• Question: What is the most destructive bomb ever made? Can we mix bombs ?

    Asked by Harry to Anna, James, Joe, Leonie, Olivia on 17 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Joe Spencer

      Joe Spencer answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Harry,
      There’s lots of destructive bombs, nowadays in terms of destruction it’s probably the hydrogen bomb. It’s a type of nuclear warhead, but instead of fission, it harnesses the enormous power of nuclear fusion.
      According to the internet the most powerful was detonated in 1961
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

      To answer the second part, a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) does actually mix two types of bombs, initially it’s a fission bomb, a uranium based explosion that causes so much heat and pressure it can ignite the secondary effect, which is the fusion fuel that causes the thermonuclear explosion. So yeah, two bombs in one essentially.

    • Photo: Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes

      Leonie Oostwoud Wijdenes answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      I don’t know much about making bombs. The only bomb I know how to make is the one in which you drop Mentos into a bottle of diet coke 🙂

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Hi Harry,

      The most destructive bomb dropped in war was the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had a power of 15 thousand tonnes of TNT explosive (Hiroshime “Little Boy”) and 20 thousand tonnes of TNT (Nagasaki, “Fat Man”).

      The most powerful nuclear weapon detonated is the Tsar Bomba device, which had an explosion of 50 thousand tousand tonnes of TNT (a 50 mega-ton device).

      I’m a bit of a Cold War geek, a period of time that has always interested me because in some ways it is incredible we made it through alive and in others it is obvious why we did.

      Generally each Inter-Continental Ballistic Millsles (ICBMs) would carry 8 1-5 megaton war heads, each of these sufficient to wipe out a city the size of New York. A similar ability is held by the UK’s Trident submarine system.

      During the height of the Cold War, both sides had about 5000 warheads pointing at each other, enough to kill each others countries 2 or 3 times over.

Comments

  • Photo: Harry

    Harry commented on :

    Is all of the bomb filled with the exploding stuff or is it just the tip?

  • Photo: Joe

    Joe commented on :

    James. I guess you’ve seen this

    quite scary

  • Photo: James

    James commented on :

    Yep. I remember meeting a guy during my undergraduate who was doing a PhD in the seismic waves used to detect whether there were secret underground nuclear weapons testing.

    Both cool and scary in equal measure!

  • Photo: Joe

    Joe commented on :

    Harry.
    Not all of it is the bomb, a fission bomb uses a clump of uranium about the size of a fist and has a hole in it, the basic premise is you need to make the Uranium reach critical mass. so they shoot one bit of uranium into the other using a gun like thing. So it’s really a small part, the rest is complicated electronics and devices to make it work.
    I have a friend who 30+ years ago worked in a nuclear testing site. They’d spend six months or so wiring up a bomb underground just to detonate it, and then they get all the data and information on that before all their equipment is destroyed.

    • Photo: James

      James commented on :

      The clever part (if such a word applies to nuclear weapons) is that they include as much material in the bomb design, such as the bomb casing that will join in the reaction and the detonation.

      They are fascinating things, but also so incredibly devastating.