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It's only implied in the article, but developing such a 1000+ megaton bomb would probably have been possible. There is no clear upper limit to the yield of a t
by retrac 5y ago
It's only implied in the article, but developing such a 1000+ megaton bomb would probably have been possible. There is no clear upper limit to the yield of a thermonuclear device; it seems it's mostly a question of adding more fuel.
- foobarian 5y agoIt's interesting that they also thought it would not be possible to deliver such a bomb due to its expected size. It's water under the bridge now but I wonder if that constraint would have been overcome had they chosen to develop the bomb.
- duskwuff 5y agoAs mentioned in the article -- if the bomb is large enough, that no longer matters. You can detonate it wherever it happens to be and destroy your target -- along with yourself, and everyone else on the planet. Whether this is a useful strategy remains (unfortunately) up for debate.
- hotpotamus 5y agoIf the goal is mutually assured destruction, then wouldn't it be more economical for all countries to just share one bomb rather than duplicate all the development efforts and go to the trouble of putting rockets under them?
- lapetitejort 5y agoPerhaps form an alliance with as many countries as desired, each of which gets one button wired in parallel with the rest. If any one country were to feel threatened by any other, they could just hover their hand over it.
- dylan604 5y agoBut with all things geopolitical, how many buttons must be pushed to reach a consensus? Or better phrased, how many do not have to push the button to make it useless?
- lliamander 5y agoBut who gets to push the button?
- duskwuff 5y agoIt hardly matters. Once the button is pushed, there's no one left to care who pushed it.
- brokenmachine 5y agoThat's a hilariously rational proposition! The whole world working together for a single goal, it's beautiful.
- brokenmachine 5y agoWe're pretty much doing that now with global warming.
- duskwuff 5y agoExcept in reverse. Everyone is refusing to take their finger off of the button.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoThat would be a brilliant premise for a dystopian story I think, have it set a hundred years after the single bomb was created. There could be an international organisation set to guard and if necessary detonate it, the plot could revolve around a team desperately trying to debug 100 year old sensors and triggers nobody really understands any more because the documentation is so secret.
- foobarian 5y agoI took that note as hyperbole myself. But the other comments about dev testing the bomb were interesting - there was (thankfully!) serious concern about fallout wherever the bomb would end up getting tested.
- dragontamer 5y agoThe Dr. Strangelove movie was excellent in its satire of this concept. Its an insane concept, and no normal / rational human would ever dream of that argument. But the problem is that we are not all rational people. The majority of the people in the movie are rational, it only took a couple of crazies to turn the whole situation into a darkly hilarious and apocalyptic turn of events. --------- Spoilers for the old movie: That's exactly the point of the doomsday device. The problem in the movie, is that the Russians didn't announce the existence of the doomsday device yet... they were __planning__ to inform the USA on Dimitri Kissov birthday next week. Which is... a comedic but somewhat believable reason to hold back on the announcement of such a weapon. So the Russians were only crazy because they didn't inform the USA of the weapon yet. And it only took one crazy commander ("Precious Bodily Fluids") to go against the US President and start the nuclear war.
- Retric 5y agoIt’s possible to scale ICBM’s to basically any size. The “unwieldy” Tsar Bomba was only ~60,000lb in 1961, but by 1967 the Saturn V could have launched ~5 of them to LEO.
- dragontamer 5y ago"Fortunately", its a more efficient plan to instead launch MIRVs. That is, instead of launching 5 Tsar Bombas with one rocket, you should launch 100 smaller (but still nuclear) bombs in one rocket. The explosions from a nuclear blast have a radius proportional to cube-root(power), and radius-squared is roughly the level of damage you deal. As such, MIRVs of smaller weapons (large enough to be of incredible destructive power, small enough to fit many many of them on a rocket) is simply a superior strategy over the old Tsar Bomba.
- Retric 5y agoIn general yes, but the specifics get complicated. Both cost and weight are non linear with bomb size. For maximum efficiency vs surface targets relatively small H-Bombs win, but it’s more complicated when you start looking at bunkers, tactical nuclear weapons, fallout, EMP, and targeting accuracy. Which is why the US and Russia both had a wide range of bombs. Historically a significant portion of the push for MERVs was simply an increase in targeting accuracy.
- dylan604 5y agoMIRVs also have the advantage of being harder to neutralize after re-entry based on their numbers. Reducing the count makes it more likely that anti- weapons become effective.
- dragontamer 5y agoWell, these ICBMs travel at like Mach 20. I don't think anyone actually expects any defense system to stop them once launched.
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- philipkglass 5y agoI don't have citations to hand because I've been reading too many different nuclear weapon publications, but I seem to recall there was an idea to deliver these super-size weapons by unmanned submarine. The targeting wouldn't have been very accurate, but it wouldn't need to be. It's interesting how nuclear weapons in general were solving the problem of accurate targeting by making it unneeded. Today one attack helicopter can plausibly take out 16 1969-vintage T-72 tanks before rearming. In 1969 the expected solution to a giant herd of Soviet tanks coming through the Fulda Gap was tactical nuclear weapons, because NATO forces could not fire their conventional weapons accurately enough to stop such an advance.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoAny book recommendations in that category? Ive been eyeing “109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos” for some time but have not started anything.
- philipkglass 5y agoI read the big Richard Rhodes classics [1] a long time ago. Now I'm mostly reading blogs, declassified primary sources, and publications from open source intelligence. Two somewhat lesser known books I recommend if you are looking for details more than broad history are U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History and The Swords of Armageddon, both by Chuck Hansen. Both are currently out of print. The latter can be found on Library Genesis. I scanned The Secret History about 10 years ago and uploaded it to a technical book sharing forum but sadly nobody seems to have propagated my scan to Library Genesis and I can't be bothered to go through their sign-up process right now. [1] The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.
- eesmith 5y agoQuoting a different article by the same Wellerstein, at https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-story-of-the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-bomb/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-story-of-the-worl... : > It is hard to convey the damage of a gigaton bomb, because at such yields many traditional scaling laws do not work (the bomb blows a hole in the atmosphere, essentially). However, a study from 1963 suggested that, if detonated 28 miles (45 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, a 10,000-megaton weapon could set fires over an area 500 miles (800 kilometers) in diameter. Which is to say, an area about the size of France. Yes, it's so powerful it's blasting the air into space. Adding more power doesn't so much make the blast more powerful as make the air go into space more quickly!
- Arrath 5y ago< Yes, it's so powerful it's blasting the air into space. Adding more power doesn't so much make the blast more powerful as make the air go into space more quickly! Wow. How many of these would it take to appreciably reduce atmospheric pressure world-wide?
- eesmith 5y agoWhen I wrote "air into space", I didn't mean it reached escape velocity. Rather, it no longer acted as a pressure cover to the blast. The air have gone up a few hundred km and returned to earth. FWIW, there was a pressure wave world-wide. The Wikipedia page says a fluctuation of 0.6 mbar was measured in New Zealand. (Krakatoa's pressure wave was recorded going around the Earth three times!) That said, let's consider the number of Tsar Bomba's needed to lower the pressure by 0.01mBar, permanently, assuming all of the energy from the bomb was used to get air to exactly escape velocity. (In reality, energy also went into space, or melted snow, or was turned into seismic energy, or ... And there will be a distribution of velocities.) Mass of the atmosphere is about 5.15E18 kg. 0.01mBar is 1/100,000 reduction in atmosphere gives 5.15E13 kg. Escape velocity about 11 km/sec. Energy = 1/2 m v * v = 3E21 J. Tsar Bomba = 210–240 PJ = 2E17 J. So, assuming the impossibly perfect transfer of all energy into moving air at escape velocity, 10,000 Tsar Bombas. I don't know how many orders of magnitude more are needed before the spherical cap of atmosphere would be blasted to escape velocity, but clearly even a tera-ton bomb isn't enough.
- dividedbyzero 5y agoI wonder if a ship might actually be a decent delivery mechanism for a multi-gigaton device
- dragontamer 5y agoThe Tsar Bomba was the practical limit for what could be dropped by an airplane. In fact, the Tsar Bomba had a large parachute, to ensure that the airplane could fly away in time. --------- Allegedly, the Tsar Bomba weighs 27 tons, which is a little bit beyond what a modern C-130 could carry. (But maybe a modified C-130 could carry such a weapon). EDIT: Bigger bombs could be made, but the question of "how to deliver" the weapon to our enemies becomes a significant question. There's always the Dr. Strangelove approach of building an infinitely huge bomb in your own country, and hoping the bomb is big enough to blow up the world... but that was a joke / sarcastic movie and not an actual plan (I hope).
- mithras 5y agoI think Starship could deliver a 150 metric ton bomb.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoWhat about delivery by ship? I wonder what are the limits for cargo ships. Personnel could evacuate and remotely detonate.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- trhway 5y agoModern Russian “Tsar Bomba” in an autonomous nuclear powered 10000+ miles range mini submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_... . They are already being put into service.
- ethbr0 5y agoThe problem with nuclear UUVs is that they don't solve any tactical problems Russia actually has. Want to nuke Jacksonville, Norfolk, New London, San Diego, and Puget Sound? Russia can already clobber them with enough ICBMs. So... first strike? In which case the silos in the Great Plains launch on you, followed shortly thereafter by any SSBN on patrol. It only makes sense as a defensive weapon. And while Russia is paranoid, I don't think they're strategically expecting the US to be able to neutralize their road/rail mobile forces and submarines and strategic bombers in a first strike. In which case it only makes sense as a propaganda device. Good use of limited funding, there.
- krylon 5y agoTechnically, yes. Practically, the Tsar Bomba was already beyond what was useful in military terms. Above a certain yield, most of the energy is radiated off into space, IIRC. Not that I'm eager to find out, if you're catching my drift.
- markdown 5y agoNo, I'd rather not catch your radioactive drift.
- krylon 5y agoMy "drift" was that I think nuclear weapons are bad idea to begin with, and that Gigaton weapons would be a really REALLY bad idea, not just from ethics perspective, but also useless from a military perspective. I should have chosen my words more carefully.
- rbanffy 5y ago> Tsar Bomba was already beyond what was useful in military terms If we think of it as a weapon, yes. If we think of it as a demolition device, then not even the sky is a limit. You never know when you might need to demolish a small moon.