The Atomic Bomb - what if?

[Crab_to_be]

@Floyd08

Sir what is the biggest megaton atomic bomb ever made?

From the Wikipedia, the largest hydrogen bomb ever made (it was tested too!) was the Russian Tsar Bomba at 50+ megatons.

For comparison, the first nuclear detonation ever (Manhattan Project - Trinity) was 19 kilotons, Little Boy (Hiroshima) was actually smaller at 13 kton and Fat Man (Nagasaki) was 20 kton. The largest nuclear device ever detonated by the USA was Castle Bravo at 15 megatons.

A more complete list of nuclear detonations is available here.

Edited to add: 50 Mtons of TNT would occupy a volume of about 30 000 cubic metres, based on the density of pure TNT of 1654 kg/m^3. That’s a volume roughly equivalent to a wall of pure TNT one metre wide and almost five metres high, stretching from London to New York. The Tsar Bomba was probably slightly smaller

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@Crab_to_be

From the Wikipedia, the largest hydrogen bomb ever made (it was tested too!) was the Russian Tsar Bomba at 50+ megatons.

Of course, as the destructive power of a bomb scales with the cube root of the explosive power in Megatonnes it wasn’t very much use. Poor dears, going to all that effort and not being able to use it!

[Crab_to_be]

The article suggested that it was about sabre-rattling as much as anything else. The design was apparently capable of yielding up to 100 megatons, but was not tested at such a yield for reasons related to staying alive. If you read the article about the Tsar Bomba, it was still an impressive bang by all accounts, including blast damage found 1000 km from the detonation point.

[pdf27]

@Crab_to_be

The article suggested that it was about sabre-rattling as much as anything else. The design was apparently capable of yielding up to 100 megatons, but was not tested at such a yield for reasons related to staying alive. If you read the article about the Tsar Bomba, it was still an impressive bang by all accounts, including blast damage found 1000 km from the detonation point.

IIRC the reasons were mainly fallout-related. Basically, the yield would have been roughly doubled by fitting a large depleted uranium (U-238) jacket to the bomb. This would IIRC improve the efficiency of the fusion stage while providing a tertiary fission stage as well as the U-238 reacted with fast neutrons. It also increases the fallout by several orders of magnitude, although as this would have been an airburst the fallout wasn’t going to be all that bad.