Xtra News Community 2
March 29, 2024, 04:38:08 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Welcome to Xtra News Community 2 — please also join our XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP.
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links BITEBACK! XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP Staff List Login Register  

The biggest ever nuclear detonation…

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: The biggest ever nuclear detonation…  (Read 209 times)
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« on: August 29, 2017, 05:09:47 pm »


from BBC News....

The monster atomic bomb that was too big to use

In 1961, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb so powerful that it would have
been too big to use in war. And it had far-reaching effects of a very different kind.


By STEPHEN DOWLING | Wednesday, 16 August 2017



ON THE morning of 30th October 1961, a Soviet Tu-95 bomber took off from Olenya airfield in the Kola Peninsula in the far north of Russia.

The Tu-95 was a specially modified version of a type that had come into service a few years earlier; a huge, swept-wing, four-engined monster tasked with carrying Russia's arsenal of nuclear bombs. 

The last decade had seen enormous strides in Soviet nuclear research. World War Two had placed the US and USSR in the same camp, but the post-war period had seen relations chill and then freeze. And the Soviets, presented with a rivalry against the world's only nuclear superpower, had only one option — to catch up. Fast.

On 29th August 1949, the Soviets had tested their first nuclear device — known as ‘Joe-1’ in the West — on the remote steppes on what is now Kazakhstan, using intelligence gleaned from infiltrating the US's atomic bomb programme. In the intervening years, their test programme had surged in leaps and starts, detonating more than 80 devices; in 1958 alone, the Soviet tested 36 nuclear bombs.

The Tu-95 carried an enormous bomb underneath it, a device too large to fit inside the aircraft's internal bomb-bay, where such munitions would usually be carried. The bomb was 8 metres long (26 feet), had a diameter of nearly 2.6m (7ft) and weighed more than 27 tonnes. It was, physically, very similar in shape to the ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ bombs which had devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade-and-a-half earlier. The bomb had become known by a myriad of neutral technical designations — Project 27000, Product Code 202, RDS-220, and Kuzinka Mat (Kuzka's Mother). Now it is better known as Tsar Bomba — the ‘Tsar's bomb’.


The remote archipelago of Novaya Zemlya was selected as the target.
The remote archipelago of Novaya Zemlya was selected as the target.

Tsar Bomba was no ordinary nuclear bomb. It was the result of a feverish attempt by the USSR's scientists to create the most powerful nuclear weapon yet, spurred on by Premier Nikita Khruschchev's desire to make the world tremble at the might of Soviet technology. It was more than a metal monstrosity too big to fit inside even the largest aircraft — it was a city destroyer, a weapon of last resort.

The Tupolev, painted bright white in order to lessen the effects of the bomb's flash, arrived at its target point. Novya Zemlya, a sparsely populated archipelago in the Barents Sea, above the frozen northern fringes of the USSR. The Tupolev's pilot, Major Andrei Durnovtsev, brought the aircraft to Mityushikha Bay, a Soviet testing range, at a height of about 34,000ft (10km). A smaller, modified Tu-16 bomber flew beside, ready to film the ensuing blast and monitor air samples as it flew from the blast zone.

In order to give the two planes a chance to survive — and this was calculated as no more than a 50% chance — Tsar Bomba was deployed by a giant parachute weighing nearly a tonne. The bomb would slowly drift down to a predetermined height — 13,000ft (3,940m) — and then detonate. By then, the two bombers would be nearly 50km (30 miles) away. It should be far enough away for them to survive.

Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32, Moscow time. In a flash, the bomb created a fireball five miles wide. The fireball pulsed upwards from the force of its own shockwave. The flash could be seen from 1,000km (630 miles) away.

The bomb's mushroom cloud soared to 64km (40 miles) high, with its cap spreading outwards until it stretched nearly 100km (63 miles) from end to end. It must have been, from a very far distance perhaps, an awe-inspiring sight.

On Novaya Zemlya, the effects were catastrophic. In the village of Severny, some 55km (34 miles) from Ground Zero, all houses were completely destroyed (this is the equivalent to Gatwick airport being destroyed by a bomb that had fallen on Central London). In Soviet districts hundreds of miles from the blast zone, damage of all kinds — houses collapsing, roofs falling in, damage to doors, windows shattering — were reported. Radio communications were disrupted for more than an hour.


This mock-up of Tsar Bomba shows the weapon's enormous size.
This mock-up of Tsar Bomba shows the weapon's enormous size.

Durovtsev's Tupolev was lucky to survive; the blast wave from Tsar Bomba caused the giant bomber to plummet more than 1,000m (3,300ft) before the pilot could regain control.

One Soviet cameraman who witnessed the detonation said:

“The clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash. The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards... Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.”

Tsar Bomba unleashed almost unbelievable energy — now widely agreed to be in the order of 57 megatons, or 57 million tons of TNT. That is more than 1,500 times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War Two. Sensors registered the bomb's blast wave orbiting the Earth not once, not twice, but three times.

Such a blast could not be kept secret. The US had a spyplane only tens of kilometres from the blast. It carried a special optical device called a bhangmeter useful for calculating the yield of far-off nuclear explosions. Data from this aircraft — codenamed Speedlight — was used by the Foreign Weapons Evaluation Panel to calculate this mystery test's yield.

International condemnation soon followed, not only from the US and Britain, but from some of the USSR's Scandinavian neighbours such as Sweden. The only silver lining in this mushroom cloud was that because the fireball had not made contact with the Earth, there was a surprisingly low amount of radiation.

It could have been very different. But for a change in its design to rein in some of the power it could unleash, Tsar Bomba was supposed to have been twice as powerful.


ONE OF the architects of this formidable device was a Soviet physicist called Andrei Sakharov — a man who would later become world famous for his attempts to rid the world of the very weapons he had helped create. He was a veteran of the Soviet atomic bomb programme from the very beginning, and had been part of the team that had built some of the USSR's earliest atom bombs.

Sakharov began work on a layered fission-fusion-fission device, a bomb that would create further energy from the nuclear processes in its core. This involved wrapping deuterium — a stable isotope of hydrogen — with a layer of unenriched uranium. The uranium would capture neutrons from the igniting deuterium and would itself start to react. Sakharov called it the sloika, or layered cake. This breakthrough allowed the USSR to build its first hydrogen bomb, a device much more powerful than the atomic bombs of only a few years before.

Sakharov had been told by Khrushchev to come up with a bomb that was more powerful than anything else tested so far.


The Tsar Bomba was carried to the drop zone by a modified version of the Tu-95 ‘Bear’ bomber.
The Tsar Bomba was carried to the drop zone by a modified version of the Tu-95 ‘Bear’ bomber.

The Soviet Union needed to show that it could pull ahead of the US in the nuclear arms race, according to Philip Coyle, the former head of US nuclear weapons testing under President Bill Clinton, who spent 30 years helping design and test atomic weapons. “The US had been very far ahead because of the work it had done to prepare the bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then it did a large number of tests in the atmosphere before the Russians even did one.

“We were ahead and the Soviets were trying to do something to tell the world that they were to be reckoned with. Tsar Bomba was primarily designed to cause the world to sit up and take notice of the Soviet Union as an equal,” says Coyle.

The original design — a three layered bomb, with uranium layers separating each stage — would have had a yield of 100 megatons — 3,000 times the size of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The Soviets had already tested large devices in the atmosphere, equivalent to several megatons, but this would have been far, far bigger. Some scientists began to believe it was too big.

With such immense power, there would be no guarantee that the giant bomb wouldn't swamp the north of the USSR with a vast cloud of radioactive fallout.

That was of particular concern to Sakharov, says Frank von Hippel, a physicist and head of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

“He was really apprehensive about the amount of radioactivity it would create,” he says, “and the genetic effects that could have on future generations”.

“It was the beginning of his journey from being a bomb designer to becoming a dissident.”

Before it was ready to be tested, the uranium layers that would have helped the bomb achieve its enormous yield were replaced with layers of lead, which lessened the intensity of the nuclear reaction.

The Soviets had built a weapon so powerful that they were unwilling to even test it at its full capacity. And that was only one of the problems with this devastating device.

The Tu-95 bombers built to carry the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons were designed to carry much lighter weapons. The Tsar Bomba was so big that it couldn't be placed on a missile, and so heavy that the planes designed to carry it wouldn't have been able to take them all the way to their targets with enough fuel. And, if the bomb was as powerful as intended, the aircraft would have been on a one-way mission anyway.


The power of the bomb persuaded nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov to renounce nuclear weapons.
The power of the bomb persuaded nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov to renounce nuclear weapons.

Even where nuclear weapons are concerned, there can be such as thing as too powerful, says Coyle, who is now a leading member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a think tank based in Washington DC. “It's hard to find a use for it unless you want to knock down very large cities,” he says. “It simply would be too big to use.”

Von Hippel agrees. “These things [large free-falling nuclear bombs] were designed that if you wanted to be able to destroy the target even if you were a mile off, it could be done. Things moved in a different direction — increasing missile accuracy and multiple warheads.”

Tsar Bomba had other effects. Such was the concern over the test — which was 20% of the size of every atmospheric test combined before it, von Hippel says — that it hastened the end of atmospheric testing in 1963. Von Hippel says that Sakharov was particularly worried by the amount of radioactive carbon 14 that was being emitted into the atmosphere — an isotope with a particularly long half-life. “This has been partly mitigated by all the fossil fuel carbon in the atmosphere which has diluted it,” he says.

Sakharov worried that a bomb bigger than the one tested would not be repelled by its own blastwave — like Tsar Bomba had been — and would cause global fallout, spreading toxic dirt across the planet.

Sakharov become an ardent supporter of the 1963 Partial Test Ban, and an outspoken critic of nuclear proliferation and, in the late 1960s, anti-missile defences that he feared would spur another nuclear arms race. He became increasingly ostracised by the state, a dissident against oppression who would in 1975 be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and referred to as “the conscience of mankind”, says von Hippel.

Tsar Bomba, it seems, may have had fallout of a very different kind.


http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170816-the-monster-atomic-bomb-that-was-too-big-to-use
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #1 on: August 29, 2017, 05:10:20 pm »



Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 
aDjUsToR
Part-Of-The-Furniture Member
*
Posts: 882


« Reply #2 on: August 29, 2017, 06:19:08 pm »

They also designed a doomsday bomb. Designed to contaminate the whole planet with nuclear fallout. I believe it was designed to be packed into a ship. Apparently it was never built because it was too evil.
Report Spam   Logged
Donald
Part-Of-The-Furniture Member
*
Posts: 898



« Reply #3 on: August 29, 2017, 06:24:43 pm »

Yup...there is no doubt....nuclear weapons have saved thousands and maybe millions of lives over the years....excellent tool to keep peace between major powers😜
Report Spam   Logged
aDjUsToR
Part-Of-The-Furniture Member
*
Posts: 882


« Reply #4 on: August 29, 2017, 07:48:26 pm »

It would have been a good tool if despot regimes were resolutely stopped very early in their tracks from obtaining them. The democratic world hasn't done this and passed the menace of these crackpot nations onto their own children.
Report Spam   Logged
Donald
Part-Of-The-Furniture Member
*
Posts: 898



« Reply #5 on: August 29, 2017, 07:51:57 pm »

Yes...that op is the fly in the ointment😳
Report Spam   Logged
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #6 on: August 29, 2017, 07:58:04 pm »

Yup...there is no doubt....nuclear weapons have saved thousands and maybe millions of lives over the years....excellent tool to keep peace between major powers


That's why North Korea has developed a nuclear deterrent....to deter America from invading them like they did to Iraq because Iraq didn't have a nuclear deterrent.

And if Trump rips up the Iraq agreement, you can guarantee that Iran will quickly develop a nuclear deterrent to guard against America invading them.

So, yep, for countries such as North Korea and Iran, a nuclear deterrent is an excellent tool to keep the peace by keeping the warmongering Americans at bay.

« Last Edit: August 29, 2017, 09:09:58 pm by Kiwithrottlejockey » Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 
Donald
Part-Of-The-Furniture Member
*
Posts: 898



« Reply #7 on: August 29, 2017, 08:17:46 pm »

Ktj...."And if Trump rips up the Iraq agreement, you can guarantee that Iraq will quickly develop a nuclear deterrent to guard against America invading them"


....sorry...have I missed something....or are you a very confused individual....what's the agreement about with iraq😳
Report Spam   Logged
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #8 on: August 29, 2017, 09:11:08 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

In direct challenge to Trump, Iran's president says
it could restart its nuclear program ‘within hours’


President's warning to Trump comes in response to ballistic missile sanctions.

By RAMIN MOSTAGHIM and SHASHANK BENGALI | 10:45AM PDT - Tuesday, August 15, 2017

In a direct response to new sanctions passed by the U.S., Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's warning challenged the Trump administration's confrontational policies. — Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/European Pressphoto Agency
In a direct response to new sanctions passed by the U.S., Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's warning challenged the Trump
administration's confrontational policies. — Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/European Pressphoto Agency.


IRAN's president on Tuesday warned it could restart its nuclear program “within hours or days” if the Trump administration continued its confrontational policies toward the Islamic Republic.

President Hassan Rouhani's remarks were a direct response to Trump's increasingly bellicose rhetoric toward Iran and his announcement of fresh sanctions on individuals and businesses connected to Iran's ballistic missile program.

Trump has also pledged to undo the 2015 agreement that Iran signed with the United States and five other world powers under which it suspended activities that could have led to the production of a nuclear bomb in exchange for a sharp reduction in international sanctions that had hammered its economy.

Rouhani told lawmakers in Iran that “sanctions and bullying” by Trump administration officials were the type of “failed policies that forced their predecessors to the negotiating table” to reach the landmark nuclear deal, one of the Obama administration's signature foreign policy achievements.

Rouhani said Iran could quickly resume its nuclear activities and increase its quantities of enriched uranium — a precursor to building a nuclear bomb — to levels higher than before the agreement.

“If they want to return to the previous position, definitely, not within a week or a month, but within hours or days, we will be back to a much more advanced stage than we were during our last negotiations,” the state IRNA news agency quoted Rouhani as saying.

Rouhani has staked his presidency on the nuclear deal, and won reelection this year in part because the agreement remains widely popular in Iran, even among anti-Western hard-liners who believe it averted a military confrontation with the U.S.

It was the first time Rouhani threatened to break the agreement, a sign of how rapidly the war of words between the U.S. and Iran has escalated since Trump took office.

It was not clear if Rouhani's comments were bluster or if Iran could indeed restart its nuclear activities quickly. United Nations inspectors have access to Iran's nuclear facilities under the agreement and have said the Islamic Republic is complying with its terms.

But last week, the head of Iran's atomic energy agency and an architect of the 2015 agreement, Ali Akbar Salehi, suggested that Iran could return to 20% uranium enrichment levels “in four or five days … to catch [the U.S.] by surprise.”

Congress has repeatedly certified that Iran is complying with the agreement — as it is required to do every 90 days — but Trump has called the deal “a disaster” and suggested that he would push to have the certification revoked.

Meanwhile, he has ratcheted up pressure on Iran by announcing a massive arms deal with rival Saudi Arabia and unilateral economic sanctions related to Iran’s ballistic missile program. The missile program is not covered by the nuclear agreement, but Iran believes any additional U.S. sanctions violate the spirit of the deal.

Iran responded this week by announcing increased spending on its military, including an additional $300 million for the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary organization led by hard-liners.

It also announced that the government would prepare a strategic plan to combat the United States' “hegemony-seeking policies” and “interference” in the Middle East.

“Iran is sure that the sanctions are a failure,” said Hamid Reza Taraghi, a political analyst close to the supreme leader. “What President Rouhani said today is a threat against America's threat.”


Special correspondent Ramin Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Los Angeles Times staff writer Shashank Bengali from Mumbai, India.

• Ramin Mostaghim has been the Los Angeles Times' Tehran-based special correspondent since early 2007. He has worked as a journalist, producer and translator for Iranian and Western media for three decades. Since joining the L.A. Times, he has covered Iran's capture and release of British sailors in 2007, the parliamentary elections of 2008, the disputed presidential election of 2009 and its violent aftermath. He graduated with a degree in zoology from Razi University in Kermanshah and maintains strong personal connections to Iran's Kurdish western provinces and northern Caspian Sea region.

• Shashank Bengali is the Los Angeles Times' South Asia correspondent, covering a stretch of countries from Iran to Myanmar. He joined the L.A. Times in 2012 as a national security reporter in the Washington bureau. He has reported from more than 50 countries since beginning his career with McClatchy Newspapers, where he served as a foreign correspondent in Africa and the Middle East. In 2016, he shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the L.A. Times staff for coverage of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California Originally from Cerritos, California, Shashank holds degrees in journalism and French from USC and a master's in public policy from Harvard. He lives with his wife in Mumbai, India.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iran-nuclear-20170815-story.html
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #9 on: August 29, 2017, 09:11:54 pm »


from The Washington Post....

EDITORIAL: Trump may be planning to make
a very bad decision on the Iran deal


The deal needs to be extended, not ended.

By EDITORIAL BOARD | 7:10PM EDT - Sunday, August 20, 2017

President Trump walks across the tarmac before boarding Air Force One at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Hagerstown, Maryland, on August 18th. — Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press.
President Trump walks across the tarmac before boarding Air Force One at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Hagerstown, Maryland,
on August 18th. — Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press.


DESPITE MUCH HEATED RHETORIC, the Trump administration is doing little to counter Iranian aggression. In Syria, its strategy of striking deals with Russia has opened the way for Tehran's forces to establish control over a corridor between Damascus and Baghdad. In Afghanistan, Iran is steadily building a strategic position even as President Trump balks at a plan to strengthen U.S. support for the Afghan government. In Yemen, the United States enables its Persian Gulf allies to pursue an unwinnable proxy war with Tehran whose main result has been the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

In only one area has the Islamic Republic's toxic ambition been relatively contained: the production of material for use in nuclear warheads. According to international inspectors and the U.S. intelligence community, Iran has largely abided by the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, which greatly reduced its stockpile of enriched unranium and placed strict limits on its nuclear activities. If the regime continues complying, it could be a decade or more before Iran could again threaten to become a nuclear power. Yet perversely, Mr. Trump is matching his passivity toward Iran's regional meddling with an apparent determination to torpedo the nuclear pact.

After grudgingly certifying in July that Iran was meeting the terms of the deal — a test mandated by Congress every 90 days — Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal that he planned to find the regime non-compliant when the next certification is due in October. How to reach such a finding if the intelligence community judges otherwise? According to Foreign Policy, Mr. Trump ordered a group of political aides, including now- fired strategist Stephen K. Bannon, to cook up a rationale — something that presumably will be made easier by their lack of data or expertise.

The real experts puzzle over what Mr. Trump could hope to accomplish by announcing that Iran is non-compliant — other than satisfying what appears to be his compulsive urge to spoil President Barack Obama's legacies. Without proof of Iranian non-compliance, U.S. partners in the nuclear deal, including the European Union, Russia and China, would surely refuse to support the nullification of the accord or the reimposition of sanctions. Iran might respond to decertification by resuming uranium enrichment, even if Mr. Trump did not reimpose U.S. sanctions. That would present the White House with the ugly old problem of how to stop Iranian progress toward a bomb. Could Mr. Trump credibly threaten Iran with military action even while using the threat of force against North Korea?

The principal weakness of the nuclear accord is its temporary nature. Most of its provisions will expire in eight to 13 years, leaving Iran free to stockpile an unlimited quantity of nuclear materials. It follows that the challenge for a rational U.S. administration would be not how to get out of the deal now, but how to extend its restrictions into the future. U.S. partners would likely be ready to co-operate in a strategy aimed at that goal — and they ought to be pressed to do more to stop Iran's non-nuclear misbehavior. But there is no reason to expect support for a foolish U.S. move that would rekindle a dormant Iranian threat while tolerating its truly dangerous behavior.


__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Carl Bildt: If Trump blows up the Iran deal, he'll cause a meltdown in Europe, too

 • Boris Johnson: Without the Iran nuclear agreement, the world would be in supreme danger


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-may-be-planning-to-make-a-very-bad-decision-on-the-iran-deal/2017/08/20/1faf5642-81e2-11e7-b359-15a3617c767b_story.html
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 
Donald
Part-Of-The-Furniture Member
*
Posts: 898



« Reply #10 on: August 29, 2017, 09:32:51 pm »

Ktj...."And if Trump rips up the Iraq agreement, you can guarantee that Iraq will quickly develop a nuclear deterrent to guard against America invading them"


....sorry...have I missed something....or are you a very confused individual....what's the agreement about with iraq😳
Report Spam   Logged

Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Open XNC2 Smileys
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy
Page created in 0.063 seconds with 15 queries.