From Business Insider Defense (q.v.)
This Chart Shows The Terrifying Power Of Modern Nuclear Bombs
This infographic designed by Maximilian Bode and posted on fastcodesign.com illustrates the terrifying power of today’s nuclear bombs. Each red block represents a ton of TNT.
It breaks down the difference between bombs of the past, such as the Little Boy dropped at Hiroshima, and ones more recently detonated by the U.S., like the Castle Bravo.
Check it out.
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{ 56 comments… read them below or add one }
If this doesn’t make you say “Holy S&$7!”, consider this. Castle Bravo was only the fifth largest nuclear device ever tested! The Soviet Union tested bombs that were much bigger than Castle Bravo. That’s some scary stuff!
The nukes they had weren’t even their most terrifying weapons. They had ICBM warheads loaded with weaponized Anthrax, Bubonic Plague, Smallpox, and they had weaponized Marburg virus, but it’s unknown if it was ever deployed. Marburg virus is practically identical to Ebola but with a slightly lower mortality rate.
They had originally had problems producing Ebola in large quantities, but towards the end of the 1980s they’d sorted that out. They were also working on a hybrid of Smallpox and Ebola.
Nmate, your post reminded me of the book The Hot Zone by Richard Preston (who also wrote the outstanding book Demon in the Freezer). Definitely terrifying stuff.
Im with SF medic. It certainly puts things into perspective.
I read the Hot Zone in one night while enduring Hurricane Erin in Melbourne. That book scared the S%^# outta me!
xcalbr you knew exactly what nmates comment reminded me of. that was a great n scary book at the same time, knowing how close it came to D.C. at one point
I read Ken Alibek’s book “Biohazard”, the Biopreparat people were serious, devious and altogether scary.
That being the case, nuclear weapons are still bang-for-buck the nastiest thing you can launch at another country. There really hasn’t been a lot of work done in terms of best altitude to release anthrax spores or tularemia or whatever, and trying to hit the right altitude when you’re coming down at 5,000 mph out of a suborbital launch is pretty tricky. Not to mention ICBM delivery vehicles, etc.
Biologicals are much better delivered covertly than with an ICBM. They work just as well (the self-propagating kind, anyway) and there’s less risk of blowback on you. If we saw an ICBM coming over the pole we wouldn’t hold back because it was “just” an anthrax weapon that would affect an area a fraction of the size of that affected by a nuclear bomb and the resultant fallout. Back in the day, one missile is all of the missiles, so the response would have been nuclear.
Hey, I dusted out some of my old nerd neurons and continued this illustration from Wikipedia. http://twolftfeet.com/cv/nuc_burst2.jpg
Any fusion bomb much bigger than Castle Bravo and especially the Tsar expends a lot of energy by blasting atmosphere into space! (USAF std altitude of the atmosphere is 300kft depending on which part you work on)
What no Tzar Bomba????? That’s sad not to mention that.
Or I say have the Strangelove philosophy on abombs LOL.
http://www.tsarbomba.org/Tsar-Bomba-Charts.html
stop worrying and learn to love the bomb :D
Scary stuff!!
The message is loud and clear, we need bigger bombs! Lets go for a 30,000 kiloton!
Where is the Tsar Bomba (58MT)? Honestly, these aren’t remotely “modern” nuclear weapons. They’re all free fall bombs, for one. Two, as delivery systems became more accurate (principally ballistic missiles), the yield needed to defeat a target shrank. Smaller warheads were mounted on MIRV buses with yields in the 300-450KT range for US weapons and 500KT to 1MT for Soviet weapons. Both sides did retain some massive weapons for very hard targets, but they are the exception and not the norm.
Yes but can you ride one of the modern ones down from the belly of a B-52 waving your cowboy hat in the air?
I remember reading somewhere that another reason for using MIRV with lower yields was because the destructive power of weapons decreased as a square of the distance. If for example you were 400m away from an explosion, the destructive power would be 1/4 that felt at 200m. So not only would the opponent have a harder time trying to intercept multiple warheads of lower yield, the overall potential for damage was just as high if not higher than using a single higher yield weapon.
John, you are correct. I’m an old SAC warrior, and yield became very important when came time to negotiate treaties. Greater yields didn’t equate to greater destruction or projected force. As guidance systems increased in accuracy, lower yields were preferable.
Thanks, David! You’ve succeeded in giving the visual I’ve been warning about for 35 years or more. These things are potentially the end of Life as we know it…and this demonstrates this fact in a very illuminating manner. Well Done!
But he doesn’t show the devastation pattern. High yield devices, as others have stated, lose their damage potential exponentially as the distance from Ground 0 increases. 4 1/4KT devices, spaced 500km apart have as much or more damage potential than than 1 1KT device (and take more to intercept, are smaller targets to intercept, etc.). This is a case where “less is more”. High yield devices are purely political- they are waste of time, money and are completely impracticable to use (in their manufacture, their storage, and their potential delivery).
Luckily they didn’t include the Czar. It would have taken me forever to scroll down here and complain about mentioning it the Czar was not necessary because we got the message after the Castle Bravo.
obama wants to lower the number we have. i guess it doesn,t make much difference whether we have 1000 or 2000 but i would rather have 2000.
We will have to make up for smaller number with BIGGER bombs LOL. :X
if i point a pistol at you, would you feel safer with 6 bullets in the magazine or 4? it truly makes no difference. we have enough nuclear weapons (5,000 roughly last i heard) to annihilate the entire planet in nuclear fire, so having 5,000 vs 2,000 is a moot point.
4, actually. It gives me 2 less rounds to have to not get hit by. Not disagreeing with your post, but the analogy is a little weak.
eh, thats the nature of reducing arms. we still have a ***** load and certainly enough to wipe out civilization. and I dont remember where i heard that from, i think it was quoted from the SALT treaty.
He who has the most toys!!!
Personally I miss sleeping on an air mattress in lower level missile as a non-qual. Talk about a woody.
To provide another perspective, I have some data from Gen. Leslie Groves’ book on the Manhattan Project. As you all know, the guys at Alamogordo tested a bomb prior to their actual use against Japan. This particular bomb was of the ‘implosion’ type, in use to this day. “Little Boy” was gun-type bomb; they KNEW it would work. Implosion…they wanted to be sure. After the ‘shot’, when the ground beneath the tower was evaluated, the force of that explosion was calculated to be One Million Atmospheres! An ‘atmosphere’ is the weight of a column of air, one square inch in size…extending UP to where the atmosphere stops (roughly. Keeping it simple here.) That pressure is = to 14.7 lb./square inch. Thus…one million atmospheres equals 14.7 pounds TIMES One Million….over EVERY SQUARE INCH of that ground; 14.7 million pounds. OUCH!
im no mathmatician but… dont the “megatons” start coming in at 1000 kilatons…?
so “castle bravo” would be a 15 megaton weapon ? honest question.
Yep…congrats. Your math skills are better than most.
BTW, my daddy always told me the only dumb question is the one you don’t ask.
thank you.
yes, the Castle Bravo is a 15 megaton weapon, and yes, 1000 kilotons equals 1 megaton. big *********
I understand that we were always trying to one-up the Soviets, but beyond that what was the intended use of such an enormous device? Was it intended for the most hardened of targets? Or was it simply a means of assuring that if the Soviets attempted to wipe out the United States, we could return the favor? (I get the MAD concept) The amount of civilization that a device like this would have wiped out would have been unimaginable.
deterrence, plain and simple. The threat of mutually assured destruction kept a uneasy peace between the US and Soviet Union, giving zero incentive for a conventional war in Europe. MAD, however, helped perpetuate the proxy war.
Castle Bravo was an accident. It was one of the first deliverable nuclear weapons, the Ivy Mike shot was basically a building that exploded, while the Bravo device was something you could put in a B-36 and retaliate with. The fuel for the fusion part of the weapon was, like all fusion bombs, some combination of deuterium and tritium and in the case of the Bravo test the deuterium was bound to lithium to make it solid and easier to handle. Lithium-6 gives off a tritium atom when it absorbs a neutron, so the lithium-6 provides the other part of the fusion fuel.
What was unknown before the Bravo shot was that lithium-7 would also contribute to the fusion fuel, so the 60% of the lithium that was lithium-7 was assumed to be inert…only it exploded just like the Li-6. As a result the fusion yield was much higher than anticipated, which meant the third stage of the bomb (the second fission reaction as the U-238 case underwent fission) was much larger as well.
The biggest “bangs” in fission-fusion-fission bombs (often called “thermonuclear” bombs) are in the third stage where the neutron flux is so high it starts to split U-238 like it was U-235. A “neutron” bomb is just a fission-fusion bomb without the uranium tamper/x-ray guide so that most of the yield is pure neutrons with a lot less fallout. It is the U-238 tamper wrapped around the fusion section of the bomb that makes most of the fallout.
Castle Bravo shot was the code name given to the first U.S. test of a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb device. A device, more of a test bomb. Not something put in inventory, if it was it would of been given a designation.
The device was a very large cylinder weighing 23,500 pounds and measuring a half inch less than 15 feet in length and a tenth of an inch under 4 and a half feet in width. It was mounted in a “shot cab”. I have no idea the size of bomb bay doors but that is huge.
The “shot cab” was for Ivy Mike, the first fission-fusion-fission bomb. Literally, it was built into a building on a part of the atoll and then detonated. Scientific instruments were mounted around the device to measure…stuff. Not a nuclear scientist on this end.
And yes, Bravo was not a deliverable weapon, but it was a whole lot closer than Ivy Mike was. Unless the commies were going to allow us to build a building in their target zones that would explode with ~10MT yield like Ivy Mike did. The core of the Bravo bomb was shared with subsequent deployed munitions, it’s kind of a grandfather of some of them.
Richard Rhodes wrote a pretty good book about the H-bomb project called “Dark Sun”. Highly recommended if you’re interested.
Operation Castle was a United States series of high-energy (high-yield) nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll beginning in March 1954. Operation Castle was considered by government officials to be a success as it proved the feasibility of deployable “dry fuel” designs for thermonuclear weapons. There were technical difficulties with some of the tests: one device had a yield much lower than its predicted yield (a “fizzle”), while two other devices detonated with over twice their predicted yields. One test in particular, Castle Bravo, resulted in extensive radiological contamination of nearby islands (including inhabitants and U.S. soldiers stationed there), as well as a nearby Japanese fishing boat the not so “Lucky Dragon No. 5″, resulting in one direct fatality and continued health problems for many of those exposed.
Your right the lithium-7 was not inert and add to the bang. They were expecting a 4-6 Mt blast and got 15Mt. Can you say woops.
The Mark 21 nuclear bomb was a nuclear gravity bomb first produced in 1955. It was based on the TX-21 “Shrimp” prototype that had been detonated during the Castle Bravo test in March 1954. While most of the Operation Castle tests were intended to evaluate weapons intended for immediate stockpile, or which were already available for use as part of the Emergency Capability Program, Castle Bravo was intended to test a design which would drastically reduce the size and costs of the first generation of air-droppable atomic weapons (the Mk 14, Mk 17 & Mk 24). At 12 feet, six inches long, 56 inches in diameter and weighing 15,000 pounds (6,800 kg) – less than half the Mk-17/24 weapons – the Mk-21 was significantly smaller than its predecessors. Its minimum yield was specified at four megatons.
Gotta say that Castle Bravo is one big SOB. If I remember right max load for us was eight 100Kt warheads per tube, times 16 tubes comes to 12,800Kt total for whole boat, we only had Poseidon C3 missiles. Some had been upgraded to C4 but not us. C4 same pay loaded but better range and guidance systems, uses a star sighting for improved accuracy. D5 missile carry’s more punch. The Trident II can carry 12 MIRV warheads but START I reduces this to 8 and SORT reduces this yet further to 4 or 5. So this leaves out a combo of all 100Kt warheads. Best load out now. Four 475 Kt warheads per tube, time 24 tubes comes to 45,600Kt total. Went to get a part off of an Ohio class once down in Port Canaveral, what a monster compared to my boat. Though we did shoot 4 Poseidon missile down the east coast missile range. That was just before I left in ’85 to go to oceanographic ship.
As President Ronald Reagan said , we need to use a position of strength aas a detourant to violnce and tyranny. I am not sure that this is still a good idea considering the damage we can inflict with our militarys non-nuclear weapons. The thing is , we need to rid the world of this ability. We can’t junk ours and let rouge countries have this ability. I am hoping that the knowledge of what these nuclear weapons can do to life on earth for a minimum of 100 years should stop anyone from using them.
Does anyone really think we could destroy the planet even if all the bombs were set off at once?
not disintegrate it into space dust, no…but annihilate the planet’s entire ecosystem and surface, definitely, and many times over. That wouldnt even be getting into ozone depletion and the nuclear winter, as colorfully hypothesized by Carl Sagen and other members of the TTAPS team. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/weathering-nuclear-war
No but large parts of the planet would be uninhabitable for a few hundred years.
Except by cockroaches… they would live
I agree we couldn’t break it into little bits. Think of this though, the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano paralyzed flights across Europe. Imagine that on a grand scale. A lot of surface bursts would help to send tons of dust into the air. Nuke plant has a bad day in Japan, we see increase radiation in the US. Radiation would follow weather patterns circling the globe, no one would. With the amount of nukes in the world, the massive amount of dust and crap thrown in the air. I think we end up looking something like the moon, when the dust settled.
Off course it helps having lots of guns and ammo stocked up for the zombie apocalypse when one of these suckers explodes over your house…. just saying the threat of this nuclear crap is much bigger than a so-called “zombie apocalypse”
Castle Bravo was only 15KT, a relatively small and one could argue very, very small weapon. —- These charts are only weapons tested and do not represent what is in our inventory. —– Minus nuclear depth charges, demolition charges and artillery rounds the smallest air dropped or missile launched nuclear weapon in our arsenal produces a yield many times larger than any of those listed above. —– The aviation ordnance mans nemesis: A one megaton nuclear weapon equals 8 million 500 pound Mk 82 GP bombs; which one would you rather hump? —- We have warheads in our inventory that exceed 100 megatons (= 800,000,000. million pounds of TNT).
Castle Bravo was 15 Megatons.
The B41 thermonuclear weapon was the most powerful nuclear bomb ever developed by the United States, with a theoretical maximum yield of 25 megatons.
The B53 was a high-yield bunker buster thermonuclear weapon developed by the United States during the Cold War. Deployed on bombers, the B53, with a yield of 9 megatons of TNT, was the most powerful weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal after the last B41 nuclear bombs were retired in 1976.
The B53 was the basis of the W-53 warhead carried by the Titan II Missile. The W53 warhead had the same physics package as the B53, without the air drop-specific components like the parachute system, reducing its mass. It was the highest yield warhead ever deployed on a US missile. W-53 warhead carried by the Titan II Missiles were decommissioned in 1987.
The last B53 was disassembled on October 25, 2011, a year ahead of schedule. With its retirement, the largest bomb currently in service in the U.S. nuclear arsenal is the B83, with a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons of TNT. The B53 was replaced in the bunker-busting role by a variant of the two-stage B61 nuclear bomb.
As I remember some of our multi-warhead submarine based missiles carry much bigger yield warheads. The titans are old technology as were the B series bombs. I only worked with B28, 43, 57 & 61s plus land based sub surface demolition and underwater mines for operations and deployment, but I remember others from the various schools and transfer operations at sea. The Air Force, Navy and Marines shared some of the arsenal, but not all. But, my memory could be failing.
Trident II can carry up to 5, but limited by treaty to four, W88 warheads. W88 list out in the 475Kt range. So even though the Titan II were old, they had a lot of lift. NASA used them to put satellites into space. I am fairly sure that they were the only carrier of the W-53 warhead, but not positive.
Castle Bravo was much higher than than 15,000 KT. The Russians detonated one that was I think close to 50,000 KT. When B-52′s flew 24 hour missions, a typical load was four 5 megaton weapons.
@FormerSFMedic, it sure did make me say that! Is there any good reason for building a bomb that big (and bigger)? I mean, other than the typical ******* contest that it supports… It seems to me the bombs dropped in Japan did what they were intended to do. Why did the US (and Russia etc) invest the time and money on getting something so many times more powerful?
Like any explosive device with the exception of fuel air bombs, the shock waves travel in a straight line and can be affected to varying degrees by terrain and delivery method. Some are designed for detonation at altitude, some at surface and some below. A wide open flat target area is a different set of considerations when target planning than say a mountainous or even hilly area or built up area like a major city with tall building. Deployment in a midwestern or southwest city on flat terrain and NYC or Las Vegas (a valley surrounded by mountains would be good examples. —– Also some are rated in total while they are actually independently targetable multiple warheads, say six warheads carried on one missile that can each reach six different targets after being deployed at altitude.
Understand I am not advocating the use of nuclear weapons but I do believe their performance as a deterrant have kept us safe since the beginning of the cold war. The real issue with nuclear weapons is who has them and what can we do about that. The Genie is out of the bottle the weapons exist and they will not go away no matter what treaties are signed and what promises are made in reducing thier number and to believe otherwise is naieve.
If we Americans show the world our good intentions by reducing our weapons to some goodie-two-shoes number like Obama’s 400 or rid ourselves of them altogether we will be placeing our heads on the chopping bloc. In effect reductions at this point in time when Russia is revamping their entire military and China is too, make us entirely unsafe and removes too many options for the sake of some utopian dream of a one world government. Add to this, the States that have fairly unstable governments like India and Pakistan (which is completly unstable) have nuclear weapons, and Korea has them and now Iran will soon have them. This makes for a very precarious world situation. If either of these four nations begin to launch devices as they have spoken of in the recent past, the chances for a full on escalation is only minutes or at most hours away from the first mushroom cloud. What will the responses be? There are few options open to us.
Take a scenario in which Iran delivers a device to U.S. soil, from our perspective New York, Washington, or Los Angeles or where ever just got hit by ‘what appears to be a Nuclear Device’! Who did it? and Why? I am fairly sure we (the US) wont just start lobbing Nukes hither and thither at our suspects. But every nuke weapon capable state will be going to full readiness and comunications between Washington or Air Force one and England France Russia and China will be blazing, confused and both offensive and defensive demands for the others to stand down will be paramount. Will they Stand down? What happens if Iran then detonates a device in Russia or China how quick will things spiral out of control? An here the US sits with only 400 deliverable weapons. I believe that a Trident D4 SLBM can carry quite a few MIRVs if that number were say 5 that would mean that there would only be four subs assuming that are fully loaded, available to respond. But we would have other launchers such as land based missles and bombers in which we could respond with. How many Stealth Bombers do we have? 400? no! Less than a hundred! So lets say 100 bombers 100 landbased ICMBs and 200 SLBMs, half of which would be in port. You can see that the number of launchers is small and divided up between air and ICBMs and SLBM forces, 400 weapons dosent go very far, and thus the number of targets that the opposition needs to hit are few. Would Russia or China see this as an oppurtunity to remove our nuclear capabilities and our horrible capitalist ideals out? I bet someone in the halls of the Kremlin or the Chinese politburo will. A first strike could reduce these numbers by half so now they are only looking at 200 launchers! Will they take the chance? And what if the Iranians deliver an airburst from 35,000 feet over the east coast on a comercial jet, the EMP could affect 1000′s of square miles, New York to Charleston SC to Cleveland. And what if it was coordinated with three or four other flights? The entire country could be put into third world status or worse and it would take years to come out of that if it were the only attack. And if we were blinded by and EMP attack what would Russia and/or China do then?
Or are we better off with thousands of weapons in many different launchers, like carrier strike aircraft, fast attack submarines, cruise missles and ICBMs in Ohio class boomers, hundreds of Bombers and ICBM’s?
The size of warhead yeild is relatively unimportant, I mean dead is dead. These really big ones are called city busters and are scarey to civilians population centers and in an all out nuclear exchange they would be used against targets where they would yield the most damage like hitting capitol cities and large military bases. However I agree with NMate the 300 to 400 kiloton weapons are far more effective and efficient and accurate. And accuracy is key, there are few structures that can withstand a blast of that type except Nuclear Silos and even then a direct hit will crack them and prevent the launcher from operating which is standard military doctrine against land based missles in a first strike.
What we really need is the ablitiy to strike our enemies while keeping thier allies subdued so that in a scenario like that I have described above we can say to them “Look we know it was Iran and we are going to take out thier launchers and bomb making facilities, all their military capabilities etc… So stay out of it” and we could reach some arrangement or other. A nation state can only do that from a position of strength politicaly, economically and militarily. To weaken our selves in the front of the world at this time is ridiculous. Look even Venuzuela is ratteling their sabers at us since OBAMA has come to the world stage and they are best buds with Iran and Korea!
So what’ll it be kids, more hope n change? Or anyone but Obama!
Given me flash backs to Sub School in Ct. and Guided Missile “A” School in Dam Neck Va. Next thing I know I’ll be hearing receiving flash traffic and over the 1MC to set condition 1 SQ when I go to bed tonight almost 30 years later.
I was a fastboat Torpedoman ssn660 84 to 91 out of chas sc.
SSBN 644 out of Weapons station in Charleston, SC. On for almost three year 84-87. Sins tech.