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It's really interesting that the "Davy Crockett" (smallest bomb) will only level three city blocks and spread radiation for six. Not sure why you would not just

by kenrikm 15y ago

It's really interesting that the "Davy Crockett" (smallest bomb) will only level three city blocks and spread radiation for six. Not sure why you would not just use conventional weapons if you need a blast that small? On the opposite end, it's really scary to see the effects of a Tsar Bomba 100mt Bomb. It basically takes out the entire New York metropolitan area :(

simonsarris 15y ago
You need the blast that small because the Davy Crockett was to be fired by a human on the ground, not dropped from an airplane. A small blast can be strategically preferable if you want to fire a bunch in a line in order to stop troops from advancing over a border for several days due to radiation hazards. It seems that using the weapon posed massive risk for the operator, so it might have been in the maker's interest to make the bomb even smaller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
- Symmetry 15y ago
  Are you sure the Davy Crocket has any lingering radiation worth worrying about? Fallout ought to be a function of radiation flux over volume, plus the unconsumed portion of the bomb, and for three stage devices the unconsumed portion of the uranium tamper as well. I seem to recall that most fallout from your typical nuclear weapons comes from the tamper - replacing the uranium with lead reduces yield by around 50%, but reduces fallout by a much larger fraction. I'd expect that after three days the blast site would be almost safe for habitation, and that you could safely travel through the site of the explosion immediately if you're in a tank or APC.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    Wikipedia says that the area would be uninhabitable for up to 48 hours. The intent was not to make the border region permanently unavailable, but simply stall for time to mobilize other defensive forces.
mikeash 15y ago
A conventional weapon capable of doing that much damage would need to be delivered by a large truck or aircraft. The Oklahoma City bomb weighed 7,000 pounds, for example, and didn't even destroy one city block. The Davy Crockett weapon, on the other hand, was small enough to be transported in a single jeep and fired by one person. Additionally, since it was designed as a tactical weapon of war, the quarter-mile lethal radiation dose is what really matters. I believe this was particularly important for tanks, which are robust against nearby explosions but whose armor provides only poor shielding against radiation, meaning that you'd likely end up killing the crew even though the tank itself would still be mostly intact. The fact that you could set these up ahead of time and have them manned around the clock would have made them an incredibly effective defense in Europe in the event of war with the USSR. Over two thousand were produced, and many positioned around the countryside. Delivering the equivalent in conventional explosives would have required hundreds or thousands of aircraft, vulnerable to getting shot down, and needing much more advance notice and planning, while making those aircraft unavailable for other uses. I'm not saying that deploying a couple thousand man-portable nukes around the border areas of West Germany was necessarily a good idea, but it did make sense given the situation at the time.
- bdunbar 15y ago
  ... needing much more advance notice and planning Without disagreeing with your point ... The Army being the Army - while the weapons were issued, the troops trained on the system with dummy warheads, I suspect that issuing live atomic warheads to the troops would have required just as much confusion, hurly-burly, and wacky improvisation as getting a wing of airplanes aloft. Or more? The Air Force does fly airplanes around all the time. One suspects the guys in charge of atomic warheads did not actually issue their toys to the battle groups very often.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    It's a complex subject, certainly. One additional subtlety that's worth considering is that, while they may not have had warheads on the border all the time (although things were more lax in the 60s), war was unlikely to break out with absolutely no warning, and they could be stationed at the border if tensions rose, potentially days or weeks in advance of war breaking out. Whereas with airplanes, you can't launch your bombers days before you expect the enemy to cross the border. However, probably the more pertinent point was that, even if the warheads would have been troubled by administrative confusion as you propose, they probably looked much more effective to the guys in charge of procuring items like this, where such problems often get abstracted away or simply forgotten about.
ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
The 100 megaton version of Tsar Bomba was only a design. The biggest one tested was 50 megatons, because anything more powerful would have been too large and/or too heavy to carry, and the pilots would not have had enough time to get to a safe distance before detonation. "The bomb, weighing 27 tonnes, was so large (8 metres (26 ft) long by 2 metres (6.6 ft) in diameter) that the Tu-95V had to have its bomb bay doors and fuselage fuel tanks removed. The bomb was attached to an 800 kilogram parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 kilometres (28 mi) away from ground zero. The fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was seen almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from ground zero. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (nearly eight times the height of Mount Everest). The base of the cloud was 40 kilometres (25 mi) wide. All buildings in the village of Severny (both wooden and brick), located 55 kilometres (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were completely destroyed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
- th0ma5 15y ago
  Just to add a little on to what you wrote, seems like there's also a part where anything much over 50 MT just blows the rest of the energy out into space, so there seems to be a cap on how big one can be?
  - ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
    I'm not an expert here, but my opinion is that there is no limit on the megatons, or if there is, it's substantially higher than 50. The reason I believe this comes partly from one sentence in the Wikipedia article: "Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland." That focusing reminds me of the practice of shaping conventional explosives. The focusing from the Tsar Bomba test was accidental, meaning that they did not design it into the bomb, but if you were to, for example, design a nuclear explosion to work in conjunction with techniques which allow for precise, large-scale control of weather, you could effectively create a nuclear shaped charge which would focus the explosion downwards or outwards, thereby allowing you to increase the expected yield, as delivered to the target, whereby dissipation into space would not be a real concern. This is just off the top of my head, and I'm guessing that no one's tried it, mostly either due to lack of need, or lack of ability to do grand nuclear experiments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_focusing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_focusing
zokier 15y ago
I don't think you really appreciate how large destruction "only" three city blocks is.
- TeMPOraL 15y ago
  I appreciated it when I put the marker on my home - I could then clearly imagine what the destruction range is.

by kenrikm 15y ago

simonsarris 15y ago

You need the blast that small because the Davy Crockett was to be fired by a human on the ground, not dropped from an airplane. A small blast can be strategically preferable if you want to fire a bunch in a line in order to stop troops from advancing over a border for several days due to radiation hazards. It seems that using the weapon posed massive risk for the operator, so it might have been in the maker's interest to make the bomb even smaller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

Symmetry 15y ago
Are you sure the Davy Crocket has any lingering radiation worth worrying about? Fallout ought to be a function of radiation flux over volume, plus the unconsumed portion of the bomb, and for three stage devices the unconsumed portion of the uranium tamper as well. I seem to recall that most fallout from your typical nuclear weapons comes from the tamper - replacing the uranium with lead reduces yield by around 50%, but reduces fallout by a much larger fraction. I'd expect that after three days the blast site would be almost safe for habitation, and that you could safely travel through the site of the explosion immediately if you're in a tank or APC.
- mikeash 15y ago
  Wikipedia says that the area would be uninhabitable for up to 48 hours. The intent was not to make the border region permanently unavailable, but simply stall for time to mobilize other defensive forces.

mikeash 15y ago

A conventional weapon capable of doing that much damage would need to be delivered by a large truck or aircraft. The Oklahoma City bomb weighed 7,000 pounds, for example, and didn't even destroy one city block. The Davy Crockett weapon, on the other hand, was small enough to be transported in a single jeep and fired by one person. Additionally, since it was designed as a tactical weapon of war, the quarter-mile lethal radiation dose is what really matters. I believe this was particularly important for tanks, which are robust against nearby explosions but whose armor provides only poor shielding against radiation, meaning that you'd likely end up killing the crew even though the tank itself would still be mostly intact. The fact that you could set these up ahead of time and have them manned around the clock would have made them an incredibly effective defense in Europe in the event of war with the USSR. Over two thousand were produced, and many positioned around the countryside. Delivering the equivalent in conventional explosives would have required hundreds or thousands of aircraft, vulnerable to getting shot down, and needing much more advance notice and planning, while making those aircraft unavailable for other uses. I'm not saying that deploying a couple thousand man-portable nukes around the border areas of West Germany was necessarily a good idea, but it did make sense given the situation at the time.

bdunbar 15y ago
... needing much more advance notice and planning Without disagreeing with your point ... The Army being the Army - while the weapons were issued, the troops trained on the system with dummy warheads, I suspect that issuing live atomic warheads to the troops would have required just as much confusion, hurly-burly, and wacky improvisation as getting a wing of airplanes aloft. Or more? The Air Force does fly airplanes around all the time. One suspects the guys in charge of atomic warheads did not actually issue their toys to the battle groups very often.
- mikeash 15y ago
  It's a complex subject, certainly. One additional subtlety that's worth considering is that, while they may not have had warheads on the border all the time (although things were more lax in the 60s), war was unlikely to break out with absolutely no warning, and they could be stationed at the border if tensions rose, potentially days or weeks in advance of war breaking out. Whereas with airplanes, you can't launch your bombers days before you expect the enemy to cross the border. However, probably the more pertinent point was that, even if the warheads would have been troubled by administrative confusion as you propose, they probably looked much more effective to the guys in charge of procuring items like this, where such problems often get abstracted away or simply forgotten about.

ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago

The 100 megaton version of Tsar Bomba was only a design. The biggest one tested was 50 megatons, because anything more powerful would have been too large and/or too heavy to carry, and the pilots would not have had enough time to get to a safe distance before detonation. "The bomb, weighing 27 tonnes, was so large (8 metres (26 ft) long by 2 metres (6.6 ft) in diameter) that the Tu-95V had to have its bomb bay doors and fuselage fuel tanks removed. The bomb was attached to an 800 kilogram parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 kilometres (28 mi) away from ground zero. The fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was seen almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from ground zero. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (nearly eight times the height of Mount Everest). The base of the cloud was 40 kilometres (25 mi) wide. All buildings in the village of Severny (both wooden and brick), located 55 kilometres (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were completely destroyed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

th0ma5 15y ago
Just to add a little on to what you wrote, seems like there's also a part where anything much over 50 MT just blows the rest of the energy out into space, so there seems to be a cap on how big one can be?
- ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
  I'm not an expert here, but my opinion is that there is no limit on the megatons, or if there is, it's substantially higher than 50. The reason I believe this comes partly from one sentence in the Wikipedia article: "Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland." That focusing reminds me of the practice of shaping conventional explosives. The focusing from the Tsar Bomba test was accidental, meaning that they did not design it into the bomb, but if you were to, for example, design a nuclear explosion to work in conjunction with techniques which allow for precise, large-scale control of weather, you could effectively create a nuclear shaped charge which would focus the explosion downwards or outwards, thereby allowing you to increase the expected yield, as delivered to the target, whereby dissipation into space would not be a real concern. This is just off the top of my head, and I'm guessing that no one's tried it, mostly either due to lack of need, or lack of ability to do grand nuclear experiments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_focusing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_focusing

zokier 15y ago

I don't think you really appreciate how large destruction "only" three city blocks is.

TeMPOraL 15y ago
I appreciated it when I put the marker on my home - I could then clearly imagine what the destruction range is.