Population in SEIV

[Baron Munchausen]

When you are talking about hardened miltary targets, mass is essential for doing damage on anything but a direct hit. In an atmosphere the intense radiation heats up the stuff around it and causes the explosion. Thus the damage. Outside a certain radius even a nuclear warhead isn't going to do much damage in space. This would depend on the heat resistance of the skin of your ship, of course.

The Orion project actually included the 'propellant' -- stuff for the nuclear explosion to heat up -- with the bomb. It wasn't just a bald nuke dropped out of the craft. You can see the details as I said, by going to a search engine. So, it was not relying on just the energy.

I would really like to know where you get the information about any nuclear tests larger than 50 megatons. According to every official 'Nuclear Arms Testing' site I've ever visited the largest test ever was a Soviet nuke of 50 Mgtn which it was believed could be souped up to 100. Where on earth could anyone have tested anything larger?

Edit: The 'Tsar Bomb' was the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed or detonated. While only tested at 50 Megatons, it was intended to be a 100 megaton device. It was 'useless militarily' and was created purely for political purposes.

NB: Sakharov was the designer! (1961)

http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew...ovwarhead.html

[ July 14, 2002, 03:40: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Skulky]

just out of curiosity why would something of 100 megatons be useless militarily? too big to fly in?

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, that was their choice of words on the site that I found. I guess no nuclear bomb is truly 'useless' but it's sure possible for it to be 'out of spec' or even 'counter-productive'. Think about the whole context of warfare. This must be a very expensive bomb to build, with refined uranium being a very scarce and precious resource, and also very difficult to deliver without killing the pilot. Even assuming it could be delivered with an ICBM of some sort, saving the 'pilot' question, it's so huge that it would wipe out far more than the target. At the least this is a waste of your precious resource, refined uranium. And unless you really are a lunatic and seeking to cause as much destruction as possible, it doesn't do any good to take out hundreds of square miles of countryside along with the military base that you were aiming at. What it does do is make you look bad to kill the vast number of civilians that would be killed along with the military personel. So from a 'pragmatic' perspective of waging war 'intelligently' I guess it is essentially useless. Weird as it sounds to talk of pragmatic and intelligent use of nuclear weapons...

[Kammak]

RE: Military utility of big nukes,

As the accuracy of delivery systems increased, the yield of individual warheads was decreased and MIRV'ing came into being. Put a bunch of "smaller" warheads on a single delivery platform, so you can hit and destroy more targets effectively. Cheaper to deliver (vice one uber-massive warhead) and gives you greater reduncy to counter the Soviet ABM systems that were in place during the cold war.

The primary killer for "modern" nuclear devices is the overpressure and then bLast - radiation has always been an un-intended and unwelcome side effect - except for the "neutron bomb" devices.