Tsar Bomba

Deepak

B3D Yoddha
Veteran
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=2046393742348211186

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6279945569633429232

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, in Novaya Zemlya, an island in the Arctic Sea. The device was scaled down from its original design of 100 megatons to reduce the resulting nuclear fallout. Although the bomb was a 'light version' which would of allowed a yield of 150 megatons. :oops:

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The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen 1,000 km away. The heat could have caused third degree burns at a distance of 100 km. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 60 km high and 30–40 km wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, even breaking windows there. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage up to 1,000 km away. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the earth.

:oops:
 
Do we have the current technological capacity to build a bomb with a capacity over 200Mt?
What yield would be required for a single nuclear bomb to wipe out all life on this planet?
 
Wouldn't the radiation of a 200Mt nuke be enough to wipe all life out?

I doubt the fallout from a single detonation would spread globally unless the blast was so big as to render fallout a moot point. If your really intent on your crusade of exterminating all life on Earth you'd probably need to deflect it into the sun, or crush it into a black hole, or maybe set off a negatively charged stranglet bomb just to be sure because theres always going to be some microbe somewhere which is intent of surviving under the last rock.

Good luck with that.;)
 
Do we have the current technological capacity to build a bomb with a capacity over 200Mt?
AFAIK, easily. The way H-bombs are designed, it is trivially easy to just tack on as many explosive stages as desired to get as large explosion as you want. The Tsar Bomba was decided upon, designed, constructed and detonated within a timespan of only a few weeks with early 1960's technology, which should give an indication of just how easy it is to scale up H-bomb designs once you have got one in the first place.

As for wiping out all life, a 200Mt bomb won't do it; it is approximately big enough that you could kill everyone in one EU country or one US state of your choice, but for all life on Earth as a whole? No way. To do that, you'll have to come up with something that can reach and fry even the the endolithic bacteria that people have been finding within kilometer-deep solid rock lately; good luck with that.
 
What do you mean "stages" of a H-Bomb? Is it like the GL pipeline model or something?

One of the fundamental problem in building fission bombs is that you cannot store large quantities of fissionable material, you have to construct a super critical mass when the bomb is to go off. This puts a rather strict upper bound on the size of a conventional one stage fission device at mere hundreds of kilotons.

But there's nothing stopping you from using the enormous flux of neutrons or x-rays to ignite further stages of either fission or fusion.
 
So if I were to eradicate all human life several 200Mt bombs going off will produce enough fallout to wipe out all of humanity?
 
So if I were to eradicate all human life several 200Mt bombs going off will produce enough fallout to wipe out all of humanity?

really i think you'd have a better chance getting your hands on an airborne super virus. Something that kills with a high proficiency and doesnt reveal itself for at least 24 hours after infection, unleashed in an international airport or two would cause some pretty massive damage. If anything is going to wipe out most of the human race that will be it. Would make the plausible damage of the Tsar bomb look like a kiddie toy.
 
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