Please Explain Nuclear/Atomic Weapons To Me

a reply to: Soloprotocol

Ok.

The Tunguska event has been estimated as being as small as a 3KT, and as large as a 30KT detonation. It did however flatten not just a few trees, but 80 MILLION of them, over a distance of over two thousand square kilometers.

It also produced a seismic shock of 5.0 on the richter scale. The combination of the extreme shaking it would cause, combined with its raw explosive potential, would, without a doubt, destroy any city it happened to detonate over. Thats game over.

Its simply a measure of the potential energy in the meteor.

If there was no atmosphere and the meteor was able to strike at full speed in tact, thats the energy it would transfer to the earths surface.

We have a nice thick atmosphere however, and the meteor starts to break up miles above the earth to by the time it reaches the ground much of that energy has been sucked out - if it even manages to reach the surface as many do not (shooting stars).

The energy of a big one traveling at thousands of miles per hour is substantial and thus comparable to nuclear weapons in terms of energy released in its final few minute of life. Nothing else we have really comes close to that sort of energy release, you could say, "a meteor came to earth yesterday with the energy equivalent of a billion mice running for a week" or somthing silly but thats just not a very good way to put it for people to understand. Nuclear weapons release the most energy of anything people understand.

Though of course not dangerous like nuclear weapons since theres no radiation or EMP blast.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thanks Zaphod. Tha makes it clearer. New Clear, lol.

This one was said to have been equivalent to 30 Hiroshima bombs, but no major damage, deaths....



Still it was enough to cause the Russian defense systems to go on alert.

Imagine that happening over a major US city, and the main explosive shockwave happening at a lower elevation?

No one seen this one coming. Odds are they won't detect the next big one that actually impacts and does real damage, or may even end life on this planet.

Say something in the million kiloton range?

the reference to atomic bomb is in reference to the very first ones dropped.

little boy and fat man were between 10-15 kilotons of tnt. so when you hear as powerful as 1,000 atomic bombs that is the reference they refer to.

but how did they gauge the bombs since nothing that powerful had ever been detonated before?

they used a reference blast before the first one was detonated in Alamogordo, they took 100 tons or .1 kT of tnt



100 tons of tnt reference

then when the trinity blast happened they compared the two blasts and that determined the power