13 ms·
The ‘Tsar Bomba’ Was a 50-Megaton Nuke
- stygiansonic 12y agoIf you enjoyed this article, the documentary "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie" was great - decent footage and a great soundtrack.
- dominotw 12y agoThere is one on youtube also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYUP7zJ0CwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYUP7zJ0CwU
- matthewmcg 12y agoThe filmmaker behind TAB is Peter Kuran. He was a visual effects specialist for some pretty cool movies (e.g. Empire Strikes Back). Restoring old atomic test footage is a special interest of his and he's also done several more in-depth documentaries about atomic weapons: Nuclear Rescue 911: Broken Arrows & Incidents Atomic Filmmakers: Behind the Scenes Atomic Journeys: Welcome to Ground Zero Nukes in Space Atomic Filmmakers is my favorite--it's sort of a "making of" for the historical footage used in the other movies and it talks about the secret Lookout Mountain film studio the Air Force set up outside LA to develop special technology to document and instrument above-ground nuclear tests.
- joezydeco 12y agoBe sure to visit the NUKEMAP simulator and see how the Tsar Bomba matches up to some of the other nuclear warheads available. Drop one on your hometown! http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
- anigbrowl 12y agoOr the 3d version, which is a bit scary in combination with the 3d building imagery from aerial photography - for my house it's good enough that I can easily make out individual trash bins and features as small as a couple of square feet in my back garden. When you hit the detonate button you get to see the mushroom cloud as well as the blast radius :-/ http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap3d/# http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap3d/#
- cge 12y agoI've always thought it illustrative to compare the NUKEMAP results for Little Boy and the Tsar Bomba at Hiroshima. It gives a good indication of just how much more destructive and terrifying warheads became: where Little Boy destroyed a city, a 100 Mton Tsar Bomba would have destroyed much of the region, and caused fires on other islands. And for ICBMs, MIRVs meant that even smaller warheads, themselves still vastly larger than Little Boy, could be launched together to have the same or worse destructive effects.
- jacquesm 12y agoI'm pretty sure if the first atomic warheads had been 10 or even 100 times the size they still would have been used. After all they could have dialed down 'Little Boy' (what a crap name for a weapon) to a smaller yield too, or dropped it in a less populated area but did not.
- jokoon 12y agoI wonder why, depending on the bomb, the radius some radius don't come in the same order. Some time the air blast is larger than the fireball, sometimes not.
- maxerickson 12y agoOne thing that factors into that is the surface vs airburst setting (the presets differ). edit: for the simulation, the other major thing that factors into it must be the "fission fraction", the presets store 4 things: name, yield, a field marking surface/airburst and the fission fraction.
- jacquesm 12y agoThat's a function of the density of the material around the bomb at the time of the explosion.
- kijin 12y agoThe fireball radius and air blast radius are probably proportional to different multiples and/or powers of the bomb's total energy. For example, if A = 7x^2 and B = 2x^3, A will be larger than B when x is small, but B will overtake A as x grows beyond a certain point.
- myrryr 12y agook... here is the deal.... the Tsar Bomba was ^#%$ing huge. No seriously... MUCH MUCH bigger then you think. it was 10 times the combined power of all the conventional explosives used in World War II it was 10% of the combined yield of all nuclear tests to date. and mostly.... It was the equivalent of over 1kg of antimatter going up. 1 ^#%$ing kg.... of ^#%$ing antimatter. It broke windows in Norway and Finland and its shock wave was VISIBLE in the air 700 km away. It is impossible to get people to understand how much of a monster it was. AND.... and this was it dialed down to 1/2 its maximum yield. No one has been crazy enough to test another nuke of its size. Even in the height of the cold war no one was crazy enough to test something like that again.
- dijit 12y agothat's the part that boggles my mind.. it's as phenomenally big as everyone mentions, but it was only 50% yield because the Soviets were scared. my head cannot fathom what 100% yield would look like.
- jug 12y agoIt would also have been far more terrible even in the 50% yield if it had been let to touch the ground for the energy to turn into seismic waves. The energy corresponded to a 8.1 on the Richter scale.
- tim333 12y agoThe trouble with the 100% yield version that was originally planned is it would have dumped a lot of radioactive fallout on Russia. The 50% version was not so much dialled back as a different design with some of the uranium components replaced with lead.
- Symmetry 12y agoThank goodness. I'm also glad they tested it high enough up to prevent the fireball from touching the ground. With a modern bomb you get fallout from the primary stage but the vast majority from an air burst is going to be from the outer uranium-238 shell which absorbs all the extra neutrons from the fusion and splits without emitting any neutrons itself. This isn't a problem with lead for reasons I don't understand and with the air near the bomb you're just doing stuff like turning nitrogen into carbon-14. The results either decay immediately or last for a thousand years and so aren't particularly radioactive. If a bomb goes off near the ground or sea water then there's plenty of stuff possible products with those nasty intermediate half-lives.
- adventured 12y agoTsar's destructive force was incredible, but I think it bothers me a lot more that the US built 500 B41 bombs with a 25Mt yield during that era. What's the functional destructive difference between 50Mt and 25Mt? Zilch, any practical target hit by it is gone.
- Synaesthesia 12y agoIt's incredibly bothersome. We still have the ability to annihilate the whole human race, instantly,
- afsina 12y agoI think it is not possible to eradicate all human race with current nuclear bombs. Some would survive.
- spacemanmatt 12y agoI agree it would be hard to be sure you had gotten every last one, but it would be easy to ensure that the survivors live in a new stone age with nuclear fallout making most of the earth uninhabitable for people, if not most life. I've been somewhat amazed at how resilient the biome around Chernobyl has shown itself to be, but I'm sobered by the measurable losses attributable to it that accident as well.
- refurb 12y agoWhat's the alternative?
- jkot 12y agoIt was different time. Soviet union was enclosed by US airbases and nonstop flying bombers, which could hit any city in a few hours. America also developed crazy stuff like Project Pluto... Anyway there are two reasons for this bomb not mentioned in article: - Terraforming. Soviets honestly believed they could redirect rivers from north to arid south. They even made artificial valley in mountains as experiment. Larger nukes are cleaner than smaller nukes. - Doomsday device in form of dirt bomb. Plan was to concentrate all nuclear waste from Soviet countries on single place, and explode massive bomb under it. Explosion would spread nuclear material into atmosphere and most of earth wold become radioactive. This device was not approved by soviet leaders, too dangerous.
- dijit 12y agoI think that Russia is still surrounded by US forces, or at least US sympathetic forces. I wonder if this causes their country-people to feel boxed in or cornered. :\
- speeder 12y agoYes, it does. And might be the reason why they are so quick to also help other countries with a similar issue (for example: I am from Brazil, and our navy is crap, when we announced finding one of the largest oil reserves of the world, US immediately announced reactivating their south-atlantic fleet, they don't even tried to hide their intentions... so Russia now patrols our water for us, to keep US ships away from the oil rigs).
- ceejayoz 12y agoThe US makes about 8 million barrels a day. The Tupi field discovered off Brazil makes about 100,000 a day and best-case contains a few years of American oil production total. You think the US Fourth Fleet reactivation was intended to steal that production? And risk war with most of South America?
- PerfectDlite 12y ago
- codeshaman 12y agoWhen I think about human intelligence, my mind always arrives at these scientists. How can, then, some of the smartest people on Earth be involved in something as stupid as this. Many scientists realise the grave consequences of their stupidity, after the fact. Both Sakharov and Oppenheimer realised this, but it was too late. The genie was out. The mirage of power, respect, titles, prizes and access to unlimited resources for their experiments is too strong to resist, I guess. :Carrot Then there's the patriotism thing - do right for you country, protect it from the enemies. Fear. :Stick This is how the devil works, after all :). Beware of the stupid as he knows not what the implications of his activities are. Be scared of the smart working for the stupid, as he very well knows the implications, but is too weak to resist the temptation. He has sold his soul.
- dominotw 12y agoIt is not as simple as that . Watch this documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYUP7zJ0CwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYUP7zJ0CwU
- mikeash 12y agoIt's your classic Prisoners' Dilemma. (No surprise, since game theory was largely developed to analyze nuclear war.) You're stuck with another guy. You're both better off if you both cooperate. But individually you're better off if you betray the other guy. In that situation it's really, really hard to arrange cooperation. The US and USSR would have been better off if they could have put a halt to the madness. But if one stopped, that gives huge incentives for the other to betray. The thing is, betraying the other is the rational thing to do. It's the worst outcome, but it comes from purely rational actions.
- digi_owl 12y agoAnd hilariously, whenever it is tested the whole thing falls flat. Because humans cooperate by instinct. Kennedy was told again and again to escalate until the Kremlin backed down. Eventually he had enough and basically showed "rationality" the door. Thus the Cuban Crisis ended without the cold war going hot.
- 12y ago
- garethrees 12y agoThe Tsar Bomba was an experimental weapon, but the United States had the B41, a three-stage thermonuclear weapon with a yield of 25 megatons. Four of these would have been as powerful as the Tsar Bomba; the U.S. manufactured 500 of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb In the 1960s the U.S. Strategic Air Command ran a continuous airborne nuclear-armed patrol (Operation Chrome Dome), so there was probably a 25 megaton weapon in the air for much of that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome It's also worth remembering that the limiting factor on the yield of the Tsar Bomba was the carrying capability of the Tu-95. The Teller–Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons is scalable: you can keep adding stages as long as you have the uranium, plutonium and lithium to make them with. Edward Teller supposedly designed (or at least contemplated) a 10 gigaton bomb: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-big...
- paganel 12y ago> Edward Teller supposedly designed (or at least contemplated) a 10 gigaton bomb That guy was batshit crazy, pardon my French. I know that the Dr. Strangelove character was pretty much based on him, I know about and I partially understand the reasons behind the nuclear arms race, but when you read about plans like this you just start contemplating about the end of humans as a species.
- drzaiusapelord 12y agoHow is he crazy? When nukes are on the table either you implement a MAD-like policy or you die in nuclear fire. There's no real middle ground with weapons this powerful. Its rational to support MAD. Thus far, its working. A lot of human warfare is on its face is crazy sounding, but has a rational backing. >when you read about plans like this you just start contemplating about the end of humans as a species. We called up the USSR and asked them to stop producing weapons on that scale. They laughed in our face. What exactly do you propose? Heck, the USSR's client states were motivated to nuke us without warning. Castro had a pretty big hard-on for launching nukes: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22nuke.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22nuke.html?_r=0 He wasn't convinced by the loss of life or anything. His Moscow handlers had to explain to him that the radioactive cloud would be bad for Cubans. Heck, the politburo was demanding WWIII from Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. Today, Russia maintains an openly published first strike policy on what it calles "tactical nukes." Essentially they say they can launch nukes whenever they feel like it and not consider it a MAD violation. So if Putin's conventional troops are losing, he just nukes the opposition. With madmen like Putin running nukes, MAD makes sense. Its the only thing that does.
- golemotron 12y agoI saw a doc about nuclear weapons that mentioned this one and said that the real reason that no one made them bigger was the fact that they were wasteful. The atmosphere is effectively 10 miles high. Once your blast radius approaches that the difference in pressure pushes most of the energy upward above the atmosphere. You don't get the horizontal spread you'd expect as you increase tonnage.
- hga 12y agoThere's also a re-radiation effect, where the ground etc. that was heated up by the bomb radiates part of that energy into space.
- RexRollman 12y ago"Interestingly enough, Tsar Bomba was one of the “cleanest” nuclear weapons ever detonated, because the bomb’s design eliminated 97 percent of the possible fallout." How do one design a bomb to eliminate, or minimize, fallout? I wasn't even aware it was an option.
- korethr 12y agoBy my understanding, fallout is less a function of the explosion being nuclear and more of how the bomb is detonated. The Tsar Bomba was an air-burst. By keeping the fireball in the air, less vaporized material from the ground is kicked up into the debris cloud from the blast. Both air bursts and ground bursts generate fallout, but a ground burst will generate nastier, localized fallout, and more of it. This is my speculation, but I suspect another reason for the relative lack of fallout from the Tsar Bomba was related to its yeild. To get a particularly large yeild from the materials available, the bomb is going to have to be as efficient as you can get it. All things equal, a more efficient system generates less waste. Or the design the article could simply be referring the bomb's parachute system, which helped keep the blast in the air.
- arethuza 12y agoMost of the energy in most H-bomb designs comes from the fission of the uranium tamper around the secondary by neutrons from the fusion of the secondary. Fission is a messy process. In the "limited" Tsar bomb design they had a non-fissioning secondary tamper so yield was mostly from fusion and the explosion was high enough (i.e. far from the ground or sea) that the fusion neutrons didn't have too much else to activate.
- jostylr 12y agoI found the recent series by the Digital Antiquarian to be very interesting on this, weaving together Infocom's Trinity series and the atomic bomb history, including the Tsar Bomba. http://www.filfre.net/2015/01/t-plus-3-edward-teller-and-his-superbomb/ http://www.filfre.net/2015/01/t-plus-3-edward-teller-and-his...