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> Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of
by frabjoused 5y ago
> Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.
At this point where anything bigger creates a threat that goes beyond nations, what kind of person even proposes this. "This is child's play, there's much more effective ways to destroy the planet"
- credit_guy 5y agoIt’s not that easy to destroy the planet. The 1815 eruption of the Mount Tambora volcano released about 2000 times more energy than the 15 megatons TNT released by Castle Bravo [1]. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was equivalent to about 3000 Tamboras. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Examples
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoSix million Castle Bravos? Or, (just under) two million Tsar Bombas? Wow. Just... wow. I had no idea Chicxulub was that big.
- elihu 5y agoWhat's really surprising to me is that right below Chicxulub in intensity on that list are the recent Indian Ocean earthquake in 2004 and the one in Japan in 2011. They're both only about 1/10th the total energy, but still it's a lot more than I would have guessed. (I live in the vicinity of the Cascadia subduction zone, which will probably experience something similar some time in the next couple hundred years.)
- spaetzleesser 5y agoWith a big hydrogen bomb you would also have a lot of radiation which may make recovery very difficult.
- elihu 5y agoI think hydrogen bombs tend to be cleaner. Or at least, they have a higher ratio of heat/kinetic energy versus radioactive fallout. The long-term environmental contamination of a few large hydrogen bombs probably wouldn't be as bad as a lot of smaller fission bombs. (I'm not an expert though. And either way you'd probably want to hide in a hole in the ground for awhile at least if you aren't and can't get far upwind.)
- spaetzleesser 5y agoWasn't there talk about a 1 Gigaton bomb? When asked how to transport it, they said it's not necessary because it would basically destroy the planet anyway. I remember reading something like this
- gambiting 5y agoIt's literally in the article. US was working on a gigaton bomb, but even it was only used as a means to ignite a 10 gigaton bomb. The exact damage caused by such a thing is extremely hard to estimate though.