How large a bomb would it take to:
- Wipe out humanity?
- Wipe out all life?
- Split the Earth in half?
Better question is, how large of a ransom are you thinking of demanding not to use such a device once you’ve completed its construction?
If you regard the bomb as a device for dispersing toxic levels of radioactive material, then cobalt bombs may suit your needs for wiping out humanity.
Wiping out ALL life on earth is likely to be impossible for anything except a meteor strike so massive that it creates a crustal tsunami that incinerates everything above and below the ground. like this one.
Splitting the earth in half - i.e. unstitching the two halfs from each other - isn’t enough; they’ll just fall back together under their mutual gravity. You’d need to impart escape velocity to each half so that they’d fly apart and never come back together again. The calculation for that is going to be a bit complicated, but it will suffice to say that it’s many thousands of miles per hour, which represents an awful lot of energy for something as massive as one half of the earth. Probably more energy than we’ve got at our disposal.
For all 3, larger than we have now for a single bomb.
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For #1 possibly all the bombs we have now set off might just kill off the human race.
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Cockroaches and other creatures are pretty hardy. Nothing we have now could do it.
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Splitting the Earth? Maybe if we put all the bombs we have right now in deep, deep holes, we could crack the mantel and the Earth would split. However gravity would soon start pulling things back together. Of course the Earth might not look nothing like it does now.
I would have thought everyone had read this by now.
I not only just read it, I have it pinned to my blackboard for reference.
The practical app of large bombs is badly misunderstood. Nuclear wars between superpowers were actually expected to last 4-7 years. The strategy is to take out each other’s key strategic and population targets one by one until one power is left without further resources to carry on the stupidity. The general public seems to think that nuclear war will last a day and Oprah, golf and the Simpsons will resume the next day. The term for this is “stupid.”
BTW, if you ever wondered why a mid-power like France would invest so heavily in nuclear weapons, the apparent answer is that they actually believed that in a contest betw. the Cold War powers, France could be the last man standing and the new #1 world power. That hope was dashed when the U.S. notified them that in the event of a nuclear war, they would have to instantly declare which side they were on or be regarded as a target themselves.
I’m not aware of anyone who thought this. They seem to think that nuclear war will last a day and the majority of the world population will be dead or dying the next day.
Wikipedia would have us believe that their strategy was to invest in enough nukes to cause more bad stuff (i.e. destruction) to the attacking country than whatever good would be gained by attacking France. Even though they didn’t have enough to reliably obliterate either superpower, they could hit the major population centers.
Look, I’m pretty sure doing any of that stuff with a bomb would be illegal in the U.S.. So, how is your question NOT a violation of the rules of this board?
So, I’m afraid I’m pretty reluctant to help you with your question as I wish to remain a guest of this board in good standing. On the other hand, once the U.S. Patent Office completes its review and assigns me a patent, I’d be willing to negotiate some sort of licensing fee thing with you for a product/process I think you might be interested in. 
And I feel fine…
That’s great.
My impression was France wanted their own deterrent independent of NATO. They weren’t 100% confident we would honor our commitment if the Soviets did invade west. And how could France possibly be the last man standing? Any scenario I ever heard of involved tactical nukes going off all over Europe before the ICBM’s were launched.
I think I’ve been reading to much xkcd. I was finding myself disappointed with its lack of intellectual rigour…
I always liked the reply from the French ambassador to the Soviet ambassador when the latter queried why France had a nuclear deterrent if the USSR’s was so much larger.*
“It is true we cannot kill you, but we could, perhaps, tear an arm off..”
But yes, I agree, even if the Soviets allowed France to ‘sit it out’** (unlikely given the French semi-commitment to NATO) such a level of devastation in Germany was almost certain to spill over into France.
*I believe thats the context and quote, google isn’t coming up with anything more exact
** and even that is assuming that the Western powers allow France to avoid commitment
I recall from reading “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb” by Richard Rhodes that there was no theoretical limit to how powerful a hydrogen bomb could be made. However, at some point you end up just launching a chunk of the atmosphere the size of Pennsylvania into space, and as you make the bomb more powerful, you just end up launching that same-sized chunk faster.
And I also recall a discussion of how to deploy an H-bomb based on its size, like if it could be dropped from a plane or brought it via rail, etc. At a particular size, the deployment method is “detonate it in your backyard” because it will destroy all life on Earth no matter where it goes off.
If I’m recalling correctly, we’ve had the capability to destroy all life on Earth with a single H-bomb since the 1950s.
I remember seeing an edition of the Book of Lists (popular, for some reason in the mid 1970’s) and reading that the United States and the Soviet Union were two of the very few nations owning enough explosive technology to destroy the earth more than 100 times over. That edition also included lists of nations that could destroy the earth 50, 10, and 5 times over and, naturally, each list grew a bit longer.
I think the list compilers assumed point a missile or plant a C4 brick (or whatever) on the surface and blow away contiguous portions of the planet’s map.
Later, in a college course called Our Nuclear Future, I learned that The Game wasn’t about blasting every square inch of surface (dozens of times over), it was about hurling as many missiles as possible at key places in Soviet territories while the Soviets fired anti-missile missiles at our missiles in order to blow them up before they could unleash nuclear explosions above their lands (while the same thing happened–with the roles reversed–over United States’ territories). The game, therefore, was in expecting a lot of our missiles to be destroyed in mid-flight and hoping that a small portion of our volley would get past their anti-missile missiles – either because they had run out of anti-missiles before we ran out of missiles or because a few of their anti-missles missed our missiles – and our missiles would then continue on to reach their intended targets.
So, since I was always the young naive kid who was willing to point out that the emperor wasn’t really wearing any clothes, I asked, “What will happen to all that junk if a nuclear missile IS destroyed in the air?”
Our guest speaker noted that such was The Game that US and Soviet engineers weren’t thinking beyond launching outgoing nukes and destroying incoming nukes in a war of statistical accuracy ratings and hit probabilities and penetration values. Nevertheless, I pressed the issue, “If a warhead alone is a 3-foot tall cone full of enriched uranium and it gets nailed by an anti-missile missile, does the debris just burn up in the explosion and become harmless?”
No, he admitted. The warhead (and the rest of the missile, for that matter) would be blown into trillions of tiny microfragments* which would get caught in the winds of the upper atmosphere and slowly make their way down to the planetary surface. Since we lack the technology to control planetary winds, nobody on the planet would be spared. The debris would pollute every water supply and every patch of land, get absorbed by plants and consumed by animals, and wind up one way or another in human bodies, which would die. A nuclear exchange would, of course, involve several thousand anti-missiles hitting several thousand nuclear missiles and, since the enriched Uranium used to make warheads is known to give animals radiation-related health problems in concentrations of something like 14 parts per trillion (no, I don’t remember the exact figures), the resulting cloud of nuclear debris drifting down from the sky would doom the survivors to slow, inescapable, and agonizing deaths over a period of 5 to 10 years. The lucky ones would be those who were in towns that got hit by the missiles that reached their targets.
The US or the USSR would win, lose, or even break even in a nuclear exchange, but the fall-out from the success of anti-missile technologies would kill everything anyway.
*We didn’t have a term for it before the USSR crumbled, but that’s the idea behind Dirty Bombs today, isn’t it? Just at ground level instead of in the stratosphere?
–G!
can I have some time alone?