We’re talking nuclear here. I read that the largest manmade explosion ever on earth was made by the Russians, with a device they called “Tsar Bomba.”
The article reported that the Russians had deliberately lowered the power to 50,000,000 tons of TNT from 100,000,000 tons (try to wrap your mind around that.)
My question here is, if you were theoretically able to get a hold of enough fissionable material, wouldn’t it be possible to do not 100M tons, but 100B tons? Wouldn’t something like that tear a quarter of the earth away? Not to mention the fallout.
What is the limit here? See this link for more info on that particular bomb.
Ferchrissakes, even the Tunguska explosion clocks in at 40 megatons. Could this bomb have been bigger?
As I understand it, it isn’t the quantity of fissionables, but of fusionables. Most of the bang in a multi-megaton bomb is from fusion of hydrogen: The fission is just to trigger the fusion reaction. Of course, you can also just use the fission bomb by itself, without triggering a fusion bomb with it, but this will get you something in the kiloton range, not megatons. It would take an awful lot of fissionable material to make a megaton bomb, even assuming you could scale it up well (essentially, you’d have many separate bombs, and you’d have to coordinate them all to blow at exactly the same time, before one could destroy all the others).
The problem with extremely large fission based bombs is that the process is self-limiting in most cases, because the explosion itself eliminates the proximity of the fissionable material to itself. Implosion by first stage fission triggers is one solution, and enrichment of the “pit” with neutron donating materials is another. A combination of these and the introduction of true fusion reactions gave us the hundred megaton bombs of the late twentieth century.
Such bombs are almost entirely useless in a strategic sense, and represent a significant waste of resources. Thirty bombs of ten kilotons spaced properly will destroy far more than a single hundred megaton bomb, and introduce your opponents to the joys of secondary nuclear firestorms, as well. You can probably initiate a world wide ecological crisis with no more than fifty such bombs, if you wish to do so.
However, the now much studied field of shaped nuclear explosions allow an entirely new realm of explosive devices. Such a device would use twenty some nuclear triggers, arranged around an appropriately prepared super pit. The problem of dissipation of the fissile material is greatly reduced when the tamping forces are measured in kilotons. Such timing was not possible during the early cold war periods. That is no longer the case. Fission, and even fusion could be maintained for milliseconds, perhaps longer in such an environment.
Do we really want to encourage this sort of research? That ends up being the worst case scenario for the newly touted “small nuke” research currently desired by the military, and of course George II.
Small ones of course could turn my imaginary shaped charge multinuke into a portable device.
Not hardly. The event that produced the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan was many orders of magnitude larger than your proposed warhead. The result was devastating at the time, but barely visible today.
Hmm. That Chicxulub baby was 100 million megatons, not just tons like my imaginary explosion. That’s some serious hardware.
But you know, if the boys can build it, it will get built, if even for supercomputer simulation. However, the notion that not one of these megamonsters but 100 of its tiny cousins will ruin the earth is actually more realistic . . . and frightening . . .