RE: Every nuclear explosion since 1945
June 2, 2012 at 2:30 am
(This post was last modified: June 2, 2012 at 2:44 am by Anomalocaris.)
(June 1, 2012 at 8:18 pm)padraic Wrote: Coincidentally ,there was a doco last night called "World's Biggest Bomb". In part,it dealt with Soviet HIGH ALTITUDE Soviet nuclear testing in 1961. The radioactive clouds drifted for HUNDREDS of miles and effected many thousands.
It's a National Geographic film so should be available elsewhere on line if the link below doesn't work.
http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/224...ggest-Bomb
Actually, megaton for megaton, the soviet 50 MT "Czar Bomba", the largest bomb ever tested, was by some very considerable margin the cleanest hydrogen bomb ever air tested.
The actual weopon was capable of twice the yield released during the test. The test bomb was specifically "de-tuned" to reduce fallout to a very minimum.
(June 1, 2012 at 9:03 pm)Norfolk And Chance Wrote: America sure likes blowing shit up.
1,000 nuclear tests?
You can imagine after test #4 or something, them saying "yep, it explodes", and somebody else saying "let's juuuuust try one more, you know, just to make sure"
it is true that simple but well engineered fission bombs are very reliable. No country except north Korea have ever contrive to screw up their first fission bomb test.
However, fusion weapons have a lot of tunable parameters, and fusion weapons can definitely screw up. America's first fusion bomb was so screwed up the physicists involved got its yield forecast wrong by a factor of eight.
None of the current generation of weapons fielded by US, Russia, Britain, France and China are simple explosive devices. They are all highly optimized weopons designed to be light, have adjustable explosive power, tunable initial neutron burst, and adjustable fallout to suite the type of target they are deployed against, and conserve self-decaying fusion material to achieve maximum shelf life.
These complex designs needs to be tested to verify they work as intended.
Furthermore, fusion weapons have a shelf life due to radioactive decay of the fusion material. As they degrade their performance becomes difficult to model. So if no new weapons and fusion and fission materials are being made, existing stockpile needs to be continuously sample tested to determine their explosive characteristics as the degrade.
