The Worlds Biggest Nuke

Yeah you are totally correct, these bombs do not leave huge smoking craters. My father lived next to a nuke zone cause there were F-111's were dangerous to the russians. He said that once the blast hit, stay in your house for a while and wash off your roof lol. I also had some time to talk to someone who lives in Nagasaki, he said it really wan't that bad. ALso i hate the scientists that say there will be a nuclear winter with only 100 megatons exploded. lol jeeze, how many megatons did we explode in tests in 20 years? like 3000? Who knows about the russians

Hello everyone... this is my first post on ATS... Just to let you all know the Russians did have the largest Nuc ever produced. The weapon was 100MT detonated at half yeild. The reason it was only detinated at half yeild was due to them not truly knowing what a 100MT weapon would do, theories did exsist though. The crew that dropped the bomb was never told they were on a suicide mission either, both crew and plan were destroyed. There is video of the detination from four different cameras that i have seen, three of the four were destroyed as well. Im not sure if the film is still classified, so i won't elaborate on this anymore. but there is a massive area of siberia russia that is uninhabital due to this detination. The discovery channel or TLC did a documentary on it a few years back. I know this info because i am a 2W2 in the USAF and this is my specialty. Have any questions feel free to ask!

Are you referring to the Tsar bomb? I asking 'cos it wasn't tested in Siberia. The testing grounds were at Novaya Zemlya, an island in the Arctic Sea

Actually, I'd like you to get me anything on a golden plate....

I was a 2W1.........(yay)

$.02
Sorry, had to put that in. Least we were in the same neighborhood...........

i heard something a while back on a tv program that the russians (present day) have a nuke that can be launched from a boomer submarine that is meant to be able to make an area the size of europe uninhabitable.

i have a feeling im gonna get alot of correcting from you lot but hey thats what i heard

So you didn't see pics of a 100mt US warhead. You saw pictures of missiles that some guy says are 100mt. The fact that Kennedy would have believed them to be SAMs means they were relatively small, which means they were NOT 100mt.

[Edited on 11-1-2004 by Esoterica]

nuclearweaponarchive.org...

Of todays standards then, what is the capability of a best scenario situation where the group of nukes etc detonate, in other words how much stuff could they blow up?

The design and practicality of large nuclear projectiles has changed in the last 20 or so years. The military would much rather use smaller, tactical warheads( say with 5kt-10kt) than larger megatonnage. With tactical strikes in, and around, enemy troop placements, and even around smaller cities, there would be maximum casualties, with very little property damage.

Take for example the M454, better known as the 155mm atomic projectile. This weapon had a setting for airburst. Now just imagine exploding one of these, say over a small city. With a yield of 5kt, and tritium for enhanced radiation, the casualties would be grave. Maybe not instantly, but the end result of fallout would 100% cause mass deaths down the road of the victims.

My favorite - which happens to be the largest nuclear bomb ever - was the Soviet Union's "Czar Bomba," or the Czar's Bomb. It was a triple stager; at an impressive 50 MT +. It actually broke windows in Finland. The bomb was detonated on Novaya Zemlya, the large Russian island(s) about 600 miles north east of Finland.

I was watching a program on the history channel once and they were talking about how once a nuclear crazy scientist suggested to Nikita Kruschev that they build an atom bomb the size of a giant tanker ship. It was meant to be like a suicide thing so if the soviets cant live then nobody an lol. But even kruschev was not that crazy so the idea never went into effect.

That thing could have been a world ender.

hehe yep, well that was the main idea behind it

>Well, there actually is a practical limit to how large a nuclear weapon should be. The larger you get, the more fissile material you waste in the explosion.


Well yes and no. If you're talking about a straight out atomic detonation yes theres a limit even with tritium boosters. However I believe the Tsar Bomb was a multi-stage Hydrogen bomb? Those don't technically have a limit. Look up in google the term "gigaton mine". Essentially what Ulam and even Teller discovered was the real limiting factor on H-bombs was tritium when it comes to deliverability (aka if you want to deliver it by missile or plane you use tritium or a combo of tritium and lithium deuteride). This allows for a compact nuke device. However if size isn't the issue and you just want to go for pure destruction and fireball radius then you can build even up to a 100-120 stage device using deuterium. This is what they termed a gigaton mine. Essentially these were submarine size (14,000 ton) vessels that were one gigantic bomb. They would simply be brought up to the coast of a country and detonated. The size of the fireball from the detonation would have been around 12 miles across according to some of their calculations.

Also what's this carbon bomb aka dark sun they say is so scary that they are afraid to detonate it. I heard about it but not really sure what it is. Thanks for informing us about those things.

Well actually the hydrogen bomb is the carbon bomb and dark sun, but umm there is another one I heard of which has never been tested yet, maybe I got it confused with another name, does anyone have a guess at this?

[Edited on 19-1-2004 by NEODI]

Cobalt capped or Strontium Capped nukes are probably what you're thinking of. A strontium capped 100 mt nuke could feasibly be a planet killer if was detonated in high atmosphere and allowed to spread via air patterns. At the very least the strontium-90 contamination would be vast.

I saw that one (i posted about it somewhere around here, dont remember if it was a main topic or reply to something)

But it was supposed to have a radiation counter on it, when the radiation counter hit a certain point (indicating the Soviet Union had been nuked and destroyed) it was supposed to be set to go off, and it was supposed to be completely automated, and once built and set, wasn't supposed to be able to be stopped, thank God Kruschev made the sane decision, though i hear he debated actually building it for a while

Wow that's pretty interesting, I never knew those details of thestory. Thanks for sharing.

Yes, the 3rd stage was actually made from lead instead of U-238 ('DU'), thus making it the cleanest bomb ever detonated. If the 3rd stage had been DU, then it would have reached its 100Mt potential. However it would have been incredibly dirty.

PS. As for the pilots being killed; as far as I know they didn't die, but were awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union for their heroism.