Aren’t most things in the world outside of Amarillo, TX?
Also depends on what you mean by vaporize.
If you hit 4 cities (Omaha, Lincoln, Bellevue, & Grand Island), you could kill off about 1/3 of the population, and destroy most of the transportation, logistics, and power generation systems – that would pretty much make the whole state a casualty.
Losing Amarillo would put a big damper on any future nuke plans.
STRATCOM being based at Offutt, I’d worry about Nebraska vaporizing most of the rest of the world.
I had a relative in the AP back when. He got to work on the lowest basement floor of the big old SAC bunker there checking IDs of generals before letting them in. It was pretty safe and secure to say the least.
While the underground floors are presumably immune from BeepKillBeep’s anger, the aboveground floors are still pretty hefty.
It would take more than a couple direct hits of H-bombs to vaporize that. That’s not by accident.
Maybe just pop off a nuke and open up the Yellowstone hot spot, let the volcano do all the work for ya … wouldn’t be vapor but a couple hundred feet of 800ºC pumy rock would achieve the same results …
I’m fascinated by this idea of an upper limit to the kaboominess of a nuke. I’m hoping Chronos (or somebody) will supply some more detail. Let’s say the amount need is 2.5 GT spread out over many bombs. If I had a bomb of say 250 GT, why wouldn’t this work?
I cannot use a lot of nukes, because I only have a limited and small supply of AI-controlled helpers.
And once again, I’ve said too much.
Aliens also says
And “a cloud of vapor the size of Nebraska” is not the same as “vaporizing an area the size of Nebraska”
However, I applaud your efforts to get rid of Nebraska and I ask that you let me hit the button.
Because the Earth is round.
Now, 250GT might be enough, if it was detonated high enough.
But, it’s also 100x more than you need. This was the reasoning behind the reduction of our missile’s power - why spend more on a bigger explosion, when you can put 12 smaller warheads on the same rocket, and do much more damage.
I am aware. In the OP I state a “cloud of vapor the size of Nebraska”. However, I think compute the power to produce such a cloud would be rather difficult due to a lack of information, i.e. what exactly is being vaporized, so I changed the outcome. However, I’m all for somebody computing the power to produce a cloud of vapor the size of Nebraska.
So you mean that when the explosive blast gets big enough the energy stops becoming an even bigger blast because it just shoots off into space? I.e. when the the energy vector of the blast is a tangent (more or less) to the surface of the Earth?
My AIs are officially disappointed we cannot do this with a single big bomb.
That’s one reason.
The other is that the explosion is roughly spherical, so it scales as the inverse cube of the yield. So a weapon that is 1,000 times as powerful as another only causes 10x the damage.
So, in theory, you could build a single bomb that could wipe Nebraska off the map (small loss…), but it would have to be really, really big.
Interestingly, the Tsar Bomba, at full 100MT yield, was calculated to be able to cause fatal burns over an area nearly size of Pennsylvania, if detonated the optimal altitude.
Well, maybe a little concave.
To be strictly correct, you could do it with a single really big bomb. But the size of the bomb needed grows inconveniently fast compared to the amount of destruction.
He Who Walks Behind The Rows is not amused.
I was going to say it was a trick question. The answer is ZERO!
Whadju got against Nebraska? Note that I’m not particularly for Nebraska, but [ul]
[li]Florida[/li][li]Texas[/li][li]California[/li][li]Ohio[/li][/ul]
well before we turn all the corn into flakes.
You could try one of Teller’s 10 GT bombs.
Man, you must really be using a lot of explosive if bombing Nebraska would have effects in New Brunswick as well.
Betcha both of you read about it here:
How big can a nuclear weapon get? [On maximum yield/splodiness]
What is the largest nuclear bomb that could be built? [On bomb mechanics and arsenals]