3 Minutes to Midnight: The Nuclear Weapons Thread

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Kopijeger: Feb 14, 2010

computer parts posted:

Also they had to attach a parachute to the bomb so the plane could get clear, even with the 50MT dial down.

That was the case with Little Boy as well. Doesn't mean much on its own.

# ? Dec 31, 2015 00:29

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# ? May 5, 2024 05:44

jivjov: Sep 13, 2007; But how does it taste? Yummy!; Dinosaur Gum

LeoMarr posted:

You have no idea how international politics work do you

Eh; the idea that there's at the very least a plan for "How do we take down Canada" sitting in some dusty office somewhere seems sound. Although there's no way we actually have missiles hairtriggered for them.

# ? Dec 31, 2015 02:16

1337JiveTurkey: Feb 17, 2005

jivjov posted:

Eh; the idea that there's at the very least a plan for "How do we take down Canada" sitting in some dusty office somewhere seems sound. Although there's no way we actually have missiles hairtriggered for them.

If such a plan to attack a close ally were leaked or discovered for whatever reason, it could be politically damaging. Since the United States and Canada collaborate closely on mutual defense against nuclear attack, that means the chances are greater than if it were someone else and could potentially end that relationship. So there's a big potential downside and if there's any situation where such a plan would be of any use whatsoever, it'd be preceded by a massive breakdown in relations, leaving time to come up with plans then.

# ? Dec 31, 2015 04:07

Mc Do Well: Aug 2, 2008; by FactsAreUseless

The US/Canada geopolitical alliance can only get stronger as the Arctic opens up - if not because of resource extraction than for travel/sovereignty disputes.

# ? Dec 31, 2015 04:27

Goatse James Bond: Mar 28, 2010; If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

McDowell posted:

as the Arctic opens up

Which is to say, next week?

# ? Dec 31, 2015 04:35

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Blue Footed Booby posted:

Reminds me of how a big metal disk unintentionally became the fastest man-made object ever.

Edit: this might have been posted before but it's so cool I can't help myself.

It's pretty much 100% bullshit though. It's one of those urban legends like "aero engineers say bees shouldn't be able to fly" that is based on misunderstanding and persists through confirmation bias. When you think about what would actually happen to an un-aerodynamic metal disc subjected to that sort of instantaneous acceleration, you may as well say the LHC produces the fastest man-made objects, because both cases involve itty-bitty pieces spectacularly destructing in all directions.

jivjov posted:

Eh; the idea that there's at the very least a plan for "How do we take down Canada" sitting in some dusty office somewhere seems sound.

It really, really isn't.

Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Dec 31, 2015

# ? Dec 31, 2015 04:47

Woolie Wool: Jun 2, 2006

How often do people have to be reminded that the "invade Canada" war plan comes from an era where Canada was a British dependency and the US and Britain were rivals with no guarantee of permanent peaceful relations?

# ? Dec 31, 2015 07:32

TenementFunster: Feb 20, 2003; The Cooler King

Koesj posted:

You're nearly there, but the boosting/thermonuclear-development thing is a bit more complex, as are the places where tritium (hydrogen-3/³H) can come into play.

During development of Fat Man, Los Alamos was already looking at hollow cores to improve weapon efficiency. Stuff smashes into each other harder during an implosion when there's an air gap in the center, and you can get away with using much less prime-grade nuclear material this way too. The reason why the first implosion bomb didn't use this technique, and was such a terribly inefficient device as a consequence, was that the US wanted to be sure it'd go off the first time(s).

The Soviets' first bomb was a direct copy of Fat Man because they (Stalin) too wanted to be sure it'd go off, even though their scientists were already looking at the better 'hollow pit' solution. Soon after detonating their first ones, both sides' second generation weapons benefitted greatly from the idea of these hollow cores, at least doubling efficiency (i.e. increasing the amount of material that undergoes fission).

You're totally right in that the next step was injecting tritium gas into the cavity to release more neutrons during implosion, and further increase the amount of material undergoing fission. This hasn't got anything to do with having a 'true' thermonuclear weapon - with a discrete second stage which can increase weapon power by an order of magnitute - in concept though. True, it provides for a really powerful fission 'primary' bomb that can light a fusion secondary more easily, but the idea of 'boosting' a weapon through tritium gas came some time before the one weird trick for a true thermonuclear device was even figured out!

Further development of boosting did kinda end up in a thermonuclear dead end though, and again tritium plays a large part. The original 'superbomb' idea was to build a layered bomb which in itself could produce tritium by lighting up a shell of lithium-6 deuteride (which'd undergo a bit of deuterium-tritium fusion), in turn igniting fission in a 'natural' (non-enriched) uranium-238 outer casing. Unfortunately this design (Sloika/Layer Cake in the USSR, Alarm Clock in the US, some UK piece of poo poo that wasn't even tested) brought pit design right back towards the path of inefficiency: li6 deuteride 'fusion' provided only a fraction extra weapon yield, and the amount of U²³⁸ needed made it big and heavy for little extra effect compared to the technologically 'sweet' basic boosted weapon.

Anyway, true fusion indeed requires a fission bomb (primary) as a trigger for a radiation implosion (or ablation, rather) of the fusion fuel secondary. X-rays from the primary bounce around in a radiation-opaque casing surrounding both stages, and 'heat up' both the outside of a hollow cylinder of fusion fuel, and a U²³⁸ 'sparkplug' inside. Since this secondary stands off a bit from the fission primary, and because the fusion part doesn't get blown outward like in the layered design, it's got enough time to fully ignite and hella increase weapon yield through full thermonuclear effects rather.

So the tritium-boosted fission primary (first useful ³H usecase) provides enough excess neutrons in X-rays to compress the fusion secondary, but AFAIK with a powerful enough non-boosted primary you'd get there too. Not that there's any reason to use a shitton more fissile materials though

With the second useful ³H usecase, the production of tritium during LiD fusion, an unexpected boon came to light when the US detonated the Shrimp device in the Castle Bravo test, which used both lithium-6 and -7 as its partially enriched LiD fuel. Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb test, had used a fuckoff huge tank of liquid deuterium for a D-D fusion secondary. In the follow-up Castle series, newer, deliverable weapons with solid fuel secondaries were tested. Using the same 'self-producing' Deuterium-Tritium fusion from Lithium Deuteride as the Alarm Clock design, but now in a true, staged thermonuclear device. Li6 was expensive though so it was diluted with common li7 which wasn't expected to break down as rapidly and not add any energy to the fusion process like li6 woulkd.

Turns out they were wrong! In the sunny insides of a thermonuclear reaction, instead of absorbing a neutron and producing Li8, Li7 captures the neutron, and instantly decays into an alpha particle, another neutron, and a tritium nucleus! Bog-standard Li7 upped the yield of this early two- (not three!) staged device a whopping two and a half times, from an expected average of 6 megatons, to 15Mt. So there you have it, free tritium from cheap lithium, entirely different from using it as a separate booster in a fission device, and in a basic two-stage package.

e: cleaning up phoneposting

post more

# ? Dec 31, 2015 08:06

Hexyflexy: Sep 2, 2011; asymptotically approaching one

Dead Reckoning posted:

It's pretty much 100% bullshit though. It's one of those urban legends like "aero engineers say bees shouldn't be able to fly" that is based on misunderstanding and persists through confirmation bias. When you think about what would actually happen to an un-aerodynamic metal disc subjected to that sort of instantaneous acceleration, you may as well say the LHC produces the fastest man-made objects, because both cases involve itty-bitty pieces spectacularly destructing in all directions.

I've always wondered how far the plate got, I'd bet not far, but I can't be arsed to estimate it. You can kinda think of the air in its path as a solid column, the plate is supersonic so every 'unit' of air it's travelling through is compressed and heated in front of it (sorta kinda, but near enough).

At the velocity it was supposed to be launched at, the mechanical stress of the frictional forces, and that amount of heat being dumped through it, probably ripped it apart really quickly.

Kinda sad, it'd be nice if the thing was currently exiting the solar system with a grin on its little metallic face.

# ? Dec 31, 2015 08:10

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Hexyflexy posted:

I've always wondered how far the plate got, I'd bet not far, but I can't be arsed to estimate it. You can kinda think of the air in its path as a solid column, the plate is supersonic so every 'unit' of air it's travelling through is compressed and heated in front of it (sorta kinda, but near enough).

At the velocity it was supposed to be launched at, the mechanical stress of the frictional forces, and that amount of heat being dumped through it, probably ripped it apart really quickly.

Kinda sad, it'd be nice if the thing was currently exiting the solar system with a grin on its little metallic face.

Yeah, it was basically a meteor going upward. It likely ablated to nothing very, very quickly. But man, for the fraction of a second before that happened it was hauling rear end.

I have no idea what that "basically 100% bullshit" comment was supposed to mean, BTW. Did that guy think I was claiming it exited the solar system?

# ? Dec 31, 2015 08:21

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Hexyflexy posted:

I've always wondered how far the plate got, I'd bet not far, but I can't be arsed to estimate it. You can kinda think of the air in its path as a solid column, the plate is supersonic so every 'unit' of air it's travelling through is compressed and heated in front of it (sorta kinda, but near enough).

At the velocity it was supposed to be launched at, the mechanical stress of the frictional forces, and that amount of heat being dumped through it, probably ripped it apart really quickly.

Kinda sad, it'd be nice if the thing was currently exiting the solar system with a grin on its little metallic face.

I tried to run a calculation like that once, and it gets really complicated really fast. It started as one of those physics problems where wooden block A collides inelastically with wooden block B on a frictionless surface, find the final velocity of the combined mass... except that A was traveling at the sort of speeds one usually associates with APFSDS rounds. Even if you assume the collision is inelastic, it's catastrophic to any sort of wood you can name, and you start having to figure out what the atmospheric density in the test chamber is and figuring out heat absorption once the front face of the block converts to charcoal.

Blue Footed Booby posted:

I have no idea what that "basically 100% bullshit" comment was supposed to mean, BTW. Did that guy think I was claiming it exited the solar system?

It's bullshit because the researcher who did the original calculations didn't do any sort of worthwhile friction, acceleration, materials, or gravity calculation. It was basically "assume a point mass in a vacuum." The actual test cap almost certainly never reached anything close to the velocities people claim on the internet.

Also, a 900kg steel cap moving at six times escape velocity (6*11,200m/s) would have about 2.04 terajoules of kinetic energy, which is... a lot. It's equivalent to about half a kiloton. If that much energy was dumped into it uniformly over its rear surface over a very short period of time, you don't have to be a structural engineer to suss that Very Bad Things would start to happen, even before you start figuring out aerodynamic heating, even if you assume the cap is flawless and uniform.

Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Dec 31, 2015

# ? Dec 31, 2015 09:05

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

jivjov posted:

Eh; the idea that there's at the very least a plan for "How do we take down Canada" sitting in some dusty office somewhere seems sound. Although there's no way we actually have missiles hairtriggered for them.

Any war plan that's going to be of at least marginal use is going to require a significant amount of time, effort and resources to write and continually update. That's time, effort and resources that could be better spent on planning for the conflicts that are actually on-going, as well as all the other possible conflicts that are higher up on the plausibility and threat level scale than "US vs Canada".

It also takes away from work that might otherwise be spent on cooperation and integration with Canada. If you have a running operation to monitor, patrol and defend the Arctic Circle with another country, any time you spend trying to prepare for the eventuality of having to go it alone is time taken away from maintaining the current state of affairs, not to mention the political fallout if it ever leaks that you have a plan for going it alone, much less actively fighting your nominal partner.

At most, you're maybe technically correct that there's some dusty old plan stashed in a desk drawer somewhere, but it's almost assuredly not anything that would be useful as-is, and would have to be updated to become useful if there was ever a change in the state of international affairs that might suggest conflict with Canada as becoming a likely prospect.

# ? Dec 31, 2015 09:17

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Dead Reckoning posted:

...

It's bullshit because the researcher who did the original calculations didn't do any sort of worthwhile friction, acceleration, materials, or gravity calculation. It was basically "assume a point mass in a vacuum." The actual test cap almost certainly never reached anything close to the velocities people claim on the internet.

Also, a 900kg steel cap moving at six times escape velocity (6*11,200m/s) would have about 2.04 terajoules of kinetic energy, which is... a lot. It's equivalent to about half a kiloton. If that much energy was dumped into it uniformly over its rear surface over a very short period of time, you don't have to be a structural engineer to suss that Very Bad Things would start to happen, even before you start figuring out aerodynamic heating, even if you assume the cap is flawless and uniform.

Oh, ok. Given that I've always seen the story told with the part about the high speed camera coming before the number, I'd always figured this was the "lower bound" mentioned in this line:

quote:

In the event, the cap appeared above the hole in one frame only, so there was no direct velocity measurement. A lower limit could be calculated by considering the time between frames (and I don't remember what that was), but my summary of the situation was that when last seen, it was "going like a bat!!"

but I'd never actually bothered to math it because who would put not true things on the internet! :saddowns:

I bolded another key detail. If he remembered the framerate he'd have the time between frames, so I wonder if the numbers floating around on framerate are from separate research or someone's rear end. Wikipedia says there was a camera in the 50s that could record frames one millionth of a second apart, but my cursory googling isn't revealing anything on the actual camera used. Oh well.

Just gonna assume actual speed was "in the realm of solar escape velocity" because it makes a cool story. :v:

VVV But Krampus is.

Blue Footed Booby fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Jan 1, 2016

# ? Dec 31, 2015 23:30

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Blue Footed Booby posted:

Just gonna assume actual speed was "in the realm of solar escape velocity" because it makes a cool story.

Escape velocity with respect to solar gravity at the orbit of the earth is about four times higher than earth's escape velocity, so still considerably faster than the cap likely ended up going. I'd stick to Brownlee's highly scientific assessment of "going like a bat!!"

Santa isn't real.

Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jan 1, 2016

# ? Dec 31, 2015 23:59

Fojar38: Sep 2, 2011; Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia

also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->

There are a couple of plans to take down Canada but they're old and not very detailed and are all in the context of a wider war with the British.

Right now the power gap between Canada and the US is so huge that I'm not sure a plan is really needed aside from walk in.

# ? Jan 1, 2016 00:44

Rent-A-Cop: Oct 15, 2004; I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

Fojar38 posted:

Right now the power gap between Canada and the US is so huge that I'm not sure a plan is really needed aside from walk in.

Send in the New York National Guard. Assist if necessary.

# ? Jan 1, 2016 02:23

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

USGS picked up a 5.1 Magnitude Earthquake near a known nuclear test site in North Korea.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10004bnm#general_summary

# ? Jan 6, 2016 03:43

goatsestretchgoals: Jun 4, 2011

Can magnitude numbers be extrapolated into KT? NK was talking about a thermonuke but common consensus was they couldn't pull it off.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 03:47

Max Manus: Oct 25, 2004; Saboteur par excellence.; Nap Ghost

buttcoinbrony posted:

Can magnitude numbers be extrapolated into KT? NK was talking about a thermonuke but common consensus was they couldn't pull it off.

Considering the amount underground testing done by the US alone I would not be surprised if they have some pretty good estimates.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 03:50

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

buttcoinbrony posted:

Can magnitude numbers be extrapolated into KT? NK was talking about a thermonuke but common consensus was they couldn't pull it off.

This is close to the same magnitude as the last time they tested, so it gives us a small displacement around 6-7 kilotons.

Which is only about a quarter of the Trinity test's 20 kilotons.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 03:51

ComradeCosmobot: Dec 4, 2004; USPOL July

CommieGIR posted:

This is close to the same magnitude as the last time they tested, so it gives us a small displacement around 6-7 kilotons.

Which is only about a quarter of the Trinity test's 20 kilotons.

They just came out and claimed it was a fusion device.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 04:49

Juffo-Wup: Jan 13, 2005; Pillbug

ComradeCosmobot posted:

They just came out and claimed it was a fusion device.

Where? Can you post a link to the press release or whatever?

# ? Jan 6, 2016 04:55

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

ComradeCosmobot posted:

They just came out and claimed it was a fusion device.

Yeah, just saw that. Do they even have a rocket capable of delivering it yet?

And who knows with the DPRK, they love bullshitting everyone

CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Jan 6, 2016

# ? Jan 6, 2016 04:57

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Juffo-Wup posted:

Where? Can you post a link to the press release or whatever?

I just got a BBC alert for it, but they haven't updated the article past saying a "tremor" was detected.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 05:04

CommieGIR: Aug 22, 2006; The blue glow is a feature, not a bug; Pillbug

LOL They are claiming 250 Megatons
https://mobile.twitter.com/DPRK_News/status/684584328899198978

North Korea is so full of poo poo.

E: Its a parody.

CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Jan 6, 2016

# ? Jan 6, 2016 05:07

ComradeCosmobot: Dec 4, 2004; USPOL July

Juffo-Wup posted:

Where? Can you post a link to the press release or whatever?

KCNA press release.

EDIT:

CommieGIR posted:

LOL They are claiming 250 Megatons
https://mobile.twitter.com/DPRK_News/status/684584328899198978

North Korea is so full of poo poo.

That's a parody account.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 05:08

Fojar38: Sep 2, 2011; Sorry I meant to say I hope that the police use maximum force and kill or maim a bunch of innocent people, thus paving a way for a proletarian uprising and socialist utopia

also here's a stupid take
---------------------------->

ComradeCosmobot posted:

They just came out and claimed it was a fusion device.

Yes North Korea I'm sure it was.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 05:10

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

CommieGIR posted:

LOL They are claiming 250 Megatons
https://mobile.twitter.com/DPRK_News/status/684584328899198978

North Korea is so full of poo poo.

Looking forward to the press release about Kim Jong UN celebrating by playing 18 holes and scoring -72 tomorrow

# ? Jan 6, 2016 05:11

Optimus Subprime: Mar 26, 2005; Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

NK is lying to everyone, but I can't imagine China is particularly pleased by any of this.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 05:16

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

Optimus Subprime posted:

NK is lying to everyone, but I can't imagine China is particularly pleased by any of this.

The Chinese government has condemned the test, and says they were given no forewarning.

ABC News link . Note that the media is stupid, this was not a successful hydrogen bomb.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 10:14

goatsestretchgoals: Jun 4, 2011

I wonder how many of these NK nuclear tests are glorious grandson deciding that the only problem with the gun type was they didn't have a big enough bullet.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 11:07

special tactics: Oct 13, 2015

I think that in the coming years we'll see nuclear strike on positions of ISIS in Syria. You can prtsc it.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 11:45

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Assuming humanity had the physics down pat as early as they needed to, could the nuclear weapon have been invented earlier?

I'm thinking of things like, at what point did we have fine enough control over explosives to do the simultaneous detonations within a nuclear device, or when could we have started mining and processing uranium once we knew we needed it.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 13:13

Mc Do Well: Aug 2, 2008; by FactsAreUseless

special tactics posted:

I think that in the coming years we'll see nuclear strike on positions of ISIS in Syria. You can prtsc it.

Inshallah - they must light the fires of a new ideology - otherwise it is just the ultimate in escalation.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 13:35

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

gradenko_2000 posted:

Assuming humanity had the physics down pat as early as they needed to, could the nuclear weapon have been invented earlier?

I'm thinking of things like, at what point did we have fine enough control over explosives to do the simultaneous detonations within a nuclear device, or when could we have started mining and processing uranium once we knew we needed it.

Considering we went from Meitner and her team discovering fission chain reactions in 1938 to using a practical plutonium implosion device on a city in 1945 I don't know how much margin there would be for improving the pace. Maybe if the Manhattan Project was started a couple years earlier or something? Other than that you'd have to push fundamental scientific discoveries to earlier dates. It wasn't the timing of explosives that held them back since that's not an issue in gun-type bombs, and in any case their solution for that can be seen in photos of the Gadget - all of the cables connected to explosive charges are identical lengths; not a very complex solution for the problem.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 13:43

Morbus: May 18, 2004

Koesj posted:

....
Anyway, true fusion indeed requires a fission bomb (primary) as a trigger for a radiation implosion (or ablation, rather) of the fusion fuel secondary. X-rays from the primary bounce around in a radiation-opaque casing surrounding both stages, and 'heat up' both the outside of a hollow cylinder of fusion fuel, and a U²³⁸ 'sparkplug' inside. Since this secondary stands off a bit from the fission primary, and because the fusion part doesn't get blown outward like in the layered design, it's got enough time to fully ignite and hella increase weapon yield through full thermonuclear effects rather.
....

Something to note is that in practical thermonuclear weapons, just under half of the total weapon yield comes from thermonuclear reactions in the compressed and ignited secondary stage. The fusion reactions produce most of their energy as copious amounts of fast neutrons, which can promptly fission U238. So If the secondary container is made of U238, a lot of it will s be fissioned by the neutrons from the burning secondary, and this fast fission can account for roughly half of the total weapon yield

Taking it a step further, if you use a sufficient amount of U235/Pu239 in the secondary container instead of just U238, then the intense ablation driven compression of the secondary by the primary will create a critical assembly and cause very efficient fission, since the compression is so fast and so strong compared to high-explosive driven compression of the primary. In fact the original concept of staged implosion was being researched by Ulam as a means of creating more efficient and powerful fission weapons. It was Teller who (allegedly) realized the concept could be used to create a working and elegant thermonuclear weapon.

So, in a staged implosion weapon that uses substantial quantities of fissile material in the secondary container, you could remove the fusion fuel from the secondary entirely and still retain more than half of the full thermonuclear weapon yield. Arguably, this is a better way of conceptualizing most modern staged implosion weapons. You have a small fission stage that is used to compress and ignite a second, larger fission stage. The compression of the second fission stage is strong enough to support D-D fusion in addition to D-T fusion, which allows much thermonuclear fuel to be used, a more substantial thermonuclear yield, extremely efficient fissioning of the second fission stage, and substantial fast fission of any U238 present.

Since the most sophisticated and efficient missile-delivered weapons almost certainly use secondary containers containing substantial quantities of HEU, you could argue that they are very sophisticated two-stage boosted fission weapons more so than fusion weapons.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 13:54

Salt Fish: Sep 11, 2003; Cybernetic Crumb

According to a NYT article the former detonations were 4.8 magnitude and 4.9 magnitude. South Korea estimated these at 6 and 7.9 kilotons. Keeping in mind that each magnitude number is an order of magnitude more energy we could guess that a hypothetical 5.8 test would be on the order of 60 KT which is reasonable for a small hydrogen test.

yes, I realize this was 5.1 but I'm not doing that math because I'm bad at math (dumb)

# ? Jan 6, 2016 13:56

Morbus: May 18, 2004

I would guess fusion boosted pit in a soika/alarm clock kind of design, with some U238 fast fission. That would be the easiest and cheapest way to take their existing lovely fission design and boost the yield to ~50kT for a dick-waving demonstration where weight and size were of no concern.

A proper staged implosion weapon should have a higher yield and would also be much harder to develop.

# ? Jan 6, 2016 14:01

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

The fast-fissioning of the U-238 is why real nukes would create a lot more radioactive crap than hypothetical cobalt bombs found in science fiction. The fast neutron activation cross section for cobalt is garbage and it would only be in place for a fraction of a second anyway so such a weapon would just vaporize and spread a bunch of cobalt-59 instead of creating copious amounts of radioactive cobalt-60 as claimed. However, with a U-238 tamper, in addition to having a bigger explosion (as discovered during US nuclear tests when such bombs had a bigger yield than anticipated) you'd have gobs of additional fission crap released in the explosion.

However, seeing as we haven't murdered ourselves with radiological contamination it's very likely that such weapons that purposefully create lots of contamination are just the realm of science fiction. (A cobalt bomb would probably be much closer to a neutron bomb in that there's little preventing the reaction's radiation from leaving, resulting in larger immediate doses to people near the bomb; however in that case you can use something cheap like steel and the usefulness of neutron bombs are vastly overstated by fiction anyway)

# ? Jan 6, 2016 14:02

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# ? May 5, 2024 05:44

Juffo-Wup: Jan 13, 2005; Pillbug

Salt Fish posted:

According to a NYT article the former detonations were 4.8 magnitude and 4.9 magnitude. South Korea estimated these at 6 and 7.9 kilotons. Keeping in mind that each magnitude number is an order of magnitude more energy we could guess that a hypothetical 5.8 test would be on the order of 60 KT which is reasonable for a small hydrogen test.

yes, I realize this was 5.1 but I'm not doing that math because I'm bad at math (dumb)

I don't know about the NYT, but USGS revised their initial estimate for the 2013 event to 5.1

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usc000f5t0#general_summary

# ? Jan 6, 2016 14:05

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 3 Minutes to Midnight: The Nuclear Weapons Thread

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