Gigaton nuclear weapons

i`ve posted a list in another thread about total nuclear detonations - an example is the castle bravo `tests` where they tested a 15MT device

The U.S. conducted 11 nuclear tests with yields exceeding 4 megatons. These had a total yield of 105 megatons (54 mt fission). All were conducted from 1952 to 1962 in the Pacific Ocean.[1] The last was an underground test, Shot Cannikin of Operation Grommet, described above with the W71 warhead

www.johnstonsarchive.net...

big list from a man with a phd in this subject

the russians have blown up far bigger `nukes` than the USA - there devices are bigger to compesate for being less accuarte in the 1980`s

Take the worlds biggest nuculear powerplant, wire it up to a thermo nuke so it may detonate, and do what you must to make the bomb around, say, 500 gigatonnes. take a few steps back and let it off. there goes earth! BIG BOOM! (incase aliens invade or something, so they dont suck out our brains and steal all our important info and stuff). For the important ones of us, well evacuate to our bomb shelter over by neptune before its let off, and hope for the best...

Originally posted by bios
It seems like the Russians made a 300 megaton device that they exploded at a lower yeild, whatever that means. That was the largest nuke ever known to exist.

I recently learned USS Nautilus was on station off Novaya Zemlya and filmed some of these nuclear tests. They had a filter over the periscope eyepiece and it was still "like a flashbulb" going off in your face.

"On one periscope we had an optical detector that measured light intensity versus time, on the other a high speed color movie camera attached".

That same Navy Chief in the book Body of Secrets, described the sound as like a jetliner when it breaks the sound barrier. It rocked the ship and broke fluorescent lights.

He said he witnessed 12-13 tests from 20Kt up to 50Mt and "they were spectacularly beautiful to watch" !

I wouldn't want to be anywhere near an exploding nuke.

You know, half the reason one might contemplate building such a device is the "Can we?" factor. Keep in mind that the people who put these things together are all scientist, and it seems to be human nature to see what happens when you add more of something to a reaction.
As for the design of such a weapon, multiple fission device wrapped in a lithium-tritium casing arranged around a large sphere of lithium-tritium could probably do it. Basically a compression fusion type of reaction.

What we need to do is develop a space-bound nuclear missile of sorts, larger than Earth bound nukes, maybe a Gigaton. Then, we should start picking out random planets in the nearest solar systems to our own within this sectio of the Milky Way Galaxy, and simply start offing entire planetoids~!

Of course they'd have to be small planets, perhaps moons, but it would be so cool to get some video footage of moments before the impact. If the planetoid in question is like .. the moon Titan, in that its full of methane gas, the show would be extra exciting! Lol.

And God forbid there's any life on any of the test targets we pick out .. hey.. a planet killer (for us on a planet outside of the solar system) would be useful in the future if/when we start dealing with other humanoid cultures within the Milky Way Galaxy.

A gigaton nuclear weapon, 1000 megatons of tnt, due to the energy constraints on providing enough power to quickly compress much larger successive stages, would require 3 thermonuclear stages, in total about 1525 kilograms of lithium deuteride fusion fuel coming in at a total of 4860 gallons or 18.4 meters^3. Although, less lithium deuteride would be needed since for a u-238 tamper-pusher, yield would come from fission-fusion-fission.

In order to destroy the earth, we need to arrive at a more satisfactory elaboration. To obliterate the earth, and send all the matter in the earth outward to infinity using a nuclear weapon placed at its very center, we would need a total of 2.24×10^32 Joules of energy (en.wikipedia.org...). This amounts to 5.354x10^16 megatons of TNT, or 53,540,000,000,000,000 megatons of tnt. We use the formula 10^(n-1) = 5.354*10^16. Where n is the stage, and the right hand side is in megatons. This we get from the fact that each stage can be 10x the power of the previous stage (rough estimate based on nuclear tests). We get n=17.73 stages. We can round this to roughly 18 stages, which includes the primary.

Lithium deuteride has a density of about 0.85 g/cm^3 (author=borroso, fisica dos explosivos nucleares - book), and has an explosive yield of 64.0 kilotons/kg (source: nuclearweaponarchive.org). This gives us 8.366x10^17 kg (kilograms). Multiplying by 1cm^3/0.85 grams, gives us the conversion to volume, which is 9.842*10^20 cm^3, which is .076% the volume of the earth's oceans, and would fill a sphere 38 miles in diameter. For such a nuke, save the earth's oceans, you would need to mine the atmosphere of a gas giant like jupiter or saturn, which is made up of lots of hydrogen and lithium, so that lithium deuteride can be extracted. A single primary of the normal size would be powerful enough to "spark" this reaction however.

A design for this, I envisage, would take the shape of a dome, divided into a series of bars from top to bottom, like so...

===========================================
Pusher | Li6D | Pu-239/DT gas| Li6D |Pusher (u-238)
===========================================

with radiation channels near the walls of the dome.

Truman Show theme with Truman Dome: www.youtube.com...

[edit on 21-7-2010 by DoYouKnow]

[edit on 21-7-2010 by DoYouKnow]