RE: So COOL! We need a 4th leg to the Nuclear Triad !!
January 24, 2018 at 10:19 am
(This post was last modified: January 24, 2018 at 10:23 am by Anomalocaris.)
(January 24, 2018 at 1:17 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: How long would it take to traverse, say, Sakhalin to Seattle? And wouldn't the larger submersible required to carry a multistage rocket be susceptible to an active sonar net?
It would take around 2 months for submersible creeping at 3 knots to go from Sakhalin to Seattle.
I am not talking about a multistage rocket. I am talking about a mult-stage thermal nuclear warhead. Thermal nuclear warheads can in theory be designed with any arbitrary number of fusion boost stages to boost its total explosive yield to any arbitrary level. The most powerful nuclear bomb ever actually made was 3 stages if I am not mistaken, weighed about 30 tons and tested at 50 MT, but capable of 100 MT.
A submersible much smaller than any manned submarine can still easily be designed to accommodate a fixed 30 ton or a 100 ton warhead warhead, So yield well in excess of 100MT is possible. If it detonates 3 Miles off shore of a major city the city will be utterly devastated to perhaps 15-20 Miles inland. If it detonates outside of the Golden Gate Bridge I think everything up to Fairfield, including Berkeley, Oakland, concord, will be a flattened ruin. If it detonates underwater near the sea floor, the devastation will be increased by the massive amounts of radioactive debris and ejecta from the crater, as well as possible set up a radioactive mini-tsunami. The fall out zone will extend considerable further inland, perhaps as far as Nevada.
If a submersible travels slowly and deeply beneath thermalclines in the sea, using electric motors or other means of energy conserving and silent propulsion, it would be extremely difficult to detect over a large area even if it is large enough to hold a 100 ton payload. It would still be smaller than the smallest diesel electric manned submarine.
