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Film of largest nuclear bomb declassified

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Film of largest nuclear bomb declassified

Old 1st Sep 2020, 16:58
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Ahh, the big and pointless bomb. No matter the obvious (as pointed out by the Russian scientists building the thing) the Russian politicians wanted it anyway.
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Old 1st Sep 2020, 17:27
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The device had no conceivable military value, but what it did do was to demonstrate the the West that the 'Sloika' design was viable and weaponized. The layer cake which Sakharov and Ginzburg instigated had no theoretical upper limit on yield.

The concern over the test, and the uncertainty over the effects convinced the bomb technicians to remove part of the uranium tamper to detune the device to approximately half its design yield of 100 Mt.

As it was, the shockwave went round the World seven times, and the blast was visible from over 600 miles away.

By the time it exploded though, it marked the beginning of the end for large weapons. The fourth power law means the less accurate your weapon, the massively bigger it has to be to achieve the necessary military objective. Hence smaller, accurate weapons were paradoxically more effective, and the more of them you could launch on a single bus. You just needed to invent GPS.

So they did.
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Old 1st Sep 2020, 17:46
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I've heard it said that the Tsar Bomba was created with the intention of targeting Mount Cheyenne and NORAD, or just to detonate over the North Atlantic to create a huge EMP. Likely?
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Old 1st Sep 2020, 19:06
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Originally Posted by Mick Stability
By the time it exploded though, it marked the beginning of the end for large weapons. The fourth power law means the less accurate your weapon, the massively bigger it has to be to achieve the necessary military objective.
Plus the small matter that the Russian boffins understood completely - an insanely big bomb on roughly spherical planet tends to push most of its energy towards space.
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Old 1st Sep 2020, 19:18
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You’d never hang it under a Jag.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 00:05
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The Imperial Japanese built a heavy water plant in 1936 . How different Pearl Harbour would look if they had of been successful in building a device.
If they had of built a device and a means of delivery the outcomes would have been different.

The research done by them in Camp 731 was interesting from a historical point of view . Technically not very highly advanced , but an interesting inquiry into human indifference to pain and suffering in the search for new weapons .

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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 05:54
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I bet it took the Polar Bears weeks to get the stains out of their fur.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 09:44
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Originally Posted by SOPS
I don’t understand why they describe it as a ‘clean bomb’. WTF is ‘clean’ about it? It was polished before the exploded it?
To be a 'clean' bomb, it had to be an 'airburst' ie detonate sufficiently high so as not to suck up debris from the surface into the fireball which would subsequently come back down as radioactive fallout; by detonating above the ground, you also get maximum damage from the shockwave too.
At least, that's what we were taught in the Royal Observer Corps where we had to report the fireballs as 'touching' or 'clear' from our GZI photos.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 15:33
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"The Imperial Japanese built a heavy water plant in 1936 . How different Pearl Harbour would look if they had of been successful in building a device."

What people forget is the ENORMOUS amount of engineering and scientific effort that was required in the US to actually build the damn things in the first place - the idea is pretty simple but oh the details. No-one else could have done it - and certainly not Japan
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 16:01
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LR, Kubrick tricked him into hamming it up for takes and called them rehearsals, not the real thing. Then he used them in the film.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 16:12
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Originally Posted by fitliker
Who ? Google it . Those guys in the Hugo Boss uniforms did make several different types of big bangs . Several failures , a big dirty one and several clean big bangs in Poland . Old news really was in the papers last year and on the History Channel as well . A bigger bang than the Recent Thermobaric devices which would suggest a clean burning fuel or a failure to ignite the dirty nuclear fuel .
That needs a bit more documentation than the History Channel.
Afaik, Speer allocated enough resources to Heisenberg to perform basic research experiments, but nothing like the scale of support that could generate a bomb. There was no shortage of uranium, but a mistake in measuring the utility of graphite to serve as a moderator meant the Germans were forced to try for a heavy water moderated reactor, which never came about. Other claims of a separate SS run program producing test explosions are undocumented and unverified.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 16:17
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Ckean vs. Dirty

Scenario ... load on unattributable ship, sail to San Francisco, detonate and contaminate large swathes if US West Ciast with plume heading East on orvailing wind. No need to worry about Decontam, as invasion of USA is not in the script.

Of course, retaliation is a different question ... but whodunnit? USSR or PRC?
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 17:22
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Originally Posted by etudiant
That needs a bit more documentation than the History Channel.
Afaik, Speer allocated enough resources to Heisenberg to perform basic research experiments, but nothing like the scale of support that could generate a bomb. There was no shortage of uranium, but a mistake in measuring the utility of graphite to serve as a moderator meant the Germans were forced to try for a heavy water moderated reactor, which never came about. Other claims of a separate SS run program producing test explosions are undocumented and unverified.
I'm glad I'm not the only one went when I read the original post that you replied to, anyhow it gave me an excuse to re-read Richard Rhodes version of the story which funnily enough ties in with your version of events, rather than whatever nonsense appears to be on Google.

fitliker, if you haven't, pick up a copy of Rhodes "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"...it's regarded as one of the most authoritative works on atomic research prior to WW2 and the development of the first nuclear weapons ..needless to say it has some pages devoted to the German efforts.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 17:53
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Operation Epsilon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon
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Old 3rd Sep 2020, 09:16
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Originally Posted by fitliker
Cosmic Irony the guy who designed that particular weapon , Sakharov was awarded a Nobel peace prize

The model of aircraft that carried the payload is still in service and a similar aircraft was playing War games off Alaska this week. Not the scarey version the one with the hypersonic cruise missiles and Mig 31 escorts , just the observation model.


The Nazis were working on a clean Nuclear device , start worrying if the designs and plans for the clean weapon they tested in Poland are ever found . Although such a device would make mining more profitable
Really? The Nazi nuclear programme was at least a decade behind TUBE ALLOYS/MANHATTEN and was a million kilometers away from even being remotely weaponised. Some interesting work was done at Heidleburg (where they built a primative 'pile') and at the Chemical Research institute in Garmisch (where, at the end of the war, they hid radioactive material in the river - which US Authorities recoved in 1946/47).
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Old 3rd Sep 2020, 09:47
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My current [and very interesting] reading on Kindle ...
Amazon Amazon

The Western Allies’ Procurement of Nazi Germany’s Technology: The History of British and American Operations to Capture Nazi Scientists and Equipment

I note that it's still free.
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Old 3rd Sep 2020, 09:55
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Originally Posted by etudiant
That needs a bit more documentation than the History Channel.
Afaik, Speer allocated enough resources to Heisenberg to perform basic research experiments, but nothing like the scale of support that could generate a bomb. There was no shortage of uranium, but a mistake in measuring the utility of graphite to serve as a moderator meant the Germans were forced to try for a heavy water moderated reactor, which never came about. Other claims of a separate SS run program producing test explosions are undocumented and unverified.
After the July 1944 plot against Hitler, Hitler (probably Himmler, in reality) apointed the pyschotic and paranoid architect and SS General Herr Dr Frans Kammler to progressively take over the two main V weapons production and delivery programmes and all jet aircraft production. I have seen reference that he also took over nuclear research, which would have been logical, as he took over all other innovative weapons programmes. Luckily he was grossly incompetent and regularly issued countermanding orders on the same day.

Unfortunately if you try to do scholarly research on the German weapons programmes, the internet is a dangerous place. It is festering with Nazi fanboi material and pure fantasy (such as Antactic bases, Amerika Racket, 'the Bell' anti-gravity aircraft, flying saucers etc). Each has a germ of truth about them but been then allowed to run riot in the fevered minds of some rather sick people. A classic example of this is: Hans Kammler - The Fairfield Project

Here's a much better researched article on the V2 being deployed to attack specific operational level targets (which I hadn't hear of before). By this stage the batteries had been withdrawn from around The Hague and therefore couldn't reach London. V2ROCKET.COM - SS Werfer Abteilung 500 in Hellendoorn / Dalfsen

Kammler died near Prague in May 1944 in a partisan ambush where he took his own life. He driver later gave evidence to Allied investigators.

Last edited by Whenurhappy; 4th Sep 2020 at 21:32.
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Old 5th Sep 2020, 13:16
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BBC NEWS | Europe | Hitler 'tested small atom bomb'


https://www.nevingtonwarmuseum.com/germany---atomic-reactor-atomkellar.html



After a war, the winners write the history.
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Old 5th Sep 2020, 13:29
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In a Willy waving contest points may be awarded for style and entertaining value , but it is usually biggus dickus that wins .
The RAF raid that took out the secret factory in Norway , probably was the most important raid in WW2 . Those crew might never get the recognition they deserve due to secrecy . But without their efforts the war might have ended differently.
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Old 5th Sep 2020, 21:28
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All very dubious imho. Germany did not have an enrichment program afaik and no nuclear reactors, so where does the fissionable material come from?
The only practical indication that the Nazi nuclear program may have been much larger than generally believed is that the controversial Asse salt mine nuclear waste deposit site apparently stores 200,000 tons of nuclear materials including stuff left over from the Nazi era. How much the legacy stuff represents was not disclosed..
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