8 ms·

ok... 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 con

by myrryr 12y ago

ok... 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 ago
that'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 ago
  It 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Thank 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.
    - m_mueller 12y ago
      Well, lead is a very stable element from what I understand. Radioactive elements like Uranium are radioactive because they're inherently unstable, such that fission is 'easily' doable and releases a lot of surplus energy.
      - Symmetry 12y ago
        Yeah. I just don't understand why lead can't be turned into an unstable element by bombarding it with neutrons.
        drostie 12y ago
        Looking it up in a reference, natural lead is about 1% Pb-204, 24% Pb-206, 22% Pb-207, and 53% Pb-208. These are all of the stable isotopes. If Pb-204 absorbs a neutron it turns into Pb-205, which isn't stable but its half life is ten million years so it's only very weakly radioactive. The -206 and -207 turn into other stable isotopes, of course. So those don't matter so much: about half of your neutrons enter lead nuclei which can safely absorb a neutron. The other half, the Pb-208, turns into Pb-209. Pb-209 is radioactive with a surprisingly short half-life of 3.25 hours, so that's gone in a matter of weeks. The nasty stuff is the lead atoms which happen to absorb two different neutrons during the explosion. This becomes Pb-210, which has a half life of 22 years: short enough that it's going to be emitting a bunch of radiation, long enough that it won't be gone after a few weeks. So the answer is probably "it's very rare in these sorts of explosions to have two neutrons hitting a single lead nucleus." There are other possibilities (maybe they got the lead from spent nuclear fuel or centrifuges or something and it's all Pb-206) but that sounds like it's the most plausible.
        Symmetry 12y ago
        Ok, I did a bit of research. It seems that Pb-208 has a very small absorption cross section for neutrons so you'll probably see very little Pb-209. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_cross_section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_cross_section http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/resources/n-lengths/elements/pb.html http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/resources/n-lengths/elements/pb.htm...
trhway 12y ago
>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. and thanks to the test we know for sure that ignition of the atmosphere with even such a bomb still wouldn't happen :)
- Xophmeister 12y ago
  Whenever the Tsar Bomba comes up, the potential for it to have ignited the atmosphere is always brought up. What exactly, however, does that mean? (Apologies if that sounds sarcastic; it's a genuine question!) My guess is that the heat/EM could induce a state change in atmospheric gasses into plasma. Would this be a chain reaction that ultimately encircles the world? Also, what are the implications of that (locally or globally)?...
  - rpeden 12y ago
    It might get brought up because before the first atomic bomb was detonated, one of the physicists who worked on it (Edward Teller) suggested the possibility that detonating the bomb would ignite Earth's atmosphere. There's a bit more information here: http://www.sciencemusings.com/2005/10/what-didnt-happen.html http://www.sciencemusings.com/2005/10/what-didnt-happen.html
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    I assume it's similar to fear that fusion bomb detonated under the sea would cause a chain reaction with the hydrogen, turning all water into plasma.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Every transformation (chemical, nuclear) has an activation energy. When you're exploding bombs using a new principle you might cross the activation energy of stuff that you'd rather keep around.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      This is only a problem if it's possible for the transformation to be self-sustaining. That is, the act of transforming atmosphere causes yet more atmosphere to transform. Only in that situation would the whole planet's atmosphere burn. Is that possible?
jug 12y ago
When nukes stop being about the M.A.D. concept and more about being a propaganda tool... It was designed to shock. And it surely did. Soon after the detonation, Andrei Sakharov himself (behind the Soviet "Third Idea" nuclear weapon design) began speaking out against nuclear weapons and became a Soviet dissident.
yarper 12y ago
It's not crazy. It's pretty horrifyingly logical. Why have one 100Mt nuke, when you can have a hundred 1Mt nukes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetable_reentry_vehicle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetab...
- angdis 12y ago
  Indeed. I can confirm that after having played Missle Command on the Atari 800 in 1983!
- pcarmichael 12y ago
  Here are a couple videos of MIRV re-entry tests - basically what it'd look like before having a really bad day. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1dDTnszCQC0 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1dDTnszCQC0 http://theaviationist.com/2013/12/27/russia-icbm-test-kura/ http://theaviationist.com/2013/12/27/russia-icbm-test-kura/
tomjen3 12y ago
If you want to see the effects of various nukes there is a simulator here: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ (I have no idea if it will get you on some sort of list if you access it). The takeaway is that, as long as it is just a single nuke, the damages are rather underwelming, except for the Tsar bomba.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  Those rings show the area of near total destruction and death. The area of severe damage and less instant fatality is maybe twice as wide. Outside of that there's another ring of significant damage, but the probability of survival increases (as long as you're not near a window when the shockwave hits.) The map also doesn't show fall out or the effects of a possible firestorms.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    "The map also doesn't show fall out" It's an option you can select - you can also set wind speed and direction (drag the windsock icon about). You also need to make sure it is a ground burst as an air burst won't produce much fallout.
- arethuza 12y ago
  "the damages are rather underwelming" Not sure I would agree with that - a single 800kt detonation over Manhattan looks pretty bad to me and a realistic attack would probably have had many tens of warheads used. Here is a rather jolly 1980's BBC documentary that spends a lot of time looking at the effects of a single 1Mt warhead on London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vejorfkdgwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vejorfkdgwU Of course, it does finish by noting that a real attack would have multiple ground and air bursts. [NB UK("pretty bad") == NonUK("utterly appalling")]
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    Well when I mean pretty underwhelming I mean that I kinda expected a nuke to take out the entirety of New York + a big chunk of the east coast. I mean these are the weapons of doom, right? The weapons that will end the world? And yet if you are just 30 miles from the target the first time you are going to notice is when you turn on the TV.
matthewmcg 12y ago
Not just crazy--there was no military utility for a bomb that large, even in the twisted logic of cold war doomsday planning.
gshubert17 12y ago
A 1-Megaton explosion has the same energy as 46.55 grams of matter. 50-Megatons is thus about 2.32 kilograms, or 1.16 kg each of matter and anti-matter. A kilton of TNT is said [0] to be equivalent to a cube 27.8 feet on a side. 50-Megatons would be a cube over 1000 feet on a side. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent

by myrryr 12y ago

dijit 12y ago

that'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 ago
It 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Thank 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.
  - m_mueller 12y ago
    Well, lead is a very stable element from what I understand. Radioactive elements like Uranium are radioactive because they're inherently unstable, such that fission is 'easily' doable and releases a lot of surplus energy.
    - Symmetry 12y ago
      Yeah. I just don't understand why lead can't be turned into an unstable element by bombarding it with neutrons.
      - drostie 12y ago
        Looking it up in a reference, natural lead is about 1% Pb-204, 24% Pb-206, 22% Pb-207, and 53% Pb-208. These are all of the stable isotopes. If Pb-204 absorbs a neutron it turns into Pb-205, which isn't stable but its half life is ten million years so it's only very weakly radioactive. The -206 and -207 turn into other stable isotopes, of course. So those don't matter so much: about half of your neutrons enter lead nuclei which can safely absorb a neutron. The other half, the Pb-208, turns into Pb-209. Pb-209 is radioactive with a surprisingly short half-life of 3.25 hours, so that's gone in a matter of weeks. The nasty stuff is the lead atoms which happen to absorb two different neutrons during the explosion. This becomes Pb-210, which has a half life of 22 years: short enough that it's going to be emitting a bunch of radiation, long enough that it won't be gone after a few weeks. So the answer is probably "it's very rare in these sorts of explosions to have two neutrons hitting a single lead nucleus." There are other possibilities (maybe they got the lead from spent nuclear fuel or centrifuges or something and it's all Pb-206) but that sounds like it's the most plausible.
        Symmetry 12y ago
        Ok, I did a bit of research. It seems that Pb-208 has a very small absorption cross section for neutrons so you'll probably see very little Pb-209. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_cross_section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_cross_section http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/resources/n-lengths/elements/pb.html http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/resources/n-lengths/elements/pb.htm...

trhway 12y ago

>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. and thanks to the test we know for sure that ignition of the atmosphere with even such a bomb still wouldn't happen :)

Xophmeister 12y ago
Whenever the Tsar Bomba comes up, the potential for it to have ignited the atmosphere is always brought up. What exactly, however, does that mean? (Apologies if that sounds sarcastic; it's a genuine question!) My guess is that the heat/EM could induce a state change in atmospheric gasses into plasma. Would this be a chain reaction that ultimately encircles the world? Also, what are the implications of that (locally or globally)?...
- rpeden 12y ago
  It might get brought up because before the first atomic bomb was detonated, one of the physicists who worked on it (Edward Teller) suggested the possibility that detonating the bomb would ignite Earth's atmosphere. There's a bit more information here: http://www.sciencemusings.com/2005/10/what-didnt-happen.html http://www.sciencemusings.com/2005/10/what-didnt-happen.html
- Ygg2 12y ago
  I assume it's similar to fear that fusion bomb detonated under the sea would cause a chain reaction with the hydrogen, turning all water into plasma.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Every transformation (chemical, nuclear) has an activation energy. When you're exploding bombs using a new principle you might cross the activation energy of stuff that you'd rather keep around.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    This is only a problem if it's possible for the transformation to be self-sustaining. That is, the act of transforming atmosphere causes yet more atmosphere to transform. Only in that situation would the whole planet's atmosphere burn. Is that possible?

jug 12y ago

When nukes stop being about the M.A.D. concept and more about being a propaganda tool... It was designed to shock. And it surely did. Soon after the detonation, Andrei Sakharov himself (behind the Soviet "Third Idea" nuclear weapon design) began speaking out against nuclear weapons and became a Soviet dissident.

yarper 12y ago

It's not crazy. It's pretty horrifyingly logical. Why have one 100Mt nuke, when you can have a hundred 1Mt nukes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetable_reentry_vehicle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetab...

angdis 12y ago
Indeed. I can confirm that after having played Missle Command on the Atari 800 in 1983!
pcarmichael 12y ago
Here are a couple videos of MIRV re-entry tests - basically what it'd look like before having a really bad day. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1dDTnszCQC0 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1dDTnszCQC0 http://theaviationist.com/2013/12/27/russia-icbm-test-kura/ http://theaviationist.com/2013/12/27/russia-icbm-test-kura/

tomjen3 12y ago

If you want to see the effects of various nukes there is a simulator here: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ (I have no idea if it will get you on some sort of list if you access it). The takeaway is that, as long as it is just a single nuke, the damages are rather underwelming, except for the Tsar bomba.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
Those rings show the area of near total destruction and death. The area of severe damage and less instant fatality is maybe twice as wide. Outside of that there's another ring of significant damage, but the probability of survival increases (as long as you're not near a window when the shockwave hits.) The map also doesn't show fall out or the effects of a possible firestorms.
- arethuza 12y ago
  "The map also doesn't show fall out" It's an option you can select - you can also set wind speed and direction (drag the windsock icon about). You also need to make sure it is a ground burst as an air burst won't produce much fallout.
arethuza 12y ago
"the damages are rather underwelming" Not sure I would agree with that - a single 800kt detonation over Manhattan looks pretty bad to me and a realistic attack would probably have had many tens of warheads used. Here is a rather jolly 1980's BBC documentary that spends a lot of time looking at the effects of a single 1Mt warhead on London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vejorfkdgwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vejorfkdgwU Of course, it does finish by noting that a real attack would have multiple ground and air bursts. [NB UK("pretty bad") == NonUK("utterly appalling")]
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Well when I mean pretty underwhelming I mean that I kinda expected a nuke to take out the entirety of New York + a big chunk of the east coast. I mean these are the weapons of doom, right? The weapons that will end the world? And yet if you are just 30 miles from the target the first time you are going to notice is when you turn on the TV.

matthewmcg 12y ago

Not just crazy--there was no military utility for a bomb that large, even in the twisted logic of cold war doomsday planning.

gshubert17 12y ago

A 1-Megaton explosion has the same energy as 46.55 grams of matter. 50-Megatons is thus about 2.32 kilograms, or 1.16 kg each of matter and anti-matter. A kilton of TNT is said [0] to be equivalent to a cube 27.8 feet on a side. 50-Megatons would be a cube over 1000 feet on a side. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent