No Bomb Powerful Enough To Destroy an On-Rushing Asteroid, Sorry Bruce Willis

coondoggie writes "Maybe it's the doom predictions about the end of the Mayan calendar this year, or maybe these guys are obsessed with old Bruce Willis movies. Either way a class of physics students from the University of Leicester decided to evaluate whether or not the premise of Willis' 1998 'Armageddon' movie — where a group of oil drillers is sent by NASA to detonate nuclear devices on an asteroid that threatens to destroy Earth — could actually happen. The students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."

Comments

not about destroying

[Anonymous Coward]

is it me or did the class get it wrong, it was never about destroying an asteroid, it was about splitting it up in pieces or nudging it out of the earth direction

Re:not about destroying

[letherial]

That wouldnt be a good movie.

Its either.
A. Sir! we got a astroid that is going to hit earth with in 20 years.
          Good find private, now send up the ION maker and point at it for the next 15 years, that should move it away to safely pass by

OR
B. Sir we got a asteroid that will hit us in the next few months
          Good find private, we will nuke the bastard, but first we must make some realy cool ships, get a few heroes and they can go drill the hole in the asteroid and really get it good.

A is good if it realy happens, B is good for the movie theater...

Re:Bruce still has a shot

[Tore S B]

Actually, there was a real, sensible (as things go in the field of nuclear deterrent) reason for them: The USSR did not at the time have anything that could deliver a payload with precision. Plus, they used big and slow bombers, which made it possible to intercept them. Thus, they employed a lesson from Ken Thompson in the future: "When in doubt, use brute force". :)

The design was not scaled down as such - it was a 100MT bomb; they simply substituted lead for U-238 in the tamper.