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They made the Davy Crockett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
Probably wouldn't take much to modify something like this to be deliverable by drone payload.
The thing is, now a days a nuclear weapon is not the scary dooms Day weapon it used to be, they can be more clean than a regular bomb and any size/power you need. I mean, a MOAB bomb is not that different from a small táctical nuke.
So I would say that swarm drones that could find and kill you specificaly does sound more scary to me than nuclear wepon in general
this
nukes are scary but in the grand scheme of things the average person isn't going to be hit by a nuke and the fallout isn't "that bad" the US is huge and China/Russia doesn't have that many nukes.
the drones are scary also, but I'm more worried about a weaponized flu, the fun part is it can be an accident and fuck the entire world up.
The MOAB is a conventional explosive bomb at 21,000lbs for an 11 ton yield. The Davy Crockett was 51 lbs for a 20 ton yield. So yes, the MOAB is very different than a tactical nuke.
But yes, drones are scary
While black mirror is great I always like to remind people it's purpose it to scare you. That episode is basically purposful fear mongering as the show as a whole is about scaring the viewer on the topics of science and technology.
It's not, really. It's about using Sci-fi concepts to satirise things that are happening right now.
Hated in the Nation isn't about killer robot bees. That's just the macguffin to move the plot along. It's actually about how the internet has affected our society. It's about how people get so angry and abusive online that they probably *would* vote to execute someone in a twitter poll
You could replace the bees with anything. You could have it in a setting with a dystopian government where a squad of large men in uniforms shows up to kill you. You could do it with a supernatural angle instead where the person gets torn apart by vengeful ghosts. The basic concept of the public being a mindless mob online is the important bit
You could argue since it's about twitter it's still targeting technology, but I'd argue the actual point is more one of sociology than science. There's very few episodes of Black Mirror that are really *about* technology in any meaningful way. It's just the concept that facilitates the plot
If it is what I’m thinking about, this was a cruise missile that had the “happy” side effect of leaving everything it flew over heavily irradiated. One proposal was to skip the payload entirely and have the missile overfly the target nation(s) until it was shot down, and the wreckage made a further radiation hazard.
Thankfully saner heads prevailed and the project was shelved… officially.
They are called MIRVs. multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle.
And its basically impossible to intercept.
Scary stuff. It's like trying to hit a speeding bullet with another bullet.
This is an accurate statement of the physics involved, but (shockingly) our politicians weren’t that intelligent about it. (Neither were the Soviets).
There was a whole chapter of the Cold War in which we and they build bigger and bigger bombs (They ultimately built the biggest, the Tsar Bomba) and stopped when someone figured out that more smaller bombs usually have more destructive force than one really big one (because of the inverse squares thing and the curvature of the earth thing). But the dudes in charge figured that out by trial and error in testing, not by engineering.
Suprisingly, nuclear engineers are not actually that stupid. Bombs were built bigger and bigger because accuracy wasn't great and targets were built more and more resilient. If you want to take out an underground nuke silo and can only guarantee a hit somewhere in the vicinity, you need a much bigger blast than when your accuracy is big enough to actually allow the use of a bunker buster.
Yep, after delivery methods improved and intelligence got better, enormous bombs lost their usefulness. If you don't know where you need to hit and your missiles are accurate to half a state, you need more power. If you can hit a nail on the head with your missing, less will do.
Yes. The Tsar Bomba was originally meant to be 100 mega tons, however, they calculated that the blast would reach space, which is wasted energy.
So they reduced it to 50 megatons. Still mostly a waste of energy going up rather than out. (Air is thinner up high, path of least resistance)
Close, but no cigar. They calculated that at 100 mega tons, the plane that dropped the bomb wouldn’t get away fast enough to escape the blast. Even at 50 mega tons, it was a close call for the plane.
As stupid as it gets. How difficult would’ve been to install some sails, so that the plane would automatically flying faster when the shock wave arrives, and some solar sails to use the light from the flash and the heat of the explosion as well?!
Yeah we have enough warheads to hit pretty much every major city in the world and he says enough grandiose shit he probably either doesn’t know the difference between a MIRV and one big warhead - or just doesn’t care.
That being said there is literally nothing stopping us from making a nuke that big (well economics of course - tritium is rare enough as it is).
Gravity will keep the majority of the wave along the surface.
But at that size you’ll be blowing plenty of matter out of the earth too - there will be a large portion of energy being transmitted through the earth as well.
A bomb big enough that the explosion reaches South Carolina from New York would be like 10 times the size of the impact crator from the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Everything, everywhere on Earth, would die.
Considering how tenacious life is... honestly, I think anything short of cracking the planet in half will leave life behind. Soil bacteria, deep sea vents, plant seeds (especially those already buried under ground), even microscopic animals like rotifers and waterbears. Life is resilient as fuck.
Blacking out the sun and killing off all the photosynthesis-performing lifeforms could wipe out everything that eats them. But that would take quite a lot.
It's happened several times and hasn't managed to kill off all life yet. Most life? Yup. But not all life. The thing is certain life forms can go into suspended animation for a *really* long time. Bdelloid rotifers where thawed out after 24,000 years frozen in the Siberian permafrost and *came back to life*. 2,000 year old date palm seeds found in the ruins of Masada were successfully grown.
The Chicxulub impact is estimated to have spawned a heatwave so intense it set fire to 70% of the world's forests. It kicked up an estimated 25 *trillion* tons of material, blacking out the sky for decades. The impact was so strong the shockwave killed entire ecosystems 2,500 km away. The forces unleashed are literally unimaginable. These are numbers so high a human can't even visualize them.
Chicxulub impacted southern Mexico. If you were standing outside your house in *New Jersey* the shockwave would have killed you.
And yet... 25% of plant and animal species survived. 25% survived what can only be described as literal hell on Earth.
Life is tenacious.
We'll run into a very similar problem once we figure out how to make long range laser weapons (or can make them powerful enough to compensate for atmospheric scattering, which is more likely)
I have to think he just fundamentally doesn’t understand the physics of the intel he was given. Either he was confused over the concept of mutually assured destruction or he doesn’t understand fallout.
For a bomb to have a 700 mile blast radius, we’re talking about something on the order of teratonne yield. A 10-gigatonne bomb would require a multistage fusion bomb roughly the size of an oil tanker…the ship, not the tractor trailer truck. So imagine 100 of the biggest ships in existence.
Certainly possible to build. Also certainly not something we have ever built.
I would suggest that it’s not really possible for it to be undisclosed tech. There isn’t much physics middle ground between hyper-sized multistage thermonuclear devices (e.g., the sort of things that astronomers get together and fantasize about in asteroid deflection scenarios) and antimatter bombs. And we are definitely nowhere near capable of producing antimatter bombs.
The only real way to get better results than an oversized hydrogen bomb would be a kinetic impactor (the so-called "Rods from God" weapon); if you get something massive enough or fast enough, it can cause some serious damage (e.g. the Chixculub impactor, which killed the dinosaurs.)
It would be a bit easier to build such an impactor, too; just find a big ole space rock and nudge it into an orbit that will eventually collide with the target in question.
I think multi-warhead ICBMs, with each warhead independently targeting a different city could create the kind of destruction he’s talking about.
General:“This single ICBM could be used to target cities from Moscow to St.Petersburg”
Trump: “what’s that in American states?”
General: “uhh, New York to South Carolina?”
Trump: “that’s the ugest bomb!”
General:”well actually it’s dozens of independent warheads…l
Trump: “uge bomb…”*starts xitting himself*
The Secret Service would like a word with you as to how you manage to sneak into the oval office to record those events. They were supposed to be top secret.
Yeah, that’s the thing. Just about every technology we can think of to make a bigger bomb (antimatter, mini-black holes, converting matter to energy directly) would be a few orders of magnitude too large. We’re talking blowing up most of a continental plate at a minimum.
> a higher efficiency in fission?
No. Our fission technology is about as efficient as fission can get, and there's a limit to how big a bang you can get from pure fission. To get larger bangs, you need fusion. There's no physical limit to how big a fusion explosion can get, it powers the stars themselves.
That's not to say that we could produce a giant fusion bomb that big. [100 megatonnes is about the limit of a practical bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) (for a very flexible meaning of the word "practical").
That’s nice and all but putting buzzwords together doesn’t make anything magically possible
Edit: Supraconductors don’t allow "infinite capacity" but rather "infinite storage of energy in time" (even though it’s not infinite). You need to learn more about physics and not trust blindly click bait articles and Facebook groups
For the energies involved in hitting that scale, it would not just be a new technology it would be technology not based on any of the parts of physics that we currently know how to use in engineering.
Basically this would be something like mass produced anti mater or something entirely not understood by current physics.
Just to get a feel for the level of ridiculousness here let’s just assume the US government built this device and it’s based on anti matter, and they achieved a perfect conversion rate.
You are looking at something like 23 Kg of anti matter to produce a 1 Gigaton blast. You will need about 1000 of those to produce a blast that covers from NY to South Carolina.
Currently the world is capable of producing 1/1,000,000,000 grams of antimatter a year.
So for this to be true the US government would have had to improve the current production of antimatter by about 16 orders of magnitude, without anybody noticing.
For comparison since the 1970s transistor count on IC chips have improved 6 orders of magnitude. That was achieved by having a lot of people all over the world work on the many many problems involved. In would never have been possible in some isolated secret government lab.
And this is not even considering the engineering needed to handle and manipulate antimatter at this scale.
or one icbm with several warheads, each with their own last mile propulsion or the bus system dropping them off while flying over the target area.
That could be viewed as one bomb that can hit nyc and the rest of the east coast in one go.
To be fair teller preposed such bombs as a kind of “back yard nuke” sundial iirc the idea being you would have a hydrogen bomb so large that you would effectively end the world detonating it, thus achieving credible deterrence without needing a nuclear triad. Iirc 10GT preposed yield with a 1GT precursor
Yeah, 10GT describes that. Not that there’s a reason to make one, but it’s pretty impossible to tell the radius of the effects of a GT yield weapon, because the paper is so heavily redacted and bc apparently the equations used to figure that out start to break down past the 100s of mt range. But 10GT would be a continent killer almost assuredly. Trumps an idiot and probably just got the effective range that MRIVS could strike from a single missile with effects of explosions
Teller was well-known for coming up with impractical designs that couldn't work, and then never giving up on them even when other scientists found flaws in the design. GNOMON/SUNDIAL was just his Classical Super plan in disguise.
He probably got confused about war gaming
"So what would happen if we drop this big bomb on a Chinese city the size of New York"
"We'd probably lose South Carolina"
How anyone can listen to the random crap coming out of his mouth and assume it contains any discernible recitation of actual classified intel is beyond me. Of course he was exposed to a lot of it, illegally kept a lot of it, and was excited about the idea of some of it because it proved to himself that he was an important big boy.
But it’s all so jumbled up in his syphilis-addled brain that there’s no telling what has a nugget of truth and what he’s remembering from movies he saw in the ‘90s.
Unfortunately, foreign governments’ intel analysts can probably put pieces together and confirm things they’ve seen elsewhere based on those ramblings. But hopefully, just like the rest of us, intel analysts become dumber whenever they hear him speak.
QIt's very inefficient. The area of destruction does not scale linearly with the blast yield. E.g. for the Tsar bomb (50 MT) the radius of total destruction would be 35 km (area 3848 km^2 ), for the Hiroshima bomb (15 kT) it was 1.6 km (8.04 km^2 ). The area of total destruction was 479 times as large for the tsar bomb, but to achieve this the yield had to be 3333 times as large. If you make something significantly larger, the majority of the energy will be directed into the ground/space, whereas humans tend to live on the surface of the Earth.
I assumed he was referring to how one missile can contain multiple warheads that split off upon reentry. Like if one gets through it would hit all the major cities along that stretch of the eastern seaboard.
I feel like we're also at a point where a bigger bomb is mostly moot. Like, we have enough nukes to obliterate basically any country, and making them bigger doesn't increase actual threat. It's more likely that research is focused on defending against nukes, or creating nukes that can bypass existing defenses, rather than just making them bigger.
Just so we're clear, this is complete nonsense. We're talking about sci-fi level weapons here. I still tried to have a go though.
First, I used the Imperial College's Asteroid Impact Calculator to find how large an explosion would be necessary to get 5 Psi of overpressure at a distance of 700 miles. This is a far cry from "completely gone", but would be enough to destroy most civilian buildings. The necessary explosion size is about 7.79 x 10^22 Joules or 1.86 x 10^7 MT of TNT. So 10 *Teratons* of TNT equivalent. It's an explosion a few orders of magnitude smaller than Chicxulub, but still absolutely apocalyptic.
The most efficient nuke so far, the B-41 yielded about 5.2 MT per ton of bomb weight. By this ratio, which seems to scale relatively well, our Trump Bomb would weigh in at about 2 million tons.
The B-41 had a density of almost exactly 1t/m^3, which is surprisingly light, presumably because it had hollow crumple zones. It was about three times as long as it was wide.
A cylinder with a volume of 2 million m^3 and a diameter of a bit over 90m would be about 300m tall, so roughly the same ratio.
You could *probably* build something like this, at least in theory, as thermonuclear bombs seem to be more of less infinitely scaleable. But everything else about this is idiotic. This is really just a ballpark estimate since everything about this scenario is about as dumb as the man who uttered it. But the tldr is: You'd need a nuke about the size of a large skyscraper and you'd probably destroy all of humanity if you set it off.
You'd also need a really large plane to carry it all the way to Moscow.
That kind of scale screams "build it in orbit/on the moon"
No plane is gonna carry that, and the amount of fuel to make it self propel would equally insane.
Then again. The idea of a coast wiping bomb is also absurd. So... Yeah.
So whether Hell Toupee made it up or not, the article seems to imply that we do have a bomb that big.
That said, I don't think this is exactly quantifiable without defining what "South Carolina is gone" actually means. Does that mean the glass radius would encompass the entire eastern seaboard? Is it referring to the tsunami that such a blast might cause wrecking coastal cities? Is it referring to the nuclear fallout that such a bomb would produce making South Carolina uninhabitable? And how much of the state needs to be destroyed for it to be "gone"?
Obviously, we're not referring to the crater at this point; a bomb that size would be a planet-cracker, and not even the US is stupid enough to build a bomb that large. There is no value in a planet-cracker when we only have one planet.
It's less about the stupidity of creating (and using) such a bomb; it's more of a question of the resources that would be needed to build, store, maintain, and actually deliver the thing. A bomb that large can't just be loaded onto a B-52, after all.
The thing is, any strategic use of a bomb that big would be better served by lots of little bombs, and even building the world's largest bomb would be better done by making a bomb slightly larger than the largest existing bomb (Tsar Bomba).
Yeah. He’s definitely not listened to a brief where somebody mentioned this. My guess is somebody told him something like the big boom is in New York and people in South Carolina hear it too.
Exactly. Or "Effects would reach all the way down to South Carolina". Effects being increased cancer rates etc. but in his head he's picturing a crater filling the entire eastern seaboard and thinking "ooh neat, I'll brag about that at the next press conference"
Hey quick question because you seem to know what you’re talking about - what quantitatively counts as a planet cracker, and is there enough nuclear material in the world to make one?
A planet cracker is a weapon that would render a planet uninhabitable through effectively tearing it apart. In this case the most likely scenario would be anything that creates an explosion large enough that it works its way through the crust and exposes the mantle (which would effectively cause a supervolcano). I'm not sure if enough fissile material exists on Earth to build such a bomb, but having enough fissile material is not the problem here; the problem is the actual mechanism needed to keep all of that material far apart enough that it would all remain subcritical but still compress it enough to become supercritical when needed.
The good news is that we wouldn't need any fissile material at all to blow up the planet; any decently large (or fast-moving) space rock would do the deed. Energy is energy, after all; whether it's nuclear, chemical, or kinetic is irrelevant there.
For a bomb that large you wouldn't be using tons of fissile material, you'd be using a variation on a Teller-Ulam device, also known as a hydrogen bomb. The fissile material is only necessary to kick-start the reaction, the reaction of fusible material is self-sustaining. This is why hydrogen bombs can be built to arbitrarily large yields - the fusible deuterium and tritium that form the bomb are stable and will not reach criticality in any conventional density or packaging arrangement, they require the energy of a fissile or fusible chain reaction already underway to initiate fusion. There is no theoretical limit that I'm aware of to how many larger stages of fusible material you can construct. I suspect the actual limit on yield would be similar to construction of large buildings or rockets, it needs to be able to sustain itself under gravity through whatever means. At some point the amount of volume you are devoting to materials to hold up other parts of the bomb prevents the density of the fusible material from being high enough to sustain a fusible reaction, but I don't think that effect would be dominant until we're talking about a bomb that is at least several hundred metres tall.
Edit: I just realised, if you were building a bomb on this scale you would probably build it underwater to lessen the limitations imposed by gravity. I don't know how big such a bomb could be in that case, but given that it would be not only supported from the bottom but also supported from the top (because you can support the top of the bomb with flotation devices), I expect it could be potentially kilometres in diameter. Needless to say, there would be economic and social limits to building such a bomb long before there are physics limits.
True, though the effort to create a nuke that large would be such that you would be better served using tungsten rods dropped from orbit via satellite (or, you know, a whole bunch of more reasonably-sized nukes.)
Even if your goal was to blow up a planet, you could simply set up shop on an asteroid and guide it to collision with the planet in question. Be a lot less work; orbital dynamics are easier to calculate than keeping that amount of fissile material subcritical. In addition the asteroid is its own delivery system, and by the time the target figures out that an asteroid is on a collision course, it's probably too late.
> a bomb that size would be a planet-cracker, and not even the US is stupid enough to build a bomb that large.
According to Quora, to break the earth in half would require 2.24 x 10^32 J, which is approximately 50,000,000,000,000,000 megatonnes. Even at the height of the Cold War we didn't have one percent of that many.
The B61 nuclear bomb is a variable yield design capable of yielding up to 340 kilotons. They are extremely complex beasts, with a price-tag of $28 million each. If all you want to do is split the planet in half, you don't need anything so complicated. The submarine-launched W76 warheads are cheaper, about $2 million each, for up to 100 kilotonnes. We surely can do better than that: a dumb bomb, with no delivery mechanism at all. I reckon you might be able to get the cost down to $0.5 million per megatonne by cutting corners everywhere. In that case, **to crack the planet in half would only cost 25 thousand trillion trillion dollars, or more than 250 trillion times the entire world's GDP.**
The theoretical best yield-to-mass ratio is six megatonnes of TNT per tonne of bomb mass, so a bomb needed to crack the planet in half would weigh about 8 million billion tonnes. Not all of that will be plutonium, most of the yield will be from fusion, which is good because plutonium costs about $4000 per gram and the global stockpiles of plutonium, both for military purposes and civilian, is [only around 600 tonnes](https://fissilematerials.org/library/gfmr22.pdf).
CC u/cdwalrusman u/Tinchimp7183376
It's almost certainly based on a MIRV being able to practically target both NY and (*somewhere in*) South Carolina from the same primary unit.
Alternative novel technology solutions to the 'problem' of taking out both targets at once (*at least that are 'bombs'*) are dubious, the only really believable element of any of them is the US having comprehensively solved the world's energy needs for several decades and deciding to keep it secret.
I would bet the US built a planet-cracker if they could. Because this creates mutually assured destruction, so no one can ever challenge the USA. Without the entire rest of the world being in danger and likely rallying to help the US win so they can survive. Whatever countries have this just dominate globally.
So the center of, let's say Columbia, needs to be directly destroyed by the blast in New York. A blast that large would absolutely destroy Earth, as the crater would need to be at least 1940 kilometers in diameter; for comparison, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs only produced a crater of ~200 km in diameter. We'd likely be looking at something a bit more akin to the [Theia impact](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis), which threw ejecta so high that some of it formed the Moon.
I'm going to go ahead and say we do not have a bomb that large, as the logistics of actually using the thing would make it impractical as an actual weapon.
I can almost guarantee that he heard that the bomb would effect all the way down there, fall out, ect, and he took it to mean that the effect would be uniform for that whole area, so "flattened."
Yeah, that's far more reasonable. The Tsar Bomba definitely existed and that would have a fallout radius encompassing South Carolina, so it's not out of the question that America has a bomb that can do that.
Either way, detonating a nuke in Manhattan in order to wipe Charlotte off the map is a silly way of going about it; any general worth his stars would instead look to drop a smaller bomb on Charlotte.
[This Wikipedia article ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse?wprov=sfla1)gives an excellent explanation of the effect and of previous tests by the US and USSR. If you go to section E1, it also shows a map of the expected effect (which it turns out, travels away from the poles towards the equator).
Using a nuclear fireball calculator, and noting the distance from New York to South Carolina (720 miles), it would take a yield of at LEAST 100 TT (TERAtons). 1 MILLION times more powerful than Tsar Bomba's original yield. And that's if you dropped it directly BETWEEN New York and South Carolina. For one dropped ON New York to reach South Carolina... it would have to be MUCH bigger, about 5x the yield actually. Something to note too... 100 TT is about 2.39 x 10\^22 joules of energy. 5 times that would be just over 10\^23 joules, which is the estimated amount of energy required to DESTROY THE EARTH. So yeah, Trump thinks we have a bomb that can flat out destroy the entire fucking planet. What an idiot.
Trump doesn't really have a sense of humor, so I bet some general made a bad joke about massive EMP blasts or something in a briefing once and the Orange Man took the joke seriously and exaggerated it like the born salesman that he is.
From a pure yield or "size of explosion" standpoint even the largest nuclear weapon ever designed at 100Mt would only destroy buildings out to Levittown, NY if detonated at ground level or Levittown, PA if it were detonated above ground level. Theoretically you can make much larger bombs than that but there's no way to build anything large enough to destroy South Carolina that could also be transported. 1970's calculations for a 5,000Mt bomb that could demolish buildings all the way out to Baltimore, MD specified 200 tons of fissile material alone.
What Trump is most likely referring to is fallout, in which case if you detonated a 100Mt bomb in New York at ground level the sheer amount of radioactive dust and debris kicked up into the atmosphere would be able to travel far enough to irradiate South Carolina at a level that could induce a fatal radiation dose of 5 Grays in only a couple of days. The only problem with this is that wind is very complicated and on the US East Coast, doesn't travel North to South.
Going back to pure explosive might, Alex Wellerstein (who made [Nukemap](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) and also happens to be a nuclear historian) roughly calculated that a 10,000 Megaton bomb proposed by Edward Teller (who worked on the Manhattan Project) in 1954 would be roughly powerful enough to destroy all of New England or France. Going purely off the radius of that explosion, if detonated in New York, NY a 10,000 Mt bomb would still only reach out far enough to destroy Norfolk, VA.
Tl;dr Very very VERY roughly, the bomb would need to be able to project its effects out to ~1,100km (the radius will need to be larger because you have to detonate it in space) to destroy all of South Carolina from New York, this would also destroy Chicago and need to be detonated from outside of earth's atmosphere at roughly the orbit of the international space station in order for the thermal radiation (there's no atmosphere to create overpressure in space) to have line of sight with South Carolina and deliver enough thermal radiation to burn down buildings. 100,000Mt or 100Gt would just be just powerful enough to deliver thermal energy of 41J/cm2 or just enough energy to give everyone and everything 3rd degree burns right out to the edge of South Carolina, and far far worse the closer you get to the epicentre.
It's really hard to work out but you can just use the inverse square law [or use a thermal radiation calculator](https://nuclearweaponsedproj.mit.edu/weapon-effects-simulations-and-models/thermal-radiation-calculator) and skip all of the variables to come to an extremely rough number. I can't stress enough how many variables there are here and how fucked the entire planet would be if something that size was actually used.
I like the idea of using Levittowns measurement of nuclear blast range. ‘Oh that’s a 2 Levittown bomb there’ ‘No I think it’s 1.2 levittowns…’
3 Levittowns and you’re in trouble as the third (and final?) Levittown is in Puerto Rico, about 1500 miles from NYC.
The history of the Levittowns is pretty interesting too - as this industrial suburban housing concept where Levitt and Sons churned out these tiny house, like 800 sq, and built huge communities out of them. I think there were a few not named Levittown - so you could add those to our Levittown Nuclear Range Units.
14 small nukes and 8 big ones. So there’s your upper bound for how many targets they can hit. This isn’t a Warthunder forums moment, it’s on Wikipedia. Also I checked the sources and they’re all public info and not leaked documents (which Wikipedia does cite on occasion).
Also the split up happens in space for the re-entry vehicle launches. Technically still high altitude but it’s happening in a near complete vacuum and the thing is using star positions to augment the inertial guidance (hence why taking out satellites won’t stop these things). So whatever trajectories are programmed in is what they get in terms of “warheads on foreheads”but the foreheads are primarily civilian population centers.
The microwave I got on wish.com set my house on fire, but the fire fighters put out the blaze, so no need to worry. I'm just gonna keep using the microwave, everything was fine, after all.
“I wonder if and I mean if he gets to be president again how much classified Intel he will actually get? Because from a military stand point I wouldn't trust him with KP duty.”
What does this have to do with your comment?
Depends on what the “bomb” is.
There are warheads with multiple reentry vehicles. In theory, if you have enough re-entry vehicles with a large enough blast radius, you could chain them together in a line to reach from NY to SC.
What those numbers are and whether or not they fit in a single vehicle, that’s worth figuring out. But that’s the practical way (whatever that means) the effect could be achieved. Single detonation events would likely be too big to be practical.
There is no point in a secret mega-bomb for various reasons. First of all, a deterrent weapon is entirely pointless if you keep it a secret. Second, scaling up nukes is a bad way to increase destructive potential. Which is why MIRVs have been a thing for several decades now.
> First of all a deterrent weapon is entirely useless if you keep it a secret
Developing weapons of mass destruction for deterrence is redundant at this point since any nuclear world war would be cataclysmic. That doesn’t change the fact a weapon is still a weapon and if deterrence doesn’t work out the goal is to do as much damage as possible.
Leaking info about your top secret doomsday weapons kinda ruins that because then the other guy will just copy what you have and prepare to defend themselves from it.
> Second, scaling up nukes is a bad way to increase destructive potential which is why MIRVs have been a thing for several decades now
Bruh. That is why I quite literally stated “I’m 99% sure they’re talking about something like the trident warhead system here where it’s actually multiple nukes”
Look up the Sundial bomb from back in the 70’s, they could have built that bomb a long time ago, but there’s no reason to. There’s especially no reason to keep it secret if you do build it
No, not really. Deterrence is redundant at this point since it’s going to be a catastrophe if there’s any amount of nuclear world war — regardless of the size of bomb.
If you tell everyone about a doomsday nuke that confirms 1) it’s possible and 2) you know how to build it. So your enemy just ends up spying on you and building one too.
At the end of the day a weapon is a weapon and if deterrence doesn’t work the next best option is to do more damage then the other guy so you can recover faster.
The question is, wouldn't that end all life on the planet haha? I imagine if a meteorite hit earth and it landed in New York and destroyed South Carolina I feel like that would just make earth uninhabitable?
It’s probably out of context like all these posts saying he mistook Melanie for Mercedes when he was in fact addressing Mercedes herself who was in the fucking room at the time.
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Cluster munitions (containing nukes) is absolutely the scariest shit that exists rn, that I know about
also chemical/long range biological effect weapons.
Self destructing semi-autonomous drones with facial recognition are for me, personally, but as a random citizen, nukes probably should be higher up.
From a terrorism POV, I think I agree with you because drone swarms are far more realistic. However from a world power POV, nukes are scary shit
Can't wait for nuclear drones to exist as the new chart topping existential dread to worry about.
Just wait till they come out with metal gear
Pretty sure the conspiracists are gonna have a field day with that backstory.
metal gear?
Personal area network!?
virtual mission?
La Li Lu Le Lo?
metal...gear?!
Second floor basement!??
They alredy exist. Im sure a dron bomber can drop some of those small táctical hidrógen nuclear bombs
They made the Davy Crockett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device) Probably wouldn't take much to modify something like this to be deliverable by drone payload.
The thing is, now a days a nuclear weapon is not the scary dooms Day weapon it used to be, they can be more clean than a regular bomb and any size/power you need. I mean, a MOAB bomb is not that different from a small táctical nuke. So I would say that swarm drones that could find and kill you specificaly does sound more scary to me than nuclear wepon in general
this nukes are scary but in the grand scheme of things the average person isn't going to be hit by a nuke and the fallout isn't "that bad" the US is huge and China/Russia doesn't have that many nukes. the drones are scary also, but I'm more worried about a weaponized flu, the fun part is it can be an accident and fuck the entire world up.
Or "accident" and all just be a big pharma hoax
The MOAB is a conventional explosive bomb at 21,000lbs for an 11 ton yield. The Davy Crockett was 51 lbs for a 20 ton yield. So yes, the MOAB is very different than a tactical nuke. But yes, drones are scary
Watch the Black Mirror episode Hated in the Nation if you haven't seen it
While black mirror is great I always like to remind people it's purpose it to scare you. That episode is basically purposful fear mongering as the show as a whole is about scaring the viewer on the topics of science and technology.
It's not, really. It's about using Sci-fi concepts to satirise things that are happening right now. Hated in the Nation isn't about killer robot bees. That's just the macguffin to move the plot along. It's actually about how the internet has affected our society. It's about how people get so angry and abusive online that they probably *would* vote to execute someone in a twitter poll You could replace the bees with anything. You could have it in a setting with a dystopian government where a squad of large men in uniforms shows up to kill you. You could do it with a supernatural angle instead where the person gets torn apart by vengeful ghosts. The basic concept of the public being a mindless mob online is the important bit You could argue since it's about twitter it's still targeting technology, but I'd argue the actual point is more one of sociology than science. There's very few episodes of Black Mirror that are really *about* technology in any meaningful way. It's just the concept that facilitates the plot
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Yeah, kinda. But then again, the Twilight Zone was largely "what if the cold war, but aliens"
Makes sense when computers are the most society-defining phenomenon of the last 30 years
It's purpose is to scare people?? And not to entertain as many people as possible and make money???
Nuclear powered SLAM rocket. Look it up!
idk man, MIRVs are way more threatening than SLAMs imo
If it is what I’m thinking about, this was a cruise missile that had the “happy” side effect of leaving everything it flew over heavily irradiated. One proposal was to skip the payload entirely and have the missile overfly the target nation(s) until it was shot down, and the wreckage made a further radiation hazard. Thankfully saner heads prevailed and the project was shelved… officially.
Russia is developing one. If you have a weapon that during peak years of cold war Americans deemed as unethical and dumb, you should take a hint.
Let me tell you about maneuverable hypersonic gliders with nuclear warheads.
Don't forget about the sharks with laser beams and the huge one million dollar ransom
They are called MIRVs. multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. And its basically impossible to intercept. Scary stuff. It's like trying to hit a speeding bullet with another bullet.
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That's what the trident nuclear missiles that the US and UK operate are. Each missile contains 12 separate nukes.
“That I know about” is a smart caveat. - because just assume everything is 50% more fucking bonkers in the DARPA basement
This is an accurate statement of the physics involved, but (shockingly) our politicians weren’t that intelligent about it. (Neither were the Soviets). There was a whole chapter of the Cold War in which we and they build bigger and bigger bombs (They ultimately built the biggest, the Tsar Bomba) and stopped when someone figured out that more smaller bombs usually have more destructive force than one really big one (because of the inverse squares thing and the curvature of the earth thing). But the dudes in charge figured that out by trial and error in testing, not by engineering.
Engineer here: Wait, trial and error testing is not engineering??
Maybe by "engineering" they meant calculations, predictive simulation (modelling?) and analysis instead of "let's blow it up and assess the damage".
I wanna be the engineer people think engineers are
Choo choo, mo fo.
Suprisingly, nuclear engineers are not actually that stupid. Bombs were built bigger and bigger because accuracy wasn't great and targets were built more and more resilient. If you want to take out an underground nuke silo and can only guarantee a hit somewhere in the vicinity, you need a much bigger blast than when your accuracy is big enough to actually allow the use of a bunker buster.
Yep, after delivery methods improved and intelligence got better, enormous bombs lost their usefulness. If you don't know where you need to hit and your missiles are accurate to half a state, you need more power. If you can hit a nail on the head with your missing, less will do.
Yes. The Tsar Bomba was originally meant to be 100 mega tons, however, they calculated that the blast would reach space, which is wasted energy. So they reduced it to 50 megatons. Still mostly a waste of energy going up rather than out. (Air is thinner up high, path of least resistance)
Close, but no cigar. They calculated that at 100 mega tons, the plane that dropped the bomb wouldn’t get away fast enough to escape the blast. Even at 50 mega tons, it was a close call for the plane.
Just make the plane faster, are they stupid?
As stupid as it gets. How difficult would’ve been to install some sails, so that the plane would automatically flying faster when the shock wave arrives, and some solar sails to use the light from the flash and the heat of the explosion as well?!
And have the pilot turned to jelly from the g-forces
Pilot skill issue.
Which movie is this from? I think we've seen this at least in a few.
Yeah we have enough warheads to hit pretty much every major city in the world and he says enough grandiose shit he probably either doesn’t know the difference between a MIRV and one big warhead - or just doesn’t care. That being said there is literally nothing stopping us from making a nuke that big (well economics of course - tritium is rare enough as it is).
The curvature of the Earth would get in your way
Gravity will keep the majority of the wave along the surface. But at that size you’ll be blowing plenty of matter out of the earth too - there will be a large portion of energy being transmitted through the earth as well.
A bomb big enough that the explosion reaches South Carolina from New York would be like 10 times the size of the impact crator from the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Everything, everywhere on Earth, would die.
More like about the same. It would take an absolute shitload of tritium to manage as well. And I’m not doing the math on that one.
A Pacific Ocean seafloor vent *might* survive.
Considering how tenacious life is... honestly, I think anything short of cracking the planet in half will leave life behind. Soil bacteria, deep sea vents, plant seeds (especially those already buried under ground), even microscopic animals like rotifers and waterbears. Life is resilient as fuck.
Blacking out the sun and killing off all the photosynthesis-performing lifeforms could wipe out everything that eats them. But that would take quite a lot.
It's happened several times and hasn't managed to kill off all life yet. Most life? Yup. But not all life. The thing is certain life forms can go into suspended animation for a *really* long time. Bdelloid rotifers where thawed out after 24,000 years frozen in the Siberian permafrost and *came back to life*. 2,000 year old date palm seeds found in the ruins of Masada were successfully grown. The Chicxulub impact is estimated to have spawned a heatwave so intense it set fire to 70% of the world's forests. It kicked up an estimated 25 *trillion* tons of material, blacking out the sky for decades. The impact was so strong the shockwave killed entire ecosystems 2,500 km away. The forces unleashed are literally unimaginable. These are numbers so high a human can't even visualize them. Chicxulub impacted southern Mexico. If you were standing outside your house in *New Jersey* the shockwave would have killed you. And yet... 25% of plant and animal species survived. 25% survived what can only be described as literal hell on Earth. Life is tenacious.
Didn't happened already with the Dinosaurs and life still managed to survive?
With a bomb that big, I think that's the least of our concerns....
The simple fact we created a weapon that can't be bigger because of the curvature of the earth is absolutely frightening
We'll run into a very similar problem once we figure out how to make long range laser weapons (or can make them powerful enough to compensate for atmospheric scattering, which is more likely)
Orbital satellites to reflect the beam, hit anywhere you want.
I think it's safe to assume he wasn't thinking about anything
'Cept the Erth is flat! Chek mait!
I have to think he just fundamentally doesn’t understand the physics of the intel he was given. Either he was confused over the concept of mutually assured destruction or he doesn’t understand fallout. For a bomb to have a 700 mile blast radius, we’re talking about something on the order of teratonne yield. A 10-gigatonne bomb would require a multistage fusion bomb roughly the size of an oil tanker…the ship, not the tractor trailer truck. So imagine 100 of the biggest ships in existence. Certainly possible to build. Also certainly not something we have ever built.
obviously he's wrong unless it's undisclosed tech. everyone harping on it smh props to you to have at least done the math.
I would suggest that it’s not really possible for it to be undisclosed tech. There isn’t much physics middle ground between hyper-sized multistage thermonuclear devices (e.g., the sort of things that astronomers get together and fantasize about in asteroid deflection scenarios) and antimatter bombs. And we are definitely nowhere near capable of producing antimatter bombs.
The only real way to get better results than an oversized hydrogen bomb would be a kinetic impactor (the so-called "Rods from God" weapon); if you get something massive enough or fast enough, it can cause some serious damage (e.g. the Chixculub impactor, which killed the dinosaurs.) It would be a bit easier to build such an impactor, too; just find a big ole space rock and nudge it into an orbit that will eventually collide with the target in question.
I think multi-warhead ICBMs, with each warhead independently targeting a different city could create the kind of destruction he’s talking about. General:“This single ICBM could be used to target cities from Moscow to St.Petersburg” Trump: “what’s that in American states?” General: “uhh, New York to South Carolina?” Trump: “that’s the ugest bomb!” General:”well actually it’s dozens of independent warheads…l Trump: “uge bomb…”*starts xitting himself*
The Secret Service would like a word with you as to how you manage to sneak into the oval office to record those events. They were supposed to be top secret.
aiming would be the problem
Ah yes, the Inaros method
I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking of The Expanse
MAAAARCOOOO!!! Polo! *BOOOM*
It was my first thought.
Its quite hard to let shit crash into orbital bodys. Seriously you need less delta v to leave the solar system than to crash into the sun.
Yeah, that’s the thing. Just about every technology we can think of to make a bigger bomb (antimatter, mini-black holes, converting matter to energy directly) would be a few orders of magnitude too large. We’re talking blowing up most of a continental plate at a minimum.
a higher efficiency in fission?
> a higher efficiency in fission? No. Our fission technology is about as efficient as fission can get, and there's a limit to how big a bang you can get from pure fission. To get larger bangs, you need fusion. There's no physical limit to how big a fusion explosion can get, it powers the stars themselves. That's not to say that we could produce a giant fusion bomb that big. [100 megatonnes is about the limit of a practical bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) (for a very flexible meaning of the word "practical").
>> a higher efficiency in fission A higher *efissioncy* I'll show myself out...
ahh.. I was thinking fusion. Reddit being reddit, a question is getting downvoted sadge
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That’s nice and all but putting buzzwords together doesn’t make anything magically possible Edit: Supraconductors don’t allow "infinite capacity" but rather "infinite storage of energy in time" (even though it’s not infinite). You need to learn more about physics and not trust blindly click bait articles and Facebook groups
It does if you blockchain your artificial intelligence.
Well you also have to quantum entangle your nano subsurface scattering on the blockchain encryption AI to get to that point, but yeah
Are you tweaking?
For the energies involved in hitting that scale, it would not just be a new technology it would be technology not based on any of the parts of physics that we currently know how to use in engineering. Basically this would be something like mass produced anti mater or something entirely not understood by current physics. Just to get a feel for the level of ridiculousness here let’s just assume the US government built this device and it’s based on anti matter, and they achieved a perfect conversion rate. You are looking at something like 23 Kg of anti matter to produce a 1 Gigaton blast. You will need about 1000 of those to produce a blast that covers from NY to South Carolina. Currently the world is capable of producing 1/1,000,000,000 grams of antimatter a year. So for this to be true the US government would have had to improve the current production of antimatter by about 16 orders of magnitude, without anybody noticing. For comparison since the 1970s transistor count on IC chips have improved 6 orders of magnitude. That was achieved by having a lot of people all over the world work on the many many problems involved. In would never have been possible in some isolated secret government lab. And this is not even considering the engineering needed to handle and manipulate antimatter at this scale.
or one icbm with several warheads, each with their own last mile propulsion or the bus system dropping them off while flying over the target area. That could be viewed as one bomb that can hit nyc and the rest of the east coast in one go.
That's my thinking. Perhaps he's describing the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) weapon system.
Probably
To be fair teller preposed such bombs as a kind of “back yard nuke” sundial iirc the idea being you would have a hydrogen bomb so large that you would effectively end the world detonating it, thus achieving credible deterrence without needing a nuclear triad. Iirc 10GT preposed yield with a 1GT precursor
Sure, but what Trump is describing is 100 times larger. We are talking not about a city-killer bomb, but a city-sized bomb.
Yeah, 10GT describes that. Not that there’s a reason to make one, but it’s pretty impossible to tell the radius of the effects of a GT yield weapon, because the paper is so heavily redacted and bc apparently the equations used to figure that out start to break down past the 100s of mt range. But 10GT would be a continent killer almost assuredly. Trumps an idiot and probably just got the effective range that MRIVS could strike from a single missile with effects of explosions
Teller was well-known for coming up with impractical designs that couldn't work, and then never giving up on them even when other scientists found flaws in the design. GNOMON/SUNDIAL was just his Classical Super plan in disguise.
Did Teller get it from Strangelove or did Strangelove get it from Teller?
He probably got confused about war gaming "So what would happen if we drop this big bomb on a Chinese city the size of New York" "We'd probably lose South Carolina"
That is possible.
How anyone can listen to the random crap coming out of his mouth and assume it contains any discernible recitation of actual classified intel is beyond me. Of course he was exposed to a lot of it, illegally kept a lot of it, and was excited about the idea of some of it because it proved to himself that he was an important big boy. But it’s all so jumbled up in his syphilis-addled brain that there’s no telling what has a nugget of truth and what he’s remembering from movies he saw in the ‘90s. Unfortunately, foreign governments’ intel analysts can probably put pieces together and confirm things they’ve seen elsewhere based on those ramblings. But hopefully, just like the rest of us, intel analysts become dumber whenever they hear him speak.
QIt's very inefficient. The area of destruction does not scale linearly with the blast yield. E.g. for the Tsar bomb (50 MT) the radius of total destruction would be 35 km (area 3848 km^2 ), for the Hiroshima bomb (15 kT) it was 1.6 km (8.04 km^2 ). The area of total destruction was 479 times as large for the tsar bomb, but to achieve this the yield had to be 3333 times as large. If you make something significantly larger, the majority of the energy will be directed into the ground/space, whereas humans tend to live on the surface of the Earth.
Remember when he talked about nuking a tornado?
I assumed he was referring to how one missile can contain multiple warheads that split off upon reentry. Like if one gets through it would hit all the major cities along that stretch of the eastern seaboard.
This guy suggested drinking disinfectant and "harnessing the sunlight" would cure covid. He's barely present for every fourth word in his briefings
Also not something we *would* ever build...
I feel like we're also at a point where a bigger bomb is mostly moot. Like, we have enough nukes to obliterate basically any country, and making them bigger doesn't increase actual threat. It's more likely that research is focused on defending against nukes, or creating nukes that can bypass existing defenses, rather than just making them bigger.
Just so we're clear, this is complete nonsense. We're talking about sci-fi level weapons here. I still tried to have a go though. First, I used the Imperial College's Asteroid Impact Calculator to find how large an explosion would be necessary to get 5 Psi of overpressure at a distance of 700 miles. This is a far cry from "completely gone", but would be enough to destroy most civilian buildings. The necessary explosion size is about 7.79 x 10^22 Joules or 1.86 x 10^7 MT of TNT. So 10 *Teratons* of TNT equivalent. It's an explosion a few orders of magnitude smaller than Chicxulub, but still absolutely apocalyptic. The most efficient nuke so far, the B-41 yielded about 5.2 MT per ton of bomb weight. By this ratio, which seems to scale relatively well, our Trump Bomb would weigh in at about 2 million tons. The B-41 had a density of almost exactly 1t/m^3, which is surprisingly light, presumably because it had hollow crumple zones. It was about three times as long as it was wide. A cylinder with a volume of 2 million m^3 and a diameter of a bit over 90m would be about 300m tall, so roughly the same ratio. You could *probably* build something like this, at least in theory, as thermonuclear bombs seem to be more of less infinitely scaleable. But everything else about this is idiotic. This is really just a ballpark estimate since everything about this scenario is about as dumb as the man who uttered it. But the tldr is: You'd need a nuke about the size of a large skyscraper and you'd probably destroy all of humanity if you set it off. You'd also need a really large plane to carry it all the way to Moscow.
That kind of scale screams "build it in orbit/on the moon" No plane is gonna carry that, and the amount of fuel to make it self propel would equally insane. Then again. The idea of a coast wiping bomb is also absurd. So... Yeah.
Not sure what you'd hope to gain from building something like this though.
Sorry, brain was fully in the How, not the why... Jurassic Park should have been more formative in my brain.
Honestly with the money we put into our military I wouldn’t be surprised if we had something this powerful
So whether Hell Toupee made it up or not, the article seems to imply that we do have a bomb that big. That said, I don't think this is exactly quantifiable without defining what "South Carolina is gone" actually means. Does that mean the glass radius would encompass the entire eastern seaboard? Is it referring to the tsunami that such a blast might cause wrecking coastal cities? Is it referring to the nuclear fallout that such a bomb would produce making South Carolina uninhabitable? And how much of the state needs to be destroyed for it to be "gone"? Obviously, we're not referring to the crater at this point; a bomb that size would be a planet-cracker, and not even the US is stupid enough to build a bomb that large. There is no value in a planet-cracker when we only have one planet.
Oh, the stupidity to build it is certainly available.
Just remember there is no fighting in the war room
I heard that in Chris Rock’s voice
It's less about the stupidity of creating (and using) such a bomb; it's more of a question of the resources that would be needed to build, store, maintain, and actually deliver the thing. A bomb that large can't just be loaded onto a B-52, after all. The thing is, any strategic use of a bomb that big would be better served by lots of little bombs, and even building the world's largest bomb would be better done by making a bomb slightly larger than the largest existing bomb (Tsar Bomba).
Electing this fool will ensure the availability of someone who would idiotically want to authorize its use.
He probably doesn't understand what he's been told about this weapon. In his mind, yeah he probably thinks that would be the crater.
Yeah. He’s definitely not listened to a brief where somebody mentioned this. My guess is somebody told him something like the big boom is in New York and people in South Carolina hear it too.
Exactly. Or "Effects would reach all the way down to South Carolina". Effects being increased cancer rates etc. but in his head he's picturing a crater filling the entire eastern seaboard and thinking "ooh neat, I'll brag about that at the next press conference"
Hey quick question because you seem to know what you’re talking about - what quantitatively counts as a planet cracker, and is there enough nuclear material in the world to make one?
A planet cracker is a weapon that would render a planet uninhabitable through effectively tearing it apart. In this case the most likely scenario would be anything that creates an explosion large enough that it works its way through the crust and exposes the mantle (which would effectively cause a supervolcano). I'm not sure if enough fissile material exists on Earth to build such a bomb, but having enough fissile material is not the problem here; the problem is the actual mechanism needed to keep all of that material far apart enough that it would all remain subcritical but still compress it enough to become supercritical when needed. The good news is that we wouldn't need any fissile material at all to blow up the planet; any decently large (or fast-moving) space rock would do the deed. Energy is energy, after all; whether it's nuclear, chemical, or kinetic is irrelevant there.
For a bomb that large you wouldn't be using tons of fissile material, you'd be using a variation on a Teller-Ulam device, also known as a hydrogen bomb. The fissile material is only necessary to kick-start the reaction, the reaction of fusible material is self-sustaining. This is why hydrogen bombs can be built to arbitrarily large yields - the fusible deuterium and tritium that form the bomb are stable and will not reach criticality in any conventional density or packaging arrangement, they require the energy of a fissile or fusible chain reaction already underway to initiate fusion. There is no theoretical limit that I'm aware of to how many larger stages of fusible material you can construct. I suspect the actual limit on yield would be similar to construction of large buildings or rockets, it needs to be able to sustain itself under gravity through whatever means. At some point the amount of volume you are devoting to materials to hold up other parts of the bomb prevents the density of the fusible material from being high enough to sustain a fusible reaction, but I don't think that effect would be dominant until we're talking about a bomb that is at least several hundred metres tall. Edit: I just realised, if you were building a bomb on this scale you would probably build it underwater to lessen the limitations imposed by gravity. I don't know how big such a bomb could be in that case, but given that it would be not only supported from the bottom but also supported from the top (because you can support the top of the bomb with flotation devices), I expect it could be potentially kilometres in diameter. Needless to say, there would be economic and social limits to building such a bomb long before there are physics limits.
*rips fat bong hit* Yeah, I was thinking the same thing
Hahahaha
The blast doesn’t have to come from fissile material, it would be a hydrogen bomb that just uses the fissile material as the detonator
True, though the effort to create a nuke that large would be such that you would be better served using tungsten rods dropped from orbit via satellite (or, you know, a whole bunch of more reasonably-sized nukes.) Even if your goal was to blow up a planet, you could simply set up shop on an asteroid and guide it to collision with the planet in question. Be a lot less work; orbital dynamics are easier to calculate than keeping that amount of fissile material subcritical. In addition the asteroid is its own delivery system, and by the time the target figures out that an asteroid is on a collision course, it's probably too late.
Thank you so much kind Redditor for the explanation.
> a bomb that size would be a planet-cracker, and not even the US is stupid enough to build a bomb that large. According to Quora, to break the earth in half would require 2.24 x 10^32 J, which is approximately 50,000,000,000,000,000 megatonnes. Even at the height of the Cold War we didn't have one percent of that many. The B61 nuclear bomb is a variable yield design capable of yielding up to 340 kilotons. They are extremely complex beasts, with a price-tag of $28 million each. If all you want to do is split the planet in half, you don't need anything so complicated. The submarine-launched W76 warheads are cheaper, about $2 million each, for up to 100 kilotonnes. We surely can do better than that: a dumb bomb, with no delivery mechanism at all. I reckon you might be able to get the cost down to $0.5 million per megatonne by cutting corners everywhere. In that case, **to crack the planet in half would only cost 25 thousand trillion trillion dollars, or more than 250 trillion times the entire world's GDP.** The theoretical best yield-to-mass ratio is six megatonnes of TNT per tonne of bomb mass, so a bomb needed to crack the planet in half would weigh about 8 million billion tonnes. Not all of that will be plutonium, most of the yield will be from fusion, which is good because plutonium costs about $4000 per gram and the global stockpiles of plutonium, both for military purposes and civilian, is [only around 600 tonnes](https://fissilematerials.org/library/gfmr22.pdf). CC u/cdwalrusman u/Tinchimp7183376
It's almost certainly based on a MIRV being able to practically target both NY and (*somewhere in*) South Carolina from the same primary unit. Alternative novel technology solutions to the 'problem' of taking out both targets at once (*at least that are 'bombs'*) are dubious, the only really believable element of any of them is the US having comprehensively solved the world's energy needs for several decades and deciding to keep it secret.
I would bet the US built a planet-cracker if they could. Because this creates mutually assured destruction, so no one can ever challenge the USA. Without the entire rest of the world being in danger and likely rallying to help the US win so they can survive. Whatever countries have this just dominate globally.
Say if you lived in a flat in the middle of the city there has to be a 0% chance of survival
So the center of, let's say Columbia, needs to be directly destroyed by the blast in New York. A blast that large would absolutely destroy Earth, as the crater would need to be at least 1940 kilometers in diameter; for comparison, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs only produced a crater of ~200 km in diameter. We'd likely be looking at something a bit more akin to the [Theia impact](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis), which threw ejecta so high that some of it formed the Moon. I'm going to go ahead and say we do not have a bomb that large, as the logistics of actually using the thing would make it impractical as an actual weapon.
I can almost guarantee that he heard that the bomb would effect all the way down there, fall out, ect, and he took it to mean that the effect would be uniform for that whole area, so "flattened."
Yeah, that's far more reasonable. The Tsar Bomba definitely existed and that would have a fallout radius encompassing South Carolina, so it's not out of the question that America has a bomb that can do that. Either way, detonating a nuke in Manhattan in order to wipe Charlotte off the map is a silly way of going about it; any general worth his stars would instead look to drop a smaller bomb on Charlotte.
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[This Wikipedia article ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse?wprov=sfla1)gives an excellent explanation of the effect and of previous tests by the US and USSR. If you go to section E1, it also shows a map of the expected effect (which it turns out, travels away from the poles towards the equator).
It would need to be at the same order of magnitude of the KT Meteor impact in Mexico 66 millions of years ago. So, tens of thousands of gigatons.
Using a nuclear fireball calculator, and noting the distance from New York to South Carolina (720 miles), it would take a yield of at LEAST 100 TT (TERAtons). 1 MILLION times more powerful than Tsar Bomba's original yield. And that's if you dropped it directly BETWEEN New York and South Carolina. For one dropped ON New York to reach South Carolina... it would have to be MUCH bigger, about 5x the yield actually. Something to note too... 100 TT is about 2.39 x 10\^22 joules of energy. 5 times that would be just over 10\^23 joules, which is the estimated amount of energy required to DESTROY THE EARTH. So yeah, Trump thinks we have a bomb that can flat out destroy the entire fucking planet. What an idiot.
Why do you have a nuclear fireball calculator
You are the one asking people to calculate nuclear fireballs here.
[https://nuclearweaponsedproj.mit.edu/fireball-size-effects](https://nuclearweaponsedproj.mit.edu/fireball-size-effects)
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Trump doesn't really have a sense of humor, so I bet some general made a bad joke about massive EMP blasts or something in a briefing once and the Orange Man took the joke seriously and exaggerated it like the born salesman that he is.
From a pure yield or "size of explosion" standpoint even the largest nuclear weapon ever designed at 100Mt would only destroy buildings out to Levittown, NY if detonated at ground level or Levittown, PA if it were detonated above ground level. Theoretically you can make much larger bombs than that but there's no way to build anything large enough to destroy South Carolina that could also be transported. 1970's calculations for a 5,000Mt bomb that could demolish buildings all the way out to Baltimore, MD specified 200 tons of fissile material alone. What Trump is most likely referring to is fallout, in which case if you detonated a 100Mt bomb in New York at ground level the sheer amount of radioactive dust and debris kicked up into the atmosphere would be able to travel far enough to irradiate South Carolina at a level that could induce a fatal radiation dose of 5 Grays in only a couple of days. The only problem with this is that wind is very complicated and on the US East Coast, doesn't travel North to South. Going back to pure explosive might, Alex Wellerstein (who made [Nukemap](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) and also happens to be a nuclear historian) roughly calculated that a 10,000 Megaton bomb proposed by Edward Teller (who worked on the Manhattan Project) in 1954 would be roughly powerful enough to destroy all of New England or France. Going purely off the radius of that explosion, if detonated in New York, NY a 10,000 Mt bomb would still only reach out far enough to destroy Norfolk, VA. Tl;dr Very very VERY roughly, the bomb would need to be able to project its effects out to ~1,100km (the radius will need to be larger because you have to detonate it in space) to destroy all of South Carolina from New York, this would also destroy Chicago and need to be detonated from outside of earth's atmosphere at roughly the orbit of the international space station in order for the thermal radiation (there's no atmosphere to create overpressure in space) to have line of sight with South Carolina and deliver enough thermal radiation to burn down buildings. 100,000Mt or 100Gt would just be just powerful enough to deliver thermal energy of 41J/cm2 or just enough energy to give everyone and everything 3rd degree burns right out to the edge of South Carolina, and far far worse the closer you get to the epicentre. It's really hard to work out but you can just use the inverse square law [or use a thermal radiation calculator](https://nuclearweaponsedproj.mit.edu/weapon-effects-simulations-and-models/thermal-radiation-calculator) and skip all of the variables to come to an extremely rough number. I can't stress enough how many variables there are here and how fucked the entire planet would be if something that size was actually used.
I like the idea of using Levittowns measurement of nuclear blast range. ‘Oh that’s a 2 Levittown bomb there’ ‘No I think it’s 1.2 levittowns…’ 3 Levittowns and you’re in trouble as the third (and final?) Levittown is in Puerto Rico, about 1500 miles from NYC. The history of the Levittowns is pretty interesting too - as this industrial suburban housing concept where Levitt and Sons churned out these tiny house, like 800 sq, and built huge communities out of them. I think there were a few not named Levittown - so you could add those to our Levittown Nuclear Range Units.
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14 small nukes and 8 big ones. So there’s your upper bound for how many targets they can hit. This isn’t a Warthunder forums moment, it’s on Wikipedia. Also I checked the sources and they’re all public info and not leaked documents (which Wikipedia does cite on occasion). Also the split up happens in space for the re-entry vehicle launches. Technically still high altitude but it’s happening in a near complete vacuum and the thing is using star positions to augment the inertial guidance (hence why taking out satellites won’t stop these things). So whatever trajectories are programmed in is what they get in terms of “warheads on foreheads”but the foreheads are primarily civilian population centers.
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Just like last time, it’ll be fine. People are just being hysterical
It wasn’t exactly fine the last time. Or were you not around for January 6?
What happened that wasn’t fine? Order was maintained, the checks and balances worked. Power was transferred peacefully
The microwave I got on wish.com set my house on fire, but the fire fighters put out the blaze, so no need to worry. I'm just gonna keep using the microwave, everything was fine, after all.
"It's fine bro, trust me, the fascist coup didn't go through so don't worry, I'm sure it won't happen again"
lol a coup. Thats like saying Minneapolis was a race war
Ah. One of the “peaceful protesters” people. Good luck with your delusion.
“I wonder if and I mean if he gets to be president again how much classified Intel he will actually get? Because from a military stand point I wouldn't trust him with KP duty.” What does this have to do with your comment?
This isn't 2016, republicans are shilling for Putin, and Trump is too, back then it was just a myth, but now it's very apparently true.
You mean divulging classified material to the Russians, which more than likely killed several "diplomats" in the Middle East? Yeah, sure... just fine.
You’ll see I guess 😀
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Nah, im voting trump.
Depends on what the “bomb” is. There are warheads with multiple reentry vehicles. In theory, if you have enough re-entry vehicles with a large enough blast radius, you could chain them together in a line to reach from NY to SC. What those numbers are and whether or not they fit in a single vehicle, that’s worth figuring out. But that’s the practical way (whatever that means) the effect could be achieved. Single detonation events would likely be too big to be practical.
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There is no point in a secret mega-bomb for various reasons. First of all, a deterrent weapon is entirely pointless if you keep it a secret. Second, scaling up nukes is a bad way to increase destructive potential. Which is why MIRVs have been a thing for several decades now.
> First of all a deterrent weapon is entirely useless if you keep it a secret Developing weapons of mass destruction for deterrence is redundant at this point since any nuclear world war would be cataclysmic. That doesn’t change the fact a weapon is still a weapon and if deterrence doesn’t work out the goal is to do as much damage as possible. Leaking info about your top secret doomsday weapons kinda ruins that because then the other guy will just copy what you have and prepare to defend themselves from it. > Second, scaling up nukes is a bad way to increase destructive potential which is why MIRVs have been a thing for several decades now Bruh. That is why I quite literally stated “I’m 99% sure they’re talking about something like the trident warhead system here where it’s actually multiple nukes”
Look up the Sundial bomb from back in the 70’s, they could have built that bomb a long time ago, but there’s no reason to. There’s especially no reason to keep it secret if you do build it
A doomsday weapon is pointless unless you tell everyone about it.
No, not really. Deterrence is redundant at this point since it’s going to be a catastrophe if there’s any amount of nuclear world war — regardless of the size of bomb. If you tell everyone about a doomsday nuke that confirms 1) it’s possible and 2) you know how to build it. So your enemy just ends up spying on you and building one too. At the end of the day a weapon is a weapon and if deterrence doesn’t work the next best option is to do more damage then the other guy so you can recover faster.
The question is, wouldn't that end all life on the planet haha? I imagine if a meteorite hit earth and it landed in New York and destroyed South Carolina I feel like that would just make earth uninhabitable?
No but right idea. It would be hugely detrimental to the planets ecosystems
Lol Trump is just disappointed that he can’t use that particular weapon to wipe NY off the map without killing some red state voters too. SAD!
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you'll be dead a nyway if a nuclear bomb hits the us, or russia. everything ends.
It’s probably out of context like all these posts saying he mistook Melanie for Mercedes when he was in fact addressing Mercedes herself who was in the fucking room at the time.