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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."
Yes, but you can transport them on a large nuclear submarine and quietly lay them down by your enemies coastlines. Say 20 of these 100Mt bad boys and you got yourself a nice man made tsunami. No need to fly around or expose the launch...
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.
You got that right. This is why modern weapons don't even go above one megaton. Instead you load multiple warheads that are "only" a few hundred kilotons into a single missile. Of course, this is pretty much overkill as well, because quite frankly, a "small" number of warheads will be quite sufficient as a deterrent. The chance that somebody will attack you if they know they will get 50 nukes flying right back at them is not very much greater than if they are going to get 400 nukes back in their face. Now, to put this into perspective, the US has more than 5000 warheads in service, and more than 9000 stockpiled. Russia has close to 6000 in service, and 16000 stockpiled. The UK has 750 in service, France has 350, and China some 130. India has about 80, Pakistan about 10, and Israel is suspected to have between 100-300.
Thus in total there are some 10.000 warheads in service in the world, which works out to about 100 nukes per country. As anybody with half a brain can see, this is absolutely silly. The larger nuclear powers could cut their arsenals by a factor of 10, and they would still have several hundred nukes in service as a deterrent.
I just finished reading "A Brief History of Rome" (free e-book from gutenberg.org). Throughout, the 19th-century author kept referring to "Barbarians" and "Civilization". I eventually figured out that the difference was literacy (the pen). The Romans inflicted both the pen, and Christianity on the world. The author seemed to think both were true gifts, but I noticed that the downfall of Rome started in earnest with Constantine, who converted them empire's faith, and that the dark-ages followed shortly after. Coincidence? I doubt it. Wikipedia has a great article on it. Just my own two-cents, but a corrupt society built on slavery and the spoils of war needed the old religion and an all-powerful emperor to survive. So... which is more powerful, the pen, or religion?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Just to point out that if you read a modern study of the fall of the Empire in the west you will find a very different set of explanations. Why the Empire fell is one of the "big questions" for historians and current answers don't bare much resemblance to those of the nineteenth century.
When I was a history undergraduate, I remember one of my lecturers saying he thought it was a question that frequently said more about the writer than anything else; eg in the immediate post-war period historians concentrated on the external military pressures of the "barbarians" (it's a Roman word). Later historians turned more to ideas of internal factors such as the increased tax burden on local elites and the Empire allowing barbarian auxiliaries to settle within the empire's borders under their own leaders.
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Given the fact the explosion created power for such a short amount of time it is not inconceivable that its power output was approaching 1% of the sun. It would not be able to sustain that power, and given it was a fission reaction which for each reaction releases ~ 200MeV of energy, compared to ~ 13MeV for a fusion reaction, you can create a lot more energy (usually in the form of heat) from a short term fission than you can fusion.
Also as many others are stating, you're probably confusing power with energy, the energy output won't be 1% of the sun, but the power output for that short time could well approach it.
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.
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.
I was an MIT undergrad when Ronald Reagan came into office. The Reagan administration was a boon to certain types of research, and a bust for others. There was an enormous shift in emphasis towards research that could be weaponized.
I remember a scientist who joined the project I was working on. He had headed a small lab elsewhere at MIT as a principal investigator, but he signed on to our project as an engineer because research money had dried up. He brought with him this odd stainless steel apparatus that looked like a mutated, high tech water main. We were using it as small vacuum tank. I asked him what the thing was built to do, and he told me that it was a new kind of electron microscope he had invented that could make images showing the distribution of the different kinds of atomic nuclei in the thing being imaged.
"Wow, that's very interesting," I said.
"It is," he replied, "but it was funded on an ONR grant, and they're not funding that kind of research any more. Back in the old days," he went on, "I'd have told them it was a death ray. It's all those damned ROTC engineering grads," he sighed. "About the only way you could kill somebody with this is to drop it on him from a high place. Those guys aren't physicists, but they know a death ray when they see one. All they want to talk about is deaths per dollar."
The deaths per dollar metric fascinated me. Later I brought it up with some of my friends back at the dorm, and we kicked around the question of how various methods of manslaughter stacked up. The idea of blowing up the famous "Corita" LNG tanks near Boston was popular, until we fetched some Chem E majors who told us about the eight hundred reasons that you couldn't kill more than a handful of people that way.
Finally, I hit upon an unbeatable method when it comes to deaths per dollar. Go to a construction site, and root through the dumpster until you get a nice section of 2x4 about five feet long. Then walk down the street and beat everybody you meet to death with it.
"But," they protested, "that's assuming that your time is free."
"This is a government project," I replied. "To a first approximation staff time is free. We just take all the resources not engaged in productive activity -- that is producing deaths -- and treat them as slack."
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Some historians think it was because Germany's racial doctrine was so aggressively disparaging of 'Jewish' physics, and so their research and funding ended up being steered
The bigger problem was that an impurity in graphite during research caused German scientists to miscalculate the amount of uranium needed to have a sustainable fission reaction, causing them to estimate it at many hundreds of tons, rather than the small pounds that the Americans ultimately came up with. With so many other urgent priorities, it didn't seem possible so therefor, they didn't really pursue it!
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Some historians, notably Richard Rhodes, have theorized that the German mismeasurement of the cross-section of graphite was sabotaged by the scientists who did it.