We’ve probably all seen old video footage of nuclear explosions taken from film reels that are half a century old. When I hear that the yield on a modern nuclear weapon is hundreds of times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I try to imagine how much more terrifyingly massive such an explosion can possibly get. It boggles the mind … so much so that I’d like to see what one of these modern warheads looks like when it goes off.
Is there any test footage of a “modern mushroom cloud”? Are there nuclear weapon tests that have been made in the modern era and immortalized on film?
No, the dream sequence from Terminator 2 does not count.
Yeah, I heard about the Tsar and that it was the biggest ever, but that was so long ago. I sorta figured based on what’s said about modern nukes that something even bigger had come along since then … or is that all apocryphal?
You may be interested in Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, which has footage of nuclear explosions, from the initial 100 ton TNT test used to calibrate Trinity, the Trinity test itself, Little Boy, Fat Man, and many (if not all) of the American above ground nuclear tests, as well as the first Soviet and Chinese tests.
ETA: Modern nuclear weapons have never been exploded above ground, AFAIK.
No, that remains the most powerful detonation of a nuclear weapon. Following the introduction of MIRVs it was realized that several smaller bombs would be far more effective than one big one, and they stopped making the uber-powerful ones in favor of modestly powerful bombs.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t make a bigger one. The Tsar Bomba was actually rated for 100 megatons but it was scaled down for the test. We have the knowledge to make them bigger, but there’s no point, really.
The French did not agree to the Partial Test Ban Treaty and detonated some of them in French Polynesia until 1995, only a year prior to signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
In a link from the Tsar Bomba youtube video above there’s reference to a larger US detonation see here, anyone know which one it was?
Another video of the Tsar Bomba from the Discovery Channel. There’s a second of footage at the end that I saw on another documentary of a nearby town, you can see two men getting knocked over by the blast, with the cheery Russian narrator chastising them for being so near the blast.
I recall reading a quote somehwhere by E. Teller saying that anything bigger the 50 megatons doesn’t really increase the blast radius, and that most of the extra energy just gets wasted moving more dirt and atmosphere around.
Tsar Bomba wasn’t built to be actually deployed as a weapon. Out of random curiousity, does anyone know what the highest yield bomb built built that was actually made to be a deliverable weapon was?
These days, isn’t that something we might want to do, moving - or shattering - an asteroid? Would a test of such be allowed under the various treaties?
The largest nuclear weapon fielded by the US was the B-41 gravity bomb with an estimated yield of 25MT. The largest ICBM nuclear weapon was the W-53 “physics packages” based on the B-53 gravity bomb, which was carried by the Titan II ICBM. Both of these were intended to be “bunker busters” capable of striking at a hardened installation like missile complexes or weapon production/storage facilities. The B-41 has long been out of service, and all B-53/W-53s have either been decommissioned or moved to the Inactive class in the Enduring Stockpile since the Titan II force was decommissioned in 1989.
I believe the largest Soviet nuclear weapon was the 18-25MT estimated yield warhead on the R-36M (NATO reporting name SS-18 Mod 1 ‘Satan’), which is the weapon that scared Congress into approving funding for the development of the M-X (later dubbed LGM-118 A ‘Peacekeeper’). Although it was the 10+ MIRV variants (Mods 2 and 4) of the SS-18 that really spurred the US into M-X development, the Mod 3, an improved accuracy version of the Mod 1, capable of accurately targeting the “dense pack” Minuteman silos and destorying them despite hardening measures, that lead to much debate about how and where Peacekeeper (which was designed to be deployed in existing Minuteman silos to reduce cost and delployment effort) was to be based. Anyway, the new SS-27 Topal-M probably has enough throw weight for that warhead, and I would guess that they have retained those weapons in their stockpile.
Not under extant treaties (although said treaties only apply to the signatories, so China or India could do as they please). We would be better off trying to deflect a threatening object rather than fragmenting it, which will make it harder to track or further deflect. On that basis, you’d be better off using a bunch of smaller devices to push it sideways, either by encapsulating in plastic and creating a large diffuse plasma to attentuate the shock or an ORION motor type device which lands on the object (assuming that it is solid and has a firm surface to attach to) and applies the impulse via a damped piston.
Yeah, but WRT the discussion they were under the ocean, not above ground, weren’t they? I recall footage of the sea boiling in an instant, in a vast radius. Mind you, that might constitute being “filmed” - but no mushroom cloud IIRC.
It’s my understanding that Russian missiles weren’t nearly as accurate as U.S. ones, so the Soviets had to make bombs with a bigger BOOM! instead of relying on accuracy.
Of course, they could’ve jacketed them with Cobalt-Thorium-G and buried them underground…after all, if you merely wish to bury bombs, there’s no limit to the size.
That’s the impression you may get from reading Tom Clancy, but it is both inaccurate and overly simplistic. There was certainly truth to this back in the mid-'Sixties through the 'Seventies when American microprocessor manufacturing capabilities far outstripped Soviet capability, but by the late 'Seventies the Soviets were deploying weapons with sufficient demonstrated accuracy to strike at individual facilities or hardened missile complexes with high probability of kill capablity.
The penchant of the Soviets for heavy warheads stems at least in part from their differing view on the strategy of nuclear deterrence and nuclear exchange. The Soviets, as a integrated planning philosophy, never subscribed to the notion of “Assured Destruction”, and thus, their planning focused more on the notion of a disabling strike and graduated warfare, and the tools to apply this like the SS-18 Mod 3 or the FOBS. The Soviets had a highly developed civil defense system and were prepared to lose a substantial part of their population and keep moving, though a full up exchange would have annihilated both nations regardless of any reasonable preparations. Only when the US started deploying MRV and MIRV systems on its submarine-based SLBMs (which were not at the time suffiicently accurate or long range to strike at hardened targets, and thus were dedicated to destroying cities and populations in alignment with the “total war” philosophy) did the Soviets respond by building MIRV systems of their own.
MIRVs were supposed to be inherently stabilizing, and would be cheaper, offering a greater deterrent value for fewer launchers; instead, MIRV became a new subrace of its own, and one that the US arguably “lost” at least in terms of raw capability. While the Peacekeeper was probably superior to any opposing ICBM system of its day, Soviet weapons were “accurate enough” to reliably hit US missile complexes and strategic centers. That the US Air Force had selected “dense pack” configuration for newer Minuteman (and later Peacekeeper) sites was the result of a persistant belief that ABM systems like Safeguard and SafeSAM would be developed and would be more readily protected if in a small garrison; however, such systems (with the exception of the barely-operational-before-deactivation Stanley R. Mickelson Complex) have never been operationally deployed, and as a consequence US missile silos were very exposed to such an attack, which if successful could disable a dozen or more US assets in a disarming strike.
Modern Russian ICBMs are comperable to anything currently fielded by the United States, and if their PR is to be believed emerging systems are more capable than anything in the US arsenal (i.e. maneuvering RVs). I wouldn’t stick any of the morgage money on Russian missiles being inaccurate.
The website at zvis.com/nuclear/nukimgs.shtml has still photos of nearly all nuclear explosions from 1945 until 1963. (After 1963, the test ban treat meant that most explosions were underground, so not much to see in a photo.)
Stranger, you are probably the only one here who might appreciate this:
Back in the mid-1980s, I was involved in determining exactly when the Peacekeeper’s MIRVs impacted the broad ocean area near Kwajalein. We did this by precisely plotting the signatures on light-sensitive paper which generated a printout that FLEW out of the machine and looked something like a sine wave or something with a timestamp at the bottom/top.
I really, really, wanted to save some of that paper to frame as a souvenir, and if I had been able to do so, I’d send you a piece, I think you would have liked it.
Alas, they would not let me, the paper was all burned as a security measure. :mad:
Before someone gets the wrong idea, this being the SDMB, I probably shoud expand my reply slightly.
The tapes were recordings of what sonobuoys anchored in that area recorded and transmitted to instrument-laden Caribou airplanes that circled near the anticipated impact area. When the planes got back to Kwaj, we unloaded the equipment, which was locked to rails on the airplane, and rolled it into the lab. We used the tapes in a machine which allowed us to both listen to the sounds, determine when we heard the initial impact, and then start the paper flying with the accompanying time signatures.
Then, we took this paper to a table and started mapping out the impact signatures with the timestamps to determine exactly (well, more or less, it was past hundreths of a second, more I would not be comfortable saying) when this particular sonobuoy “heard” the impact.
Then, repeat for all of the other sonobuoys, so the folks elsewhere could triangulate and determine pretty accurately where each RV impacted.
Sorry for being long-winded, but just trying to cover the bases as much as I can before someone goes ??? or cries bullshit.
