'The Largest Nuclear Bomb Ever Detonated' Explored in Declassified Russian Footage (smithsonianmag.com) 210
"The blast was over 3,000 times bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima," reports Smithsonian magazine:
Hydrogen bombs are so destructive, their impact has been described as unthinkable throughout history. Recently declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb test shows why. The 40-minute documentary, which was posted on YouTube on August 20, shows footage of the largest bomb ever detonated on Earth, Thomas Nilsen reports for the Barents Observer.
Video footage shows the blast from several angles, sometimes struggling to show the entire mushroom cloud in the frame. Later, the documentary compares the ice-covered archipelago before the blast to the scorched, red and brown landscape left behind afterward. The Soviet Union tested the 50-million-ton hydrogen bomb, officially named RDS-220 and nicknamed Tsar Bomba, in late October 1961, Matthew Gault reports for Vice. This test occured during the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States competed to build the largest and most destructive nuclear weapons.
"There was a megatonnage race — who was going to have a bigger bomb," atomic age historian Robert S. Norris tells the New York Times' William Broad. "And the Soviets won...." It was three times as large as the biggest bomb ever detonated by the U.S., dubbed Castle Bravo.
schwit1 shares more information from Popular Mechanics: It's difficult to truly get across how powerful RDS-220 was. The mushroom cloud reached an altitude of 210,000 feet, and people observed the flash through bad weather at 621 miles. An observer felt heat from the explosion at a distance of 168 miles, and the bomb was capable of inflicting third-degree burns at 62 miles.
Video footage shows the blast from several angles, sometimes struggling to show the entire mushroom cloud in the frame. Later, the documentary compares the ice-covered archipelago before the blast to the scorched, red and brown landscape left behind afterward. The Soviet Union tested the 50-million-ton hydrogen bomb, officially named RDS-220 and nicknamed Tsar Bomba, in late October 1961, Matthew Gault reports for Vice. This test occured during the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States competed to build the largest and most destructive nuclear weapons.
"There was a megatonnage race — who was going to have a bigger bomb," atomic age historian Robert S. Norris tells the New York Times' William Broad. "And the Soviets won...." It was three times as large as the biggest bomb ever detonated by the U.S., dubbed Castle Bravo.
schwit1 shares more information from Popular Mechanics: It's difficult to truly get across how powerful RDS-220 was. The mushroom cloud reached an altitude of 210,000 feet, and people observed the flash through bad weather at 621 miles. An observer felt heat from the explosion at a distance of 168 miles, and the bomb was capable of inflicting third-degree burns at 62 miles.
Even more disturbing (Score:2)
Re:Even more disturbing (Score:4, Insightful)
There were a lot of weird myths about "what could happen from nuclear" back in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly due to sci fi writing influences on scientific community among Western scientific circles. Many of those influences being mutually exclusive, i.e. "it's going to turn planet into the sun" to "it's going to result in nuclear winter".
Some of them ended up being more true than others.
Also to my knowledge, these influences were much weaker behind the Iron Curtain due to information control. A lot of relevant prose was never translated to, banned or severely censored in Russian language at the time.
Also, as far as I know 100Mt was considered possible, but deemed to add unnecessary technological complexity for already complex first prototype of the bomb. Which ended up being the only sample, as bomb was generally poorly suited for Cold War style MAD stand-off, where sub-megaton MIRV warheads became a norm instead of a single oversized explosive.
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The oversized detonation has actually snuck back into popularity with more an aim at environmental impact that destroying a city ie drop in in the middle of one of the great lakes, to detonate at the right depth to generate a massive radioactive tidal wave to destroy all towns and cities on it's shores as well as all surrounding farm land, or targeting the yellowstone caldera to create a massive sympathetic volcanic eruption, making the headwaters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers radioactive. Fewer bo
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These large bombs actually do very little damage over time. There's almost no residual radiation due to just how clean the reaction is.
As for "but let's stimulate eruption", that is in a realm of science fiction, just like "burning atmosphere". Amount of energy in things like volcanoes is many times more than all nukes on the planet combined and it's still not enough for most volcanoes on the planet to erupt. You need to use cobolt bombs for long term damage. Radiation is one of the single worst methods to
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It's something we observed in practice in Fukushima. They dumped the highly radioactive water from the plant into the ocean, and within a few hours, radiation readings at the immediate dumping site were good enough that you could swim in it. Within a day or so, it was effectively gone where you needed complex instrumentation looking for specific atoms to even know that something was wrong.
The trouble is we do in fact have those advanced instruments of phenomenal sensitivity. I think this is how they detecte
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Why is that trouble? It's excellent that we have such accurate detection capability. About the only downside is that people peddling misinformation get more ammunition to use in their material, but such people are rarely limited by lack of real world evidence of harm they claim.
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The Soviets wanted "More rubble for the Ruble".......
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No, they just wanted to answer the cessation of US moratorium with a kind of a weapon that would end the de facto dick comparison of "who has the bigger bomb".
It worked.
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Also, as far as I know 100Mt was considered possible, but deemed to add unnecessary technological complexity for already complex first prototype of the bomb.
I think this is incorrect: the 100Mt switch was a simple, well understood change posing few engineering challenges. If the lead bomb casing and tamper was replace with uranium then the fast neutrons from the fusion stage would fission the uranium causing a much larger blast. The problem with that is it's dirty as all hell and spews out a massive amount
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I recommend looking up the location in question to understand why your assumption about motivators is almost certainly false. This location is specifically chosen to be very far away from any meaningful area in Soviet Union and is so utterly isolated and economically unviable land that if the entire archipelago was to become permanently unusable, little to nothing of value to USSR would have been lost.
Re: Even more disturbing (Score:2)
Submegaton MIRVs are the norm, yes, but the Russians still have a couple of 20 MT warheads intended for heavy bunker busting (Cheyenne Mountain) and targets where missing is not an option (Washington DC).
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But you don't even comprehend what nuclear winter is, so you don't understand that what happens in the atmosphere is different than what happens on the surface, and nuclear winter would be caused by an excess of surface material being lofted high into the atmosphere.
Yes, but if the initial effect is to burn off the entire atmosphere, then how does material get ejected into the atmosphere?
And if your initial move in any discussion is to start insulting people, how do you even make any friends?
Re: Even more disturbing (Score:4, Funny)
Listen, lad. I built this planet up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Others said I was daft to build a planet on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest planet in the Galaxy!
Re:Even more disturbing (Score:5, Informative)
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the actual concern — leading to the reduction of yield — was that the bomb-dropping aircraft may not be able to escape the blast...
Re: Even more disturbing (Score:2)
And now Russia is back at it making doomsday devices. They might as well call it the Doomsday Device
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In 1991-92 Moscow was, quite literally, starving. The US could've gotten anything it wanted in exchange for relief
Except that it couldn't. You can only push a desperate nuclear power so far.
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the actual concern — leading to the reduction of yield — was that the bomb-dropping aircraft may not be able to escape the blast...
That could probably have been worked around. If you read further, they left out the uranium tamper, which is responsible for most of the radioactive fallout, and not really needed for a test blast. So, combined with the altitude, it resulted in a very clean test.
Re:Even more disturbing (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably if you wanted to drop such bombs more than once, subsequent air crews would refuse having known the outcome of the first air crew.
Re:Even more disturbing (Score:5, Informative)
Contrary to the common misunderstanding of "Soviets didn't care about people", Soviets actually cared a great deal about specialists. People like ones trained to drop experimental bombs.
What Soviets didn't care about was the fate of any single individual soldier in the trenches. Those could be sacrificed by the millions if deemed necessary because they were plentiful as a resource. But deeply specialised, highly trained crews capable of handling experiments like these were exceedingly rare and expensive resource for the state and as such valued very highly, in many ways more so than in the West. It's why such crews would be typically de facto interned alongside their families in Soviet "closed cities", which both had far greater access to luxuries and far more restricted movement.
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the engineers were afraid of catching the atmosphere on fire.
That was a concern before the Trinity test in 1945. All the calculations showed it was impossible, but there was still a teeny bit of concern.
By 1961, nobody believed the atmosphere could detonate.
Not sure if that is possible
No, it is not possible.
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the engineers were afraid of catching the atmosphere on fire.
That was a concern before the Trinity test in 1945. All the calculations showed it was impossible, but there was still a teeny bit of concern.
Some far out speculations and fearmongering happen every time something big and not very well understood happens. More recently, before the LHC was put into operation, there was some concern that it will generate a black hole that would suck the whole Earth in [home.cern].
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Some far out speculations and fearmongering happen every time something big and not very well understood happens. More recently, before the LHC was put into operation, there was some concern that it will generate a black hole that would suck the whole Earth in [home.cern].
Indeed. And it hasn't happened yet.
If you need additional peace of mind, look at the live webcam from CERN. [cyriak.co.uk] You'll need to enable Adobe Flash to see it, but is that such a great price to pay to allay your fears? I think not, my friends, I think not.
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Indeed. And it hasn't happened yet.
If you need additional peace of mind, look at the live webcam from CERN. [cyriak.co.uk] You'll need to enable Adobe Flash to see it, but is that such a great price to pay to allay your fears? I think not, my friends, I think not.
In our timeline, yes. But in the other 99.999999% of universes where the Earth was instantly annihilated, nobody is left to say "whoops".
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Because they believe that some or even all of the "physics" they were taught in high school was literally true. They didn't comprehend that it is a bunch of incorrect approximations that are necessary to understand the next level of academic knowledge, and that they don't talk about what is really happening until the senior year of an undergraduate degree, at the earliest.
Or, for people who read books, whenever they want to read it, maybe even as a kid. But reading non-fiction in excess of what is forced is
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How could that be possible? Very small black holes evaporate extremely quickly.
Well, theoretically, but if we had solid evidence for how those things work, we would not need the LHC.
There was some evidence for a doomsday scenario in the repeated problems that delayed the LHC starting.
You just need the many-worlds hypothesis and the anthropic principle.
https://www.lesswrong.com/post... [lesswrong.com]
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Very small black holes evaporate extremely quickly.
In theory. But there is no empirical evidence whatsoever that is what actually happens.
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> Some far out speculations and fearmongering happen every time something big and not very well understood happens.
Ahem... COVID-19 being caused by 5G...
FTFY
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No, it is not possible.
This is actually not comforting. There was some hope that these bombs had some power limit, not anymore.
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Isn’t that what causes problems between scientists and the public? If there’s a 0.000001% they will say it is not impossible and people then think of that as a 50/50% chance. :)
I seem to remember something similar about the Hadron collider when asked about the chance of creating a black hole.
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The way I read it the 100MT design was used, minus the U238 wrapper. I don't think there is a physics limit to the number of stages and megatonage so why try?
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If I'm understanding the video correctly, it speaks of "bomb mechanisms being designed for 100Mt yield device, but 50Mt was used for pragmatic reasons".
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What I've heard is that they scaled down the design so that they could guarantee the safety of the air crew dropping the bomb.
let's never do this (Score:2)
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Fuck knows how we got through the cold war without adding another Hiroshima. Blind luck?
Blind luck was a big factor. There were several close calls.
Better intelligence, especially from satellites, showed both sides what their adversaries were deploying. This led to restraint since we could base our armaments on what we knew rather than what we feared.
Better guidance systems also helped. You need a multi-megaton bomb if your target is a city. A few kilotons are needed if your target is a building. A 500 kg conventional warhead is sufficient if your target is a specific window.
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on accident
"By accident" and "on purpose," not the fucking opposite. Capiche??
"On accident" is a regionalism. It is commonly said in California and the Pacific coast. It is less common in the rest of America and very rare in other English speaking countries. It is more commonly spoken by young people.
Whether it is "correct English" is debatable. I neither say it nor write it, but I hear it all the time (I live in California), and the meaning is obvious.
Re: let's never do this (Score:5, Interesting)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened because, as bad as they were, they were the best of the remaining options. With the Cold War, nukes were the worst of many options. The big powers intentionally relegated themselves proxy wars because open conflict between could only have ended very, very badly.
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The Japanese wanted to surrender but were only holding out because Truman insisted on "unconditional surrender." The only condition the Japanese wanted was for their emperor to not be executed. The only thing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki accomplished was mass murder.
Truman was both a monster and an idiot. His argument about how difficult it would be to invade Japan made no sense because 1) they were willing to surrender anyway and 2) the Russians were moving in and ready to invade Japan alongside u
Re: let's never do this (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Of course, it would have been better not to use nukes and execute a conventional invasion of Japan. That would sure come much cheaper, just a few hundred thousand of death American soldiers, and surely well over a million Japanese gunned down, bombed into burger pieces, and just plain bayoneted.
There was not going to be an invasion of Japan (Score:2, Informative)
Re: There was not going to be an invasion of Japan (Score:3, Insightful)
If they were ready to surrender before Hiroshima, why did they wait until after Nagasaki to do so?
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Because everyone was in absolute shock after Hiroshima and information about the effect and what happened there did not travel as fast as it does today and probably was not believed at first and because they did not just surrender after Nagasaki, but after Russia declared war on Japan, just the day before Nagasaki bombing.
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Japan was willing to negotiate the end of the war before Hiroshima, but the US wanted Japan to surrender without conditions. Americans didn't want to end the war, they wanted to win it and to take control of Japan. That's why the US committed these crimes against humanity.
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Re: There was not going to be an invasion of Japan (Score:5, Informative)
Japan was willing to negotiate the end of the war before Hiroshima, but the US wanted Japan to surrender without conditions. Americans didn't want to end the war, they wanted to win it and to take control of Japan. That's why the US committed these crimes against humanity.
Actually the 2 bombs we dropped weren't even the worst thing we did to Japanese cities. We firebombed 67 of the other 69 largest cities (that's where their arms factories were). The two we spared only to use fission weapons on them. I feel from the tone of your post that perhaps you don't quite understand the scale of what was happening at the time. Its not true that the Japanese were ready to surrender. Even after the first nuclear weapon was dropped, many nationalists still wanted to fight. Their political system was very much tied into their national religion. The final straw was actually the Russians declaring war on Japan in late August 1945. Not because the Russians would actually fight but because it was Japan's last hope for an alley to help them negotiate a better deal. The nuclear weapons being deciding factor wasn't really true and if you had to choose between being in Tokyo (firebombed) and Hiroshima (U-235 bomb), you would be a fool to choose Tokyo.
And before you work yourself into a fit, Japan was committing war crimes on par with the Nazi for the last 15 years at that point. Ask the Chinese, Filipino, Thai, or Koreans about that. You just don't know about it because its not on the History Channel much.
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I don't get who moderated this as flamebait, it is as factual and dispassionate comment as there can be. Did Slashdot become Reddit with the mods just modding down stuff they disagree with or sounds inconvenient?
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I don't get who moderated this as flamebait, it is as factual and dispassionate comment as there can be.
As I read, it is +3 flamebait. Slashdot moderation works better than most websites, in my experience.
While I don't agree with the post, I'd rather argue with the idiots who downvote instead of providing a counter-argument.
And I agree with the parent, who made the point that an invasion of Japan would have been orders-of-magnitude worse than the nukes. But his sarcastic tone and irony is far more deserving of the "flamebait" tag. Where is the "wrong but under-rated" or "right but an arsehole" vote when yo
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I distinctly remember this discussion during my high school history class in the early 90's. We were even asked to write an essay on how many lives the bombs saved. It was very clear that they wanted us to believe the Japanese were 100% devoted to their emperor, would never surrender and would fight to the very last person with kitchen tools if needed. As easily manipulated children we blithely tossed around our estimates of millions dead, and gladly accepted the party line. That's what it was actually, I l
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two small nukes vs the wall that happened to germany? The wall was the bigger war crime IMO. And then add all the deaths that invasion would have entailed.
I'm willing to bet that the death tool on both sides would be as low as twice what we ended up having.
So did they have to, no, but I believe things are better for the USA and Japan that we did.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So two small nukes would be fine in Iraq? Syria? All these justifications don't survive any Kantian moral judgement. The death toll on both sides if the fighting would continue would be soldiers, not civilians. Attacking civilians to save the lives of your soldiers is a war crime. There is no way around that.
Things are not better of for the world. Nuclear weapons have been used in war. That crossed a threshold that should have never been crossed. There is nothing you can do now to take it back. Eventually i
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Those analogies don't hold up. At all.
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Re: let's never do this (Score:2)
Might want to check your assumptions there. By your logic, the bombing of a city would be considered a war crime. And that would in turn mean that every bombing of every city in World War II was a war crime. Sorry, that's just not the case. So the casualties would not be limited to just soldiers.
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Giving up any part of Japan to the USSR would have been worse than dropping a few experimental nukes.
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That depends on the angle from which you view it. Better for United States or better for the survival of the human race? With a short sighted single century view of events you can get to short sighted conclusions that are quite frankly very dangerous. Dropping nuclear weapons on civilians for strategic gain seems a very fascist point of view as well.
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Re: let's never do this (Score:2)
The nuclear bombs weren't exactly received as devastating to Japan, they had already been devastated by conventional weapons many times over that made the damage from the nukes look tiny in comparison. They did however give the emporer a justification for surrender.
Also, you ought to do some research on why Japan really wouldn't like it if the US formally apologized for Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as it would create political problems for Japan that have nothing to do with the US. And no, it wasn't a war crime,
Re: Oh, I am sure will get the chance to see it (Score:2)
Ah, yes, one of THOSE people. Choosing to ignore the fact that "socialist" was added to the name at a time when the Nazis were trying to get away from their street fighting roots (where they fought against mainly, you guessed it, socialists!), and trying to court left wing voters as they moved to being a mainstream party. Its also worth pointing out the Hitler was against adding socialist to the party name.
Let me guess, do you also think that North Korea is a democracy since they have Democratic right ther
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Ooh, get your historical revisionism.
What, do you really think the National Socialist party didn't have socialist policies, socialist tendencies, didn't introduce socialism within Germany?
Here, educate yourself:
https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
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Remind what NAZI stands for again? Remind me how it is not you?
Given you believe uncritically what murderous dictatorships say about themselves, I assume you believe strongly that North Korea is a democracy. It's RIGHT THERE in the name...
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Remind what NAZI stands for again?
NAZI is an abbreviation of German pronunciation of Nationalsozialist (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). It's quit amusing that you are implying that they were a socialist party, especially considering that they emerged from the Freikorps and, by 1930 were fully committed to anti-Marxist and antisemitism . I suppose that there isn't enough time or crayons to explain to you that just because you something has a name that says X doesn't mean that it must be X. Incidentally: The 24th edition
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MAD is what got us through that. And MAD is still in effect and why US and China aren't in any danger of having a proper existential war. Or US and Russia. Or Russia and China.
Or the oldest pair of mutually hating nations, UK and France.
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That moment when you're unaware of Indian-Pakitani stand-off and think that India and China are "closer to existential war" than those two.
Hint: The soldiers that were brawling. A single Roman Century with time-appropriate gear would easily crush both Chinese and Indians combined. Because both sides understand that there's no way to wage a war over Himalayas, and so it makes no sense to even equip those soldiers with firearms. All that would do is enable random sniping across the mountains that worsens rela
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>Hardly. The Romans wouldn't be nearly as well acclimated to the high altitude.
What in the actual fuck am I reading? Are you unaware of existence of Alps, or the campaigns Romans waged around and on them?
>Would be easily spotted and bombed off the mountain on the way up.
Apparently you're also unaware that combat between Chinese and Indians took a place on plateau at night meaning it largely lacks such observational elements, and that there are a grand total of zero bombs available to soldiers statione
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It's hegemony. The date is set.
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I'm pretty sure once everyone actually saw how horrible Hiroshima really was, they changed their thinking, even if it was only ever so slightly.
My great uncle was sent in (right after the Japanese surrendered) by the US Army, to clean up, and help rebuild ground zero. He was supposed to be two weeks on, two weeks off. He was in the hospital by the 4th day, and by the end of what was supposed to be his first two weeks on, he was back to the USA in a hospital clinging to his life. That was almost a month af
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He was the first one to ever tell me that people were literally vaporized, and the only way you knew they were standing there is your could see their charred outline on the wall.
You need to re-calibrate your bull-shit detector. Nobody was "vaporised" as the bomb explodes half a kilometre above the city.
A much simpler explanation is that the dead bodies had been removed and buried. Or, given that the wall was still standing, the person walked away, and died of burns some hours or days later. This ridiculous story should have lead you to question some of your uncle's other claims.
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In the Hiroshima museum, you can find the remains of many household items made of metal, ceramic, and glass that had melted during the blast. I have no doubt that humans present in the same location were vaporized, since you only need 100 C temperature for that.
Quoting Wikipedia: The Hiroshima fireball was 370 metres (1,200 ft) in diameter, with a surface temperature of 6,000 C (10,830 F).[51] Near ground zero, everything flammable burst into flame. One famous, anonymous Hiroshima victim, sitting on stone s
Re: let's never do this (Score:2)
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Re: let's never do this (Score:2)
Re: let's never do this (Score:2)
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Google "another Hiroshima" vs "another Nagasaki". I'm far from alone in describing a nuclear attack as another Hiroshima
Well, if you a going to be pedantic, modern weapons are based on the Nagasaki plutonium device, like the Trinity test. The device used over Hiroshima turned out to be a dead-end.
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Google "another Hiroshima" vs "another Nagasaki". I'm far from alone in describing a nuclear attack as another Hiroshima
Well, if you a going to be pedantic, modern weapons are based on the Nagasaki plutonium device, like the Trinity test. The device used over Hiroshima turned out to be a dead-end.
Well it is what the Iranians and North Koreans attempt to do. I'm assuming that has to do with lack of resources.
Castle Bravo (Score:5, Informative)
Castle Bravo's 15 megatons was much bigger than the planned 6 megatons, due to an unexpected reaction of Lithium-7. The designers were relying on the rarer Lithium-6 isotope, but the bomb's lithium was only enriched up to about 40%, with the rest being the supposedly inert Lithium-7. The bomb's higher than expected yield had a lot of very bad effects on inhabited islands, with large levels of fallout.
wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
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We're lucky the SWEDES survived that!
Re:Castle Bravo (Score:4, Interesting)
Basicially none. This was one of the cleanest nuclear bombs in history. Crews were at the epicentre within a few hours, walking around with minimal protective gear.
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Only because it was an air burst. Tsar Bomba was detonated over 2 miles in the air, the epicenter was not on the ground.
By this metric, Starfish Prime was the cleanest bomb since it was detonated basically in space.
Kinda Sorta (Score:2)
You get more fallout detonating near the ground, as the radioactive particles bombard the soil which then vaporizes into radioactive dust. Air doesn't absorb radiation very well, ergo less fallout. The only "fallout" you get is from the particles left over from the fissile material in the bomb itself.
Also, the more efficient a nuclear bomb is at converting matter directly into energy, the less radioactive material you are going to get. As the Tsar Bomba was a very high-yield device, I'm assuming the efficie
Re:Kinda Sorta (Score:5, Informative)
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It was because it was nearly perfect fusion detonation, with over 95% of material being tritium+deuterium.
Starfish Prime was much dirtier in comparison.
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Well, since Castle Bravo was detonated on the ground (in a building) it created so much more fallout when compared to the Tsar Bomba that was detonated somewhere just over 4000m above seal level. Much of this reduction was due to the Tsar Bomba's "fireball" was kept from interacting with the ground because of the shock wave created by the explosion.
Re:Castle Bravo (Score:5, Informative)
Lithium-6 absorbs slow neutrons and then splits into tritium and helium.
Lithium-7 absorbs fast neutrons and then splits into tritium, helium, and a neutron.
So the Li-7 not only provided an unexpected big boost in fuel, but also a big boost in neutron flux with led to a much more thorough consumption of both Li-6 and Li-7 as well as the uranium tamper.
Oops.
Re:Castle Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, understanding these unexpected reactions is why we conduct tests in science.
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To be fair, understanding these unexpected reactions is why we conduct tests in science.
Sure. But this should have been discovered in a lab. They shot neutrons at Li-7 and saw that it converted to Li-8 which decays via beryllium-8 to two heliums, which are inert. So they assumed that Li-7 would contribute nothing to the yield.
But if the neutrons are energic (over about 2.5 MeV), as they were during the blast, the reaction is different and you get tritium+neutron instead of the 2nd helium.
They should have tested under more realistic conditions. But at the time, it was not understood that th
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>But this should have been discovered in a lab.
And then you literally explain how they did and found nothing.
>They should have tested under more realistic conditions.
They did. That's what test explosions are about. Testing under realistic conditions not accessible in a lab.
This article was alternatively titled... (Score:4, Funny)
How I Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb.
new footage starts closer to the end (Score:4, Informative)
Larger part of the video is an old news reel. First explosion show at 28:35 then newsreel ends then couple of unnecessarily long shots of the explosion are shown of medium interest and the rest of the video is just planes flying.
Re: 210,000 feet? (Score:4, Interesting)
The aviation industry springs to mind.
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It's like asking the Brits to drive on the right side.
"right" as "correct".
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More importantly, the dumb-asses at the rag converted all the numbers without quoting the original values: 64 km, 1000 km, 270 km and 100 km, respectively.
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If you can't even comprehend that US customary units are American units, and not Imperial (British) units, why do you presume then to be some fount of knowledge about what units people use? You haven't even made it to wikipedia level yet.
Yes, people think in terms of feet. It is a better unit for thinking, because sometimes you might want to think using rational numbers. Oh, no, you don't want to do that. But people do. That's why they think in feet, do scientific calculations in metric, and carefully use m
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Yes, people think in terms of feet. It is a better unit for thinking, because sometimes you might want to think using rational numbers.
Yes, but if the number gets too high it looses meaning, because in general people don't understand large numbers. What's wrong with miles (39.77273 miles in this case, or better: almost 40)?
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What's wrong with miles (39.77273 miles in this case, or better: almost 40)?
People don't have much intuition converting between units, especially imperial. Many people know that aeroplanes fly at about 30,000 feet (the little seat back thing tells you that), so saying 210,000 feet, is clearly quite a few times higher than an aeroplane goes. Nice. If you give it in miles, then there's no natural intuition so people take the plane height (30,000), divide badly mentally by 5.28kft and sort of zone out. All the