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The Real Mother of All Bombs, 46 Years Ago
vaporland writes "Tsar Bomba is the Western name for the RDS-220, the largest, most powerful weapon ever detonated. The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, in an archipelago in the Arctic Sea. Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb had a yield of about 50 megatons. Its detonation released energy equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun for 39 nanoseconds of its detonation. The device was scaled down from its original design of 100 megatons to reduce the resulting nuclear fallout. The Tsar Bomba qualifies as the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity."
MOD PARENT DOWN!
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
and with that lovely thought, I go to bed
to dream dreams of nuclear holocaust
"The Tsar Bomba qualifies as the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity." Except for, say, the aforementioned sun, which human beings have been regularly "utilizing" ever since we first decided it might be a good idea for our bodies to process some Vitamin D.
To drop on the Whitehouse, the Pentagon, and your house, I assume?
Yes, the RDS-220 was impressive, but it ain't got nothing on the Jobs' iPhone marketplace bomb...
This video has been floating around the 'net for years. So...what...slow day or something??
Vista's still a bigger bomb.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Streaming flash video of detonation:
http://sonicbomb.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=90
First off, the Sun isn't a device. Second, we 'use' it for almost everything. The food we eat is grown directly or indirectly using the Sun's energy. The weather system of the Earth is driven mostly by the Sun. One could probably spend hours making lists of things we directly or indirectly 'utilize' the Sun for.
:)
If you're going to engage in pedantry at least get it right. I know it was probably an attempt at humor. Better luck next time
Penis mightier.
I would strongly recommend watching Trinity and Beyond http://imdb.com/title/tt0114728/
It available on DVD..
You'll get to see some wicked badass bombs.
they are always labeled a "test". what exactly were they testing?
..or they they could go one step further in a foolish session of bloody pointless political brinkmanship?
that they can make a bloody big bang?
what the after effect were?
I always thought with nuclear weapons, that really after a certain size there were precious little point is making it more powerful.
Nothing says "happy anniversary slashdot" like 46 year old news. Our other top story, an Anonymous Coward links to wikipedia's October 30th page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_30.
It was a show. One could say one of the most spectacular special effects ever made.
That baby weighed about 30 tons. The Tupulev that carried it to its destination had its bomb bays open and some fuel tanks removed to fit that thing somehow into its belly. Though it could be carried anywhere within Russia, an intercontinental strike with it was impossible.
No, ICBMs couldn't carry it either. By far not. The R9, which just came into production in 61, could carry less than 2 tons.
The idea behind the Tsar (besides proving who has the biggest) was to compensate for inaccurate targeting. The goal was a bomb that could level a town even if dropped miles away (because the bomber was about to be shot down, or because the pilot had better things to do, like avoiding being shot down, than aiming accurately). It was quickly abandoned when ICBM targeting became accurate enough to ensure you could level whatever target you want to strike. And MIRVs offer much more destruction per ton carried.
In its core, it was a propaganda stunt. Another chapter in the dick-comparing story between Russia and the USA.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Something that we, as a human race are supposed to be proud of? Why do we care? Can't we evolve past this need to make the biggest "exploding" thing? I shake my head in horror.
-hps
Not the biggest built. Rumor has it that both the USSR and the USA built 1GT weapons in the mid 1960's. It really doesn't take that much to expand a conventional Hydrogen warhead to a tertiary. Both were built, "Just in case." I don't think we'll ever know just how close we came to vaporizing each other.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Given the history of Soviet nuclear testing (or perfection), I am happy that they managed to find a remote spot and not blow up their own like they did in Kazakhstan. Also, I am thankful that this "my penis is bigger than yours" race is over. Things could have been a lot worse.
OK, so let me get this straight: on the one hand we have the sun, a fusion reactor with a mass of about 2 * 10^30 kg (about a million times the mass of the whole earth). On the other hand, we have a fusion device with a mass of merely 27 tonnes, i.e. 3 * 10^4 kg, or 26 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE lighter.
I have a hard time believing that the energy output of the latter was anywhere close to 1% of the former, except maybe by some really bogus metric (only counting certain wavelengths of radiation, for example).
"The Tsar Bomba qualifies as the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity."
I believe my wife would argue that the cheap freezer chili burritos occasionally eaten by her husband would easily defeat any such device.
And I'm pretty sure the cats agree, too... how my wife puts up with me, I shall never understand.
Another chapter in the ridiculous history of 20th century warfare was the development of bat-mounted bombs for use against the Japanese - read all about it.
The interesting thing is that they were actually looking to be reasonably effective - so much so that they destroyed the testing facility. Unfortunately for the Japanese and the program, the atomic bomb was perfected before frozen bats could be deployed for use in warfare.
There is no limit to the insane plans the world's armed forces will try.
Read Pynchon.
Does that make K-Fed the father of all bombs? If that is the case, are we really safer if he has custody?
set up us the Tsara Bomba!
Monstar L
My sense of scale must be off; I would've thought 1% of the Sun's power could instantly reduce the Earth to a barren rock. Surely the Sun is well over 100 times larger than the Earth?
In Soviet Russia, bombs d....
BOOoOoooOoooOOOooom!!!!!!!!!!!!! Seriously though, 1% of the energy of the sun at any given moment is a difficult number to believe... I didn't RTFA (not that it would probably matter anyhow), but is this number REALLY an accurate estimation?
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Don't try this at home, kids..
This has been on the front page of digg at least four times before.
our new Russian overlords ...
Really and honestly, what purpose can a 50-megatonne thermonuclear bomb really serve, except to say, "My power to vaporise millions of innocent people is greater than your power..."? While perhaps impressive from a scientific point of view, there is no practical use for nukes other than to annihilate civilization as we know it.
Yes, leave it to the governments of the world to protect us and keep us "safe". "Safe" as in safely glowing in your grave.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
But war doesn't have to make sense and it doesn't have to be green. Bombs can also be remotely detonated. World War IV will be fought with sticks and stone buddy.
This is an interesting point. It is reasonable to assume this bomb was a Teller-Ulam design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller-Ulam_design If the uranium tamper is replaced with lead, the overall efficiency is cut in half. The fallout, however, is cut by a lot more, and is relatively low.
That Soviet union, knowing their desire for showing off their power, choose to do this, is pretty good.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Next time, don't be such a pussy.
Put it in a container, hide it among thousands of others and have the documents say it's being shipped to Washington. Attach a GPS and when it gets within a mile or two of destination it can detonate.
Hell. Just the threat of it would effectively shut down international trade.
Deleted
If the population know they're going to be vaporised when the government goes to war, they'll become far more concerned with the politicians preponderance for going to war in the first place.
Deleted
By power output are they refering to the power radiated out into space, the power we receive at Earth, or the actual power output of the sun's reactions??
All these number are drastically different. The surface temperature of the sun is ~5000K (I think) whilst the core temperature is something like ~15,000,000K. Obviously temperature is only a measure of heat energy but the output at the core is clearly higher than at the surface. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but the output of the sun is actually only the core where the fusion of hydrogen is going on. This energy must then pass through lots of 'rubbish' in the photosphere to be the energy we see as output at earth...
Anyway, which value are we talking about here because there are about 4 orders of magnitude difference here, in temperature. The pressure at the core would suggest that there is a huge difference in energy released per unit time
Additionally, I cant remember the name of the film (a recent one) but does this not show that we can't make the sun 'start working again' as they like to tell us. Nor the core of the earth for that matter (The Core).. I know they are only films, but it fills the less informed population with stupid ideas or what science is, how things work and what we can do. A pet hate of mine, and I'm sure many others.
Trivia for nerds, but no news. In fact, this link has been submitted a dozen times to sites such as digg and reddit. Despite the fact it is definitely not news. But don't let that stop you from posting all kinds of interesting articles from wikipedia. After all, there is no wikipedia site people can go to and read trivia. Oh wait..
Love the bomba!
NOTHING to be proud of.
I don't think it was a brilliant day for mankind at all.
Bravo, AC, Bravo. I was going to say much the same thing, albeit maybe less bluntly. However, I would add this to the above:
Everyone I have heard espouse the "loving Earth/Gaia" bit lives a comfortable, relatively modern life. Mother Earth loves you plenty when you have electricity, running water and stores full of food.
Take that away and get real close to Mother Earth. I've been there: Mother Earth may still love you, but the bitch will try her best to kill you at every opportunity.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Yeah, considering that the Russian "The Father of All Bombs" (pun from the American "Mother of All Bombs") had "ONLY" 44MT, then this Tsar Bomba must be the "Grandpa of All Bombs".
If that is true, America is going to start thinking how to rebrand their future bombs, if we keep going this way we will start hearing "Arthritic grandpa of All Bombs", "Fossil great-grandpa of All Bombs"... etc...
Nuclear bombs could really destroy life on this planet. When I say destroy, I mean completely annihilate it. Imagine a nuclear war where madmen from either side drop 100 MT (or greater) bombs...bye bye Earth.
It's obvious you've never sampled my chili.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
- Kiss Your Sorry Ass Goodbye! The Atom Bomb Is Gonna Fly.
- Doomsday - while just a rough draft, what's there will give you nightmares. I had to stop working on it because it made me paranoid.
- Constitutional Crisis In A Nuclear State. Happily the crisis was resolved amicably, but potential trouble is still brewing
Yeah, I was pretty surprised the domain was available too.I plan to add some stuff about the Cuban Missile Crisis sometime soon, such as a wild bear wandering onto a US Air Force Base with the result that a fighter squadron armed with - ready for it? - nuclear air-to-air missiles was scrambled, and would have taken off had not the base commander blocked the runway with his own car.
The idea behind what one pilot described as "the dumbest weapon ever invented" was to fire a rocket armed with a nuclear bomb into the general vicinity of a soviet bomber. The blast would be big enough that the bomber would be destroyed even if the rocket didn't get very close. It's not quite clear what would become of the American or Canadian citizens on the ground beneath the detonation.
There's lots more, but I have to do it in little pieces or the I start wanting to crawl out of my own skin.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The link in question is here.
Just
But I was wrong.
I don't recall now who invented it, but the idea was to surround a large hydrogen bomb was a casing of non-radioactive Cobalt. The fusion reaction produces a neutron or so for each helium atom created. In a conventional hydrogen bomb, these neutrons are used directly to cause damage, by irradiating living things. But in a Cobalt bomb...
The neutrons are absorbed by the Cobalt, to become the highly radioactive gamma ray emmitter Cobalt-60. It gets vaporized by the blast, and largely blown into the upper atmosphere.
Most radioactive fallout from an H-bomb has a very short half life, which is why those who escape the blast can safely emerge from their fallout shelters in a couple weeks. Not so with Cobalt-60: it has a half-life of several years.
That's long enough to enable to vaporized Cobalt-60 to spread via air currents all over the Earth, eventually to be caught up in raindrops and thereby fallen to the Earth.
Where it will irradiate everyone with a lethal gamma dose.
It was envisioned as a spoiler, to be detonated by the loser in a nuclear war. It would need to be a pretty big bomb, on the scale of Tsar Bomba, but it wouldn't need to be delivered, just detonated in place. It will kill everyone eventually, except maybe those in deep underground shelters, who manage to stay there for decades.
It's inventions like this by my colleagues that make me ashamed to have a degree in Physics.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Firewalkers don't burn their feet because they are in contact with the heat for only a short period of time. This bomb didn't do apocalyptic damage because it only lasted for a brief amount of time. If the explosion held its peak for a minute, there would likely be issues produced that alter life as we know it, but it was a short enough burst that the energy was able to dissipate over a large area without issue.
My webcomic
In my opinion, a more interesting question is how long you could satisfy the world's energy needs with the explosion.
50 megatons is equivalent to 2e+17 joules. The world power consumption was 1.5e+13 watts in 2004. It follows that that single blast could have powered our modern, energy-starving world for four hours.
Every time I read about this monstrosity I burst into a fit of laughter. Gigantic weapons just make me happy for some reason. I propose a 100 Megaton test on the moon so the whole world can watch...
I fail to see how this is news, it has been known for a while that the Soviets wanted to try a 100 megaton device. I would recommend to check Trinity and Beyond http://www.vce.com/trinity.html/, a real good documentary on the initial tests and further developments up to the very last test not so long ago.
I know I'd buy one!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
When I was growing up in Europe in the early 1980s there was still a very real threat of a hot cold war. A nuclear stand-off. The US deployed Pershing II medium range ballistic missiles to counter a possible Soviet attack and the USSR deployed similar SS-20 or SS-21 missiles as a counter measure. There was only a five-minute warning... It was crazy and hellish.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
And that's not at all far-fetched; I read once that a certain Washington DC Domino's Pizza knew the night before when the first Persian Gulf War was going to start, as they were getting orders from the Pentagon all night long.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Go see "Into the Wild". The Wild kills.
The British developed their A and H bombs independently from the United States, since the US chose to ignore a technology sharing treaty the UK and US had after the war. The British got their super bomb working in the Grapple test series in 1957-58 after only nine (reasonably clean) tests. Pretty impressive, but it took all the might of the crumbling Empire to build it. They scrapped all the old bombers and battleships, and rather needlessly built THREE high-tech V bombers: the Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor. (And simultaneously an atomic submarine program.) They were super, but the sheer costs must have contributed to the collapse of the British Empire. See my sig, btw. Says it all. I've read lots of accounts from the Grapple series. Security was pretty good, but some people were rather close to the explosions. They were horrifies by the strange heat wave from the bombs and the super-intense flash! People who were facing away from the bomb and closed their eyes could see the bones inside their hands! How many of them contracted cancer and disorders nobody knows.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Jason Bourne or someone else from Treadstone, yes. Otherwise, I'll take the nuke.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I've always wondered what the effect on Novaya Zemlya (the place over which it was dropped) was. Just did some reading, apparently 224 nuclear devices were detonated there.
That's really interesting. I remember how close we came to war a couple of times during the 1970s and 80s, and of course in the 50s and 60s. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bomber Command in Britain could have wiped out a large part of the USSR before the American bombers had reached their targets! But by this time the Soviets would probably have vaporized the German cities and it would have been to late anyway, because there would have been precious little to fight over. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_bomber
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
The moon is part of our ecological system, I'm not quite sure what would happen if we change anything up there. Besides, what are the odds a nuke would make it up there without some ill inspired military fool changing the target area?
The only reason we still walk around on this planet without too much extra glow is because people in charge of the switch (specifically Russion ones) had more guts and brains than was reasonable to expect from them given the propaganda both sides generate.
I don't know about you, but I find the idea of any nation (regardless of creed, religion and/or inclination) having enough capability to zap life on this globe rather worrying. MAD is indeed a very apt acronym.
Insert
... how exactly?
The thing the submitter is failing to realize is that the MOAB is so named because it's the "largest" *conventional* bomb. Big explosions are easy with a nuke, its a lot harder with chemical reactions. Point is moot anyway, Russia says they already beat the US with its Father of all Bombs.
...trying to say is...
I don't know... my money's still on the pen.
What is a pen compared to the hand that wields it?
...or the human intellect that guides both?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114728/ Narrated by our pal Bill Shatner too.
http://www.amazon.com/Trinity-Beyond-Atomic-Bomb-Movie/dp/B00000IML5
Absoloutely awesome movie, probably a bit twisted but I love atomic bombs and seeing them go off, beautiful things, horrible of course but beautiful too, fascinating stuff.
They cover Tsar Bomba in that, IIRC the mushroom cloud went 64km's in the air and people would have got 3'rd degree burns at up to 100 miles away.
(check wikipedia, I'm not linking it for whoring value)
Here's a snippet of it as it goes off underwater.
Seeing the size of that amount of water shoot up with those tiny battleships in the foreground, along with that music - goosebumps.
Epic stuff, check it out people.
Err apologies, link I was trying to post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XudyhmS1YxA
(unless I did paste it and slashdot stripped it? I doubt it?)
Anyhow if it doesn't appear in this post again, go on youtube and search for "trinity underwater" should do it.
Awesome stuff.
This is the reason I consider false or sensationalist news more dangerous to the wellbeing of society than terrorism.
Welcome to slashdot. New here?
This was around months ago. On 9/20/07 this info appeared in the blogosphere with video.
Sorry, but James Brown laid down da bomb and blew away the house.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
This sucker was about 2500 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. So using SRQT(2500)=50, at 50 miles it would be like 1 mile from the bomb at Hiroshima. I recall it was touch and go as to whether the plane that dropped it would be destroyed. Believe it was painted white to reduce radiative heating.
The Tsar Bomba qualifies as the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity.
This bomb was built to cause destruction, it might have been tested but calling it utilized is a fallacy and I for one am glad it has never been utilized.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Not a single "in soviet russia" joke?!
I'll take, "The Penis Mightier" for $500.
Don't mind me, I can't click on the right 'reply to'.
The single most powerful device(s) are Chuck Norris' right and left legs.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
*sigh* another interesting story gone. Post more details in the initial submission so we dont have to visit the website at all. Anyone summarize the best bits from the page thats now offline or got a google cachelink?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
...and yet somehow we aren't speaking Russian today.
Why hasn't someone made a scene where two people fight one with a sword the other with a pen and the pen wins? Think airplane style humor.
I am also waiting for another movie where (american) football players trip on and get pinned under that line that is put on the screen for the first down.
I respectfully disagree...
Think about demagogues. One key tool is to stir up your population hating someone else, so they'll give you the power to fix the "problem" you just created out of thin air. At the risk of running askance of Godwin's Law, think about the H-guy and the Jews prior to WWII. They were no threat, but they were a convenient bogeyman, and served as a target for hatred.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'd go for a cough/sneeze.
If they later accuse you of not actually doing anything about entropy, you can just quote the second law of thermodynamics, "Entropy increases for all real processes." Not doing anything is the only thing you can do about it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Everyone I have heard espouse the "loving Earth/Gaia" bit lives a comfortable, relatively modern life. Mother Earth loves you plenty when you have electricity, running water and stores full of food.
Take that away and get real close to Mother Earth. I've been there: Mother Earth may still love you, but the bitch will try her best to kill you at every opportunity.
The bitch is trying to kill us annually with hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, floods, and diseases. She doesn't really love us; she hates us and has been trying to kill us off.
Its detonation released energy equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun for 39 nanoseconds of its detonation.
Finally, the reason behind global warming!
They could have just as easily used pencils.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Terrorist ducks? I *knew* there was something fishy about Scrooge McDuck -- if he had nothing to hide, why doesn't he use legitimate banking methods to store his money?
jam the firing mechanism of the bomb... everyone knows you can do that... jeez.. :P
sig goes here!
Everybody knows you can't have a proper nuking in the Soviet union without some cowboy riding the bomb.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
The physics of Thermonuclear weapons is such that you can scale them up to almost any yield you want, provided you have the proper knowledge of the physics involved. It's perfectly feasible to build a "doomsday" weapon of 10 GigaTon yield or more, bury it in a quarry somewhere... and know that you could contaminate the entire earth with fallout. Dr Strangelove wasn't far off the mark. --Mike-- Am I on the no-fly list yet?
...and 39 nanoseconds is not very long.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Not working that well, is it?
Best Slashdot Co
"...but the bitch will try her best to kill you at every opportunity."
Mother Earth is not a "bitch" just because you can't build a fire.
It's been 46 years since the release of Showgirls? I'll be damned.
"[The Earth] doesn't love you any more than your pet rock does."
Remember, the Earth will not talk to you, and if fact, it cannot speak. If the Earth does talk to you, we encourage you to ignore its advice.
At 44MT, the FOAB would have been the second most powerful bomb ever detonated, coming in just after the Tsar Bomba. However, it's not quite that powerful. Not by an order of magnitude or six.
The American-made MOAB (Mother of all Bombs, or the more boring official Massive Ordnance Air Blast) weighs in at 11 tons TNT, and the Russian-made FOAB (Father of all Bombs, no official name given) weighs in at a whopping 44 tons of TNT. No, that's not kilotons or even megatons like the previous poster wrote, just plain tons. Not even close to even a puny nuclear weapon like the Hiroshima bomb (about 13 kilotons TNT). Not that I'd like to be in the neighborhood when either one of these babies goes off, though.
Here's some linkies for your clickification:
Mother of all bombs (GBU-43/B): wikipedia, Global Security, Discovery Channel snippet
Father of all bombs: wikipedia, the Guardian article, YouTube
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
I remember reading/hearing somewhere that when the first bomb was detonated in New Mexico that there were bets that it might ignite the atmosphere and cause a chain reaction cooking everything on the surface.
Question 1: Why did they think that (these were smart guys)
Question 2: Why did it NOT happen?
Question 3: Could it happen with a big enough bomb?
Picosecond pulses from a nitrogen laser are well over a megawatt, but you can put your hand in the beam without feeling anything.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Just bomb the canary island, hell just some regular explosives would set off the land slide. The whole east coast of North America is screwed, the sea life is moved a bit but not totally killed off from fallout, and it would be a lot easier to do.
Quick someone but a few battle groups around the canary islands.
It was detonated hundreds of meters into the air, yet the mere radiation melted the rock bellow it to glass, the dust cloud penetrated the cloud cover, the electromagnetic pulse disturbed radio transmissions in Australia, and the shock-wave could still be measured on its third pass around the world. Had it been detonated at full power it would have released more radioactive fallout than Soviet's entire history of nuclear testing. Sure, maybe the single shot didn't quite qualify as "apocalyptic" but build a few hundred of those things and you start getting close... This was a weapon with a destructive power that could quite correctly be described as having biblical proportions.
I just have to say this, we should all lovingly thank that bitch for trying to kill us at every opportunity. It is the murdering ecosystem we all inhabit that provided the mechanism for our evolution.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yes, it's going to far to anthropomorphize the Earth as some sort of conscious goddess character.
But it's not "just a rock." We are not aliens dropped out of the sky onto this place. We all grew out of it - straight out of the scum.
> about 50 megatons. Its detonation released energy equivalent to approximately 1%
> of the power output of the Sun for 39 nanoseconds of its detonation.
Hmmm. Maybe Marvel's character The Sentry, with the energy of "a million exploding suns" (not just plain old suns burning away) is evidence of highly retarded-level scientific illiteracy in comic book authors.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Tsar anniversary's????? I finished watching a video clip about it in youtube a few hours back!!!!!! I don't know why!! It just poped in my head (I was looking for anime).
What was the time of the detonation? I bet I watched it at the same time!!! freaky really!!!!!!
Here's a little thought experiment:
Imagine you are sitting in a barracks in beautiful Germany, just west of the Fulda Gap. Over on the other side of said Gap is a large subset of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, all planning to cruise through it and over you on their way to Paris and points west. There aren't enough conventional munitions or bodies to fire them... but you can drop a 'tactical nuclear weapon' and stop the remainder in their tracks.
Pop Quiz: Do you want to be there with a weapon that's never been rigorously tested, whose characteristics aren't fully understood, or do you want one that was and is?
It seems that you are still stuck with some of the hippy mentality you pooh-poohed above - if you cannot understand the difference between the precise delivery of a 1 Kiloton tactical weapon and a county-destroying 50 Megaton Tsar Bomba then further discussion would seem moot.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Its detonation released energy equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun for 39 nanoseconds of its detonation.
The thing that irks me the most about Slashdot is the way that the majority of posters and commenters so maladroitly feign expertise in the sciences. Anyway, you meant to say "Tsar Bomba's rate of energy release, for a period of 39 nanoseconds, was ~1% of the Sun's rate of luminous energy release (which has been maintained continuously for ~4.5 billion years.)"
Anyone care for a game of thermonuclear war?
We are now a couple of generations removed from many original sources of hate but you will still find Muslim kids who decry Jews, Jewish kids who vow to kill Muslims, Whites that beat up Blacks, Chinese that hate Japanese, etc. etc.
These kids probably have never met the recipients of their wrath nor been involved in any direct conflict, but their hate continues to exist because it has been passed down to them from their parents, their schools, their governments and the media in their societies.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
And I clean my own fish
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
They knew something was going on, I doubt they new what.
That manager was a friend of the manager at the store I worked at and called him telling him something big was going on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ugh, crunchy granola hippie sentiments don't get more palatable because they're dressed up in crappy sci-fi notions.
If |------------------| is 1nm
then we were
|.| close.
"How I stopped nuclear war." We can thank this guy for being insubordinate and not following procedures. Because if he *had* followed orders, then it's incredibly likely that none of us would be here today.
I read once that a certain Washington DC Domino's Pizza knew the night before when the first Persian Gulf War was going to start, as they were getting orders from the Pentagon all night long.
My crack dealer had the same hunch about the second Gulf war.
POKE 36879,8
Yes YES!
... Oh! the humanity! Oh My god!
Oh it is so shameful what men have done!
I loathe being a human. If only we could go back to our roots-
And live peacefully, amongst the other simian creatures!
And if only we
Uhh...
I think you mean-
Britney Spaers is the bomb of all mothers.