What's the biggest nuke possible to be built today???

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: takeru
hmm... how about if tsar bomba was dropped on top of a large dormant volcano? or a fault line?

I always wondered if the Russians had targeted any areas that would lead to "natural" disasters on top of the nuclear devastation. ie. trigger an earthquake/tsunami in the pacific northwest. The bad guys in some of the James Bond movies seemed to occasionally come up with such ideas - flood silicon valley, etc. (although most didn't seem plausible) But, why not the Russians for something more plausible?

 

[IronWing]

Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski

Originally posted by: Braznor
If there is no need to transport the weapon i.e blowing it up where it was built, how big could it be?

Remember, there is no need to deliver it by ICBM or aircraft or anything at all.

I imagine your gains get smaller as you add more material as the detonation source is still the same and everything has to radiate from there.

Nope. With a uranium tampered thermo bomb the fision detonator gets it going but the fusion plus fision secondary keeps the reaction going kind of like a neutron wick. Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun has a good explanation of how it works. Read The Making of the Atomic Bomb first though.

 

[agibby5]

Hopefully, no one has the desire to make the largest possible nuclear weapon.... just my hope!

 

[K1052]

Originally posted by: Feldenak
Big enough to suck the paint off your house and give your family a permanent orange afro.

Fitz-Hume!

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Originally posted by: Feldenak
Big enough to suck the paint off your house and give your family a permanent orange afro.

:laugh:

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: Anubis

Originally posted by: Demon-Xanth
Tsar Bomba was actually past the theoretical useful limit as a weapon.

explain

The thing was so heavy the bomber had to carry it partially inside and partially outside its bomb bay. The weight of the thing (and the terrible aerodynamics of having an open bay with something hanging out) meant that the bomber was super slow. It also didn't have enough fuel to make it all the way to all the good targets in the US from the USSR (save for alaska) let alone a return flight.

The plane would have been a sitting duck for AA fire and interceptors.

With the invention of ICBMs it became much easier to launch 100 2 MT weapons than to launch 4 Tsar Bombas.

Also, what can you destroy with 50 MT that you can't destroy with 10?

 

[The Boston Dangler]

i'm gonna have to call shens on this:

"The initial three stage design was capable of approximately 100 Mt (Megatons), but at a cost of too much radioactive fallout. To limit fallout, the third stage, and possibly the second stage, had a lead tamper instead of a uranium-238 fusion tamper (which greatly amplifies the reaction by fissioning uranium atoms with fast neutrons from the fusion reaction). This eliminated fast fission by the fusion-stage neutrons, so that approximately 97% of the total energy resulted from fusion alone (as such, it was one of the "cleanest" nuclear bombs ever created, generating a very low amount of fallout relative to its yield). There was a strong incentive for this modification since most of the fallout from a test of the bomb would fall on populated Soviet territory."

everything i've read and seen on Tsar Bomba says it was a 50ishMT prototype of a 100MT design, but the soviets were not capable of producing the 100MT version. itwas a propaganda piece from the beginning.

since when did the soviets give a flying F about any kind of polution? Tsar Bomba sprinkled plutonium over every inch of the planet.

edit:
from the excellent "Trinity and Beyond"
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f93_1176808864

 

[ShockwaveVT]

Originally posted by: Foxery
Probably large enough that you don't dare test it if you want to keep living on this planet. Today's Fusion-based technology makes the ones we dropped on Japan look like firecrackers.

More like 1958's technology. Once the thermonuclear design was figured out, R&D focused on developing more compact bombs and better delivery methods.

 

[RESmonkey]

I hope I get to witness a Carbon-based fusion bomb. Hopefully, it gets rid of the Earth, too