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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."
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Vista's still a bigger bomb.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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...
Streaming flash video of detonation:
http://sonicbomb.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=90
Penis mightier.
Sure it is. "A device whereby hydrogen is converted through fusion reactions to helium for the purpose of releasing energy." Didn't you read IBM's patent application?
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.
They're testing the effects of shockwaves, which types of light and how much of them are emitted in the blast, what exactly goes on (at the visible and molecular level) in the milliseconds after detonation, and PLENTY of other things. They were also testing new bomb designs and making sure they worked.
Regardless of what conspiracy theorist ideas you may have, they didn't spend billions developing these bombs, and then cause lots of (localized) damage testing them just for the pretty fireworks show. The tests DID have a point.
Not that I'm saying I LIKE the idea that the things are hanging around anymore. The idea that one bomb could kill millions and the idiotic world leaders wave them around like a revolver in the hands of a drunk is just a little on the "what the hades, are you totally insane??" side of things. It's a sad state of affairs we live in when people talk about "nukes for nukes" instead of the lives of the people that would be vaporized without a chance. If you've gotta use weapons, make them conventional or there won't be much of a world left to argue over...yaknow?
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.
The key difference is the incredibly short time frame the bomb produces 1% of the energy of the Sun. This is helped by the Sun releasing energy in essentially the slowest possible way. (The sun is self limited, in that when it gets too hot from too much fusion occurring it expands slightly, lowering the rate of fusion until it cools down.) I don't find it odd at all that for a short period of time the largest fusion bomb ever tested produced 1% of the sun's energy. I can produce accelerations in the hundreds of G's simply by smashing my fist into a wall and likewise say that "for less than a millisecond I produced forces hundreds of times stronger than the pull of Earth's gravity" and be technically correct.
Because the statement that it would be equivalent to "The power output of the Sun for .39 nanoseconds" is misleading.
Don't get distracted by the 39ns figure. Power is an instantaneous quantity - it is a rate at which energy is transmitted. They are saying that the bomb sustained a level of power (rate of energy) output and held it there for a period of time - 39 ns - that approached 1% of the sun.
I repeat: 39ns is just the period of time that the power level peaked for. They calculated that the amplitude of the power peak itself, was equivalent to 1% the power output of the sun.
We don't care about how long the peak lasted for, the 39ns, unless you start integrating power over time as you just did, in which case you're comparing a quantity of energy, rather than a rate of energy output. Yes, I suppose you could say that 39ns @ 1% sun power is equivalent to an amount of energy produced by the sun in 0.39ns, but that's not the interesting number here, because we could similarly integrate just about any huge power source over a long enough interval of time (hours, days, years, whatever) to come up with "the same amount of energy output by the sun over 39 ns".
So the interesting number is in this case, yes, that the actual instantaneous absolute power output of the bomb approached 1% of that of the sun, albeit for only 39 ns.
Quite remarkable...
They are testing new materials and designs of the electronics and radioactive materials used. Some tests do fail or exceed expectations. Something like the George" shot, was physics experiment relating to the hydrogen bomb.
Buster-Jangle-Able was a fizzile with a one kilogram yield, but with alot of radiation.
The American test, Castle Bravo, yielded almost double the expected yield.
Castle Bravo didn't use cryogenic boosters for its fusion phase, so it lead to the developable and miniaturization of the hydrogen bomb (Fission-Fusion and Fission-Fusion-Fusion)
Then you tested to make sure entire systems world, like Grable of the Upshot-Knothole test was a nuclear weapon fired from a 280mm artillery piece and became the proof shot for the entire like of American nuclear artillery rounds.
Then also from tests at different altitudes they've learned to optimize the device's explosion altitude so smaller devices can be deployed.
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.
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
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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