The Real Mother of All Bombs, 46 Years Ago 526
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."
Re:thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Somethign doesn't add up (Score:3, Interesting)
sigma*(5778K)^4*4*pi*(1.392E9m)^2*29ns*1% to J
= 446.3 PJ
ans/c^2
= 4.966 kg
Conclusion: maybe, maybe not.
You "just" need to convert 4.966kg in pure energy in 29ns!
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:I respectfully disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
You seem to know what you're talking about -- any merit to the above?
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.
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."
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!
Re:thanks (Score:3, Interesting)
Nukes kill with three types of damage: thermal, blast, and ionizing radiation. These three different effects scale differently, as you can read here [ingsoc.com].
Since the amount of blast-based destruction goes down rapidly the farther from "ground zero" you go (inverse-cube law), it makes sense that a big-ass fucking bomb like the "Tsar Bomba" doesn't get you very far. However, in the picture depicted here [wikipedia.org] you can see how modern weapon desigs get around this - each streak is a dummy reentry vehicle from a single Peacekeeper/MX test launch; which if it were not a launch vehicle test would have a mushroom cloud underneath, each with 20x the power of the Hiroshima blast.
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
i think we can thank the long era of conquest and empire building for that.
that, and the view that all other cultures are of lesser value in some form or other.
then when this is shown to be untrue you get that old yoda loop: fear -> anger -> hatred.
and yes, hatred is hereditary.
power is a effect of resource access and control. and when you have a group of people that you envision as no more then say a workhorse, you can go on a power trip of sorts. the "america for the whites" is built on the concept of who should control the resources (including the workforce) of the place. the workforce then being the "lesser" races.
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:1, Interesting)
I caught a tag for the local news yesterday, whose byline was, "How to keep your children safe from predators when trick or treating".
I don't recall ever going trick or treating by myself, much less, having to worry about predators. Emphasis was always about poisoned or dangerous candy; i.e... razor blades or glass inserted into it.... Maybe its just all the teacher-student sex scandals coming to light as of late or, just that the media is picking up on them more, but it seems to me that the media is emphasizing a 'fear for your children' mentality more than ever.
What was it? If you keep the public in a constant mindset of some sort of fear, they're easier to control/persuade, concerning issues of 'safety' and their well-being...
Someone, somewhere, wrote that more elegantly.
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:1, Interesting)
1. Governments do not actually produce wealth or anything of value, because government is based on the principle of coercion, unlike a market transaction which is based on voluntary association. Rationale: In a voluntary transaction, each side gains (+1) and the net sum is positive (wealth is created). Both sides gain precisely because they entered the transaction voluntarily. In a coercive transaction (i.e. taxing, stealing, slavery, etc), one side gains (+1), but only at the expense of the other side (-1). The net sum is therefore zero and no weath is created -- only moved around, from one party to the other. This logic is crucial to understanding not only how weath comes to exist, but why government cannot actually *produce* wealth, but only move it around.
2. All governments expand in power and revenue over their lifetimes, especially of course empires. Rationale: No government in history has ever significantly and permanently *reduced* its power or revenue through the process of democracy (the "will of the people"), or indeed, any process short of war. They only get bigger, in terms of both revenue and power over the people -- some more quickly than others, but as history shows, they only get bigger.
3. Putting #1 and #2 together, we can see that every government is ultimately headed for financial failure. As government takes in more and more revenue from the people who actually produce wealth (the taxpayers) -- while at the same time not able to produce any wealth of its own -- it must eventually reach and surpass the point where there is more wealth being taken than being created. This is the point of no return, and will be indicated by mass borrowing, inflation, and course war, which will eventually become the state's last hope of clinging on to its power.
Re:The Doomsday Bomb (Score:3, Interesting)
However, a cobalt device has never been known to be built. The problem probably lies in obtaining enough cobalt to make a device large enough to cause the end of life on Earth. A cobalt-based doomsday device can't be dropped onto enemy territory--due to size constraints, it must be based on friendly territory. If you don't get enough bang to end life on Earth, you would just destroy your own country for no reason.
Re:I respectfully disagree... (Score:4, Interesting)