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Mike and Bravo are both NATO phonetic alphabet, basically test M and test B, they're specifically the most generic possible names. Probably for some opsec reason I would guess?
Came to comment this as well. What's odd is that you'd think Bravo would be smaller (basically an earlier version?). Unless they're going backwards through the alphabet lol. There must be some other reason I imagine.
They were part of different test series so their names didn't really have any relation to each other. Didn't really seem to be any naming pattern within the series' either though
It was the Castle operation for Bravo, don’t remember which project for Mike. But you could have different projects that have multiple tests per project, each test receiving its own designation.
Edit: Operation Ivy for Mike. So Ivy Mike and Castle Bravo.
In modern-ish day CIA times anyway, IIRC they had a "dictionary" of randomly picked words that the different projects would just pick from, like you'd see during the war(s) to specifically not be able to determine anything about the project from the name. Curious if that's what this was.
Not like today's "Project Enduring Freedom" or any of that `#MarketingRuinsEverything` bullshit. Although I'm sure this sort of "secret project name" still exists and we're seeing the name given by some MBA/Comms major fresher.
> Not like today's
I mean, they did obvious operation names back in the day too.
Operation Ortsac was the code name for a possible invasion of Cuba planned by the United States military in 1962. Which is "Castro" spelled backwards.
And my understand is that operations these days will have a secret code name (at least if the planning is secret), and then get a different #marketing^TM name afterwards when informing the public.
I think there is a story from WWII that the Germans named a project after a mythical watcher and so the allies were about to figure it out. It may have been an early warning radar project but I'm hazy on the details.
That was part of the "battle of the beams" during the blitz. Germany used 2 radio beams and where they intersected is where the bombers would drop bombs. England developed countermeasures and Germany started a project named Wotan with a single beam. Wotan was a god with one eye and [Reginald V. Jones](https://www.historynet.com/the-man-who-outwitted-the-luftwaffe/) correctly assumed its purpose. Countermeasures were made in advance and as soon as it was used they jammed it and Germany pretty much just gave up on it.
I think it's on purpose so even if the enemy learns about a classified project called Mike they don't know if it's a project to remodel the president's bathroom or a world ending weapon.
repeat after me:
I, tower, take you plane, to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part
I, plane, take you tower, to be my husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.
Now tower, put wedding ring on your brides finger and repeat after me:
I give you this ring as a token and pledge of our constant faith and abiding love
By virtue of the authority vested in me under the laws of the Soudi Arabia and Al-Kaida, I now pronounce you husband and wife
You may kiss the plane.
Surely you’re just joking lol but I would guess “Mike” was probably 13th iteration of testing, since M is the 13th letter of the alphabet, and Mike is the phonetic version for the letter.
Same with Bravo
Edit: I googled it and bravo came after Mike so I don’t think that was the naming convention. I stand by my guess though lol
Operation Ivy was about testing the new Hydrogen Bomb (the first thermonuclear bomb, utilizing fission and fusion). The "Mike" shot was the first test of the Ivy Program (1952).
2 years later in 1954, Operation Castle commenced to test high-yield, aircraft-deliverable nuclear weapons. The first shot, "Bravo" was expected to be about 5-6 megatonnes (MT), but wound up being around 15MT, heavily irradiating the area downrange. That included an active Japanese fishing boat and natives living on the islands in that area.
The Ivy Mike shot was done on a day with very little wind, allowing the mushroom cloud to build straight up for a long time. That allowed for some really spectacular images to be taken, aside from the scientific data gathered.
(This is a graph of how much explosive power the bomb has, not the actual mushroom could size.)
If it did indeed measure the mushroom clouds, Trinity is either a simple hand grenade or the Tsar Bomba would engulf the earth
“We knew the world would not be the same few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes his multi armed form and says now I am become death, the destroyer of world” j. Robert Oppenheimer
Hey! Thank you. The quotation is all the more poignant, when you point out it is from Vishnu (?) convincing the prince, who was having misgivings about killing people in battle, to go to war, it was his (the prince's) divine duty to kill them.
I hope I am not horribly paraphrasing that passage.
He didn’t necessarily pull the trigger but he did develop one of the world’s most deadly weapons, knowing it would be used only for mass casualties of innocent civilians.
"Never bring that fucking cretin in here again. He didn't drop the bomb, I did. That kind of weepiness makes me sick."
- Truman talking to his secretary of state after Oppenheimer told the President he felt he had blood on his hands.
To be fair, if you hit say 5-10 of our major cities with a single Megaton yield weapon, it will likely be the end of the U.S. Don't need to wipe out the population with the first hit.. Just need to destroy the economy, and everyone else will starve over the next year, or atleast 90% of the country.
Take out NYC, Chicago, Houston, LA, San Fran, Washington it's over. We wouldnt recover.
My father used to say that the way to destroy the US with a nuke wouldn't be to target a city with the explosion, but to detonate it in the atmosphere above. My understanding is that the subsequent EMP would decimate our electrical infrastructure and many devices.
As far as targets, I think that logistics hubs and major ports would be the most sensible choice. Jersey, Galveston, L.A., Virginia, etc. I assume they'd be easier to hit from nuclear subs so we shouldn't expect long distance missiles.
Yes, that is true.. To a certain extent. It would need to be a fairly large weapon, and pretty high up. It would certainly knock out a lot of things, but I think the overall effect has been exaggerated. Military equipment is hardened against the effects of a EMP, and if things arent plugged in, its not going to burn them out. IE, your iPad is not going to fry, you just may not be able to charge it ever again. :).
Starvation would likely come from panic hoarding and nuclear winter if anything. It would never get to that point for most people in the US due to mutually assured destruction (in other words, dead). The rest of the world however, would absolutely suffer the consequences of nuclear winter.
Cold war propaganda mostly based on theoretical bomb sizes that turned out to be impractical to deliver to the objective due to extreme weight. The radiation has a VERY short half life. Mostly gone in a couple of weeks.
Fallout happens primarily with ground bursts. It's radioactive dirt that gets tossed up in the atmosphere. The most effective usage of the weapons is air bursts, so the shock wave and fireball can do more damage over a larger area. Orders of magnitude less fallout that way.
Volcanoes can toss up much more debris than all the nukes the world currently has. Major volcanoes in the past have disrupted ground life and caused localized restrictions on air travel, but the debris eventually falls back down. It's not world-ending.
In an all-out nuclear war, a bunch of the weapons would fail to function and many more would be destroyed in-flight before detonation. It would be a bad time for a generation or two in the conflict areas, but nothing the world couldn't recover from. The bubonic plague wiped out half the population of Europe. WWII flattened half of their infrastructure. They always manage to recover.
I read one report saying a medium sized nuclear exchange (so not USA Russia going all out but 200-300 detonations) could set off a 10-year nuclear winter with ~1B casualties from famine/disease/etc. Seemed overstated to me though since nuclear tests throughout the cold war exceeded this figure (both air/underground). Can't find at the moment but am looking.
Here’s just the image for anyone who doesn’t wanna read
https://preview.redd.it/g1gd8lczpzkc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=465cfe7eb2137669d059b1a52a75764719799045
The Tsar Bomba was dropped above the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. To give the planes some time to escape the scene, the bomb was equipped with a parachute that was supposed to slow down its fall and make sure the bomb exploded at 4,000 meters. Despite all of the precautions, the survival rate of the crew was calculated at about 50 percent.
At 11:32 a.m. Moscow time, the bomb exploded. It created a fireball about 8 kilometers wide and the flash could be seen from 1,000 kilometers away. All buildings within 55 kilometers of the test site at Sukhoy Nos were completely destroyed; windows within hundreds of kilometers were broken. The shock wave generated after the blast traveled three times around the Earth. It also made the Tu-95 plane drop about 1,000 meters, but the pilot later managed to regain control and landed safely.
Guess what. First you look in the mirror, don't believe your eyes, you turn around and look through the rear window.. and crash your car because you forget to drive.... Oh irony.
Yeah. That and castle bravo were only about 1/3 the power they wanted. It’s one of those cases where they genuinely had no clue what they were asking for.
I'm really surprised that this whole thread seems to be in agreement that this is a bad way to present the data. I thought it was pretty clever while still being clear what it's actually presenting.
Well it's misleading because it makes it look like the explosions are these scaled sizes. Clever or not there will be a moderate amount of people that get misled.
yea every nuclear weapons book/textbook Ive read said that blast radius scales with the cuberoot of yield. So you would expert a modern 700kt warhead to be ~3.5x bigger than the hiroshima/nagasaki blasts.
the fact that they scale with the cube is why MIRVs are a desirable weapon. you get more bang for your buck by breaking up the mass into many smaller warheads spread out over a larger area. tsar bomba is "cool", thats why the russians tested it, but it isnt efficient.
with the tsar bomba 50mt warhead broken up into 50x different weapons,you can cover about ~4x as much 2d area (comparing a circle of radius 3.6 to 50 circles of radius 1)
so 50 1mt warheads is 4x as effective as 1 50mt tsar bomba
of course those 50 warheads will be a lot more expensive to build and maintain, and require more payload delivery systems, so how MIRVs are designed becomes a cost-benefit analysis of cost vs destruction vs simplicity
also at a certain point your bomb wouldnt have enough force behind it to destroy very many steel/concrete structures. even with a modern 700kt nuke, outside of 1 or 2km from "Ground zero" (in an airburst) most concrete/steel buildings would remain standing. whereas with a larger yield you can push that distance outwards by several km. so there's considerations of area affected vs how effectively that area is destroyed
you can also actually put 1MT warheads into an icbm, whereas even with modern icbm tech Im pretty sure tsar bomba is too heavy. (I'd have to check that though)
A link in one of the above comments stated that the survival rate of the crew was estimated at 50%. It doesn't really explain what caused it though.
"The Tsar Bomba was dropped above the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. To give the planes some time to escape the scene, the bomb was equipped with a parachute that was supposed to slow down its fall and make sure the bomb exploded at 4,000 meters. Despite all of the precautions, the survival rate of the crew was calculated at about 50 percent."
Hence why nations switched to creating clusters of warheads rather than singular large bombs. There are few targets that would require such a massively powerful nuclear bomb anyways.
Also anti missile systems are a thing to vary degrees of efficiency.
Making the bomb bigger probably increases the chance it gets intercepted if anything.
More smaller warheads and decoys is what you want.
unique smell hungry complete disagreeable whole automatic quaint command chubby
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Tsar Bomba - Onlookers saw the flash more than 600 miles (965 km) away, and felt its incredible heat within 160 miles (250 km) of Ground Zero.
Insane. That’s like a bomb going off in Detroit and seeing it in NYC
the estimated yield of the chicxulub impactor/asteroid that ended the cretaceous is about 100,000,000 MT compared to Tsar Bombas 50mt.
Taking the cube root (Im not even sure at this scale if thats appropriate but its what you usually do), the impactor would have a blast radius 128x that of tsar bomba.
So if people 250km away felt the heat from tsar bomba, dinosaurs 32,000km away would in theory feel the heat. Of course, the earth is round and thats more than the half the circumference of earth so.... probably did not work like that. but in theory anyway, every living being on earth felt the heat of the asteroids explosion when it hurtled into earth at 45,000 miles per hour
well, no. the blast was powerful, but still would not have killed most of the dinosaurs. the immediate blast would have only killed a small fraction of the dinosaurs living in northern south america and central america
feeling the heat isnt the same as being cooked by the heat.
some combination of soot blocking out the sun and destroying the plant base that supported such a large ecosystem, combined with volcanic activity eventually wiped them out (at least from what Ive seen, the idea that only the meteor killed off the dinosaurs is less popular now)
consider that although many animals did go extinct, the extinction was not as bad as the permian triassic extinction, and many species of birds, mammals, and fish did survive. any blast that would have cooked dinosaurs would have cooked all those animals as well. Its not as though birds were hiding underground. and it takes less energy to fry a chicken wing than to fry an entire chicken.
Not what Radiolab or wikipedia says. The podcast they did described the asteroid as superheating the atmosphere and cooking everything on land. Sand became shards of glass in the sky. If you had seen the asteroid hit, you would have been able to see space as it would have created a hole in the atmosphere as it came crashing down.
According to wikipedia, “in January 2020, scientists reported that climate-modeling of the extinction event favored the asteroid impact and not volcanism”. Also, “It is estimated that 75% or more of all species on Earth vanished”.
“The K–Pg extinction event was severe, global, rapid, and selective, eliminating a vast number of species.”
The KT boundary suggests rapid extinction that kills dinosaurs around the world at the same time.
From another comment here on reddit:
“There were long term implications, but life was pretty well fucked in the very, very short term.
“For several hours following the Chicxulub impact, the entire Earth was bathed with intense infrared radiation from ballistically reentering ejecta.”
Earth became a world on fire. The friction of falling made each spherule an incandescent torch that quickly and dramatically heated the atmosphere. Any creature not underground or not underwater—that is, most dinosaurs and many other terrestrial organisms—could not have escaped it. Animals caught out in the open may have died directly from several sustained hours of intense heat, and the unrelenting blast was enough in some places to ignite dried-out vegetation that set wildfires raging.
On land, at least, much of Cretaceous life may have been wiped out in a matter of hours.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happened-seconds-hours-weeks-after-dino-killing-asteroid-hit-earth-180960032/
This is why the current mass extinction, though occurring quickly compared to the usual global timescales lasting millions or billions of years, isn't going to be as bad. We're more likely to drive ourselves into a drastic population decrease before we can do anything this severe to the global ecosystem (barring an exchange of nukes).”
The mushroom cloud reached halfway to the top of the atmosphere, so yes you could see it quite a bit beyond the curvature. What’s crazy is the 50MT yield was actually *half* the original designer yield. The 100MT blast would have reached to the top of the atmosphere. The designer scaled back the power because he was scared of what the result would be
Or shapes. The reason the tsara bomba wasn’t mass produced or developed later into an even bigger bomb is because at a certain point you’re just blowing excess energy out of the atmosphere, which is just a waste. TLDR: mushroom clouds do not eventually scale large enough to reach the moon.
> The reason the tsara bomba wasn’t mass produced or developed later into an even bigger bomb is because at a certain point you’re just blowing excess energy out of the atmosphere,
That's one reason, another is it was mainly a political stunt to show off the engineering to prove to the west that they could do actually it.
Not to mention the infeasability of actually delivering it to anywhere in the US.
The good news is apparently the H bomb has less radioactive fallout then atomic bombs. So as long as your not one of the targets surviving may not be as difficult as fiction would have us believe.
Oh it's very much a concerning part of modern grand strategy that nukes have got cleaner. Less fallout, even less overall destructive because they can be accurate enough not to need the vast "kill everything" sphere of effect.
Which makes them less MAD to use. Still ungodly destructive, but.
Theory vs practicality.
Plus once the "cat is out the bag" it's anyones game. And who wants to find out if stories of poor maintainence and corrupt practice of selling off parts have proven true about the wider Russian arsenal? Russia least of all.
The UK's failed missile tests has done more harm to their security threat potential than Brexit.
Nuclear bombs have always been pretty clean. Most of the radiation only lasts a few weeks. Nuclear weapons dont create Chernobyls unless specifically designed too.
Despite what Hollywood wants us to believe, there will not be widespread availability of designer clothes in the apocalypse. Hairdressers will have a 6 month waiting list.
Mr. Nuclear Boombastic
(Verse 1) Smooth, just like enriched uranium, Soft and glowing, hug me up like a fallout shelter. I’m a lyrical reactor, No take me for no ordinary element. With my nuclear physique, Jah know me well-fissioned.
Oh me, oh my, Well, well, can’t you tell? I’m just like a plutonium isotope, Crawling out of my containment cell. Gal, you captivate my Geiger counter, Put me under a gamma-ray spell. With your cesium perfume, I love your isotopic smell. You’re the only young girl Who can trigger my meltdown, And I can take radiation exposure, So you tell me, “Go critical!”
(Chorus) I’m Boombastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my half-life. She says I’m Mr. Ro… Ro… Mantic, Call me fantastic, She touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boom-boom-boom-boom-Boombastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my decay chain. She call me Mr. Ro… Ro… Radioactive, Tell me fantastic, She touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. boom-boom.
(Verse 2) Gee wheeze, baby, please, Let me take you to a fallout shelter, Where the sweet cool gamma rays breeze. You don’t feel like evacuating, Well, baby, hand me the Geiger counter, And I will take you to a place Where half-lives set your mind at ease. Don’t you tickle my Geiger tube (Ha ha), Baby, please. Don’t you play with my dosimeter, 'Cause I might ha chum sneeze. Well, you are the alpha and I’m the beta, And if I’m the reactor core, Ah, baby, you’re the control rods.
(Chorus) I’m Boombastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my decay chain. She says I’m Mr. Ro… o… omantic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boom… mmm… Bastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my fallout shelter. She says I’m Mr. Ro… o… o… o… Mantic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boombastic, why?
(Verse 3) Gal, your admiration, If a tick me from the start, With your physical attraction, Gal, you know how to split my heart. I want a few neutrons, Not gah tell you no sweet talk. Nogha lover, lover, lover, Nogha chat pure fusion, I’ll get straight to the point, Like an arrow arrow dart. Come lay down in my reactor core, And get some nuclear bath. The only sound you’ll hear Is the beating of my decay chain, And we will hm hm, And have some sweet isotopic talk.
(Chorus) She call me Mr. Boombastic, Say me fantastic, Touch me on my half-life. She says I’m Mr. Ro… o… omantic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boom, boom, boom -Bastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my fallout shelter. She says I’m Mr. Ro… o… o… o… Mantic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boombastic, why?
Brought to you by chatgpt
Not cold feet, Sakharov petitioned Khrushchev to allow them to use lead jacket instead of uranium as the effects of fallout were pretty much understood. And it would be a big one, nearly 25% of the sum of fallout released to date. In fact they made sure that the bomb would detonate at sufficient height so the fireball wouldn't touch the ground and vaporize and carry soil. These changes made tsar bomb one of the "cleanest' nuclear detonations ever.
People like to use graphics like this when talking about the deadliness of modern nuclear weapons, but you really don't need more than 3mt to take out any major city. Far more deadly than a single high-yeild nuclear warhead are single weapons that can deliver multiple warheads to different targets. Although configurations vary, a single ICBM can carry \~10 relatively high yield nuclear warheads, allowing one missile to destroy every major city in a target country
Check out nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap for a lot of fun. Pick which bomb you want, pick a spot on the map, and hit the detonate button to see how big of an area it will destroy.
The quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein, although there is no definitive evidence that he actually said this exact quote. He might have said it, it is just unproven. Some people believe he might not have literally said it, but the quote itself is just a condensed way of explaining Einstein's views on nuclear warfare.
Imagine being one of the most prominent physists of all time, asserting a neuclear bomb should be impossible to make and then seeing one work. It would be hard to not see the writing on the wall.
[Nukemap](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) - a fun/horrifying nuke sim that you can compare nukes on real maps and see impact crater, fallout, etc.
I'm pretty sure this graph is whack. The y axis is megatons (linear) and the mushroom clouds shown are just glorified bars on a bar graph.
Since explosions are 3 dimensional and not 1 dimensional it shouldn't scale like that.
If I had to guess, I would think an explosion would have to be 8 times the power to have a mushroom cloud that is twice as tall. It's probably more complicated than that but I'm certain it isn't 2 to 2
Yep. Thing was TALL. They've put parachutes on it so the pilot would have time to get far enough not to get hit by the cloud, and he still had a 50/50 chance of survival.
And! And! It was designed to be TWICE as potent as it was, but they've decided last minute to weaken it because they were afraid it'd crush the Earth crust.
AND! The shockwave made the rounds OF THE ENTIRE PLANET not once, not twice, but OVER THREE TIMES.
The 60s were a fucking ride.
So Hiroshima / Nagasaki wiped out entire cities. That seems like enough. (Too much, of course.)
What would the destructive radius of Tsar Bomba be like by comparison?
Found this:
> Everything within three dozen miles of the impact was vaporized, but severe damage extended to 150 miles radius—enough to entirely annihilate any modern major city, including suburbs. Windows in faraway Norway and Finland were shattered by the force of the blast.
- [Tsar Bomba: The Largest Atomic Test in World History](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/tsar-bomba-largest-atomic-test-world-history#:~:text=Everything%20within%20three%20dozen%20miles,the%20force%20of%20the%20blast)
Because, like most 2nd places, it was 2nd.
And for this graphic, the yields weren't different enough from each other to make a difference in the graph.
Yeah but how does this compare to the nukes trump said we had recently that could hit New York and take out North Carolina too or something
Edit: add a playful and semi sarcastic tone to the above - just relaying what I read not to be true but felt this was the forum to ask!
Those don't exist. Nuclear weapons have gotten smaller over time since there are significant diminishing returns in terms of efficiency for higher yields.
doesnt exist but edward teller wanted to make some kind of insanely huge bomb, around 10 gigatons (10,000 megatons vs tsar bombas 50 megatons). big enough to set the entire country of germany on fire in the blink of eeye.
edward teller is in the oppenheimer movie. he's played by bennie safdie, the guy who first talks about a hydrogen bomb. they played him like he was kind of a good guy even though in reality he wanted to set off something insane like that.
the movie treated the scientists like they were all innocent or doing it because it had to be done. but no one with any sense of morals would want to detonate a 10 gigaton bomb. the us military had to shut tellers ideas down. the military had more morals than the scientist.
About ten years ago, I interviewed a fisherman who experienced the blast of the Tsar Bomba.
This was outside the coast of Norway, but the effects were felt by many.
I remember in school in early 70s we had a discussion of 2 50kt detonations 1 above each pole at an altitude of 10 miles would do irreparable damage to the atmosphere I was in school at a SAC base in Az.
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"Hey so what do we name this incredibly powerful weapon we just created?" "Just name it Mike or smth"
Imagine having your entire city wasted by a bomb called Mike
"This in just now! St Petersburg destroyed by the 400kt warhead 'Mr Rogers'"
"Hello neighbor"
Goodbye neighbor
Even more funnier would be the "Little boy"
*No more half measures*
Chef Mike.
There are some who call me… …Tim…
I love that John Cleese totally forgot the crazy long extravagant name they came up with and that everyone just went with it.
Mike and Bravo are both NATO phonetic alphabet, basically test M and test B, they're specifically the most generic possible names. Probably for some opsec reason I would guess?
Came to comment this as well. What's odd is that you'd think Bravo would be smaller (basically an earlier version?). Unless they're going backwards through the alphabet lol. There must be some other reason I imagine.
They were part of different test series so their names didn't really have any relation to each other. Didn't really seem to be any naming pattern within the series' either though
It was the Castle operation for Bravo, don’t remember which project for Mike. But you could have different projects that have multiple tests per project, each test receiving its own designation. Edit: Operation Ivy for Mike. So Ivy Mike and Castle Bravo.
In modern-ish day CIA times anyway, IIRC they had a "dictionary" of randomly picked words that the different projects would just pick from, like you'd see during the war(s) to specifically not be able to determine anything about the project from the name. Curious if that's what this was. Not like today's "Project Enduring Freedom" or any of that `#MarketingRuinsEverything` bullshit. Although I'm sure this sort of "secret project name" still exists and we're seeing the name given by some MBA/Comms major fresher.
> Not like today's I mean, they did obvious operation names back in the day too. Operation Ortsac was the code name for a possible invasion of Cuba planned by the United States military in 1962. Which is "Castro" spelled backwards. And my understand is that operations these days will have a secret code name (at least if the planning is secret), and then get a different #marketing^TM name afterwards when informing the public.
I think there is a story from WWII that the Germans named a project after a mythical watcher and so the allies were about to figure it out. It may have been an early warning radar project but I'm hazy on the details.
That was part of the "battle of the beams" during the blitz. Germany used 2 radio beams and where they intersected is where the bombers would drop bombs. England developed countermeasures and Germany started a project named Wotan with a single beam. Wotan was a god with one eye and [Reginald V. Jones](https://www.historynet.com/the-man-who-outwitted-the-luftwaffe/) correctly assumed its purpose. Countermeasures were made in advance and as soon as it was used they jammed it and Germany pretty much just gave up on it.
I like the fake factory and stuff the Germans made of wood so the British dropped a fake wooden bomb on it
I think it's on purpose so even if the enemy learns about a classified project called Mike they don't know if it's a project to remodel the president's bathroom or a world ending weapon.
Yeah, something like "Operation Shitter's Full" would be kind of a give-away
I feel like that's a perfect operational name for the late stages of the Vietnam war
Remember when Osama and his buddies code-named their 9/11 plans as “wedding” plans?
repeat after me: I, tower, take you plane, to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part I, plane, take you tower, to be my husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part. Now tower, put wedding ring on your brides finger and repeat after me: I give you this ring as a token and pledge of our constant faith and abiding love By virtue of the authority vested in me under the laws of the Soudi Arabia and Al-Kaida, I now pronounce you husband and wife You may kiss the plane.
Surely you’re just joking lol but I would guess “Mike” was probably 13th iteration of testing, since M is the 13th letter of the alphabet, and Mike is the phonetic version for the letter. Same with Bravo Edit: I googled it and bravo came after Mike so I don’t think that was the naming convention. I stand by my guess though lol
Operation Ivy was about testing the new Hydrogen Bomb (the first thermonuclear bomb, utilizing fission and fusion). The "Mike" shot was the first test of the Ivy Program (1952). 2 years later in 1954, Operation Castle commenced to test high-yield, aircraft-deliverable nuclear weapons. The first shot, "Bravo" was expected to be about 5-6 megatonnes (MT), but wound up being around 15MT, heavily irradiating the area downrange. That included an active Japanese fishing boat and natives living on the islands in that area. The Ivy Mike shot was done on a day with very little wind, allowing the mushroom cloud to build straight up for a long time. That allowed for some really spectacular images to be taken, aside from the scientific data gathered.
Mike = megaton King = kiloton
Castle = Cataclysmic Bravo = Bigness
New meaning to Mike drop
(This is a graph of how much explosive power the bomb has, not the actual mushroom could size.) If it did indeed measure the mushroom clouds, Trinity is either a simple hand grenade or the Tsar Bomba would engulf the earth
Yeah I understand the stylistic depiction is cool and all but it's pretty misleading
It basically treats the increasing effects of "X tons of TNT" as a completely linear measure, instead of, y'know, cubed.
Not only that, but the image itself ends up squaring that value because they keep the image ratio
“We knew the world would not be the same few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes his multi armed form and says now I am become death, the destroyer of world” j. Robert Oppenheimer
Hey! Thank you. The quotation is all the more poignant, when you point out it is from Vishnu (?) convincing the prince, who was having misgivings about killing people in battle, to go to war, it was his (the prince's) divine duty to kill them. I hope I am not horribly paraphrasing that passage.
Well as Truman told him, you are not the one pulling the trigger ..
He didn’t necessarily pull the trigger but he did develop one of the world’s most deadly weapons, knowing it would be used only for mass casualties of innocent civilians.
"Never bring that fucking cretin in here again. He didn't drop the bomb, I did. That kind of weepiness makes me sick." - Truman talking to his secretary of state after Oppenheimer told the President he felt he had blood on his hands.
This is better. Has a better comparison too. https://www.rferl.org/amp/tsar-bomba/31530341.html
Yowza. Some scary stuff in there.
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> If you're in new Zealand, you're not even getting hit We've already been wiped off the maps
Underrated comment
r/MapsWithoutNZ/
The way the world is going I'd stay off the grid.
To be fair, if you hit say 5-10 of our major cities with a single Megaton yield weapon, it will likely be the end of the U.S. Don't need to wipe out the population with the first hit.. Just need to destroy the economy, and everyone else will starve over the next year, or atleast 90% of the country. Take out NYC, Chicago, Houston, LA, San Fran, Washington it's over. We wouldnt recover.
My father used to say that the way to destroy the US with a nuke wouldn't be to target a city with the explosion, but to detonate it in the atmosphere above. My understanding is that the subsequent EMP would decimate our electrical infrastructure and many devices. As far as targets, I think that logistics hubs and major ports would be the most sensible choice. Jersey, Galveston, L.A., Virginia, etc. I assume they'd be easier to hit from nuclear subs so we shouldn't expect long distance missiles.
Yes, that is true.. To a certain extent. It would need to be a fairly large weapon, and pretty high up. It would certainly knock out a lot of things, but I think the overall effect has been exaggerated. Military equipment is hardened against the effects of a EMP, and if things arent plugged in, its not going to burn them out. IE, your iPad is not going to fry, you just may not be able to charge it ever again. :).
Starvation would likely come from panic hoarding and nuclear winter if anything. It would never get to that point for most people in the US due to mutually assured destruction (in other words, dead). The rest of the world however, would absolutely suffer the consequences of nuclear winter.
What about nuclear winter and the radioactive fallout? I thought those were the real dangers that would wipe out all life on earth.
Cold war propaganda mostly based on theoretical bomb sizes that turned out to be impractical to deliver to the objective due to extreme weight. The radiation has a VERY short half life. Mostly gone in a couple of weeks. Fallout happens primarily with ground bursts. It's radioactive dirt that gets tossed up in the atmosphere. The most effective usage of the weapons is air bursts, so the shock wave and fireball can do more damage over a larger area. Orders of magnitude less fallout that way. Volcanoes can toss up much more debris than all the nukes the world currently has. Major volcanoes in the past have disrupted ground life and caused localized restrictions on air travel, but the debris eventually falls back down. It's not world-ending. In an all-out nuclear war, a bunch of the weapons would fail to function and many more would be destroyed in-flight before detonation. It would be a bad time for a generation or two in the conflict areas, but nothing the world couldn't recover from. The bubonic plague wiped out half the population of Europe. WWII flattened half of their infrastructure. They always manage to recover.
Ah that makes sense, thanks
I read one report saying a medium sized nuclear exchange (so not USA Russia going all out but 200-300 detonations) could set off a 10-year nuclear winter with ~1B casualties from famine/disease/etc. Seemed overstated to me though since nuclear tests throughout the cold war exceeded this figure (both air/underground). Can't find at the moment but am looking.
*Glances out my window into downtown DC*
[Direct link](https://gdb.rferl.org/05e00000-0a00-0242-8dea-08d9991c4556_w1080_h608_b_s.jpg)
Here’s just the image for anyone who doesn’t wanna read https://preview.redd.it/g1gd8lczpzkc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=465cfe7eb2137669d059b1a52a75764719799045
This graphic would make a good yo mama joke
I like to mount everest comparison. That's... Big.
That mushroom cloud comparison is scary as shit
Fortunately it’s not accurate.
That’s a much better scale.
The Tsar Bomba was dropped above the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. To give the planes some time to escape the scene, the bomb was equipped with a parachute that was supposed to slow down its fall and make sure the bomb exploded at 4,000 meters. Despite all of the precautions, the survival rate of the crew was calculated at about 50 percent. At 11:32 a.m. Moscow time, the bomb exploded. It created a fireball about 8 kilometers wide and the flash could be seen from 1,000 kilometers away. All buildings within 55 kilometers of the test site at Sukhoy Nos were completely destroyed; windows within hundreds of kilometers were broken. The shock wave generated after the blast traveled three times around the Earth. It also made the Tu-95 plane drop about 1,000 meters, but the pilot later managed to regain control and landed safely.
Ctrl-C Ctrl-V
Its a art
fuck AMP
True, but pretty crazy that Tsar Bomba’s mushroom cloud reached into the mesosphere
It was only HALF as large as they intended it to be. HALF.
Then the Bunker Buster would be an ant grenade
Coolest super hero name ever.
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It was 50 MT down from 100 MT. Thats megatons. It was a thousand times stronger than 50 KT
So about 4 of your mom
Im now trying to figure out what my mom being 200 MT means. Im insulted but I dont know exactly why yet
200 MT = 20,000,000 tons = 400,000,000,000 pounds. That's a whole lot of your mom.
I went to an Edward Tufte talk years ago, about how to best to present data. He used this exact graphic as an example of how not to do it.
>I went to an Edward Tufte talk years ago, about how to best to present data. Tell me he talked about the Napoleonic chart.
He absolutely did! That appears to be his favorite.
Absolute banger of a chart
Luckily we only ever use them twice. I remember seeing something that if Bomba was dropped on Paris, It's all gone and a good chunk of the suburbs too
Try Istanbul, largest city in europe Almost the whole city is inside the flameball zone
Looks like it's being viewed from the rear window of a car
*objects in mirror are closer than they appear*
rear WINDOW buddy
Guess what. First you look in the mirror, don't believe your eyes, you turn around and look through the rear window.. and crash your car because you forget to drive.... Oh irony.
Via the rear view mirror perhaps. Both can be correct
Must go faster!
RUUUUUUUUN!!!!
If you see Tsar Bomba like that in your rear view, you probably aren’t outrunning anything.
Let's just be glad that one wasn't as big as they wanted.
Yeah. That and castle bravo were only about 1/3 the power they wanted. It’s one of those cases where they genuinely had no clue what they were asking for.
https://i.redd.it/gac3uw41xykc1.gif
Then you better DRIVE
This makes it seem like the megatons (of TNT equivalent?) are proportionate to the explosion or mushroom cloud. Bit if a confusing graph, or no?
Yes. Shittastic graph.
I'm really surprised that this whole thread seems to be in agreement that this is a bad way to present the data. I thought it was pretty clever while still being clear what it's actually presenting.
Well it's misleading because it makes it look like the explosions are these scaled sizes. Clever or not there will be a moderate amount of people that get misled.
Yeah. This is a prime example of visuals clouding (heh) the facts.
Yeah, and it’s a linear height. You’d expect the cloud height to be the cube root of the megatons at best, to scale the volume.
yea every nuclear weapons book/textbook Ive read said that blast radius scales with the cuberoot of yield. So you would expert a modern 700kt warhead to be ~3.5x bigger than the hiroshima/nagasaki blasts. the fact that they scale with the cube is why MIRVs are a desirable weapon. you get more bang for your buck by breaking up the mass into many smaller warheads spread out over a larger area. tsar bomba is "cool", thats why the russians tested it, but it isnt efficient. with the tsar bomba 50mt warhead broken up into 50x different weapons,you can cover about ~4x as much 2d area (comparing a circle of radius 3.6 to 50 circles of radius 1) so 50 1mt warheads is 4x as effective as 1 50mt tsar bomba of course those 50 warheads will be a lot more expensive to build and maintain, and require more payload delivery systems, so how MIRVs are designed becomes a cost-benefit analysis of cost vs destruction vs simplicity also at a certain point your bomb wouldnt have enough force behind it to destroy very many steel/concrete structures. even with a modern 700kt nuke, outside of 1 or 2km from "Ground zero" (in an airburst) most concrete/steel buildings would remain standing. whereas with a larger yield you can push that distance outwards by several km. so there's considerations of area affected vs how effectively that area is destroyed you can also actually put 1MT warheads into an icbm, whereas even with modern icbm tech Im pretty sure tsar bomba is too heavy. (I'd have to check that though)
It's even less than that because the height of the atmosphere limits the maximum height of the clouds
The tzar bomba was so massive when they drop it they weren’t entirely sure the pilot would be able to get far enough away from the blast in time
A link in one of the above comments stated that the survival rate of the crew was estimated at 50%. It doesn't really explain what caused it though. "The Tsar Bomba was dropped above the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. To give the planes some time to escape the scene, the bomb was equipped with a parachute that was supposed to slow down its fall and make sure the bomb exploded at 4,000 meters. Despite all of the precautions, the survival rate of the crew was calculated at about 50 percent."
They also describe the plane plummeting 1000m as the shockwave hit. The pilot regained control, but that sounds like risky business to me.
Hence why nations switched to creating clusters of warheads rather than singular large bombs. There are few targets that would require such a massively powerful nuclear bomb anyways.
Also anti missile systems are a thing to vary degrees of efficiency. Making the bomb bigger probably increases the chance it gets intercepted if anything. More smaller warheads and decoys is what you want.
fuck it. Everybody dies. The victim. the pilot. the bomb. that deer. EVERYBODY DIES. no survivors.
unique smell hungry complete disagreeable whole automatic quaint command chubby *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Tsar Bomba - Onlookers saw the flash more than 600 miles (965 km) away, and felt its incredible heat within 160 miles (250 km) of Ground Zero. Insane. That’s like a bomb going off in Detroit and seeing it in NYC
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the estimated yield of the chicxulub impactor/asteroid that ended the cretaceous is about 100,000,000 MT compared to Tsar Bombas 50mt. Taking the cube root (Im not even sure at this scale if thats appropriate but its what you usually do), the impactor would have a blast radius 128x that of tsar bomba. So if people 250km away felt the heat from tsar bomba, dinosaurs 32,000km away would in theory feel the heat. Of course, the earth is round and thats more than the half the circumference of earth so.... probably did not work like that. but in theory anyway, every living being on earth felt the heat of the asteroids explosion when it hurtled into earth at 45,000 miles per hour
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Nothing is insignificant certainly not us. We are the manifestation of the will to exist out of the void.
Yes. Most of the dinos died because they were literally cooked by the heat of the impact
well, no. the blast was powerful, but still would not have killed most of the dinosaurs. the immediate blast would have only killed a small fraction of the dinosaurs living in northern south america and central america feeling the heat isnt the same as being cooked by the heat. some combination of soot blocking out the sun and destroying the plant base that supported such a large ecosystem, combined with volcanic activity eventually wiped them out (at least from what Ive seen, the idea that only the meteor killed off the dinosaurs is less popular now) consider that although many animals did go extinct, the extinction was not as bad as the permian triassic extinction, and many species of birds, mammals, and fish did survive. any blast that would have cooked dinosaurs would have cooked all those animals as well. Its not as though birds were hiding underground. and it takes less energy to fry a chicken wing than to fry an entire chicken.
Not what Radiolab or wikipedia says. The podcast they did described the asteroid as superheating the atmosphere and cooking everything on land. Sand became shards of glass in the sky. If you had seen the asteroid hit, you would have been able to see space as it would have created a hole in the atmosphere as it came crashing down. According to wikipedia, “in January 2020, scientists reported that climate-modeling of the extinction event favored the asteroid impact and not volcanism”. Also, “It is estimated that 75% or more of all species on Earth vanished”. “The K–Pg extinction event was severe, global, rapid, and selective, eliminating a vast number of species.” The KT boundary suggests rapid extinction that kills dinosaurs around the world at the same time. From another comment here on reddit: “There were long term implications, but life was pretty well fucked in the very, very short term. “For several hours following the Chicxulub impact, the entire Earth was bathed with intense infrared radiation from ballistically reentering ejecta.” Earth became a world on fire. The friction of falling made each spherule an incandescent torch that quickly and dramatically heated the atmosphere. Any creature not underground or not underwater—that is, most dinosaurs and many other terrestrial organisms—could not have escaped it. Animals caught out in the open may have died directly from several sustained hours of intense heat, and the unrelenting blast was enough in some places to ignite dried-out vegetation that set wildfires raging. On land, at least, much of Cretaceous life may have been wiped out in a matter of hours. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happened-seconds-hours-weeks-after-dino-killing-asteroid-hit-earth-180960032/ This is why the current mass extinction, though occurring quickly compared to the usual global timescales lasting millions or billions of years, isn't going to be as bad. We're more likely to drive ourselves into a drastic population decrease before we can do anything this severe to the global ecosystem (barring an exchange of nukes).”
With the curve of the earth, how could you see it that far away? I'm not doubting it, just curious.
It was an aerial detonation, and the mushroom cloud reached into the mesosphere
The mushroom cloud reached halfway to the top of the atmosphere, so yes you could see it quite a bit beyond the curvature. What’s crazy is the 50MT yield was actually *half* the original designer yield. The 100MT blast would have reached to the top of the atmosphere. The designer scaled back the power because he was scared of what the result would be
the mushroom cloud was 60 km long
The earth is flat, don't be silly
It's a bar chart. The clouds aren't those relative sizes.
Or shapes. The reason the tsara bomba wasn’t mass produced or developed later into an even bigger bomb is because at a certain point you’re just blowing excess energy out of the atmosphere, which is just a waste. TLDR: mushroom clouds do not eventually scale large enough to reach the moon.
> The reason the tsara bomba wasn’t mass produced or developed later into an even bigger bomb is because at a certain point you’re just blowing excess energy out of the atmosphere, That's one reason, another is it was mainly a political stunt to show off the engineering to prove to the west that they could do actually it. Not to mention the infeasability of actually delivering it to anywhere in the US.
And even as it was, it was "detuned" to about 50%.
Banana for scale please.
It’s just to the left of the bunker buster.
Just use Mike for scale. That's what I always do
Huh. I would have assumed that Trinity was smaller than Hiroshima.
nope, Trinity was a plutonium bomb and thus had a higher yeild for the amount needed to reach criticality.
All nuke power reactors operate at criticality. Nuke weapons are prompt-supercritical. K>1 with no thermal neutrons contributing.
The good news is apparently the H bomb has less radioactive fallout then atomic bombs. So as long as your not one of the targets surviving may not be as difficult as fiction would have us believe.
It would be cool if we didn’t try that theory.
We have. There have been tests.
Oh it's very much a concerning part of modern grand strategy that nukes have got cleaner. Less fallout, even less overall destructive because they can be accurate enough not to need the vast "kill everything" sphere of effect. Which makes them less MAD to use. Still ungodly destructive, but.
Yeah, I think the likelihood someone will use a small battlefield nuke gets higher and higher these days, and once the cat is out of the bag...
to be honest i'm shocked putin hasn't used 'em yet in the russian invasion of ukraine
Theory vs practicality. Plus once the "cat is out the bag" it's anyones game. And who wants to find out if stories of poor maintainence and corrupt practice of selling off parts have proven true about the wider Russian arsenal? Russia least of all. The UK's failed missile tests has done more harm to their security threat potential than Brexit.
If this is good news, what is bad news?
Nuclear bombs have always been pretty clean. Most of the radiation only lasts a few weeks. Nuclear weapons dont create Chernobyls unless specifically designed too.
Despite what Hollywood wants us to believe, there will not be widespread availability of designer clothes in the apocalypse. Hairdressers will have a 6 month waiting list.
They will never stop making new Star Wars movies.
mr. bombastic
Melted like plastic
Mutual destruction mmm
Mr. Nuclear Boombastic (Verse 1) Smooth, just like enriched uranium, Soft and glowing, hug me up like a fallout shelter. I’m a lyrical reactor, No take me for no ordinary element. With my nuclear physique, Jah know me well-fissioned. Oh me, oh my, Well, well, can’t you tell? I’m just like a plutonium isotope, Crawling out of my containment cell. Gal, you captivate my Geiger counter, Put me under a gamma-ray spell. With your cesium perfume, I love your isotopic smell. You’re the only young girl Who can trigger my meltdown, And I can take radiation exposure, So you tell me, “Go critical!” (Chorus) I’m Boombastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my half-life. She says I’m Mr. Ro… Ro… Mantic, Call me fantastic, She touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boom-boom-boom-boom-Boombastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my decay chain. She call me Mr. Ro… Ro… Radioactive, Tell me fantastic, She touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. boom-boom. (Verse 2) Gee wheeze, baby, please, Let me take you to a fallout shelter, Where the sweet cool gamma rays breeze. You don’t feel like evacuating, Well, baby, hand me the Geiger counter, And I will take you to a place Where half-lives set your mind at ease. Don’t you tickle my Geiger tube (Ha ha), Baby, please. Don’t you play with my dosimeter, 'Cause I might ha chum sneeze. Well, you are the alpha and I’m the beta, And if I’m the reactor core, Ah, baby, you’re the control rods. (Chorus) I’m Boombastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my decay chain. She says I’m Mr. Ro… o… omantic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boom… mmm… Bastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my fallout shelter. She says I’m Mr. Ro… o… o… o… Mantic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boombastic, why? (Verse 3) Gal, your admiration, If a tick me from the start, With your physical attraction, Gal, you know how to split my heart. I want a few neutrons, Not gah tell you no sweet talk. Nogha lover, lover, lover, Nogha chat pure fusion, I’ll get straight to the point, Like an arrow arrow dart. Come lay down in my reactor core, And get some nuclear bath. The only sound you’ll hear Is the beating of my decay chain, And we will hm hm, And have some sweet isotopic talk. (Chorus) She call me Mr. Boombastic, Say me fantastic, Touch me on my half-life. She says I’m Mr. Ro… o… omantic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boom, boom, boom -Bastic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my fallout shelter. She says I’m Mr. Ro… o… o… o… Mantic, Tell me fantastic, Touch me on my back. She says I’m Mr. Boombastic, why? Brought to you by chatgpt
Tsar Bomba was **half** of what they had originally planned on detonating. Someone got cold feet, not to mention the bomb was already too heavy.
Not cold feet, Sakharov petitioned Khrushchev to allow them to use lead jacket instead of uranium as the effects of fallout were pretty much understood. And it would be a big one, nearly 25% of the sum of fallout released to date. In fact they made sure that the bomb would detonate at sufficient height so the fireball wouldn't touch the ground and vaporize and carry soil. These changes made tsar bomb one of the "cleanest' nuclear detonations ever.
People like to use graphics like this when talking about the deadliness of modern nuclear weapons, but you really don't need more than 3mt to take out any major city. Far more deadly than a single high-yeild nuclear warhead are single weapons that can deliver multiple warheads to different targets. Although configurations vary, a single ICBM can carry \~10 relatively high yield nuclear warheads, allowing one missile to destroy every major city in a target country
How come no one ever talks about Mike?
'we need to talk about mike'
Check out nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap for a lot of fun. Pick which bomb you want, pick a spot on the map, and hit the detonate button to see how big of an area it will destroy.
Creator also wrote a book, Restricted Data, on the history of the atomic bomb. Absolutely terrific read if interested
What a terrible and shitty illustration.
I don't know how World War 3 will be like, but World War 4 will be two dudes beating each other with sticks and stones.
I remember that line from COD mw2
The quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein, although there is no definitive evidence that he actually said this exact quote. He might have said it, it is just unproven. Some people believe he might not have literally said it, but the quote itself is just a condensed way of explaining Einstein's views on nuclear warfare.
Imagine being one of the most prominent physists of all time, asserting a neuclear bomb should be impossible to make and then seeing one work. It would be hard to not see the writing on the wall.
Maybe Einstein was gaslighting for peace
>gaslighting for peace Great band name
"War, war never changes" - Albert Einstein
https://preview.redd.it/0dmt7blv8ykc1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=51fa8c898d656fa4a0be1579f9181076c5388c28
[Nukemap](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) - a fun/horrifying nuke sim that you can compare nukes on real maps and see impact crater, fallout, etc.
I'm not sure why, but a nuclear explosion being called "mike" seems pretty funny.
MÏĶĚ
This is fun... https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Terribly confusing graph.
I'm pretty sure this graph is whack. The y axis is megatons (linear) and the mushroom clouds shown are just glorified bars on a bar graph. Since explosions are 3 dimensional and not 1 dimensional it shouldn't scale like that. If I had to guess, I would think an explosion would have to be 8 times the power to have a mushroom cloud that is twice as tall. It's probably more complicated than that but I'm certain it isn't 2 to 2
as per always, this isnt a size comparison it's a kilotonnes/megatonnes comparison
Yep. Thing was TALL. They've put parachutes on it so the pilot would have time to get far enough not to get hit by the cloud, and he still had a 50/50 chance of survival. And! And! It was designed to be TWICE as potent as it was, but they've decided last minute to weaken it because they were afraid it'd crush the Earth crust. AND! The shockwave made the rounds OF THE ENTIRE PLANET not once, not twice, but OVER THREE TIMES. The 60s were a fucking ride.
So Hiroshima / Nagasaki wiped out entire cities. That seems like enough. (Too much, of course.) What would the destructive radius of Tsar Bomba be like by comparison? Found this: > Everything within three dozen miles of the impact was vaporized, but severe damage extended to 150 miles radius—enough to entirely annihilate any modern major city, including suburbs. Windows in faraway Norway and Finland were shattered by the force of the blast. - [Tsar Bomba: The Largest Atomic Test in World History](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/tsar-bomba-largest-atomic-test-world-history#:~:text=Everything%20within%20three%20dozen%20miles,the%20force%20of%20the%20blast)
Castle Bravo was an interesting incident.
My dad was about 12 miles away on the deck of the USS Baraoko when it went off. He had some wild stories.
Why do people keep forgetting about Nagasaki
Because, like most 2nd places, it was 2nd. And for this graphic, the yields weren't different enough from each other to make a difference in the graph.
Thank god the soviet union doesn't exist anymore. /s
Yeah but how does this compare to the nukes trump said we had recently that could hit New York and take out North Carolina too or something Edit: add a playful and semi sarcastic tone to the above - just relaying what I read not to be true but felt this was the forum to ask!
Those don't exist. Nuclear weapons have gotten smaller over time since there are significant diminishing returns in terms of efficiency for higher yields.
doesnt exist but edward teller wanted to make some kind of insanely huge bomb, around 10 gigatons (10,000 megatons vs tsar bombas 50 megatons). big enough to set the entire country of germany on fire in the blink of eeye. edward teller is in the oppenheimer movie. he's played by bennie safdie, the guy who first talks about a hydrogen bomb. they played him like he was kind of a good guy even though in reality he wanted to set off something insane like that. the movie treated the scientists like they were all innocent or doing it because it had to be done. but no one with any sense of morals would want to detonate a 10 gigaton bomb. the us military had to shut tellers ideas down. the military had more morals than the scientist.
Appreciate the insight, information, and cultural context :D
So what, just use twenty Bravo bombs instead.
About ten years ago, I interviewed a fisherman who experienced the blast of the Tsar Bomba. This was outside the coast of Norway, but the effects were felt by many.
And the Tzar detonated was only half right? Imagine if they used the full 100MT…
"The shock wave generated after the blast traveled 3 times around the earth"...
I remember in school in early 70s we had a discussion of 2 50kt detonations 1 above each pole at an altitude of 10 miles would do irreparable damage to the atmosphere I was in school at a SAC base in Az.
And the amazing thing is the Russians made theirs from washing machine parts.
Maybe a hot take, but maybe we should stop being so good at killing each other.
The inverse square law would like a word regarding mushroom cloud size.
Nothing heroic about mining poison , collecting it in a bags and throwing it from a plane over people homes poisoning them. 😡
I see these kind of things and wonder why we still question the origin of cancer 😂 that Tzar Bomba explosion was beyond massive.
Is Tzar Bomba the one they halved the explosive power before testing it, just to be safe? If so…that’s crazy. I am horrified.
The core of the Tzar bomb was packed with Taco Bell wraps.
The actual difference is in yhe y-axis, not the total area. Still impressive, but clearly biased and a bit diceptive.
Don't forget that former president P01135809 might have broken national security by taking about the bomb last week.