A cool interactive map of the radius of nuclear explosions.
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

1. enter coordinates
2. select bomb size
3. detonate

Huh. Would have thought it be a bit bigger than that. I'm a little less awed now.

I've played with that before. I'm in the north KC area, so if we strike first, I'm probably ok because they'll spend the bombs elsewhere. If they go first, I'm screwed because they'll probably blanket the area trying to knock out all the silos around here.

We've got so many silos in Kansas/Missouri they're selling the extras off for condo space. No joke.

I found the "little boy" Hiroshima size interesting. I thought it was a much bigger explosion.

BrandySpears wrote:I found the "little boy" Hiroshima size interesting. I thought it was a much bigger explosion.

Not bad, though, for a first try..

I did the 'minuteman' one of the centre of my city. I found out that I'd suffer 3rd degree burns.

I used to have nightmares about nuclear war as a child growing up in the late 70's and 80's!

I always thought that if a nuclear bomb hit Washington the radiation would spread as far south as Richmond. But the presets don't list a bomb strong enough. Huh.

willhud9 wrote:I always thought that if a nuclear bomb hit Washington the radiation would spread as far south as Richmond. But the presets don't list a bomb strong enough. Huh.

Possibly radioactive 'fallout', depending on the prevailing winds.

BrandySpears wrote:I found the "little boy" Hiroshima size interesting. I thought it was a much bigger explosion.

Yeah, those nukes were tiny. A conventional bombing raid could have caused more damage and killed more people.

campermon wrote:

willhud9 wrote:I always thought that if a nuclear bomb hit Washington the radiation would spread as far south as Richmond. But the presets don't list a bomb strong enough. Huh.

Possibly radioactive 'fallout', depending on the prevailing winds.

Depends if you do an airburst or not.

If you're just trying to kill people at the target then you do an airburst which limits fallout.

If you're trying to destroy hardened structures which are buried then you do a ground hit and that has a lot of fallout.

I think the reason that we are finding the results so disappointing is that we have spent so much of our lives worrying about it but never spent any time putting it in perspective. Monsters are always scarier the less you know about them.

Tzar bomb 100MT dropped on my house...

CdesignProponentsist wrote:Tzar bomb 100MT dropped on my house...

NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein - Mozilla Firefox_2012-02-17_16-18-41.png

That would also take out the Dolly Parton reactors!

Good tool, though it doesn't show some things I wish it would (5psi overpressure limit instead of 4.6psi, some other details).

Discussion here shows what I've learned from other discussions where people first learn the size and scope of nuclear weapons. First, people tend to be surprised at how localized the effects are, especially at sub-megaton bombs. Second, they tend to be somewhat ignorant of how devastating those local effects really are. Third, they tend to see for the first time that radiation effects really are a minimal part of nuclear weapons - they simply aren't a major casualty-causing agent (most of those significantly injured by radiation exposure will suffer physical and burn damage far outweighing their rad illness).

Finally, as usual, everyone tends to migrate toward the massive multi-megaton weapons for their surveys. These weapons are so wasteful that they're not even maintained in inventory any more - a big reason why the Soviets never went above the 57MT of the Tsar Bomba test shot was that the full-scale critter wouldn't have produced THAT much more effects - the fireball on such a bomb is the thickness of the atmosphere, so much of the energy is wasted to space. 10-20kt weapons are so much more efficient use of fissionables, so much more portable and deliverable, and so much cheaper in terms of design technology and materials - you can drop a whole fuckload of them for the total cost of one multi-megaton superbomb.

COOL!
Been blowin stuff up for the past half hour. Whats a little MAD between friends.
Here is a link to "Nuclear weapon yield" on w-pedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield
This is a "List of missiles" on w-pedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missiles

Weaver wrote:Finally, as usual, everyone tends to migrate toward the massive multi-megaton weapons for their surveys. These weapons are so wasteful that they're not even maintained in inventory any more - a big reason why the Soviets never went above the 57MT of the Tsar Bomba test shot was that the full-scale critter wouldn't have produced THAT much more effects - the fireball on such a bomb is the thickness of the atmosphere, so much of the energy is wasted to space. 10-20kt weapons are so much more efficient use of fissionables, so much more portable and deliverable, and so much cheaper in terms of design technology and materials - you can drop a whole fuckload of them for the total cost of one multi-megaton superbomb.

The thing that people forget is that the warhead stockpiles for the USA and Russia are still around ten thousand total. In the mid-80's it peaked at around 16,000 warheads each! Superpower conflict was (is) bloody scary because we were looking at saturation bombing with the "small" weapons, and from memory only a dozen or so sub megaton bombs would be enough to do for the UK (and we were looking at a couple of dozen 5-10 MT strikes just to take out the "hardened" targets like ports and Fylingdales).

Like Weaver said - during the cold war we were looking at not just a few multi-megaton blasts but thousands of "smaller" bombs that would be a much more devestating than the maps would suggest.

The good news though is that conflict involving such numbers of weapons is pretty much inconceivable today. The bad news is that "limited" nuclear exchanges are possible and would still be utterly horrible (a nuke on Islamabad or Dehli would easily cause casualties in the millions).

Final piece of good news. Check out the weapon documentation on wikileaks sometime. The stuff on there (mostly pertaining to the Fat Man bomb) makes it very, very clear that making nukes is the sole preserve of nation states with highly developed engineering facilities. No knocking up devices in garages for Al Quaeda (polluting dirty bombs being a different beast entirely).

Neato. Tsar Bomba makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

On a related note, Trinity and Beyond is available on Hulu. Fun for the whole family!

http://www.hulu.com/watch/225009/trinity-and-beyond

And another thing..................

What's he got against Pudsey?