100 MT Nuclear Bomb Damage

Sorry Now_Then, but the statement: , is incorrect.

One of the reasons and probably the main reason, why MIRVs were introduced was, in layman's terms, to confuse air defence system radars, such as those that are [allegedly] around Moscow.

It was supposed [back then] that if you flooded an area with smaller, low yield multiple warheads, then the Russian anti-ballistic missile - missile weapons system targetting [computers] would, simply, be overwhelmed, and probably shut down, allowing several to hit their target.

I read through the three pages of posts but no one actually answers the question...

If a 100 MT nuke was detonated in the USA, about how far would the blast damage be felt from in miles?


All I saw was a lot of equations and speculation, but no real answer to the question - I am really curious about this and have been searching for a while. I am not interested in 5 x 20 MT nukes either, just one single 100 MT explosion.

Well we simply wouldn't know because a 100mt nuclear device from what I know has never been detonated.

Shattered OUT...

Here you go:

Nuclear Weapons Blast Effect Calculation Applet

Despite the rather unusual nature of the page, the effects calculations match up with the numbers I get from my manual version, so this seems to be accurate.

Note that it also assumes 'best case'. Actual effects will vary widely due to initiation altitude, terrain, and local weather conditions.

reply to post by robertfenix

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True. People don't factor in radioactive winds, which can travel much further than a traditional wind. NASA has sketches for 'Medusa', which consist of a pod and a sail in front. The idea is to detonate a MT nuke behind it, far enough away that blast wont hurt it, but the radioactive waves would propel the sail up to amazing speeds, close to speed of light. Traveling to the stars thus becomes possible with traditional methods, nothing alien tech about it. Thats OT though, the point is radio winds are very FREAKIN strong. End.

A 100 MT device has never been tested and probably never invented. The Tsar Bomba (look it up) was only about 50 MT. It was grossly impractical and had to be dropped from a modified cargo plane. AFAIK, most nukes today are less than 1 MT.

What is truly devastating about a nuclear war is not the SIZE of the warheads, it's the NUMBER of them.

Very informative replies, thanks so much! I hope we never do see a 100 MT nuke detonated due to the fact that it has no tactical use - a tool for complete genocide in my opinion for most countries in the world.

Suffice it to say it would blow a whole bunch of peoples days for years to come. If you want data on radiation poisoning I suggest you google or yahoo hiroshima radiation poisoning. It was said people's skin sloughed off to the bone days later. Not a pleasant way to die. Post directed to AD5673. 'I was looking for information on radiation'.

[edit on 6-10-2007 by jpm1602]

reply to post by Brother Stormhammer

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Thanks for the link, Brother S

Yep, the numbers seem to check out nicely with manual calcs...That's probably the best sim I've seen online...Others seem to only handle blasts of 10 MT or so...

Peace

You wouldn't have a link handy for this "Medusa", would you? It sounds like somebody got a solar sail / light sail cross-bred with Project Orion.

I'd also like to see a source that backs up the idea that radioactive winds travel further than non-radioactive ones...given that the only difference between the two is that one carries radioactive dust and contaminants, and the other doesn't, the idea seems a tad far-fetched to me, unless there's been a huge mix-up in terminology somewhere.

The Tsar Bomba WAS a 100Mt device. However, since it's basic design meant 50 megotons worth from pure fission (aka radiation causer), and since that much fission yield would result in massive amounts of soviet civilian death no matter where you detonate it, they needed a way to make it a LOT more clean for it's yield, so they replaced some U238 with lead to almost completely eliminate the final fissioning, the end result being that 97% of the bombs energy was from fusion alone, making it one of the cleanest per yield nuclear detonations in history. Of course, that also meant losing half the blast yield as well.

As for being dropped from a modified cargo plane, where did you hear that? The plane used was a tu-95V, a modification of the tu-95 of which only one was built. A few things were changed, but the biggest modification was that the bomb doors were removed so that the bomb could be stuffed under the plane better. The Bear was no cargo plane.

reply to post by uberfoop

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It was originally projected to be 100 mt, but was soon after downscaled to 65 mt yield and then 50.

The bomb was mostly incased in lead.

A 100 mt nuclear device was to large for any form of delivery platform they had which is one of the reasons why they downscaled among the others you listed.

Shattered OUT...

They downscaled the yield, not the bomb. If it weighed 27 tons with only a 50 megaton potential yield, the thing would have been an international joke rather than a scary political move.

From every source I've looked at that bothered to put in any technical information of the downscalage whatsoever, they've said that the design was reduced in yield because a u238 tamper was replaced with a lead one.
This explanation is fitting considering the size of the bomb, the weight of the bomb, and the details regarding the lack of radioactivity from final-stage fission left from the bomb.

If you think you couldn't make a 100Mt bomb of that size, consider the most yield-efficient bomb ever made, the American B41. It produces 25Mt yield and weighs 5 tons. This efficiency means that a 100Mt bomb probably be made that would weigh only 20 tons. The Tsar weighed 27 (it was rushed in 4 months of R&D and the russians hadn't been using quite the efficiency of nuclear fuels that america had been), and even that wasn't a prohibitive weight for carrying by a Tu-95.

In any case, if it had been designed as a 50 megaton bomb (with that design style, about 25 megatons from pure fission), the final-stage fission fallout would have wrecked a HUGE area up in the Novaya Zemyla region.

Lastly, the R&D was 4 months. You can't scrap several bomb designs and have a working scaled down version at the end of that time period (you probably could these days with massive resources, but that was 1961, when everything in R&D had to be done painstakingly by hand).





The Tsar Bomb was known to use a fission-fusion-fission design. Read up on them, look at the region the bombs were detonated in, and then come back and decide how intelligent it would be to have a fully functional final fast fission (argh, alliteration) stage on a 50 megaton bomb detonated in that area.

No after the test ban everything was done behind closed doors. Who knows what type of powerful nukes they've cooked up since? The Russian 50 MT nuke was designed over 40 years ago and that was downgraded from 100MT. The "Father of the Hydrogen Bomb" Edward Teller a Jewish immigrant from Europe stated that the possible yield of nukes was limitless, now that is #ed up!

[edit on 17-10-2007 by somethingaintright]

[edit on 17-10-2007 by somethingaintright]

[edit on 17-10-2007 by somethingaintright]

However, as far as we are concerned, it's a little hard to hide the explosion of a 100mt nuclear device.

Shattered OUT...

The emphasis has been toward smaller devices, not larger ones. There are a lot of reasons for that, none of which include "goodwill toward men". The main reason ultra high yield devices were developed back in the 1950's and 1960's was the sheer inaccuracy of nuclear delivery systems. First-generation ICBMs could barely hit a city-sized target, cruise missiles couldn't always hit the right continent, and even manned bombers had Circular Error Probable values measured in hundreds of feet. With that level of precision (if you can call that precision), the only answer against hardened military targets was raw size...thus the megaton-range warheads for Atlas and Titan, and the B-41 30MT nuke for air delivery.

Once delivery systems became accurate enough, smaller devices could service targets that up until then required the 'super' warheads...and once it became possible to use them, the advantages of the smaller weapons became glaringly obvious. They were smaller and lighter and less expensive, which meant that smaller (and cheaper) missiles could carry them, or missiles (or, for that matter, bombers) of similar size could carry more warheads.

What Dr. Teller said concerning the potential yield of thermonuclear weapons has to be read very carefully. The potential yield of a nuclear weapon is pretty much limitless, in theory. In practice, however, there are distinct limits imposed by the need to actually assemble the device, and by the need to keep it together long enough after initiation for it to fully function.