North Korea threatens US with a pre-emptive nuclear strike.

kwerk said:
Carl Sagan was a communist, and one of their goals was the nuclear disarmament of the West. He was (probably unwittingly) contributing to a soviet psyops campaign. CND and all those other peace movements were run by communists and their useful idiots.
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I think you mis-understand Carl Sagan tho I will admit I don't have as an in depth knowledge of his philosophy and agenda as I'd like. He wasn't about disarmament as such but trying to bring humanity to see it's foolishness.
 
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kwerk said:
Carl Sagan was a communist, and one of their goals was the nuclear disarmament of the West. He was (probably unwittingly) contributing to a soviet psyops campaign. CND and all those other peace movements were run by communists and their useful idiots.
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The most worrying thing about all that is that you probably believe it.
 
That was indeed a spectacular explosion. The image below plots the scale of the blast against a Paris map. Red is total devastation while yellow is the fireball.

Tsar_Bomba_Paris.png
 
It was also the "cleanest" nuke ever detonated. Very little radation(in comparison). However the full sized one, would have been by and far the dirtiest with the different trigger.
 
Glaucus said:
It was also the "cleanest" nuke ever detonated. Very little radation(in comparison). However the full sized one, would have been by and far the dirtiest with the different trigger.
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Well... proportional to the blast yield, yes. In absolute terms it still dumped out massive amounts of radiation compared to a "regular" sized (~1Mt) two stage thermonuclear weapon.



Hydrogen bombs work on a fusion-fission principle. A fission bomb (i.e. a traditional A-bomb) is detonated, which gives enough energy for nuclear fusion of the hydrogen fuel to occur. It is this hydrogen fusion that releases most of the energy, and is the reason that H-bombs can reach such high yields.

Hydrogen fusion produces far less radiation (proportional to the amount of energy release) than does uranium fission. The "Tsar bomba", having such a massive yield, had ~97% of its energy released from fusion rather than fission, and so was relatively "clean" by comparison to smaller bombs, which necessarily have a greater proportion of the energy coming from uranium fission.

... The "full yield" 100Mt Tsar bomba would have had a third fission stage, which would have meant a much greater proportion of the energy coming from fission (almost 50%), and so would have meant far, far more radiation was released. To quote wikipedia:


It has been estimated that detonating the original 100 Mt design would have released fallout amounting to about 25 percent of all fallout emitted since the invention of nuclear weapons.
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...Sorry for the aside - it's late and this is one of my "pet" topics :p
 
Domo said:
That was indeed a spectacular explosion. The image below plots the scale of the blast against a Paris map.
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Not sure if its accurate but I remember reading once that the full 100mt bomb could, if dropped on London, obliterate everything within the M25, that's a serious amount of carnage.

Of course a subsonic turboprop bomber would have stood a snowballs chance against the RAF's jets, probably wouldn't have even made it over mainland UK, but the idea is still slightly scary :P
 
Duff-Man said:
I agree, but a nuclear deterrent is only useful against nation states. Rogue groups (i.e. "terrorists") who would use nukes without regard for retaliation always going to be a problem, but potentially a separate problem. Trident would do nothing to deter such groups, now or in the future.

I can envisage a day where the threat from nuclear-armed nation states is reduced to the level where we no longer need a national nuclear deterrent. "But it is not this day" [/Aragorn].
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The terrorist threat is a different issue and it is agreed that this will be a threat we cannot react to with a conventional nuclear deterrent. The issue with ridding our nuclear deterrent is that you could rid the bombs but the technology will always exist. We have no idea what might happen in the future and how many kim-jong-nut-cases might appear. I'd much rather we forever have the bomb than ever not in that case.

People dismiss the UK as some subpar state and seem to write us off as delusional for believing we're a big player. Fact is, we are a big players, unfortunately though we're in a league with a few giants in :D
 
ubersonic said:
Not sure if its accurate but I remember reading once that the full 100mt bomb could, if dropped on London, obliterate everything within the M25, that's a serious amount of carnage.

Of course a subsonic turboprop bomber would have stood a snowballs chance against the RAF's jets, probably wouldn't have even made it over mainland UK, but the idea is still slightly scary :P
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I think a 100mt bomb would take out more than that.
 
Von Smallhausen said:
I think a 100mt bomb would take out more than that.
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100Mt blast:





The blue circle is the "air blast radius", where most buildings will be damaged / destroyed. The over-under line for death should be just inside this - the blue circle represents 4.6psi over-pressure, and 5psi is generally taken as the over-under line for survival (i.e. as many inside the line will survive as those outside the line will die).

The much larger orange circle represents the thermal radiation, so there is the possibility for burns or ignition of flammable materials within this radius.

Within the smaller red circle even heavily built concrete buildings will be damaged or destroyed, and fatalities will be near-100%.


So, pretty much, every building within the M25 would be damaged or destroyed.







edit: 10 kilotonne North Korean nuke for comparison (the largest they have detonated, Feb 2013):


 
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The thermal radiation zone would cause immense damage way beyond the air blast radius hence my point that a 100mt blast would take out more than the M25 and within. It's an immense bomb and bigger than anything the Russians or Americans have test detonated.
 
Von Smallhausen said:
The thermal radiation zone would cause immense damage way beyond the air blast radius hence my point that a 100mt blast would take out more than the M25 and within. It's an immense bomb and bigger than anything the Russians or Americans have test detonated.
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My original statement that you had replied too was that everything inside the M25 would be obliterated, I never said stuff outside wouldn't suffer minor to medium damage.
 
Ditto.

Highly doubt it will.

As the media is now starting to point out, other than rhetoric NK is not actually doing anything, no movement of troops, artillery etc.
Even the movement of this missile to the coast is no different to any previous test firings over the past few months.
 
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