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About how many 1 MT nukes would it take to effectively destroy the planet?

T

Theiananator

Senior member
Hout how many 1 MT nukes would it take to effectively destroy the planet? That doesn't mean, blowing the world into itty bitty pieces, just killing most everything. Could you cite sources?
 
So, instead of "destroy the planet" you actually mean "wipe out most life on the planet"
 
if you really need sources, simply search for the area of devastation for a 1MT bomb. Then, divide the earth's landmass(you can probably get away with excluding antarctica) by that area, and you have your answer. If you want a slightly better answer, you can note that you can't arrange circles tightly and will have gaps where there was no complete devastation. To solve this, inscribe hexagons into the circles (assuming circular pattern of devastation). The hexagons pack together nicely. A little bit of simple trig and you can figure out what to multiply your number of circles by to get an actual, slightly higher, number of bombs.
 
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Radius for a 1 megaton bomb looks to be 2.7 to 4.7 miles, depending on where you set the bar for "destroyed."

edit: using the 2.7 mile radius, you destroy about 27 sq miles per bomb. Taking land mass of the earth at 57,308,738 square miles, we need 2,122,546 1MT bombs to destroy the Earths surface. This ignores the geometry issues raised by DrPizza, so add a few if you really want to fill in all the gaps.
 
Originally posted by: DrPizza
So, instead of "destroy the planet" you actually mean "wipe out most life on the planet"
Click to expand...
And in actuality this only means most life that lives on land.. pretty much everything in the water would continue to survive. Even counting the radiation effects, most everything deeper than a few feet from the surface of the water would survive.
 
Originally posted by: DrPizza
So, instead of "destroy the planet" you actually mean "wipe out most life on the planet"
Click to expand...

no, he means wipe out all human/human life. Less than half of what exists now
 
Just one, from the right country to the wrong country. The result would be a lob of nukes insuring Earth's impending devastation.
 
You wouldn't need to cover the earth surface with them. Just launch them at the right places in the ocean and you can create tidal waves to take out most life and then directly hit anything else that is living.
 
Originally posted by: evilbix
You wouldn't need to cover the earth surface with them. Just launch them at the right places in the ocean and you can create tidal waves to take out most life and then directly hit anything else that is living.
Click to expand...

Or, launch a few into the antarctic and watch sea level rise enough to wipe out all coastal cities.
 
Originally posted by: blahblah99
Originally posted by: evilbix
You wouldn't need to cover the earth surface with them. Just launch them at the right places in the ocean and you can create tidal waves to take out most life and then directly hit anything else that is living.
Click to expand...

Or, launch a few into the antarctic and watch sea level rise enough to wipe out all coastal cities.
Click to expand...

A few nukes won't have enough energy to melt enough ice - especially taking into account that some of the ice in Antarctica the ice is at -50 Celsius or lower. And the width of the ice is several kilometers
 
Okay, lets Assume a evil alien and you want "Destroy all life on the planet earth" by sterilizing it with nukes...
Sterilization by cooking the whole planet . (just like what they do to sterilize surgical instruments).......

Assuming that cooking to whole earth to 200 degrees C will do the trick ...(remember, u have to heat whole plannet, blowing the surface away will not kill people which hide under the surface in deep bunkers...

U will need around 1.5 x 10^17 Megaton nuclear weapons to do the trick..
 
Originally posted by: Calin
Originally posted by: blahblah99
Originally posted by: evilbix
You wouldn't need to cover the earth surface with them. Just launch them at the right places in the ocean and you can create tidal waves to take out most life and then directly hit anything else that is living.
Click to expand...

Or, launch a few into the antarctic and watch sea level rise enough to wipe out all coastal cities.
Click to expand...

A few nukes won't have enough energy to melt enough ice - especially taking into account that some of the ice in Antarctica the ice is at -50 Celsius or lower. And the width of the ice is several kilometers
Click to expand...

Assume ice caps have 33million cubic KM of ice....
Thats 3.3E16 Square meters of ICE..
This ice will have a mass of 917 x 3.3E16 = 3026E16 =3E19 KG worth of Ice in the ice caps...
Ice melts as 0 and has a energy Capcity of 2100 J/KG ..Assuming the average Ice cap temprature is -40 ...
You will require 252000E19 J = 2.52 E 24 Joules to melt the ice caps.

Every ton of TNT has 4.1E6 of energy..... so a MT nuke will have 4.1E12J of energy per bomb...........

So you will need 6.1E11 x Megaton nuclear weapons to melt the artic icecaps...
 
Originally posted by: anthrax
Originally posted by: Calin
Originally posted by: blahblah99
Originally posted by: evilbix
You wouldn't need to cover the earth surface with them. Just launch them at the right places in the ocean and you can create tidal waves to take out most life and then directly hit anything else that is living.
Click to expand...

Or, launch a few into the antarctic and watch sea level rise enough to wipe out all coastal cities.
Click to expand...

A few nukes won't have enough energy to melt enough ice - especially taking into account that some of the ice in Antarctica the ice is at -50 Celsius or lower. And the width of the ice is several kilometers
Click to expand...

Assume ice caps have 33million cubic KM of ice....
Thats 3.3E16 Square meters of ICE..
This ice will have a mass of 917 x 3.3E16 = 3026E16 =3E19 KG worth of Ice in the ice caps...
Ice melts as 0 and has a energy Capcity of 2100 J/KG ..Assuming the average Ice cap temprature is -40 ...
You will require 252000E19 J = 2.52 E 24 Joules to melt the ice caps.

Every ton of TNT has 4.1E6 of energy..... so a MT nuke will have 4.1E12J of energy per bomb...........

So you will need 6.1E11 x Megaton nuclear weapons to melt the artic icecaps...
Click to expand...

But, the savvy mad scientist would realize that the ice in the arctic is floating, thus melting it won't significantly change sea level, and you could thus focus all your efforts on Antarctica, which as you've just shown, would still be trivial.

(edit: the difference you could make would be trivial... the effort involved is far from trivial)
 
Originally posted by: DrPizza
Originally posted by: anthrax
Originally posted by: Calin
Originally posted by: blahblah99
Originally posted by: evilbix
You wouldn't need to cover the earth surface with them. Just launch them at the right places in the ocean and you can create tidal waves to take out most life and then directly hit anything else that is living.
Click to expand...

Or, launch a few into the antarctic and watch sea level rise enough to wipe out all coastal cities.
Click to expand...

A few nukes won't have enough energy to melt enough ice - especially taking into account that some of the ice in Antarctica the ice is at -50 Celsius or lower. And the width of the ice is several kilometers
Click to expand...

Assume ice caps have 33million cubic KM of ice....
Thats 3.3E16 Square meters of ICE..
This ice will have a mass of 917 x 3.3E16 = 3026E16 =3E19 KG worth of Ice in the ice caps...
Ice melts as 0 and has a energy Capcity of 2100 J/KG ..Assuming the average Ice cap temprature is -40 ...
You will require 252000E19 J = 2.52 E 24 Joules to melt the ice caps.

Every ton of TNT has 4.1E6 of energy..... so a MT nuke will have 4.1E12J of energy per bomb...........

So you will need 6.1E11 x Megaton nuclear weapons to melt the artic icecaps...
Click to expand...

But, the savvy mad scientist would realize that the ice in the arctic is floating, thus melting it won't significantly change sea level, and you could thus focus all your efforts on Antarctica, which as you've just shown, would still be trivial.

(edit: the difference you could make would be trivial... the effort involved is far from trivial)
Click to expand...

the artic ice cap might be floating...the antartica isn't, there is land underneath....Quite a large amount of the antartica is above sea level and cover with loads of ice......

 
You're forgetting about nuclear winter. Enough blasts to destroy all surface life would be more than enough to trigger a nuclear winter. That would pretty much end it for sea life with the exception of bacteria living near thermal sea vents.

The loss of all oxygen producing plants on the surface alone would do it for sea life.
 
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