5 ms·
> The hard part would be minimizing the radionuclides. Not necessarily. Tsar Bomba, the highest yield device ever detonated, was also among the cleanest becaus
by Cieplak 10y ago
> The hard part would be minimizing the radionuclides.
Not necessarily. Tsar Bomba, the highest yield device ever detonated, was also among the cleanest because they tampered the third stage with lead instead of U-238.
- M_Grey 10y agoIt was cleaner than their original design, but still a wildly dirty, and stupidly inefficient device.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago> stupidly inefficient device. Any idiot can say that in 2017. In 1967 you'd have to special kind of idiot to discount it as ineffective.
- M_Grey 10y agoNo, idiots are still impressed by big explosions. There's a reason it was scaled down from 100 MT, and even then it was known to be a waste, it used no new tech, was not practically deliverable, and oh yes... much of the blast energy just shot up and out into the stratosphere. How useful. It was designed to be a political statement as part of Cold War politics, and it was known by even its designers then that it was a silly fucking thing to be doing. To be honest, most nuclear testing by that point fell into the, "Silly fucking thing to be doing category..." but idiots still haven't figured that out.
- mirimir 10y agoIf they'd had a Pacific test site, they might well have gone with 100 MT.
- M_Grey 10y agoI suspect that you're right, although I hope that sanity might have prevailed. It's hard to imagine the damage the uranium liner + 50 megatons would have done to that ecosystem. Of course if the US hadn't been experiencing so much political upheaval, they might have tried responding in kind.
- mirimir 10y agoSanity ;) The global nuclear arsenal is still over 2500 MT, I bet :(
- ourmandave 10y agoI wish the North Koreans would get that memo.
- M_Grey 10y agoThe sad fact is that they kind of are the exception to that rule. Kind of. They actually need to test to develop their weapons, and they want the weapons to ensure continuity of their regime, but also to sell the tech (probably). It's a pretty evil/batshit thing to be doing I grant you, but... if they want nukes despite that, they at least need to test. The crazy bastards.
- hueving 10y agoIt was so large there was no feasible way to even transport such a device other than maybe building it on a suicide ship. It was purely a dick measuring contest at that point.
- flukus 10y ago> It was so large there was no feasible way to even transport such a device other than maybe building it on a suicide ship. Why is that not feasible? If they could get it on a submarine they could detonate in most of the worlds major cities.
- M_Grey 10y agoMost of the world's major cities are not under water AFAIK.
- vidarh 10y agoNo, but most of the largest cities are coastal, and you are somewhat more likely to get into a harbour with a hostile sub than with a hostile warship.
- M_Grey 10y agoI really doubt that. I can't imagine that the US and the UK for example, don't have sonar networks and other means to detect subs. It might be nearly impossible to track a boomer in open ocean, but they're not designed for littoral operations and sonar networks are much more effective there. You also have to cope with an airforce and patrolling navy. All in all, you're mostly likely to nuke the nearby ocean, rendering it mostly a radiological/environmental weapon. When you consider that you can far more easily launch a combined 100MT in smaller payloads, with a higher resulting degree of destruction than a single 100MT warhead...
- vidarh 10y agoThe key phrase being "somewhat more likely". I'm not arguing effectiveness. I was arguing against the "not under water" bit, after the person you responded to suggested a sub over a ship.
- mirimir 10y agoSorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that it would be hard to design a device that released lots of SOX without also releasing lots of radioactive stuff. The simplest idea is an S-32 "casing". The good thing is that S-35 is the most stable sulfur isotope, with a half-life of 87.4 days. But I don't know what other products would be.
- M_Grey 10y agoChlorine. Just Chlorine.
- mirimir 10y agoSo you get normal Cl-35 from S-35 by beta decay. Can you get Cl-36 from S-32 by neutron capture?
- M_Grey 10y agoActually you get 32-Phosporous from that. If you want 36-Cl you need cosmic rays interacting with 36-Ar, 39-K, 40-Ca, or neutron activation of 35-Cl.
- mirimir 10y agoDoh. S-32 + n -> P-32 + p And then P-32 decays back to S-32 with ~14 day half-life. I wonder if people are working on this. It'd be a minor tweak to nuclear weapons models.