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Yeah, buy 140 kg is a suborbital lob, and that's not nearly as insanely small. The Davy Crockett has a mass of around 40 kg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device). That involved pretty heavy miniaturization, but a warhead with slightly higher yield and slightly less miniaturization and a size of around 140 kg isn't implausible. Detonating a nuke the size of Davy Crockett on New York still does some pretty serious damage http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=0.04&lat=40.72422&lng=-73.9961&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&zm=16 and if one increases the size even a little bit, the damage starts looking pretty extreme. And the US was able to build the DC in the 1950s, so some components even North Korea would be able to automatically get smaller (such as the electronics). And DC was a variable yield weapon, so if one takes out the extra stuff for that, one also gets a little bit more. That said, it does look like as of right now, the smallest nukes that North Korea has are still much too big to fit on this sort of rocket.

However, it COULD be used to decapitate much of the [*snip* political ranting] leadership if it were detonated right off of Washington D.C.

Not really. The coastline at Annapolis is 40 km from the White House and the city centre. For a 100 Mt warhead, detonated at surface level, the effects would be like this: people outside would receive severe burns from the fireball, but most buildings would be intact, and the people inside them would be fine.

It'd be a different matter if the torpedo could navigate up the Potomac River to the city centre ... but that's seriously optimistic.

Besides, if you can get an intercontinental torpedo (read: autonomous drone submarine) to Annapolis, you can do the same thing with a ballistic-missile submarine, and launch a missile to nuke the city centre with about 60 seconds' notice (assuming your missile accelerates at two gees). But the Russians don't have the technology to accomplish this with a crewed submarine or a torpedo, anyway.

They'd have to kill 32 million people to decimate the US. Whipping out the trusy ol' NUKEMAP, if they got one of their 10kt bombs (like from their 2013 tests) into the heart of LA, it'd only kill 70K and injure 150K. But... nukemap doesn't count fallout (Because it's a bitch and a half to model) and mentions that half a million people are "within 1psi of blast". REAL roughly, let's say all those people count towards "decimation". That means N. Korea would need to do that 64 times. But there's only ~4 major population centers on the west coast where even their most advanced rocket could reach, if it worked. And it's not like nuking downtown LA 60 times linearly scales. At some point they're just nuking a dead horse.

So they'd need ~64+ to 250 bombs, and likely longer range missles to decimate us (or sneaky shipping containers). They likely have ~13–60. ...So no, N.Korea could not decimate the USA.

On the flip side, think about how completely the USA flipped it's shit when some asshats killed 3,000 bankers in NY with a few planes. No, N.Korea cannot destroy us. We are stronger than that. No, they can't even decimate us, yet. But they could very likely devastate us and we should not fuck around with a nuclear power. And let's be real. We ain't doing SHIT without buy-in from China. It's their retarded baby, let them deal with it. Goading them to do something is about the only thing we can do.

(If "decimate" means it cause stocks to drop 10%, which would be a lot easier, then the answer is definitely yes.. I kinda assumed you meant corpses. Alternatively they could irradiate 400 million square miles... but fallout math is hard. )

" Effect of various long duration blast overpressures and the associated
maximum wind speed on various structures and the human body. "

This is talking about the shockwave far from the initial blast, up to several miles away from ground zero.
https://www.remm.nlm.gov/zones...
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com...

If you're close enough to be standing at the very edge of the Mach stem, you're already dead. That's also talking about a quickly gained and then sustained overpressure, very suddenly going from 1 atmo to 2 and staying there a bit. There's not much gradient, either, as it's a supersonic wave.

The physics of a streamlined vehicle going from 2 or 3 PSI (remember nobody's planning complete vacuum) back to 15 PSI pretty suddenly through a gradient of pressures are fairly well understood. That's like going from around 35,000 feet (about 3 PSI) to 50,000 feet (just under 2 PSI) in altitude to sea level quickly, depending on air temperature. That's basically a plane that can do Mach 1 at 40,000 feet doing a near-vertical dive, only there's no necessary sudden pitch change because the pod will be near horizontal the whole time.

The failure mode of a hyperloop is not at all likely to be anything similar to going from sea level at the bottom of a 40-foot cylinder of air at 15 PSI and in milliseconds having all that air replaced by water to suddenly be under 30 PSI. That's more what you're talking about with the shockwave of 15 PSI overpressue at a few thousand feet from ground zero of a nuclear blast.

BTW, if you're close enough to a nuclear blast to worry about the full force of the overpressure wave you've already cooked by the time it's crossed your mind. Further out where you're not consumed in the heat of the fireball is where you should be worried about the air pressure.

I'll trump you.

Taken together, the Manhattan project cost $30trillion in 2012 dollars. Fat Man and Little Boy killed 129,000 people between them, so per-casualty those weapons cost: $233k per head.

More than that damn MOAB.

Sauce.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nuk...

He wasn't looking well the last tine he was arrested for...

Interesting. The lad looks a little like this fellow from Nagasaki http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com...

Could be a coincidence of course. The only thing close I could think of would be meth issues.

punch in 400000 (kt) in the yield box, and see what happens. Yeah it's big, but not as big as Texas. That would take something about 100 times the size of tsar bomba. I don't even know if that's theoretically possible.

No, it wouldn't. Nuclear weapons may be the most destructive thing we know how to build. But they're not black magic. And witless alarmism does no one any good. A 400MT nuke airbursted over Paris at the optimum height would pretty well wipe out it, its suburbs, and quite a lot of the surrounding countryside. But the majority of France would survive. and the UK would be untouched:

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nuke...

The parent is obvious flamebait, but I like history, so I'll share some here...

There was an interesting article in Foreign Policy a couple years ago (possibly paywalled link here) which argued that the Soviet declaration of war was what really prompted the surrender. The author bases this on several arguments, among them:

* The atomic bombing of Hiroshima did not particularly stand out in the context of a huge and destructive conventional bombing campaign.
* The Japanese Supreme Council did not discuss the Hiroshima bombing at all, and indeed, did not seem to care much about the destruction of cities.
* Soviet mediation was seen as the last hope for avoiding an unconditional surrender.
* Japanese forces were deployed to defend against a U.S. invasion, not a Soviet invasion from the opposite direction.
* Giving the atomic bomb credit for provoking the surrender was politically convenient for the emperor as well as the United States.

It's worth a read if you can actually get to the article. There's a comment on the AskHistorians Reddit about the article by Restricted Data (Alex Wellerstein), which gives the original source of this argument (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa), and offers some historiographical context:

Hasegawa's book is very well done. He has managed for the first time to really put together a cohesive, persuasive argument about the end-game machinations in Japan, the United States, and Soviet Union. The other historians of the bomb I know are pretty convinced at least to the point that the Soviet invasion was more influential on the Japanese than the bombs. Not all of them think the bomb was of no influence, or that it would have ended without using them, though Hasegawa himself is apparently convinced of this, from what I've read.

(Personally, I am on the fence to the degree that I just don't see how we can disentangle the atomic bombs from the Soviet invasion as fully as would be necessary to say this with authority, but I am convinced that the Soviet invasion mattered at least as much, if not more, than the atomic bombs.)

The same comment also points out an important aspect of the "moral" debate:

Note that the question of whether the bombs "worked" or not is a completely separate one from whether the people who used them were justified in doing so according to what they knew at the time. People tend to think that the former implies a moral argument about the latter, but it is an entirely separate issue regarding motivation and "the decision." (Note that even characterizing the use of the bomb as being the result of some large moral deliberation, or some sort of invasion vs. bombing tradeoff, is kind of anachronistic.)

He also has a related article here.

I don't have much of an opinion on whether the atomic bombing was "justified" or not. Large-scale attacks on civilians were common through the war in both theaters, so focusing solely on the atomic bomb seems rather limited to me.

Fusion bombs aren't that strong. An average 1.2 Mt device set off in the air at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World would likely leave most of Orlando unscathed beyond broken windows and a bad sunburn, and wouldn't even have any effects at KSC beyond hearing it. Running the plot for a much larger 5 Mt explosion shows that while there's significantly more damage, even the nearby cities of Sanford and Lakeland wouldn't be significantly affected.

If you want to calculate nuclear yields, I suggest picking up a copy of Samuel Glasstone's The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (that's an Amazon link, but there are a fair number of used copies floating around). I have the revised 1962 edition.

Be sure to pick up a copy that still has the yield computer wheel in the back of the book.

Also, this web page lets you map nuclear bursts using Google maps, and seems to be heavily based on Glasstone.

Cute. But 3 miles isn't going to be good enough if all you've got is a 22 kiloton airburst. The White House, the President, and even all of Congress would be just fine. All you'd do is kill a bunch of civilians in the suburbs.

http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/...

Also, 777s don't have much in the way of visibility except directly ahead. The pilot wouldn't know that a Sidewinder had been fired to set off the flares. Also, an F16 carries an internal 20mm cannon that can't be distracted by flares or ECM. And a 777 is a fairly big and poorly-maneouvering target.

People make drones for peace. If you have to qualify it with "military" drones, then you're just being tautological. And why does it even matter if they're made for peace? The question is "can a small nuke do more damage than a thousand drones?"

You also don't seem to understand what nuclear weapons do, if you think a few drones could accomplish the same thing. Take a look at this, for instance. Play around with the smallest nukes in their database. It still annihilates multiple city blocks.

For a real world example, consider that the US drones in Pakistan have killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 people. That's many drones operating over several years. Little Boy killed over a hundred thousand people in Hiroshima, not including radiation deaths over the following years. And Little Boy was tiny compared to the nukes in operation today.

I ran the nukemap myself and got 2.8k 2010 people killed. Again, the population circa 1960 was 3 times lower. So my off-the-top-of-my-head estimate of hundreds to thousands is right on.

Fuck off troll. Go to nukemap. The article says the bomb was 256x that of Hiroshima (17kt), so we're talking 4.5Mt. Per nukemap, the Immediate casualties are over 12,000 people, and thousands more would die from radiation related illnesses and cancers. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Now, go crawl back under your rock in your mommy's basement, dickweasel.

Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?

This is a very good question and as a nuclear layman, it's difficult for me to get a handle on an exact answer. IANA health physicist, just a guy with Wikipedia and Google. But given that, I'll try to give some baselines from what I can see on the net.

First, in terms of "radiation", it seems like we're mostly talking about release of radioactive isotopes, rather than the initial prompt radiation of a nuclear explosion itself. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ( as, eg, this blog describes) were airbursts, so relatively radiologically "clean" - they did a lot of initial damage from blast, heat and gamma radiation, but didn't leave nearly as many "dirty" isotopes in the way of fallout. This is compared with, eg, a surface shot like Castle Bravo which was a huge dirty contamination event.

So when we're talking about "comparing" Fukushima with Hiroshima, we're talking purely about the isotopes, not the explosive power. Which is not really a straight comparison. But given that, Fukushima (or any other nuclear power station) is and/or has the potential to be much dirtier than a bomb (at least an airburst), because there's more nuclear material stored onsite. You'd want a nuclear engineer to give the precise bequerel ratings of all the isotope mixes in the fuel composition, but for a back-of-the-envelope estimate: Little Boy had 64kg of uranium fuel - Fukushima had 1,760,000 kg of fuel on the entire site.

So all else being equal, which of course it's not because we're not talking weapons-grade uranium and I'm sure power rods have lots of other alloys in them, Daichi has 27,500 times as much raw radioactive fuel as the Hiroshima bomb. Impressive, no?

Now most of that fuel probably won't be released, as not all the reactors were damaged, and the health impact of the various isotopes varies wildly based on the half-life of the isotope, its heaviness (ability to be transported far from the site), whether it can be ingested in air or water, how long it stays in the body, what the affinity is for various body parts, and what kind of radiation it releases - alpha, beta or gamma. Alpha particles are the biggest, so do the most damage, but also the easiest to block - I believe outside the body they're fairly harmless, blocked by cloth or skin. But inside the body, they can do more harm. So you really do need a health physicist to work out all the equations here.

However, the buzz on the net has always centered around three main radioactive isotope families: iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and strontium-90.

Iodine has a half-life measured in days to weeks so it was always going to be the initial problem. Theoretically, if all the fission occurred at the first meltdown, there shouldn't be any left. In practice it seems like some short-halflife isotopes are still being detected, which suggests spontaneous fission may still be occurring in the melted cores. Iodine goes for the thyroid and its effect is thyroid cancers, particularly in children. This is starting to show up but there's arguments over what the baseline rate is and how much is due to testing rather than fallout.

In terms of initial (not ongoing) iodine release, Fukushima was 2.5 times bigger than Hiroshima.

Most of the Fukushima-Hiroshima comparisions focus around the caesium isotopes, as these are long-lived (several years) and the body trea

Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?

This is a very good question and as a nuclear layman, it's difficult for me to get a handle on an exact answer. IANA health physicist, just a guy with Wikipedia and Google. But given that, I'll try to give some baselines from what I can see on the net.

First, in terms of "radiation", it seems like we're mostly talking about release of radioactive isotopes, rather than the initial prompt radiation of a nuclear explosion itself. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ( as, eg, this blog describes) were airbursts, so relatively radiologically "clean" - they did a lot of initial damage from blast, heat and gamma radiation, but didn't leave nearly as many "dirty" isotopes in the way of fallout. This is compared with, eg, a surface shot like Castle Bravo which was a huge dirty contamination event.

So when we're talking about "comparing" Fukushima with Hiroshima, we're talking purely about the isotopes, not the explosive power. Which is not really a straight comparison. But given that, Fukushima (or any other nuclear power station) is and/or has the potential to be much dirtier than a bomb (at least an airburst), because there's more nuclear material stored onsite. You'd want a nuclear engineer to give the precise bequerel ratings of all the isotope mixes in the fuel composition, but for a back-of-the-envelope estimate: Little Boy had 64kg of uranium fuel - Fukushima had 1,760,000 kg of fuel on the entire site.

So all else being equal, which of course it's not because we're not talking weapons-grade uranium and I'm sure power rods have lots of other alloys in them, Daichi has 27,500 times as much raw radioactive fuel as the Hiroshima bomb. Impressive, no?

Now most of that fuel probably won't be released, as not all the reactors were damaged, and the health impact of the various isotopes varies wildly based on the half-life of the isotope, its heaviness (ability to be transported far from the site), whether it can be ingested in air or water, how long it stays in the body, what the affinity is for various body parts, and what kind of radiation it releases - alpha, beta or gamma. Alpha particles are the biggest, so do the most damage, but also the easiest to block - I believe outside the body they're fairly harmless, blocked by cloth or skin. But inside the body, they can do more harm. So you really do need a health physicist to work out all the equations here.

However, the buzz on the net has always centered around three main radioactive isotope families: iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and strontium-90.

Iodine has a half-life measured in days to weeks so it was always going to be the initial problem. Theoretically, if all the fission occurred at the first meltdown, there shouldn't be any left. In practice it seems like some short-halflife isotopes are still being detected, which suggests spontaneous fission may still be occurring in the melted cores. Iodine goes for the thyroid and its effect is thyroid cancers, particularly in children. This is starting to show up but there's arguments over what the baseline rate is and how much is due to testing rather than fallout.

In terms of initial (not ongoing) iodine release, Fukushima was 2.5 times bigger than Hiroshima.

Most of the Fukushima-Hiroshima comparisions focus around the caesium isotopes, as these are long-lived (several years) and the body trea

When you apply this to the city I live in, it becomes very clear what a nuclear blast can do. The numbers ( casualties, wounded, destroyed infrastructure, area affected ) are staggering, for a "common" B-61 charge.

You are wrong. The worst a terrorist is ever going to be able to do is a dirty bomb - basically a bunch of C4 next to the radioactive material. The bomb will spread radiation across one or two city blocks and that's about it.

The reason that they will never actually detonate a real nuke is that they are complicated and extremely delicate. The shape of the bomb must be absolutely perfect and the timing of the charge detonations must be accurate to within microseconds, else nothing happens. Getting the shape right is so important that people working on at least one major nuclear programat Los Alamos had to classify all spheres, including oranges.

It will take the resources of a nation-state to blow up a nuke on US soil and no matter what any war-mongering politicians have said, no actual nation-state is stupid enough to do that because it means the end of that country. Not Iran, not North Korea. Not going to happen.

I don't know about that. Most of the problems in shaping it comes down to having the machines to craft and shape the bomb to tight tolerances. We've been able to keep the machines that can make objects and refine materials with such tolerance out of foreign states for the most part. That's what has saved us as much as anything. The math is pretty much out there in the open to a degree. With 3d printing and 3d shaping (lathes/cnc/etc) I don't think we are far from being able to shape any material into any shape. And there are explosives that could certainly be printed and shaped to the nth degree. With some of the new technologies going mainstream and available from all quarters it's going to be downright impossible for us to control those technologies. I think the chances are going to be much higher.

My expectations are simpler than all out war. At some point a terrorist group will manage to get their hands on a nuke. The easiest delivery method is cargo container. One day, one of our ports is going to disappear. I hope I'm wrong...

You are wrong. The worst a terrorist is ever going to be able to do is a dirty bomb - basically a bunch of C4 next to the radioactive material. The bomb will spread radiation across one or two city blocks and that's about it.

The reason that they will never actually detonate a real nuke is that they are complicated and extremely delicate. The shape of the bomb must be absolutely perfect and the timing of the charge detonations must be accurate to within microseconds, else nothing happens. Getting the shape right is so important that people working on at least one major nuclear programat Los Alamos had to classify all spheres, including oranges.

It will take the resources of a nation-state to blow up a nuke on US soil and no matter what any war-mongering politicians have said, no actual nation-state is stupid enough to do that because it means the end of that country. Not Iran, not North Korea. Not going to happen.

Consider the following Nuclear Monroe Doctrine example

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?lat=-4.959937902085307&lng=76.28965300000004&zm=1&kt=20000000000

Basically the US would tow a very large nuke - perhaps one designed to ignite the ocean - just off Diego Garcia.

It's good to know that supplies of plastic dogshit will still be secure after that.

Of course it may not come to that but who knows?

Here's an NZ version

http://i.imgur.com/sr6LR.jpg

We can also send EMP messages by setting off nuclear bombs in patterns corresponding to e.g. Morse code. Does that mean that we should?

But... but nuclear bombs! We've got them just lying around. Be a shame not to use them. There's got to be some kind of science type thing we can do. Blow up the ionosphere, or put a crater in the moon maybe? Excavate a harbour in Alaska? It's the atomic science age! Gotta do atomic science to something!

(big puppy eyes)

Nuclear bombs!