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The Real Mother of All Bombs, 46 Years Ago
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Oct 31, 2007 01:30 AM
from the things-that-go-boom dept.
from the things-that-go-boom dept.
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."
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I respectfully disagree... (Score:4, Insightful)
Color, odor and flavor (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea that the fall of the Roman Empire started with Constantine is completely ludicrous and obviously is more influenced by your anti-Christian beliefs than an honest view of history. He expanded the empire, consistently beat back Germanic tribes, and led to the empire's split into halves, with the Eastern half lasting a thousand years longer.
Writing = civilization? While there's an obvious correlation, not quite. All the Germanic tribes by the fall of Rome had adopted scripts of their own. Anyway the judgment obviously had a lot more to do with 19th century ethos than anything else.
Christianity was employed against the enemy - Rome pursued a policy of converting Germanic tribes to a Rome-centered Christianity, to make them more dependent towards Rome. So in that sense, Christianity probably prolonged the empire.
It seems you read history books for the sole purpose of re-enforcing your own prejudices, and don't actually absorb any of it. Why do you even bother reading?
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the reason I consider false or sensationalist news more dangerous to the wellbeing of society than terrorism.
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re: "Loving Earth" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
"just because 'the pen is mightier than the sword', that doesn't mean you can win a sword fight with a pen."
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Funny)
ancient, loving Earth
Tough love....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake [wikipedia.org]
etc. etc.
Hey Nancy boy, maybe the Earth is trying to tell you to man-up?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:4, Informative)
In September 1940, the Japanese Army controlled Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, or Rikken, was assigned a preliminary project. In 1942, the Japanese Navy began also (somewhat independently of the Army) working on a Uranium based fission device. The project was called F-Go {or sometimes just No. F, for fission]. This was located at Kyoto, and was actually the chief reason why Kyoto was added to the list of potential military targets for the U.S. bombs, although in the end the city was still taken off the list by Truman due to its historic and social value. Despite a certain military commitment these programs weren't backed with adequate resources, and the Japanese were probably still four or more years from having a bomb by the end of the war.
A Japanese plant, concealed in Hungnam, now part of North Korea, may have been the source of heavy water subsequently used by the USSR for its own bomb research. There are reports the Soviet Union continued to run that plant and collected the output every other month by submarine, and it alone may have shaved a year or more off the USSR's development time.
In May 1945, a German submarine which surrendered to US forces , was found to be carrying over 500 kg. of Uranium oxide destined for Japan. The oxide contained about 3.5 kilograms of isotope U-235. While not enough to make a bomb, that was a sizable fraction of one. After the Japanese surrender, the occupying US Army found five cyclotrons which were capable of separating fissionable material from ordinary uranium. The US bomb program was accomplished by using gaseous diffusion based separation, but cyclotronic separation was rejected not because it wouldn't work, but because it seemed likely to take longer. Some historians see the willingness of the Germans to supply Uranium to their ally as proof they didn't fully appreciate the potential, while Japan did.
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:4, Funny)
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Nah. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nah. (Score:5, Funny)
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video here (Score:5, Informative)
http://sonicbomb.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=90 [sonicbomb.com]
Re:video here (Score:4, Informative)
Be kind to the server; YouTube has video footage as well.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pgY9gYoCsgs [youtube.com]Parent
test? (Score:4, Insightful)
that they can make a bloody big bang?
what the after effect were?
I always thought with nuclear weapons, that really after a certain size there were precious little point is making it more powerful.
Re:test? (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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Re:test? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:test? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Cool toy, but useless as a weapon (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
At least they chose a right site (Score:4, Interesting)
Somebody (Score:4, Funny)
Wholesale slaughter of millions of people (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Nuclear weapons get the populace involved (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wrote an essay that included Tsar Bomba (Score:4, Interesting)
- Kiss Your Sorry Ass Goodbye! The Atom Bomb Is Gonna Fly. [hydrogenbomb.org]
- Doomsday [hydrogenbomb.org] - while just a rough draft, what's there will give you nightmares. I had to stop working on it because it made me paranoid.
- Constitutional Crisis In A Nuclear State [hydrogenbomb.org]. Happily the crisis was resolved amicably, but potential trouble is still brewing
Yeah, I was pretty surprised the domain was available too.I plan to add some stuff about the Cuban Missile Crisis sometime soon, such as a wild bear wandering onto a US Air Force Base with the result that a fighter squadron armed with - ready for it? - nuclear air-to-air missiles was scrambled, and would have taken off had not the base commander blocked the runway with his own car.
The idea behind what one pilot described as "the dumbest weapon ever invented" was to fire a rocket armed with a nuclear bomb into the general vicinity of a soviet bomber. The blast would be big enough that the bomber would be destroyed even if the rocket didn't get very close. It's not quite clear what would become of the American or Canadian citizens on the ground beneath the detonation.
There's lots more, but I have to do it in little pieces or the I start wanting to crawl out of my own skin.
The Doomsday Bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pedantry: ENGAGED (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pedantry: ENGAGED (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Somethign doesn't add up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Somethign doesn't add up (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Geewhiz numbers (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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Re:This is kinda old... (Score:4, Funny)
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear big-effing-stupid-violent-explody-thingy. Happy birthday to you!
And I suspect Digg and
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An ex-KGB spy said they were convinced Reagan... (Score:5, Interesting)
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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