Why haven't we made/declared bigger nukes? The tsar bomb was literally downscaled from 100MT to 50 because the they were scared that the pilot wouldn't be able to make it away on time.
Surely we have dinosaur extinction asteroid tier nukes by now?
Why haven't we made/declared bigger nukes?
Because one big boom < many small booms
Why don't you use google?
>Why haven't we made/declared bigger nukes?
Bigger nukes aren't actually helpful. Most of the energy is wasted scorching clouds. It's more efficient to deploy a circular array of smaller nukes around your target in a pattern that has the blast areas overlap slightly to get better coverage.
the tsar bomba was reduced because the radiation would circle the globe and declared that "this weapon would hurt russia no matter where its used"
no, high-yield thermonuclear weapons like this are very low-radiation, in tsar bomba the only significant radiation component came from the fission ignition and this is the case for most thermonuclear weapons
>no, high-yield thermonuclear weapons like this are very low-radiation, in tsar bomba the only significant radiation component came from the fission ignition and this is the case for most thermonuclear weapons
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2125202-exposed-soviet-cover-up-of-nuclear-fallout-worse-than-chernobyl/
>no, high-yield thermonuclear weapons like this are very low-radiation, in tsar bomba the only significant radiation component came from the fission ignition and this is the case for most thermonuclear weapons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totskoye_nuclear_exercise
In mid-September 1954, nuclear bombing tests were performed at the Totskoye proving ground during the training exercise Snezhok (Russian: Cнeжoк, Snowball or Light Snow) with some 45,000 people, all Soviet soldiers and officers,who explored the explosion site of a bomb twice as powerful as the one dropped on Nagasaki nine years earlier. After the first nuclear explosion, two additional non-nuclear bombs were exploded shortly after the main blast in order to imitate a second-wave nuclear strike."Some, the majority even, had no protective clothing, and besides it was impossible to use gas masks" [in the 115 degree temperatures of the area]. Additionally, insufficient care was taken to remove and dispose of contaminated clothing of the event. Evacuations were haphazard, where villagers who chose to stay were told to "dig ditches" to avoid effects. Yuri Sorokin filed suit in 1993 against the Russian government to receive compensation for medical injuries that he attributed to the exercise.
because after a certain point you are just waisting it by making it bigger
Nukes are like boobs, when they're big its great but when they are TOO big they lose much of their effect (haha would be a shame if someone tried to disprove my thesis using visual evidence haha)
You are correct that they’re like boobs. But wrong in that there’s a such thing as “too big”
Small boobs are good. Big boobs are good. Absurdly sized boobs are good. Medium sized boobs are good. Boobs are good, as long as they’re attached to a woman. Nukes are good, as long as they’re being dropped on a communist.
Is that Kay's mom?
Absolutely built for oyakodon if she is.
It’s just Kay
We need a fail-safe in case the monkeys take over.
Because the targets for the nukes are mostly dispersed. There are neither industry centers, nor military bases that would require 100 MT for destruction. Instead of guiding 1 huge and heavy 100 MT warhead its more practical to guide 10 1 MT warheads and strike multiple targets per rocket and/or provide additional redundancy.
No. More brother wars!
Ruskie are not brothers, just half mongolian, half slav, half pigs.
Literally the exact same as Ukies then?
>1.5 Russians per Russian
>le both sides xD
What purpose does a huge bomb serve when MIRVs exist
the biggest nuke you need is as big as the biggest city, and even then it's an over kill probably.
You can look into the nazi projects that amount to "big gun do big boom" to see why it's pointless.
>tsar bomb was literally downscaled from 100MT to 50
It was downscaled because additional 50MT came from territary fission stage, and this would made bomb very dirty so they tested only two stage relatively "clean" fallout wise bomb.
is there anything that wont be destroyed by single hit by warhead in kiloton range?
you don't need hundred megaton splosion to kill a city - in fact with interceptors sending many small warheads plus fakes makes much more sense than betting on one hueg one
Because 10MT is more than enough to obliterate Moscow, and bigger nuke means bigger delivery system. So they are not worth the trouble.
>Because 10MT is more than enough to obliterate Moscow,
>heavy blast damage 69km2
>Moscow area (within Moscow ring road) 870km2
No.
They're going to be delivered by ICBM anyway, so how is that a problem?
Say you have an ICBM that can carry one big nuke, or multiple smaller ones. In that case the latter allows you both to frick up more area in total than the big nuke, and allows you to target multiple targets that are too far apart for a single big nuke to take out all of them.
And even if you're dead set on just tossing one warhead per ICBM, then a bigger nuke needs a bigger and more expensive ICBM. The bigger nukes also need more expensive fissile material. All in all going for bigger ICBMs carrying bigger nukes means you get less of them. And again, many small nukes wreck more shit than a few big ones.
Doubling the yield only increases the area destroyed by ~60%. So two 100kt bombs destroy a quarter more than one 200kt bombs.
On the other hand, if you're attacking dispersed point targets (missile silos, power plants, etc) then you're basically going to need one bomb per target regardless of yield, so there multiple smaller warheads have an even greater advantage over one big one.
The really large nukes existed for two reasons. First was pure propaganda, and the usefulness of that was kinda limited since people could just explain how more nukes > bigger nukes. Second was because in the days of intercontinental bombers CEP was measured in zip codes, and so a huge blast radius was useful to make sure you took out whatever city you've been sent to deal with. ICBMs however had much, much better precision and so the huge yields wasn't needed any more once they got into service.
Big nukes kinda made sense in the age of the strategic bomber.
Logistics and tactics of their strike means they do singular strike per flight so makes sense make this strike bigger, and weight or big nukes is less taxing.
IBCM with MIRV completely logistics and tactics.
there is a limit at nuke size, after which it becomes counter productive
Teller wanted a 10GT nuke. They had no way of delivering it to Russia but Teller argued that they could detonate it in America and still kill everyone in Russia. Everyone else thought this was a bad idea.
Precision weapons have taken many roles that nuclear weapons used to hold in military strategy. We used to doctrinally plan to use nukes to destroy tank forces. But now we have atgm's which are more cost effective and don't turn your territory into a wasteland. Even with next generation nuclear weapons, the focus is efficiency and precision. Many ballistic nuclear weapons use a shotgun pattern to more efficiently make use of destructive shockwave effects. If you use three smaller nukes, their shockwaves will meet and cause a pressure spike that is more efficient at destroying structures.
A basic b***h gen 1 MIRV gives you 10x as much boom versus a comparable generation single-bomb super-bomb ICBM with MUCH higher hit probability. Current gen nukes are much smaller, so you can reasonably get 50-100 times as much explosives into the enemy versus a single giant bomb. It's also cheaper and more reliable to build a bunch of nukes and shotgun blast an entire area into glass than drop one bomb that, at best, only turns a single square mile area into glass and merely knocks everything else down.
there were exactly two cases made for the tsar bomba, one for the test and one for the museum. it was never operational
the reason why you don't see high yields anymore is due to accuracy increases and the simple fact that there's virtually no targets that require 1MT anymore, let alone 5MT+ that were around previously. originally MT yield warheads were meant for city busting, hardened structures and turning Cheyenne Mountain into Cheyenne Lake. increasing your accuracy and militaries divesting from hardened locations means such yields simply aren't needed.
a spread of 4 175kt warheads aimed at different points in a city will do more damage than a 10MT detonated in the city center.
because they're fake