The World's Biggest Bomb

[green granite]

For info: tonight on channel 5 at 7pm


The World's Biggest Bomb: Revealed

The Cold War race for nuclear supremacy throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when the US and the Soviet Union locked horns in a battle to build the most powerful atomic bomb. First-hand testimony and modern forensic investigation explores what happened when America's Castle Bravo went out of control, vaporising three small islands in the Pacific testing ground of Bikini Atoll and spreading severe radioactive fallout to nearby inhabited islands, and reveals the story of the Soviets' Tsar bomb, which was six times more powerful than Bravo.

[SASless]

Reading the title....I thought the thread was going to be about the Obama Administration.

[Alber Ratman]

Bravo, Designing physists got the cross section of lithium deuteride 7 wrong, not realising it would be converted to 6 during the thermonuclear process, so the bang was 3 times as large as planned, as one on the engineers involved said, "It went Gangbusters" .. Czar Bomba was scaled down! LOL

[ORAC]

US Nuclear Weapons - A Secret History:

....Within a second, a fireball nearly 3 miles in diameter was formed, and a crater more than a mile wide and over 200ft deep was gouged from the reef. The light from the fireball was visible for nearly a minute on Rongerik atoll, 155 miles to the east, and was observed clearly by military personnel at Kwajalein Island, over 250 miles south-east of Bikini......

Within a minute, the fireball had risen to 47,000ft and the pulverized core from the crater was pulled into a cloud that was already more than seven miles across with a stem 2,000ft wide. In this same minute, the blast wave from the explosion moved outward from the burst point, stripping the nearby islands of vegetation and animals.

Ten minutes after zero hour, the mushroom cloud was 70 miles across and rising swiftly; a minute later, windows in buildings at Rongerik atoll rattled as the blast wave hit.....

Shot name: Bravo
Device Name: Shrimp
Predicted Yield Range: 4-8MT
Most Probable Yield: 6MT
Actual Yield: 15MT
Error: 150%

That wasn't the largest error in the Castle Series, that was on the next shot - Romeo

Shot name: Romeo
Device Name: Runt 1
Predicted Yield Range: 1.5-7MT
Most Probable Yield: 4MT
Actual Yield: 11MT
Error: 175%

[Alber Ratman]

Good book on the subject is Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun, the making of the Hydrogen Bomb"..

[500N]

ORAC
I gather that the blasts were so large that all the electronic equipment
and cameras that were supposed to gather data were vaporised so
no actual data was ever recorded.

[MAINJAFAD]

A good site for info on all nuclear testing with photos at The Nuclear Weapon Archive - A Guide to Nuclear Weapons (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org)

[Lima Juliet]

Does my bomb look big in this? :}

[newt]

You need to ask the wife!!:{:{:{

[redsetter]

RAF Canberras (1323 Flt) flew sampling sorties through the Bravo cloud, and those of the later Castle shots, from Kwajalein. Unfortunately two Canberras were lost on the operation: one missing over the Pacific with three crew; the other carried out a forced landing on an atoll and crew rescued. "Sniffing and Bottling: 1323 Flight and its successors" on lulu.com has the story.

[kylegordon]

"0 results for "Sniffing and Bottling: 1323 Flight and its successors""

[redsetter]

Try searching for just "Sniffing and Bottling" on lulu

[MAINJAFAD]

LINK (http://www.lulu.com/shop/dave-forster/sniffing-and-bottling/paperback/product-20549198.html;jsessionid=C1C6DE599A2811807CBECD0753D3E9F8) to the book about Canberra Operations in the Pacific tests. Strange that the RAF were actively involved in the Castle Tests as I'd thought that would have broke the McMahon Act.

[dirkdj]

Very scary: A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto - YouTube (http://youtu.be/LLCF7vPanrY)

[Buster Hyman]

This was my biggest...

http://www.southeastlpg.com.au/Web%20LPG%20Pics/Au%20Falcon.jpg

[walter kennedy]

That time lapse map was the most scary thing I have ever seen - puts it into perspective.
I wonder how Mr Spock would have put it - perhaps: "It's illogical, Jim, the humans appear to be waging a nuclear war against their home planet."

Seriously, though, apart from those big ones referred to, I think the very first one (Nevada before Hiroshima) happened to be significantly bigger than expected - who were those rrrsoles who went ahead with such tests when they obviously could not have predicted the yields with confidence - suppose one of them had been an order of magnitude greater? Another Permian extinction? I am not against scientific progress but to try out something so deadly before understanding the processes enough? The Japanese were on the back foot well before the first test so the risk to the environment was not justified for ending WW2 - perhaps Hiroshima was another warning to the Soviets like Dresden? Talk about collateral! Those 2,000+ subsequent tests may ultimately prove to have made us all "collateral".
Talking about other big bombs, don't forget the biggest dirty bomb - the pulverised asbestos on 911.

[Bing]

who were those rrrsoles who went ahead with such tests when they obviously could not have predicted the yields with confidence

How do you think they found out their predictions were inaccurate? I'm sure up until a few seconds after they pressed the red button they were 100% sure of what would happen...

[SASless]

Walt.....The anticipation of a Million Allied Casualties should we had invaded the Japanese mainland.....is what drove the decision by Truman. In that regard....he was absolutely correct.

It can be argued that in time we could have starved them to surrender but how long would that have taken and at what cost. Do remember the Japanese had kicked off that bit of Whirlwind and had not engendered any good feelings by the way they conducted themselves starting with Nanking and progressing right up to the very end of the War.

Given the choice of killing Japanese or enduring a Million more wounded and dead....they did not have a friend at Court when that decision was being made.

So....maybe there was also a motive to punish the Japanese that was at play.

Think back to the Bataan Death March, the suffering of the British POW's on the Railroad, the torture, starvation, and murder of Civilians and POW's everywhere the Japanese occupied and it is easy to see how it was easy to drop the bombs on them.

However the Politically Correct now days do not wish to admit the Japanese were murdering SOB's and should be seen as being Victims in this. That just is not a defensible position.

[West Coast]

Walt

Point of order, the first was in New Mexico, not Nevada.

[wiggy]

Walt

I think the very first one (Nevada before Hiroshima) happened to be significantly bigger than expected

"Trinity" test, done in reality in New Mexico (Alamogordo). Those at the top (Fermi, Oppenheimer et.al) did have a good handle on the yield. That didn't stop Fermi taking bets on the chance of the atmosphere catching fire, which is possibly where some of the folklore has come from ..........

FWIW and as a trivia point the Trinity test was a test of the Nagasaki device - an implosion Plutonium weapon, the Hiroshima Bomb (gun device using Uranium) was dropped with no test.

If you have the time to get through 800 pages of a heavy mix of both physics and politics may I recommend Richard Rhodes (previously mentioned) and his Pulitzer prize winning book "The making of the Atomic Bomb", which in addition in covering the development of science that led to the bomb also looks at the politics behind Truman's decision. Fundamentally, whilst there was some advantage in demonstrating the bomb to the Russians, it very much boiled down to, as SASless says, "The anticipation of a Million Allied Casualties should we had invaded the Japanese mainland.....is what drove the decision"...

[MightyGem]

Never appreciated just how many there were, or the fact that the US/USSR were still testing in the early 90s. :eek:

[porch monkey]

If you ever get there, Las Vegas has the national atomic testing museum. If you have any interest in the history of the devices, and the history of the testing range, principally in Nevada, well worth a visit. It is actually run by the Smithsonian as an annex, IIRC. I found particularly interesting the methods used to work out yields, signatures of the components and some of the uses for nuclear devices that were put forward.

[GreenKnight121]

Like the plan to dig a sea-level shipping canal across Nicaragua or Panama using "nuclear devices" exploded underground to create a connected series of pits (lakes)?

This 1967 magazine article has some discussion in the plans; The Rotarian - Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=0TMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=Nicaragua+canal+nuclear&source=bl&ots=-60Wqiy40V&sig=weOpi1vdxr-ZDQTiYCuG4GsICPs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_WPyUJSdIonWqAHp0YGwDQ&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Nicaragua%20canal%20nuclear&f=false)

More here: Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Cold War America - Scott Kaufman - Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=2ywJNU2lSKUC&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=Nicaragua+canal+nuclear&source=bl&ots=89hp_ENGa_&sig=UhBzLaLozJQH91ABXyaUauHT1m0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AmXyUJ3XKcrNqQHU4oDoDw&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q=Nicaragua%20canal%20nuclear&f=false)