Hydrogen bombs.

How much yield do these things have?????? I cant find anything online.

Anything from 1 kiloton to 100 megatons or more mate. I remember one massive Soviet bomb had a 50MT yield, and they detonated it, crazy bastards. Go to FAS, Wikipedia of globaldefence.org. All great sites for stuff like this.

You're in luck, I have uploaded a video to YouTube just for you.

Meet Tsaar. The biggest H bomb ever made, 4x bigger then anything America has ever exploded. Take all the explosives used in WWII and multiply it by 10 and thats Tsaar. The test detnoation's blast wave went around the earth three times, the plume went 40 miles high and turned rock into ash. The Russians didn't have the percision the Americans did so they just made ridiculously large bombs to compinsate. It would vaporize everything within 30 miles then it's fireball would incerate everything within another 110 miles.

Here you go, enjoy.

www.youtube.com...

The largest fusion weapon ever detonated was the 500 Kt Ivy King test conducted by the US. It can be assumed that any warhead larger than this has to be fusion boosted or a fully fledged thermonuclear weapon, as the Ivy King test was just about the maxiumum theoretical lmit for fission weapons. Almost all modern weapons use fusion to some degree, either fusion boosting or fusion weaopns.

Here's a gopod link : www.johnstonsarchive.net...

And here's a good thread describing how a nuclear weapon works with diagrams.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

d1k, thank you for your excellent link. I guess the World is divided among the incinerated, the about to be incinerated, or the non-incinerated.

Yes, great clip d1k. The last part was especially chilling seeing as i live in London. On the bright side though at least it would be quick and hopefully painless.

Originally posted by rogue1
The largest fusion weapon ever detonated was the 500 Kt Ivy King test conducted by the US.

I think you mean fission.

The Tsar Bomba was originally designed with a 100MT yield, but the Russians got nervous and replaced the tamper on the third stage with Lead instead of Uranium, reducing the yield to "just" 50MT.

The bomb had no practical use, the yield was unnecessarily large, hence them never building any.

I believe the US maxed out with the 9.4MT warhead of the Titan II missile. These days the typical size of the larger US warheads is 500KT, you really don't need much more.

The Teller Ulam fission weapon design still makes my eyes bulge in amazement. To figure out a practical weapon design from pure mathematics and theoritical physics is just wild. Edward Teller is my pop star.

Originally posted by Winchester Ranger T

Originally posted by rogue1
The largest fusion weapon ever detonated was the 500 Kt Ivy King test conducted by the US.

I think you mean fission.

My mistake, I did mean fission. Ivy King was a 500 Kt Oralloy fission weapon.

The largest US warheads ever stockpiled were the Mk-41 thermonuclear weapons with a 20-25 MT yield.

The largest U.S. fusion thermonuclear weapon ever detonated was Castle Bravo test, which was part of Operation Castle. Bravo test was intended to detonate a thermonuclear weapon with a yield of around 5 MT, however a miscalculation by Los Alamos scientists meant that the bomb had a yield of 15 MT.

Castle Bravo
Operation Castle

My friend's uncle was on one of these planes. Small world, huh.

That's nice to know. I wonder if any of our bombers can carry these sort of bombs.By the way westpoint you might wanna check out StellrX's response's in the russian bomber overflight thread and Rouge1 if you don't mind dropping a comment,it can make the job a lot faster

[edit on 22-5-2006 by urmomma158]

Did the guy in the Tssar film say that they detonated uranium to fuse hydrogen atoms?

Originally posted by MyStuff
Did the guy in the Tssar film say that they detonated uranium to fuse hydrogen atoms?

No, he says that an initial atmoic explosion increases the pressure so much that the hydrogen fuses. Why dont you simply listen yourself?

I thought that the Russians Decreased the Tsar Bomba yield to 65 MT.

The Tsar bomba however had a lead casing instead of a uranium casing, this made the bomb very clean suprisingly it had very minimal fallout, but the initial blast covered an area of like 15 miles. Is that right? Can anyone confirm that?

It's been a while since I've watched the history channel episode on the Tsar bomba.

Anyways, there are many delivery systems for many different weapons, bombers and aircraft will most likely carry the smaller, more portable warheads, I.E. nuclear tipped bombs.

ICBMs would carry the larger yield hydrogen bombs such as the MinuteMen III or Titan II.

Most of the stockpilled nukes in the U.S. inventory are actually small yield portable weapons. There are very few large yield weapons, and I just don't think there should be a use for large yield weapons, it doesn't make any sense to have a 10 MT warhead when a few well placed 100 KT warheads can do a better job.

Today, we still have nuclear weapons stockpilled in the thousands, so do the Russians, only problem is that the Russians have no idea where a small portion of their stockpiles even are as during the break up the Soviet Union, not everyone turned in the proper paper work. Don't quote me on that though.

Shattered OUT...

Sorry, I watched but only seen the video once. I might have selective hearing cause all I heard was something-exploding fusing the hydrogen atoms together.

[edit on 22-12-2006 by wildcat]

Originally posted by Winchester Ranger T

Originally posted by rogue1
The largest fusion weapon ever detonated was the 500 Kt Ivy King test conducted by the US.

The Tsar Bomba was originally designed with a 100MT yield, but the Russians got nervous and replaced the tamper on the third stage with Lead instead of Uranium, reducing the yield to "just" 50MT.

I heard that too, but does anyone know what would of happened if they had dropped 100MT?

Going by what the 50MT did, could it of been catastrophic?

Originally posted by Denied


I heard that too, but does anyone know what would of happened if they had dropped 100MT?

Going by what the 50MT did, could it of been catastrophic?

It would probably destroy the plane that dropped it unless they placed it on the ground and detonated it. It would probably be gigantic.

The guy who was narrating that program is wrong. It's not the pressure that causes the fusion of hydrogen atoms, its the heat. Well, pressure might be apart of it.

you have to overcome the strong nuclear force.

It would probably destroy the plane that dropped it unless they placed it on the ground and detonated it. It would probably be gigantic.

The Tsar was exploded above the ground, cant remember how far up, these days we could test that amount without planes of course, i just wondered what effect that would have been on the planet, if used.




[edit on 22-12-2006 by Denied]

Originally posted by XphilesPhan
The guy who was narrating that program is wrong. It's not the pressure that causes the fusion of hydrogen atoms, its the heat. Well, pressure might be apart of it.

you have to overcome the strong nuclear force.

Both pressure and heat are required to detonate the second stage (and subsequent stages), specifically fast X-Rays are the "pressure mechanism".

The sequence of firing the weapon would be as follows:

1.The high explosives surrounding the core of the primary fire, compressing the fissile material into a supercritical state and beginning the fission chain reaction.

2.The fissioning primary emits x-rays at the speed of light, which "reflect" along the inside of the casing, irradiating the polystyrene foam (see below for a note on what "reflection" means in this context).

3.The irradiated foam undergoes a phase transition, becoming a hot plasma, pushing against the tamper of the secondary, compressing it tightly, and beginning the fission reaction in the spark plug.

4.Pushed from both sides (from the primary and the spark plug), the lithium deuteride fuel is highly compressed and heated to thermonuclear temperatures, and begins a fusion reaction.

5.The fuel undergoing the fusion reaction emits a large flux of neutrons, which irradiates the uranium-238 tamper (or the uranium-238 bomb casing), begins to itself undergo a fission reaction, providing about half of the total energy.

This would complete the fission-fusion-fission sequence. Fusion, unlike fission, is relatively "clean"—it releases energy but no harmful radioactive products or large amounts of nuclear fallout. The fission reactions though, especially the last fission reaction, release a tremendous amount of fission products and fallout.

If the last fission stage is omitted, by replacing the uranium tamper with one made of lead, for example, the overall explosive force is reduced by approximately half but the amount of fallout is relatively low. This is the main reason the Russians used this option with the Tsar Bomba, otherwise the level of fallout would have been massive.