I've read so many times that modern nuclear weapons are several orders of magnitude more powerful than Fat Man and Little Boy. Something like hundreds or thousands of times more powerful. I never did look into those claims.
As I understand the situation, these massive nuclear weapons aren't all that useful for a wide variety of reasons, but that aside, is the Tsar Bomba really the most powerful bomb ever created? Not detonated or designed, but made. It's the most powerful I've been able to find, but I would think that in the almost 60 years that have passed, an even more powerful bomb would have been made. Or at least known to the general public.
Side Question: I've heard people say that you could more or less destroy civilization on Earth by detonating the Tsar Bomba at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Something about all the pressure above the bomb would cause the blast energy to be directed downwards and fracture the overlapping tectonic plates and something about mass amounts of magma flowing out would destroy life on Earth or something.
Yes it is the biggest ever created. Also the last that will ever be created due to extreme affects it had on rest of the world. To put it in perspective, the background radioactivity of soil here in iowa more than doubled after the tsar bomba test. It is the primary reason why we illegalized atmospheric tests internationally.
Jack Walker
Yes it was the most powerful but the size was comical. It had no practical use in a real war.
This. The only reason to go bigger is if you want to install a self-destruct device in your own country.
Jace Ramirez
The magma theory is retarded, I wouldn't be concerned
Asher Gutierrez
I mean you could load one on a ship and try to sneak it into a harbor for a sneak attack but since harbors aren't that high up the list of strategic targets it's use is still questionable.
Xavier Brooks
>Side Question: I've heard people say that you could more or less destroy civilization on Earth by detonating the Tsar Bomba at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Something about all the pressure above the bomb would cause the blast energy to be directed downwards and fracture the overlapping tectonic plates and something about mass amounts of magma flowing out would destroy life on Earth or something. The pressure down there is already many times greater than any nuclear bomb can produce, the Tzar would be nothing but a light fart in the wind.
William Richardson
I want to believe but I have found at least one source that conflicts. The initial design was a 100Mt bomb but they feared it too big so they put lead tampers to dial it down, which "...eliminated fast fission by the fusion-stage neutrons so that approximately 97% of the total yield resulted from thermonuclear fusion alone (as such, it was one of the "cleanest" nuclear bombs ever created, "
Largest tested? Sure. Largest designed or created? Well there seems to be evidence of a 100Mt proof so I'm guessing no. Source also stated the larger yield version would have been so large that fallout would probably reach back to home country. That likely indicates this high a yield is not useful or practical.
The Tzar Bomba is the largest surface-detonated nuclear device, although rumors say that, for doomsday purposes where efficient flattening (MIRV) is no longer the primary objective, there exist warheads with a yield of over 100Mt, going all the way to 200Mt, which are based on the "Emperor Bomb" but were never test-fired.
Hunter Garcia
>but since harbors aren't that high up the list of strategic targets
false, harbours are right up there with other logistics chokepoints which WILL get nuked in a full-launch scenario along with railway yards and major industrial targets
Cameron Thomas
Shit character from a shit show
Evan Scott
Yeah, sorry poor phrasing on my part. The main targets in a first strike attack would be the enemies own nuclear capability to at least try to avoid as much as possible of the enemies retaliatory strikes. Sneaking a nuke into an enemy harbor doesn't really accomplish much in the way of disabling the enemies chance to counter strike, unless for some reason the enemy decided to park all their nuclear armed subs in the same harbor, which is never going to happen.
In a full scale exchange they are obviously going to be nuked to dust like most other infrastructure like you say.
Easton Nelson
That's a negative on the trench idea, WAY too weak.
Camden Campbell
>but since harbors aren't that high up the list of strategic targets
Wut? Harbors are one of the most important strategic targets you can hit. You may not realize this but most of the foreign goods we consume (like food, manufactured objects, etc) come to us from other countries via ships that dock in harbors. This is true of all countries that aren't land-locked.
Blake Russell
See: Derp on my part not specifying first strike instead of strategic target.
Lincoln Perry
Largest single bomb, yes. Today, with MIRV warheads, I guess a single missile can achieve comparable destruction. It was not very useful, though it was more designed as a publicity stunt. Something to show the Americans the extent of Soviet tech, and remind everyone that MAD was still a thing.
Detonating Something that big in the Mariana trench would fuck up the region but not enough to wipe out every civilization. Tectonic energy is still enormous compared to that bomb.
Sebastian Rivera
There were exactly two cases for the tsar bomba ever made, one for the test and another for a museum. To claim it's was a "weapon" is a stretch.
Levi Lewis
I too enjoy making things up.
Jonathan Reyes
For the US, it was Bravo, for the USSR, it was Tzar, but eventually you realise there's no reason to keep making bigger, heavier, harder to deliver bombs, that just mean you have to spend more money developing the launch vehicles, when there's no real strategic benefit to any of them. Two smaller bombs hitting the main roadways of either side of a city will be far better than one hundreds of times bigger that covers the whole city in-between the roadways.
Brayden Fisher
Maybe they mean relatively clean. And the fission creates all kinds of far more radioactive byproducts than the original uranium.
Caleb Flores
>"Emperor Bomb" but were never test-fired.
Plenty of room in Africa to test it now,also around Syria there is a nice place in the need of glass
Chase Thomas
>but I would think that in the almost 60 years that have passed, an even more powerful bomb would have been made.
Strategic weapons design emphasised high yield weapons like that Tsar Bomba back when accuracy was low. With modern, high-accuracy weapons, yield became less important. This is why, for example, the B61 (with a modern guidance package) is still in service, but the B81 is in stockpile and the B53 has been completely retired. Same story for ICBM warheads: the W56 (a big-ass 1.2MT warhead) was needed because Minuteman 2 wasn't very accurate; when Minuteman 3 came around with higher accuracy it fielded a 120kT warhead
Henry Gomez
>false, harbours are right up there with other logistics chokepoints which WILL get nuked in a full-launch scenario along with railway yards and major industrial targets This.
Jaxson James
>background radioactivity of soil here in iowa more than doubled after the tsar bomba test what a tremendous fucking lie lmao do you seriously think that a 30 ton bomb has enough physical material in it that the waste products could travel all the way around the world and literally double the concentration of radioactive particles in the soil of fucking iowa
Elijah Sullivan
>also around Syria there is a nice place in the need of glass That's a funny way to say "Israel".
You seem to be forgetting that nuclear weapons can be carried by ships, which dock at harbors. Lots of harbors are shared by both military and civilian craft. Lots of harbors would indeed get nuked in a first strike. Subs can launch their SLBM's while docked, and just about every ship afloat can carry nuclear cruise missiles of one description or another.
Luke Barnes
I wonder what the upper limit is on thermonuclear yield. Doesn't have to be an air dropped bomb. Could we, for example, build a gigaton bomb? 100 gigatons? More? Not that there would be a point to it, but I'm curious if there are certain design difficulties you run into when you try to scale up.
Leo Cox
You're not going to be throwing a warhead at any harbor in the great lakes when you can instead throw one at Bangor.
Jaxon Gonzalez
After a certain point it becomes impractical as you need to add more and more stages
Luis Johnson
The Tzar Bomba was purely built for dickwaving. Everyone already knew building a single bomb that big was a retarded waste. There's no reason to suspect anyone has made a bigger bomb, because the only reason to do it is to tell everyone about it.
Joseph White
You don't need to have bigger bombs, just smarter technology.
Blake Ortiz
Thank god we dont have lava or magma anywhere on the surface these days. The Earth would be doooooomed, i tell you
Oliver Flores
Impractical yes. I'm just wondering if it is theoretically possible to create such a bomb and what the biggest boom we can make.
Mason Rivera
In theory you can expand the Teller-Ulam design to an arbitrarily large number of stages
Jack Smith
Vast majority of population and intercontinental trade is ocean based.Hitting LA, SD, NY, and a handful of others would permafuck the US.
Jonathan Foster
Nice, so could we build a bomb that would vaporize an entire continent? Is their enough fissile material in the world for that?
Charles Robinson
>so could we build a bomb that would vaporize an entire continent? I believe the problem with bombs that size is that most of the released energy just escapes to space
Jace Cook
OK? What does that have to do with what we were discussing?
I'm not even sure how you intend to get your underwater drone into the great lakes to begin with.
Daniel Hernandez
Anecdotally, real-life mad scientist Edward Teller kept a list on a blackboard with different designs of bombs and proposed delivery mechanisms. At the bottom of the board was his largest, over 10,000MT. The delivery mechanism was "Backyard". Actual quote: "Since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there's no use carting it anywhere."
Caleb Turner
Nuking a harbor would only interrupt trade for a few months, after which it would be greatly improved due to the newly deepened port with all new infrastructure.
Logan Torres
>To claim it's was a "weapon" is a stretch. What do you mean?
Owen Reed
>Nuking a harbor would only interrupt trade for a few months, after which it would be greatly improved due to the newly deepened port with all new infrastructure.
my son, the global coal industry generates as much atmospheric waste in a day as the Tsar Bomba did in a single blast, and somehow the soil of Iowa does not double its emission rates on a daily basis
Ryan Sanders
that one probably would need to be a teraton
10 gigs is enough to wipe out both North and South Korea in one go
Gavin Murphy
>10 gigs
fuck must pay attention next time I accidentally drop my usb stick
Yeah there's no stage at which point nuclear fission/fusion stops working and the bomb simply detonates into a large amount of confetti
Nicholas Howard
It was an exploding trophy, never intended to be deployed
Nicholas Peterson
It was originally going to be 100MT, but they decided not to set the atmosphere on fire.
Dylan Martinez
Why did you star out the u in russia?
Tyler James
See
Oliver Flores
>As I understand the situation, these massive nuclear weapons aren't all that useful for a wide variety of reasons, but that aside, is the Tsar Bomba really the most powerful bomb ever created? Not detonated or designed, but made. It's the most powerful I've been able to find, but I would think that in the almost 60 years that have passed, an even more powerful bomb would have been made. Or at least known to the general public.
Tsar Bomba was created at a time when bombers were considered to be the primary delivery system of a nuclear attack, once the warheads and missiles became smaller and more accurate, the need for such large devices was not needed. Also it was basically a giant publicity stunt as well, there's no practical scenario where a weapon like tsar bomba could be used effectively or even fielded in large enough numbers to matter.
Adam Rogers
There is a video discussing how detonating the Tsar Bomba at that trench would likley destroy the earth or out right blow up earth
Xavier Wood
>10 gigs better not drop your usb drive!
Jaxon Gutierrez
It kind of depends what you mean by powerful. For example: a Peacekeeper MIRV won't generate nearly as big an explosion as the Tsar, but having independently targeted warheads means you could use one to kill far more people if the mood took you, since you can hit multiple population-dense areas at once.
Ian Brown
Modern two stage nuclear weapons are sognificantly more powerful than a single stage fission device. Most of the information you want can be found on wikipedia. Probably put you on a list, though.
Evan Bailey
If you aren't on all possible lists your playing this game wrong
Hunter Moore
The Tsar Bomba is, in fact, the biggest weapon ever made. I'm willing to bet that larger ones have been designed, but every one of these things is fucking expensive and anything as powerful would be far too large to use for anything, meaning that it would be a massive waste of money. That's what killed the Tsar Bomba after all: it was too unwieldy, and had to be transported by a very large and very slow plane.
Aiden Jackson
there is something wrong if your not already on a list
this. look up what you read before you regurgitate. A lot of "muh radiation, muh fallout" was wildly inaccurate, in particular for how long the effects linger as a true hazard.
Ian Russell
You have to remember that megaton dickwaving is just that : dickwaving. The amount of energy received on a square meter decrease by the square of the distance. Which means that a 100Mt weapon can only destroy an area "just" twice as big as a 10Mt weapon. This is one of the (many many) reasons that we dont aim for the biggest nuke anymore, it is just useless.
Juan Garcia
found the n*wfag
John Cruz
How many tsar bombas would one need to completely, 100%, get rid of india?
Asking for a friend.
Josiah Miller
appx 37,323 would 100% wipe poos off the loo, though you'd probably only need like 20 to make it completely uninhabitable for all known life (its already almost uninhabitable)
Asher Green
To add onto this, we no longer need to glass 25sq miles to neutralize a target. Now we have the technology to essentially put a missile through someone's window (hyperbole)
Lincoln Smith
it was never about neutralizing a target, it was about fucking up as much shit as possible so that the loss of life was so outrageous that the enemy had to surrender.
like mass, indiscriminate butt hole rape
Mason Wright
I figured stalin just wanted to show off, you feel me? He'd put it behind a glass with the caption "Because I could fuck you"
user, look at your smartphone. If we figure antimatter on a weapons grade, the physics pkg. will be about as big as, if not smaller than what you are holding, but be about as powerful as the Tsar, if not more. Compare this to the pkg. of the Tsar which was about the size of a large industrial fridge.
Specifically Edward Teller proposed the construction of a 10 Gigaton nuclear weapon named Sundial and a smaller 1 Gigaton device named Gnomon. I think his stated reason was they would serve as giant area denial munitions, if the enemy was close to over running some vital area you would detonate something like Sundial or Gnomon to just smack a big dick in their face.
Gavin Martinez
The combined value of nuclear munitions on earth is something to the tune of what? 5-10 gigs? The last rock that hit us was 120 Teratons.
>Hitting LA, SD, NY, and a handful of others would permafuck the US.
Permafuck? No. Kill a bunch of people, wipe out a bunch of aging infrastructure. Both will be replaced.
Easton Perez
>the magma bit
Dont think whoever made that bullshit up realises quite how big the earth is, and how incredibly 'thin' the oceans are relative to the earths width.
It's like expecting that a gnat could stop a freight train by farting on it
Jackson Evans
Irradiated Cobalt 60 would work fine if dispersed around the area. Make in unlivable and irradiate everyone. Simple. Or a false vacuum collapse.
Anthony Jones
Iirc Tulman theorized a 1 GT bomb called Backyard. It was too big to deploy offensively and instead would have been used "defensively" which in this case meant "If the US can't have America no one can."
Caleb Carter
>1 GT bomb called Backyard I thought backyard was the delivery method :)
Jonathan Anderson
Edward Teller pushed for gigaton-level nukes in the early 50's.
Michael Rodriguez
I'm sure there are.
There are also videos of how the moon isn't real, that Clinton had a baby with a Martian and that there is a magical dimension inside a closet called Narnia
can't help but notice your fline name there says "Nuke 6" does that imply there are more for you to share my friend?
Xavier Morgan
Um, yes. Fallout is pretty insidious, user. Hell, even volcanic ash from the Mediterranean ends up falling in the US - if it was radioactive, we'd be fucking glowing. The Japanese nuclear disaster has sent detectable radiation to North America, and it wasn't even on the order of a nuclear explosion. High level atmospheric dispersion is a thing, you know.
Adam Clark
>implying volcanic ash isn't radioactive that Icelandic volcano that went off almost a decade ago generated about a hundred million cubic meters of airborne tephra. At a rate of 8 ppm, 800 cubic meters of that is radioactive material. At a bulk density of 1.2 g/cm^3, 800 cubic meters accounts for 960,000 kilograms of radioactive material, 35.5x the mass of the Tsar Bomba. Are you telling me that everyone in Europe should have terminal cancer right now?
Parker Reed
>960,000 kilograms of radioactive material
dude EVERYTHING is radioactive
literally million kilos of bananas is technicalyl a million kilos of radioactive material
David Ramirez
finally we are getting to my point. distribution patterns; clearly the 960,000 kg of radioactive material that was generated was distributed in such a way that didn't kill everyone, much less double the emission rates of European topsoil. If that didn't, then how the fuck did the Tsar Bomba double the emission rates of Iowan topsoil? Are you so stupid that you knew this all along but decided to argue just for the sake of it?
Jack Barnes
>Are you so stupid that you knew this all along but decided to argue just for the sake of it? Some radioactive matter is more dangerous than other and can cause cancer rather reliable when inhaled
Nathaniel Ross
all radioactive material is equally dangerous when ingested because it is dumping 100% of its decay energy into your body. and what exactly does that have to do with topsoil background emission rates
Charles Edwards
>all radioactive material is equally dangerous when ingested because it is dumping 100% of its decay energy into your body. dude, no, it is not equally dangerous some decaying matter has half-life in days or hours or minutes meaning they can be a billion times more dangerous than a banana
Robert Stewart
Yes it was. >Side Question: No, it can. You can use basic math by yourself to compare needed energy for that kind of stuff with amount of the energy that the Bomb can produce. Predicting another question - no, it can not be used for producing a giant killer waves or to blowing up a volcano - by the same reasons.
