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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."
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
Yeah. Think of all those forests laid waste to accommodate your bloody writing implement.
The pen is mightier than the sword: Often propaganda will work better than overt force. Shackle a man's hands and he will try to break free, shackle his mind and he will never consider it.
This is the reason I consider false or sensationalist news more dangerous to the wellbeing of society than terrorism.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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...
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.
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.
You're selling Penis Mightier? ... you're sitting on a goldmine Trebek!
The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
This sig all sigs devours
Enough with this stupid Gaia superstition and quasi-religion! The planet Earth does not care whether you exist or not. It will not protect you. And it is not holy. It is just a rock. The real loss if we hurt the environment of this planet is not some spiritual entity. It is the potential loss of knowledge for us humans. But once that level of knowledge is reasonably complete and humans can survive without the Earth, this planet will only have sentimental value and it will not matter whether we mine it to the core or use it as a testbed for nuclear weapons.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
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
I took the parent as taking issue with the 'loving' part than with the anthropomorphic tone of the OP.
My favorite 'mother earth' quote, from someone who was out in it quite a bit:
"...nature is a stern, hard, immovable and terrible in her unrelenting cruelty. When wintry winds are out and the mercury far below zero she will allow her most ardent lover to freeze to her snowy breast without waving a single leaf in pity, or offering him a match; and scores of her devotees may starve to death in as many languages before she will offer a loaf of bread."
That from Nessmuk.
I'm from the Aldo Leopold school of conservation, I don't want to poison the air and water and cut down all the trees. But I also know, from various somewhat narrow escapes, that regardless of the cartoon face stuck on nature, it wants to crunch up my bones and return them to the soil and only by my wits or by erecting technological barriers do I keep that from happening.
Entropy and all that. Nature is a big promoter of entropy.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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.
My favorite pen-sword retort:
"just because 'the pen is mightier than the sword', that doesn't mean you can win a sword fight with a pen."
stuff |
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.
ancient, loving Earth
Tough love....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
etc. etc.
Hey Nancy boy, maybe the Earth is trying to tell you to man-up?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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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True, but if Tsar Bomba makes a man's country turn into glass, I think we could notch that as a win for the bomb.
Sig it.