Gentlemen...Lets blow up the moon

[Mr.Peabody]

^^^No, you're not weird, fusion is beautiful! (As long as we don't do it much in our atmosphere) The Sun is almost nothing but fusion, and I think we all agree, it's beautiful.

If we can live on this planet without a full nuclear exchange, it will be a testament to our intelligence. It will have shown we have overcome the evolutionary, biological baggage of being an animal, and learned to control and respect such power.... and maybe one day put it to constructive use!

 

[hixidom]

I've always wondered why we don't see more celebratory moon nukings. I mean, it could be a 4th of July type thing. Or we could create national moon-bombing day. Just imagine: Once a year, all Americans standing in their backyards at night waiting for a flash of light in the sky.

 

[Mystic0]

...

Sorry if this is a bit of a derail on the original thread, which in my opinion is absolutely fiction and silly, but Traveler where did you get these figures?

Surely the biggest nuclear arsenal in terms of gigatons is still in the hands of Russia and surely it is over 7 gigatons.

Didn't Russia explode one that was a lot closer to 100 megatons in the early days by taking a super powerful H Bomb configuration and wrapping it in a U-235 "jacket" then exploding it above ground and scaring the crap out of everyone, basically making Soviet and other scientists say "never again" for that particular design?

The total amount of nuclear weapons and their total yield is ever changing. Though it is believed that at the moment Russia has the biggest total arsenal while the USA has the biggest active arsenal:

Federation of American Scientists :: Status of World Nuclear Forces

The total yield of the total arsenal is again a number that is hard to get a precise number on, the best guesses are that this is currently about 7 Gigaton.

The biggest nuclear test on earth ever was with the Tsar Bobma, this was originally a 100 megaton weapon but this was thought to cause too much fallout, so it was reduced to 'only' 50 megaton.

[YOUTUBE]

Kind regards,

The Traveler

I hate doing this.. but the design was scaled down because of the blast radius, the plane dropping the bomb wouldn't have been able to escape the blast radius in time.

Another interesting one for you all, since the early 1940's there have been over 1000 nuclear detonations at the Nevada Area 51 test site.

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lohqjdm9U51qzss4xo1_500.jpg

A wee little picture for you all, to give you an idea

 

[The Traveler]

I hate doing this.. but the design was scaled down because of the blast radius, the plane dropping the bomb wouldn't have been able to escape the blast radius in time.

They did not care much about the survival of the plane, it was painted white to help withstand the heat radiation but even then they were not sure if the crew would survive. You have to understand that this was during the cold war and the lives of expandable people were not worth that much in Russia to say the least.

The original design of the 100 megaton version had a so called 'uranium fusion stage tamper' that would act as a third stage. So you would have a fission -> fusion -> fission bomb. With this design about 51.5 megaton of the total explosive force would have come from this third uranium tamper stage. Due to serious concerns about the fallout from this design, that would mostly strike down in Soviet territory, they decided to replace the uranium tamper with inactive lead (With such a high yield it would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%!).

I hope this makes it more clear as to why they decided to reduce the total yield of this bomb.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[Pandora]

Traveler,

Thanks for that! Wow. I hadn't seen a color image of that ever and I don't think a moving image. Last I recall is reading about that in an old book my father had called, "The Manhattan Project," which had a black and white image of this.

It is AMAZING how it literally blows the weather away. O_O

 

[The Traveler]

Traveler,

Thanks for that! Wow. I hadn't seen a color image of that ever and I don't think a moving image. Last I recall is reading about that in an old book my father had called, "The Manhattan Project," which had a black and white image of this.

It is AMAZING how it literally blows the weather away. O_O

The effects from an explosion like this are phenomenal, for example:

* The cloud rose as high as 64 kilometers;
* The bomb might have actually been around 57 megaton;
* Ionization from the explosion caused a radio blackout for almost an hour;
* Atmospheric disturbance created by the explosion orbited the earth three times;
* Since this bomb was announced long enough beforehand, the USA converted a KC-135 airplane into an airborne lab to track this explosion (equipment included a high-speed photometer called a "bhangmeter" );
* That USA plane's hull got scorched by the blast, meaning it might have been closer to the explosion than the Russian drop plane;
* Due to the observations of that US plane, the USA calculated the yield as 57 megaton, hence the confusion about the yield;

All in all this is frightening and fascinating at the same time.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[nen888]

^..who was in the US plane? .."
your mission is to fly as close as possible to a 50 megaton thermonuclear firecloud!"

..i've watched the Tsar bomb a few times..it fused the rock beneath it into glass..
yeah, frightening and fascinating as Traveler says..
here's the Chinese version: [YOUTUBE]

 

[The Meddling Monk]

This is a really fascinating video. It's a year by year, blow by blow 'counter meter' of every single Atomic Weapons Tests accross the globe, starting of course with the USA 1945. I learned a lot from it I didn't realise. And that France!:x Non!
[YOUTUBE]