said to myself, "What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part? [uncertain variable]" I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you."
PS: Fusion is one of the few equations where you will see X^4th power so you vary quickly go from it's fine to big boom. However, igniting the world’s oceans would take enough energy to kick off that we would be dead either way.
In the 1960s the U.S. Strategic Air Command ran a continuous airborne nuclear-armed patrol (Operation Chrome Dome), so there was probably a 25 megaton weapon in the air for much of that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome
It's also worth remembering that the limiting factor on the yield of the Tsar Bomba was the carrying capability of the Tu-95. The Teller–Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons is scalable: you can keep adding stages as long as you have the uranium, plutonium and lithium to make them with. Edward Teller supposedly designed (or at least contemplated) a 10 gigaton bomb: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-big...
That guy was batshit crazy, pardon my French. I know that the Dr. Strangelove character was pretty much based on him, I know about and I partially understand the reasons behind the nuclear arms race, but when you read about plans like this you just start contemplating about the end of humans as a species.
>when you read about plans like this you just start contemplating about the end of humans as a species.
We called up the USSR and asked them to stop producing weapons on that scale. They laughed in our face. What exactly do you propose? Heck, the USSR's client states were motivated to nuke us without warning. Castro had a pretty big hard-on for launching nukes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22nuke.html?_r=0
He wasn't convinced by the loss of life or anything. His Moscow handlers had to explain to him that the radioactive cloud would be bad for Cubans. Heck, the politburo was demanding WWIII from Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis.
Today, Russia maintains an openly published first strike policy on what it calles "tactical nukes." Essentially they say they can launch nukes whenever they feel like it and not consider it a MAD violation. So if Putin's conventional troops are losing, he just nukes the opposition. With madmen like Putin running nukes, MAD makes sense. Its the only thing that does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller
"during Oppenheimer's trial he was the only member of the scientific community to state that Oppenheimer should not be granted security clearance"
"One of the most controversial projects he proposed was a plan to use a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb to dig a deep-water harbor more than a mile long and half a mile wide to use for shipment of resources from coal and oil fields through Point Hope, Alaska."
"Teller suffered a heart attack in 1979, and many observers[71] described him as blaming it on Jane Fonda"
"In the 1980s, Teller began a strong campaign for what was later called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derided by critics as "Star Wars," the concept of using ground and satellite-based lasers, particle beams and missiles to destroy incoming Soviet ICBMs."
A few megadeaths here-or-there.
The only thing missing from Dr Strangelove is having the uncontrollable hand. Yes, you can call him "just focused" if you prefer that. Let him "peacefully" dig in your backyard.
Russians used nukes for mining. Its not magic. You can manage fall-out, risk, etc. Its not "crazy."
>"Teller suffered a heart attack in 1979, and many observers[71] described him as blaming it on Jane Fonda"
A 70+ year old man being a difficult curmudgeon? Say, it ain't so!
> Teller began a strong campaign for what was later called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
SDI made sense. We still have SDI. Now we call its "Strategic Missile Defense" and its our biggest counter against rogue nation nuke launches and other attacks. It also has Putin scared as he can't match it and is demanding we don't continue to build new sites in Eastern Europe out of desperation.
>The only thing missing from Dr Strangelove is having the uncontrollable hand.
I really wish more people understood the world from the lessons of history instead of caricutures from Hollywood movies.
SDI could be said to plausibly make some kind of sense only in the context of the proposed broad national shield being propaganda to serve as (1) a tool to get the USSR to accelerate its spending in a way that would hasten its collapse, and (2) domestic political cover for more limited shields that would protect key military command and control sites.
If Teller's exuberant promotion of SDI was knowing participation in those propaganda efforts, then it was extremely dishonest but perhaps defensible as not completely nonsensical; on its face, however, it was nonsense.
> We still have SDI. Now we call its "Strategic Missile Defense" and its our biggest counter against rogue nation nuke launches and other attacks.
No, our biggest counter against rogue nation nuke launches is, and remains, a combination of assured destruction of any attacker and active steps to prevent undeterrable actors from gaining the capacity to make such attacks in the first place.
Strategic missile defense of any kind remains, and will for the forseeable future, an extremely limited tool, and far less than SDI was sold as by proponents like Teller.
> It also has Putin scared as he can't match it and is demanding we don't continue to build new sites in Eastern Europe out of desperation.
There's a whole lot I could say about this, but I'll let this suffice: you can't say in one post defend MAD with "With madmen like Putin running nukes, MAD makes sense", and then defend Strategic Missile Defense with the argument that it undermines mad and makes Putin scared and more aggressive.
the russians had the more accidents, though. but the US also had it share of radioactive underground rivers as a result. there is a list on wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion
puts the score at US: 28, USSR: 237.
Combining the 25 intensification and 22 storage explosions here presumably gets you past the US total of peaceful nuclear explosions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nati...
Are there more articles that you would suggest?
You just basically said that SDI is destabilizing because it will take away MAD. I fail to see how supporting that is rational or sane.
That sounds suspiciously like and end-run around MAD, which until close to 100% complete and accurate, seems like it serves to reduce the effectiveness of MAD as a method to prevent nuclear war.
My hope is that this all gets too expensive and we all get rid of nukes entirely.
You'll note the suspicious absence of a third world war to follow the War to End All Wars and the one that came after it. Some argue that nuclear weapons are directly responsible for this desirable state of affairs.
But deterring a third world war is not one of those things that's subject to moral relativism. You seriously need to spend some time talking with WWII vets, while we still have them with us.
We're seeing the lowest level of conflict in history and you're still unimpressed? Does it kill you that much to admit that MAD is working?
It is true that nuclear weaponry might have avoided many direct wars between the nuclear powers, but it has not been an absolute guarantee. There has been a war directly involving nuclear powers - the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan. [2] Again, among present troubles, Ukraine and Russia both have nuclear weaponry, I suppose.
S/he is being downvoted for being deliberately obtuse, if not outright trolling.
But in some sense, if two G-7 countries are not fighting each other in their own soil, the war does not "matter".
The G-7 countries (along with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council) are the ones who, when they go to war with each other, are EVERYBODY's problem. Every other kind of war is a local issue. It sounds heartless, but nobody in country U gives a hoot about 5 million deaths in an obscure civil war in country C. But if countries R and G get into it, the entire world sits up and takes notice, and for good historical reasons.
Again, among present troubles, Ukraine and Russia both have nuclear weaponry, I suppose.
One of the more awkward aspects of the Ukraine conflict is that Ukraine gave up their nukes willingly after the dissolution of the USSR, based on the promise that they would remain unmolested. So much for Russian promises.
Unfortunately, as long as dictators like Putin are around, we can't afford the risks of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Without MAD, we are all Ukrainians.
Since WWII, none of the countries not engaging in MAD (e.g., all those that lack the capacity to do so), including those with no nuclear-power allies, have been attacked with nuclear weapons. So, while none of those engaging in MAD has been either, there is no evidence that MAD is the reason for that. It's Lisa Simpson's tiger-repelling rock all over again.
That is, unless your goal is not MAD at all, but the nuclear destruction of the other side by your side. A prospect that Teller didn't find too horrible, I guess.
This assumes that some "other side" is willing to destroy 1/3 of the Earth just to "get you". A ludicrous supposition only believed by hawks and ideologues.
As for Putin, weren't we doing much the same under GW when we decided we were going to ignore the ABM treaty?
BTW, the 10GT design was to be used for asteroid defence.
Edward should have won the Nobel prize, he succeeded in designing a weapon so horrible it has never been used in warfare.
Pretty weak to call a brilliant man "batshit crazy" simply because his politics differ from your politics.
After all they could have dialed down 'Little Boy' (what a crap name for a weapon) to a smaller yield too, or dropped it in a less populated area but did not.
edit: for the simulation, the other major thing that factors into it must be the "fission fraction", the presets store 4 things: name, yield, a field marking surface/airburst and the fission fraction.
For example, if A = 7x^2 and B = 2x^3, A will be larger than B when x is small, but B will overtake A as x grows beyond a certain point.
Soviet union was enclosed by US airbases and nonstop flying bombers, which could hit any city in a few hours. America also developed crazy stuff like Project Pluto...
Anyway there are two reasons for this bomb not mentioned in article:
- Terraforming. Soviets honestly believed they could redirect rivers from north to arid south. They even made artificial valley in mountains as experiment. Larger nukes are cleaner than smaller nukes.
- Doomsday device in form of dirt bomb. Plan was to concentrate all nuclear waste from Soviet countries on single place, and explode massive bomb under it. Explosion would spread nuclear material into atmosphere and most of earth wold become radioactive. This device was not approved by soviet leaders, too dangerous.
I wonder if this causes their country-people to feel boxed in or cornered. :\
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21641278-russian-presid...
And might be the reason why they are so quick to also help other countries with a similar issue (for example: I am from Brazil, and our navy is crap, when we announced finding one of the largest oil reserves of the world, US immediately announced reactivating their south-atlantic fleet, they don't even tried to hide their intentions... so Russia now patrols our water for us, to keep US ships away from the oil rigs).
You think the US Fourth Fleet reactivation was intended to steal that production? And risk war with most of South America?
Sadly, too many people absent-mindedly believing in that.
Geologists (not just brazillian one) expect the pre-salt layer to have 50 billion barrels, that is 4 times Brazil current oilfields, thus why to Brazil it is important.
Also the Tupi field current exploration is more related to a stock market scam than an actual attempt (see Eike Batista and the stunt he pulled...)
And Russia is here because our government invited them, after US announcement, officially it is for "training", but Russian ships can keep US ships away from the oil rigs (ie: when a US ship is in a place the government here disapproves, the government invites Russian ships to do a "training drill" nearby, and push away the US ship, that will retreat to avoid conflict, a sort of psychological dance).
Mind you, US already used its navy to topple our government before (in 1964 it sent a carrier group to support CIA during our military coup), and US was suspected here of having too much interest in our oil company, this later was proved by Snowden (NSA did lots of spying on Petrobras, including of stuff that is more commercial than strategic), so excuse me if we don't trust US, the past behaviour of US toward us here has not been good (while we have nothing but praise for Russia... yes, I know all Russian issues worldwide, but locally to US Russia always had been a great true ally).
AFAICT, the "intention" of standing up Fourth Fleet as an organization was to bring the naval side of Southern Command HQ structure more in line with that of the rest of the geographical combatant commands (US Naval Forces Africa still doesn't have a numbered fleet or similar command associated, but Africa wasn't yet a full independent unified combatant command at the time Fourth Fleet was stood up in Southern Command.)
In 1964 US forces don't fired a single shot, but they didn't need to, US is so absurdly stronger that they being in our territory is enough to strong-arm us to do anything they want, US and Brazil government know that Brazil government will always yield to US if US is in firing range, precisely for that reason that Brazil government don't like US in firing range, Brazil knows US won't attack out of the blue, and thus this can be used to keep US away (for example keeping Russian ships in firing range instead... US won't suddenly fire on Russian ships, this fact is ALSO known to both governments).
How can, then, some of the smartest people on Earth be involved in something as stupid as this.
Many scientists realise the grave consequences of their stupidity, after the fact. Both Sakharov and Oppenheimer realised this, but it was too late. The genie was out.
The mirage of power, respect, titles, prizes and access to unlimited resources for their experiments is too strong to resist, I guess. :Carrot
Then there's the patriotism thing - do right for you country, protect it from the enemies. Fear. :Stick
This is how the devil works, after all :).
Beware of the stupid as he knows not what the implications of his activities are. Be scared of the smart working for the stupid, as he very well knows the implications, but is too weak to resist the temptation. He has sold his soul.
Isn't that what is happening now, with some of the bright people who work at the NSA?
You're stuck with another guy. You're both better off if you both cooperate. But individually you're better off if you betray the other guy. In that situation it's really, really hard to arrange cooperation.
The US and USSR would have been better off if they could have put a halt to the madness. But if one stopped, that gives huge incentives for the other to betray.
The thing is, betraying the other is the rational thing to do. It's the worst outcome, but it comes from purely rational actions.
It appears that because of MAD, sovereignty between Nuclear armed countries is pretty much ensured.
I mean I'm scared to death by Nuclear weapons (intellectually scared, similar to say Global Warming being a gigantic threat), but I can't help but wonder if these things don't prevent a WW3, and force conflicts to be resolved diplomatically, through economic sanctions, cyberwar, through export of ideology or comparatively smaller 'cold war' type conflicts.
e.g. Yemen today is essentially Iran fighting Saudi Arabia for a bit of regional influence in a way without Iran & ally Russia/China actually fighting with Saudi & ally US/West. Conflicts that are all preferable in scale to an all out WW3, which wouldn't happen (on paper) because of MAD due to Nuclear Weapons.
Nukes makes zero sense if it is a resource war, and those are the oldest ones there is.
A influence war also has little use for nukes, as you want those friendly to you to live and thrive afterwards.
As best i can tell the only time using nukes "make sense" is when faced with a enemy that is committed to your total elimination, and that are completely unified in this goal.
Nuclear Rescue 911: Broken Arrows & Incidents
Atomic Filmmakers: Behind the Scenes
Atomic Journeys: Welcome to Ground Zero
Nukes in Space
Atomic Filmmakers is my favorite--it's sort of a "making of" for the historical footage used in the other movies and it talks about the secret Lookout Mountain film studio the Air Force set up outside LA to develop special technology to document and instrument above-ground nuclear tests.
How do one design a bomb to eliminate, or minimize, fallout? I wasn't even aware it was an option.
This is my speculation, but I suspect another reason for the relative lack of fallout from the Tsar Bomba was related to its yeild. To get a particularly large yeild from the materials available, the bomb is going to have to be as efficient as you can get it. All things equal, a more efficient system generates less waste.
Or the design the article could simply be referring the bomb's parachute system, which helped keep the blast in the air.
In the "limited" Tsar bomb design they had a non-fissioning secondary tamper so yield was mostly from fusion and the explosion was high enough (i.e. far from the ground or sea) that the fusion neutrons didn't have too much else to activate.
http://www.filfre.net/2015/01/t-plus-3-edward-teller-and-his...
The atmosphere is effectively 10 miles high. Once your blast radius approaches that the difference in pressure pushes most of the energy upward above the atmosphere. You don't get the horizontal spread you'd expect as you increase tonnage.