Let me say that I am not in favor of destroying even a portion of the human population; I tend to get upset when even a minuscule portion is harmed.
But I do get pet-peevish when someone implies that the U.S.—or even the entire collective human population—has enough nuclear warheads to “destroy the planet.”
I’m not concerned about eradicating humanity; I’m not looking to find what it would take to take out the ocelot and the orangutan; bake the bacteria? BAH; boil the oceans and level the mountains? CHILDS PLAY!
I mean full-on Alderaan, millions-of-voices-crying-out-in-terror-and-being-suddenly-silenced, illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator, earth-shattering KA-BOOM!
I’m somewhat partial to the Moon, so leave that out.
IIRC, there is not enough Uranium which could be enriched or converted to Plutonium (Plutonium is obtained from Uranium) on the planet to cause an Alderaan type case.
Note that bad things tend to happen to moons of planets that have just been blasted into little bits.
The approximate amount of energy required to completely disassemble the Earth (giving every particle of it escape velocity away from every other part) is 1.5 10^39 kgm/s/s (this assumes that the Earth is of constant density, which it’s not, and this ignores all the forces holding the Earth except for gravity, so it ignores the mechanical strength of the Earth’s rocks, etc, but it gives you an idea of the size of the problem). For comparison, the amount of energy produced by the largest nuclear bomb every detonated was about 2 * 10^17 kg*m/s/s
Probably more nuclear weapons than humans could ever create.
I’m with you; this whole “nukes will destroy the world!” false exaggeration is tremendously irritating. It’s like saying that Pop Rock candy can level Mount Everest.
Nah, it’s just working on different meanings of the word “destroy”. Or “world”. If we threw enough nuclear ash into the atmosphere to end all living life as we know it and kickstart an ice age, “the world” as most people think of it would absolutely be gone. For good.
But it’s like Carlin said - the planet is fine. The *people *are fucked.
What cohesivity? Planets aren’t cohesive, or at least, not to any relevant degree. They’re held together by gravity. Blow off all the mantle, and the core will still have gravity.
Oops. Made a mistake. Make that 2.25 times 10^32 kg*m/s/s. The formula is .6 times the gravitational constant times mass squared divided by radius, by the way.
There would be some transient effects due to the fact that a lot of pressure has disappeared quickly, I suspect, but after a while, you’d have a ball of nickel-iron still there.
The gravitational binding energy of the earth is 224000000000000000000000000000000 J
The energy released by the Tsar Bomba is 210000000000000000 J
You will need 1152381000000000
Tsar Bombas to turn the earth into an expanding cloud of debris
(2.24 x 10^32 J / 2.1 × 10^17 J = 1.152381 x 10 ^ 15)