A HUGE Nuclear Bomb

As far as I'm aware the W54 warhead (the one used in the Davy Crockett 122mm recoilless rifle) is still the smallest nuclear weapon known to exist. The yield is only about 10 tons though, but that's quite a kick from a core that weighs around 25 kg.

We also had the W54 fitted on the AIR-2 Genie unguided air-to-air rockets in the later-1950s. The idea was to launch them into the center of a formation of Russian bombers and vape all of them in one gigunda blast.
 
The idea was to launch them into the center of a formation of Russian bombers and vape all of them in one gigunda blast.


In the days before science it seems...lol. Hello welcome to Radiation positioning, and cancer rates on the rise city. Might as well let them bomb.
 
Even though the yield of the W54 is small (subjectively speaking) - does it still pack a decent EM pulse?
 
Undecided said:
In the days before science it seems...lol. Hello welcome to Radiation positioning, and cancer rates on the rise city. Might as well let them bomb.
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Not if you catch them en route above an ocean
 
Gravity said:
Even though the yield of the W54 is small (subjectively speaking) - does it still pack a decent EM pulse?
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Every nuclear weapon does, and that is because of how its radiation interacts with the environment. Specifically, soft X-rays speeding outward from the burst ionize the air around it and produce hefty transient currents, which are observed by us as a big ass EMP.

The intensity of the EMP transient depends more on the type of attack profile and burst used rather than the weapon involved. But you have the right idea, in that a 10 ton weapon will generate only a tiny amount of EMP. And at the tactical distances involved in where the W54 was likely to be used, EMP wouldn't have mattered much.

Avatar said:
Not if you catch them en route above an ocean
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Yeah, that was how it would have probably happened. The Genie rockets were carried on most of SAC's F-102 interceptors flying out of Thule and the Aleutians.

That said, the residual radiation output of the W54 was very small. The total fuel weight was something like 50 pounds (including the U-238 tamper) and detonated so high in the air it would have dispersed very quickly. The only attack profiles that generate a lot of residual radiation are the laydown surface bursts that are good for digging out hardened structures like missile silos and command bunkers.
 
Still the prospect of radiation up in the atmosphere with its high winds and ability to carry radiation over large areas (alas Chernobyl) surely would have caused serious environmental problems. Also just a general inquiry question what would happen to the nuclear weapons onboard the Soviet aircraft? Would they fall into the ocean or explode along with the nuclear explosion?
 
I think even if hit hard they would not go nuclear, they would just fall into the ocean - the sequence for fusion/fission has to be precise in application and timing.
 
Undecided said:
Still the prospect of radiation up in the atmosphere with its high winds and ability to carry radiation over large areas (alas Chernobyl) surely would have caused serious environmental problems.
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From the W54 ejecta? Not at all, really. It's just too small to be noteworthy. About the only residual radiation you need to worry about from nuclear weapons is the stuff left behind by the high yield multistage Teller-Ulam layer cake devices. Think your modern ICBM warhead, complete with heavy-ass U-238 tamper and such. That's your fallout factory, not the small tactical weapons.

Even when the high yield blockbusters are used, they don't really release all that many contaminants. It's only in surface bursts when the fireballs touch the Earth's surface and suck up a whole bunch of dirt, coat it with fission fragments, and scatter it to the wind in the subsequent columnar draft that fallout becomes a problem.

Gravity said:
I think even if hit hard they would not go nuclear, they would just fall into the ocean - the sequence for fusion/fission has to be precise in application and timing.
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Yep. Modern nuclear weapons, or all staged weapons, are one-point-safe. This means that even if the high explosive lenses around the Plutonium trigger (the small fission device that initiates the fusion) detonate randomly, there is less than 1 chance in 1 million that the weapon will produce a nuclear yield. This is because, in implosion designs, the formation of a critical mass is extremely difficult and must be timed with great detail. Each individual high explosive lens must detonate at exactly the same time so as to crush the Plutonium pit inward uniformally. Otherwise the sphere of Pu-239 will just get deformed into an oblong shape and squirt out the side where the explosive is detonating the latest or the slowest.

It's so hard to get a nuke to detonate properly to begin with that the inherent stability of high explosives only makes the chances of an accidental cook-off even more remote.

There's a great many factors to consider in what would happen to the bombs themselves subsequent to the interception. My guess is, the bombs would probably be badly damaged by the explosion and their remains would fall into the sea below.
 
Hypercane said:
Aww. No pictures?
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No good ones of the Tsar mushroom cloud exist, unfortunately. The only ones I've seen have been grainy and out of focuse black and white shots. It's too bad, because it must have been quite a spectacle.

The most photogenic nuclear test shot is, in my opinion, the Romeo shot from Operation Castle. 11 Megatons, the third-largest test the US ever conducted, 26 March 1954:

CromeoB640c20.jpg


This is the same test as the picture in my avatar. ;)
 
Many participating in this thread know more than I do, but I wonder if the statement made near the start of this thread that a fusion bomb requires temperatures like the sun is correct. (I’m not thinking of “cold fusion,” which BTW seems to be coming back to life.) What I am thinking of is the fact that sun fusion is very slow. That is at roughly 10^8 degrees K, each hydrogen ion in the solar core makes “zillions and zillions” of non-fusing collisions before it fuses. Only the most extreme part of the Maxwellian velocity distribution of the protons in the solar core has enough kinetic energy to overcome the electrical force barrier and two of these “hot tail” H ions (protons) must have a nearly “head on” trajectories to fuse. This is why the sun can produce helium for roughly 10 billion years instead going out in one bright nanosecond flash like a bomb.

Thus, I would assume that the fusion bomb reaches much higher temperatures than the sun. If any significant part of the yield is He ion / proton fusion, then even higher temperatures would be required because electric forces to overcome would double. Am I correct Stokes, or anyone else? BTW thanks Stokes, et al. for making me better informed.
 
Truenemo1889 said:
i have 3 three zcar bomba mushroom cloud shots. Does anyone want to see them ?
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Please do. They provide a good perspective of how enormoush the cloud was.

weed_eater_guy said:
wow dude, that pic was sorta arousing, mind if i copy it?
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It's not mine, but even if it was, share the love! Heh.
 
Think your modern ICBM warhead, complete with heavy-ass U-238 tamper and such. That's your fallout factory, not the small tactical weapons.

But back in 1955 for instance or whenever when bombers not ICBM's were the issue. The bombs located in their bomb bays; would they not explode as well? Thus causing the contamination like that of Chernobyl if not worse?
 
Undecided said:
The bombs located in their bomb bays; would they not explode as well? Thus causing the contamination like that of Chernobyl if not worse?
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Nope. Like I said above in response to Gravity, it takes a rather complex sequence of events to cause a nuclear weapon to explode with a nuclear yield. They might be blown apart in the explosion, but only if pretty close to it - remember they're shielded inside the fuselage of the bomber. More likely, they'd just fall into the sea in one piece, albeit heavily damaged. You need to form a critical mass in order to get a nuclear explosion, and the only way to do that is to fire the HE lenses in a very precise sequence timed within 1x10^-6 seconds of each other. Otherwise you're only going to get a small bang that destroys the bomb itself.

There would be a component of contamination from the bomb's fuel as it was dispersed subsequent to blowing apart, but it would be nothing close to a thousandth of what Chernobyl was by function of the mass involved - Chernobyl's unit 2 core had a fuel mass of something like 20 tons. A staged high yield weapon has a fissile material mass of perhaps half a ton, and its isotopes (mainly harmless U-238 with a smaller amount of mildly hazardous Pu-239) are much more innocuous than the Cs-137 and I-131 (among others) lofted skyward by boiling reactor coolant after Chernobyl's containment dome blew off.

If the bomb fell into the sea in one piece, which is the most likely scenario, radiological contamination would be unremarkable. First because the bomb's fuel components, as I said, are largely innocuous. Second, because water (especially mineral-rich seawater) is an excellent shield against all types of radiological contamination. We've dropped multistaged weapons into the ocean several times before and nothing bad has happened ecologically.
 
WellCookedFetus said:
you know we have several thread more related to the topic of nuclear pulse rocket and nuclear space propulsion in general. Why don't you discuse that there? (use the search tool)
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No problem. :D
 
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