The most powerful nuke ever made had a blast yield of 50 megatons.

>>7729678
Anything with a yeld of more than 100 megatons will produce a fireball that will be bigger than the atmosphere, dispersing most of its power in the outer space.

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I don't know, but here's a proportional view of the blast size.

Beyond 50 megatons we don't have any data, so we would have to speculate. I would imagine a blast radius estimate would come from an inverse square or inverse cube calculation, in which case you would get 2-5 times the blast radius of tsar bomba.
Here's a cute interactive calculator:
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/classic/
>>7729703
I'm happy this is wrong so we don't have to worry about 50 km nuclear fireballs.

>>7729706
Yeah, that bar graph is really really stupid. Popular mechanics had it's shit together at one point...

>>7729711
> Popular mechanics had it's shit together at one point...
It did?
A google imagesearch, 'popular mechanics 1910' and 'popular mechanics 1920' reveals ill-conceived sensationalist bullshit.

>>7729719
I was told by a scientifically literate person I trust that the articles would discuss math and science topics in a sophisticated way. With equations even. Let me check their website...
>nothing but clickbait
If it did it does no more.

>>7729736
It's been like that for well over a decade now, but once it was reasonably respectable. The last issue I read talked about an anti-gravity device on the cover, but when I opened up the article it was a dude who made some clothes you can inflate with helium.

The area of the surface devastated by the blast scales sub-linearly with the yield. That's why nobody tried to outdo Tsar Bomba and modern strategic nukes are around 250-750 kilotons.

Your bomb 20 times as powerful as Tsar Bomba would do less than 20 times as much damage, even if there was an unlimited cityscape to bomb.

Incidentally, Tsar Bomba was nerfed with a lead, rather than uranium, case. The fast fusion neutrons could have triggered ordinary U238 to fission, doubling the yield. However, that would have increased the radioactive fallout, which the testers wanted to avoid.

U238 is not capable of sustaining a chain reaction (fissile), but it can undergo fission (fissionable).

>>7729678
It would work best by being used below the ground. If you bored in a few hundred feet down, the resultant seismic effects would probably be on the order of magnitude of a 9.3 earthquake over an area several hundred square miles in size.

Basically, you'd want to incorporate it into a bunker buster style of weapon so that the majority of the energy didn't just shoot upwards into space, but instead radiated out through the ground in a fashion that could annihilate the entire city of Los Angeles with ease.

>tfw all the big bombs are radioactive
>tfw can't play around with huge explosions because you'd irradiate shit
if nukes weren't radioactive i'm sure testing them would have little to no problems even if they're 1000mt
a 1000mt blast could give us some insight into cool shit and also it would look cool so that's cool shit too

>>7729797
There are some ideas about pure fusion weapons.

>>7729785
Most of it would just go to melting rock, and not nearly as much rock as you might imagine. Only about 0.5% of the energy released by an underground nuclear blast gets converted to seismic energy.

The energy released by nukes is small fry next to the energy of natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes.

You could just carry on scaling up the nuke, but 1 gigaton is not major earthquake league.

A nuclear detonation fills a sphere with energy so doubling the yield doubles the volume, thus the damage scales very slowly.

Or to put it in simpler number:
Yield: 1000 x
Blast radius: 10x
Blast area 100x.

This means gigantic nuclear bombs are useless and the preferred solution then is to use MIRV - Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles, basically nuclear carpet bombing.

This way you get synergistic effect between adjacent detonations since the combined over pressure from two or more bombs will exceed the damage threshold for structures.


During the Cold war it was said that the average distance between German towns was 10 kiloton.

>>7729678
Ignition of the atmosphere, burning all life away.

>>7730156
What if you berried it about halfway to the moon's core?

Would it crack open the moon?

>>7730208
Berried it in ur mum if u know what im sayin lolol.

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>>7730208
It would probably just cause a large crater and eject some mass. It would probably not crack it open like a beer can.

>>7729810
A gigaton bomb would need to be buried ten to twenty kilometers below surface in order to contain it and it would vaporise a kilometer radius sphere of rock. It's effects would be noticed in a hundred kilometer radius, probably fucking with so many underground structures it's not even funny.

>>7730794
that sounds fucking cool

it would be 20 times more powerful than the 50mt one

1000 megaton nuke would engulfed the atmosphere with fallout. This create nuclear winter. 100 megaton is technically enough.

>>7731539
Nigga it's debris from the ground that causes nuclear winter, not radioisotopes from the bomb. Put enough dust in the air and the temperature drops due to sunlight stopped from reaching the ground and increased cloud formation.

>Delivery size limits can be estimated to ascertain limits to delivery of extremely high yield weapons. If the full 250 metric ton payload of the Antonov An-225 aircraft could be used, a 1.3 gigaton bomb could be delivered. Likewise, the maximum limit of a missile-delivered weapon is determined by the missile gross payload capacity. The large Russian SS-18 ICBM has a payload capacity of 7,200 kg, so the calculated maximum delivered yield would be 37.4 megatons of TNT. A Saturn V-scale missile could deliver over 120 tons, giving a calculated maximum yield of about 700 megatons.

>>7731543
You need a more power for that, compare it to volcanic eruptions. Even Tambora's winter didn't last forever.

>>7731561
You need Yellowstone, bruh. Supervolcano will rape the planet.

>>7731588
There are no believable recordings from that time.
A nuclear bomb with the power of the Yellowstone would be bad for a lot of reasons.

>>7729678

I don't know, but I'd love to see it. Just detonate it on the other side of the planet from me.

>>7730956
Sounds horrible tßh. If you fucked up with the depth (and we aren't really good at burying shit 20km deep), you'd have much worse consequences, including a 5km radius crater and major destruction on 150km+ scale. Literally only good use for this is terraforming Mars, where you'd detonate such bombs underneath the polar caps. If you manage not to blast the CO2 literally out of orbit, you only need a ton or so of mass equivalent to heat up the planet.

>>7731669
Actually, my bad, it'd take on the order of 10^7 kg. I doubt it would be possible without major fucking up the whatever climate Mars has. Releasing that much energy would create insane winds and the resulting dust would negate much of the increases CO2's effect.

>>7729678
what if the tzar bomb set off the global warning?

>>7729678
>What if you made a nuke with a 1000 megaton blast yield?

you would waste a lot of resources into a huge useless explosion. Multistage nuclear bombs have no upper limit, they can be arbitrarily large, but there's a reason no country mass produced such weapons, even though they could.

>>7729678

An air burst above one megaton is dumping the vast majority of its energy into space through the upper atmosphere. I can't imagine that wastage becoming less pronounced as the yield increases further.

>>7731885
>>7731930
What if you bury it half a mile underground?