US population density statistics. While cliched, it looks like the NY/NJ area is the place to hit if you want the most immediate deaths for your weapon, plus panic, subsequent deaths from fallout, and massive displacement of survivors in the surrounding area.
Presumably, since 1MT and larger bombs exist, there may be some applications in which a single large device is preferable to smaller ones. Either that, or it’s just that the larger warheads were manufactured before accuracy became a concern. What is the straight dope on that?
The latter.
Originally, weapon delivery systems were relatively inaccurate. So, you had the monster Titan missile, armed with a 9 MT warhead, and it could land anywhere in the vicinity of your target and flatten it. Now, there are much more accurate ICBMs and cruise missiles, so they can carry a much smaller warhead.
Just as another random hijack, since apparently we’ve got all the a-bomb freaks here…
We know that nuclear facilities are common targets of nuclear weapons. If you dropped a nuclear bomb on a stockpile of nuclear material like Pu-239, would that material fission and cause a larger explosion?
That’s a very interesting question. Nuclear weapons emit copious amounts of neutrons. I suspect that if you had a bomb go off close to a pile of HEU or PU-239, it would induce fission. Whether that would add to the explosion in any significant way is debatable. In a H-bomb, even U-238 can undergo fission from all the fast neutrons.
Although not deliverable and perhaps not even emplaceable without special resources, how about deeply buried nukes? If you could set off a multimegaton blast a mile or two underground, how would that work out? Presuming the blast and fire broke the surface, would it be spead out more effectively? How about damage from seismic shock?
What about framing some other country for the blame, like Russia? Hello WWIII!
Yeah i too find that article highly, highly dubious. You can increase the size of a nuclear weapon indefinitly? A 20.000 Megaton bomb? I’d need to see a highly credible cite to believe that.
From what I’ve read about the design of thermonuclear weapons, you can add an arbitrary number of stages to the weapon. Each stage igniting the next stage in a linear array of stages. At some point it gets too big and long to move or deliver, but it still functions. You start things off with a fission device, which ignites the first fusion stage. Add a jacket of U238 for increased yield and fallout.
Could a sufficiently large detonation, at ground level, near the mouth of the Illinois river, in Chicago, cause the Great Lakes to drain back down the Mississippi river? :eek:
The honeymoon would be over, that’s for damn sure.
Wouldn’t you run out of time? Let’s say it takes six seconds (or whatever) for the blast wave of your primary detonator - the fission device - to form, and in the meantime you ignite the next stage - after your six seconds were up the blast/heat/pressure wave/whatever from your initial stage would just vaporize the rest of your device, right?
You have no idea how fast this all happens.
An fission bomb explodes in nanoseconds. A fusion bomb is triggered by the light pressure (x-rays, mostly) from the fission bomb, so you can create a very long bomb with as much fuel as you want, and not have to worry about the blast destroying it. Of course, at some point you can’t deliver it, but if you wanted to create a doomsday device…
As beowulff said, the trick is that the electromagnetic radiation from the primary is moving at the speed of light, unlike the blast wave and bomb fragments, which are just moving really, really fast. One of the conceptual breakthroughs that led to the design of the Teller-Ulam configuration was the use of electromagnetic radiation to compress and ignite the fusion secondary stage. That is unlike the fission primary, which uses the shock wave from high explosives to compress and ignite the core.
So there’s no upper limit apart from practicality. Now thats remarkable. Going to have to use this in the next superhero RPG i run.
Ok , so our hypothetical 20,000 Megaton weapon. Any idea how big and heavy it would actually have to be?
Assuming 2 kt/kg, about 10,000 metric tons. It would be huge. Something like the size of a battleship.
I guess that would depend on the size of the weapon.
For info, read about “shot Baker”, Operation Crossroads: Operation Crossroads - Wikipedia , but that was probably a Hiroshima sized warhead.
“Shot Mike”, Operation Ivy, detonated on an islet part of the Enewetak Atoll, 1952.
10 megaton weapon left a crater 164ft deep and 6400 feet wide (which was larger than the islet it was on).
Is that big enough to dig a trench for the Great Lakes to make it to the Mississippi River system?
Photos of Operation Ivy. Note circular crater in next to last photo. Operation Ivy - Wikimedia Commons
Thanks! It didn’t occur to me that you could just build the thing in a straight line. I was visualizing something like a spiral with the primary device in the middle.
one more random hijack in a fascinating thread.
what about the Neutron Bomb? the nuclear landlord? Evict the tenants and leaves the buildings standing? And what bomb and altitude would you need to explode a device to maximise the destructive power of the electromagnetic pulse to fry your targets ipods?
very interesting stuff, haven’t thought about this stuff for years