"Ivan" the Tsar Bomb :O

I just recently read about this.It is said to be the most powerful bomb ever detonated.So this thing , at 50 megatonnes , makes the more known Fat Man and Little Boy that were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers, having a blast yield more than 1000 times higher than those 2 put together. It was detonated over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago and the shockwave is said to have broken windows in Finland.That's quite a feat. :-/

So my question is: How come that place isn't a radioactive wasteland? :-/

It probably is. But nobody cares. Thats the way our society is ;D

However, there certainly is info on it on the net...

ArRaY

I read about it too.

WEEKEEPEEDEEA said:

The heat from the explosion could have caused third degree burns 100 km (62 miles) away from ground zero.

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I was wondering the same thing :-/
But it's still awesome

Haven't looked it up, but isn't that also an H-bomb?  I assume it is if it is the most powerful detonation ever.  So in an H-bomb, most of the energy comes from the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium.  There is a regular fission bomb, but probably quite a small one since it's really just the trigger for the hydrogen bomb to get fusion to begin.  There is some radiation associated with this, but not to the extent of there being huge numbers of long-lived isotopes hanging around to make the place still uninhabitable.   Eh, I'm wrong again. There will still be plenty of isotopes around during and right after the blast, since a lot of energy results from further fission on not-normally fissile materials, like depleted uranium. But isotopes all decay over time, and get dispersed by wind, water, etc. After a long time, everything is either decayed or dispersed and is in very low concentrations. There are very few places still uninhabitable really.  Even Hiroshima is fully inhabited, a thriving city now. Nature is even reclaiming Chernobyl now, slowly but surely things are growing and living there.

The US also detonated some H-bombs in the Pacific, on Bikini Atoll and such.  There is at least one island that ceased to exist when an H-bomb was detonated on/over it, it completely destroyed the entire island.  The US and Russia both did some pretty terrible things after WWII with not knowing enough about radiation and not telling people the real effects.  Those islands in the Pacific that the US used were inhabited islands, so the people basically got kicked off their home islands.  Back in the US, the Army did testing and drills in Nevada with US soldiers involved, not telling them the real effects.  

I've seen a video of a drill they did with a "tactical" nuclear weapon that could actually be fired from a smallish cannon.  They did this whole drill of there's an enemy army approaching, so the US soldiers hunkered down in trenches, they fired the cannon-based weapon, and the video shows soldiers seeing the explosion, ducking into the trenches until the shockwave went by, then jumping up out of the trenches and running towards the blast zone to fight the fake army/finish them off as part of the drill.  Literally sending hundreds of US troops straight into the blast zone while the mushroom cloud was still in the air.  Imagine the levels of radiation those troops got in an exercise for something that we know now would be a terrible idea (since it is pretty much recognized now that nuclear weapons are not a tactic, they are instead a strategy and are too extreme/damaging to ever be considered simply a tactic).

Get the movie called Trinity Above And Beyond. Its hosted by William Shatner and covers all sorts of tests from the US and former USSR. It has the bomb you speak of near the end. Most of the footage was declassified stuff shortly before the movie was made.

click for the torrent http://isohunt.com/download/51452669/trinity.torrent

I don't think this was the most powerful. Maybe I'm wrong, though. Didn't Russia detonate a 70-megaton bomb a while ago, which was one of the main reasons for the Limited Test Ban Treaty?

-Mark

The US and Russia combined have detonated atomic and hydrogen bombs into the thousands, granted they were over many years, and some below ground, but there is a decent percent of the 'background radiation' that is from nuke tests.

With the collapse of the USSR many old nukes had the cores taken out of them, and they have facilities that store and monitor them, from a video clip it looked like a warehouse with a tank holding the fissile material every 2 feet wall to wall. Scares the crap out of me what would happen if one went off and set them all off.

PyroEric said:

The US and Russia combined have detonated atomic and hydrogen bombs into the thousands, granted they were over many years, and some below ground, but there is a decent percent of the 'background radiation' that is from nuke tests.

With the collapse of the USSR many old nukes had the cores taken out of them, and they have facilities that store and monitor them, from a video clip it looked like a warehouse with a tank holding the fissile material every 2 feet wall to wall. Scares the crap out of me what would happen if one went off and set them all off.

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None of them could go off in the first place, because they are all subcritical mass. Otherwise, they would have gone off immediately. Actually, their ability to start a chain reaction decreases constantly because their radiation is decaying.

-Mark

However, there certainly is info on it on the net...

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Oh sorry , I wanted to include the wikipedia article but forgot. ;D

Yes after reading more I found out that not only the blast at Chernobyl was devastating, but the fact that an estimated 50 tonnes of radioactive stuff were released into the atmosphere.That's way more than any bomb I guess.Pretty scary stuff. These things are just too powerful and too damaging to be tested anywhere on Earth. : If they were able to make a bomb capable of a 100 kiloton blast in 1961, who knows what way more powerful and efficient stuff they can make now.

The "Tsar Bomba" was supposed to be over 100Mt but they had to reduce the size of it because it would have blown the plane out of the sky, and did A LOT more damage and would have caused too much nuclear fallout. Even at 50Mt the plane that dropped it had to have special heat and radiation shielding .

-Adam

The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth.

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Since 50 Mt is 2.1×10[sup]17 [/sup]joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.4×10[sup]24 [/sup]watts or 5.4 yottawatts. This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of the power output of the Sun.[10]

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Considering they take the cores out of the bombs at that facility an accident could possibly result in a supercritical reaction. Or if some wack job decided to attack the place, even a conventional explosion would blow enough material into the air to make a very large area uninhabitable.

Plutonium is not only radioactive, its one of the most powerful neurotoxins in the world.

The decay rate is negligible when you are talking about uranium enriched to 90% or plutonium at 100%.

One going off would provide more than enough neutrons to set the others off, even if they dont result in an efficient reaction, there is more than enough mass to result in one hell of a mess.

this was the explosion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfoQsZa8F1c&feature=related

I'd like to see the detonation of a 100MT bomb on the moon.

It's insane how much power these things release.

RA_pierce said:

I'd like to see the detonation of a 100MT bomb on the moon.

It's insane how much power these things release.

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1.4% of the power of the sun, and thats only for 50Mt