Nuclear Weapons

As of late I've been fascinated with Hiroshima, and the effects of a Nuclear Blast; Watching videos of survivors accounts and their works of art depicting what they saw that day and their point of view as well as eyewitness testimony and; It pretty much all paints the same picture; literal Hell on earth, tornados of Fire in the sky, everything on fire, people screaming help and for water, ghost like disfigured victims who's skin had melted off but the finger nails prevented their arm skin from dropping off; Like this;



That's the lucky ones. The horrors of the Flash..

Nuclear Blast Shadows from Hiroshima..





..
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that was 70 years ago, today's 'nukes' are more powerful, more deadly.
More on Hiroshima.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yez_gesztE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp9cgm4Dkzg

 

The largest explosion detonated in history was in fact a thermonuclear bomb; A hydrogen bomb named Tsar Bomba detonated by the Soviet Union October 30th 1961 was a 50 megaton bomb 1, 000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6BspF9Ie9M
Real footage.

 

That is so fake...


EDIT: Yep, found it. It is CGI.
http://home.hiwaay.net/~slone/ishadow.html

Knew that "shadow" is too perfect to have been from Hiroshima or Nagasaki. That, and I had never seen it before.

 

Oh.

 

Was just listening to a reading of the US Army corp Report on Tuesday.
https://librivox.org/the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-by-us-army-corps-of-engineers/

 

PDF can be found here: http://www.abomb1.org/hiroshim/hiro_med.pdf

 

My town, population 30,000, on an early sixties American target list:

View attachment 24662

it was allocated a DSO (designated ground zero) - 1.7 to 9 megaton ground (contact) burst. The number on the left (31) means it was at the beginning of the list and considered very important. In all over a thousand such DSOs was planned in the Warsaw Pact countries.
There was another DSO 25 miles to the West.

The place at that time:

View attachment 24665

 

My town of 300, 000 (Croydon in South London) was once on a target list during the Cold War to be on the receiving end of an H bomb (not an A bomb, but an H bomb) by the Soviet Union.
http://www.croydonguardian.co.uk/news/13924506.Croydon__targeted_for_nuclear_annihilation_by_Russians_in_Cold_War_/

I live 2.2 miles from Croydon Town Centre, according to Google maps.

 

By that time A bombs were mainly relegated to tactical use.
To destroy communication centers like cities are (roads, railways, docks) they planned to use H bombs only.
Some estimated London would get 30 large, about 10 megaton each, nuclear bursts - one third of them would be ground bursts.

London according to Nuclear War: A Guide To Armageddon:
View attachment 24666

 

The only way I could share that FT times report I found on google that I had to do a quick 1 question survey to read is as follows:

Google: financial+times+russian+bomb+plot+london if you wish to see the article. - not a direct link due to the anal nature of the publication.

but here's the best way I could share it.
Screen shot + save + upload... So here goes;
View attachment 24667

 

The brief FT Article as I found it. Either because I'm across the pond or because I run the NoScript add-on for firefox, there was no questionnaire.

 

FT writes that "Washington upset the balance of atomic power by detonating the first hydrogen bomb in 1952", but actually the Soviets worked on their own hydrogen bomb from 1945. They had a working design in 1948, and detonated it at the same time as the US did.
And their bomb was better, it could be used as it was, when the American bomb was a 82-ton POS - impossible to use as a weapon. The US Army got their first usable bombs in 1955.
It's like during the Soviet era, the Americans are guilty of everything no matter what.

 

A few general comments:

• Teller began work in earnest on a hydrogen bomb c.1942, after a conversation with Fermi in late 1941. Teller continued work on this throughout the Manhattan Project. "When work began" is not a good metric of progress or technical prowess.
• The 1949 "layered" Sakharov design was not a versatile weapon in that it had an essentially fixed yield and was a technological dead-end, and was significantly weaker than other hydrogen weapons of the 1950s/1960s period (~400kT yield instead of a yield in the MT or 10s of MT range). Teller had proposed a similar "layered" design in 1946 but it was abandoned as impractical. The Soviets similarly abandoned the design c.1952 in the aftermath of the "Ivy Mike" test and eventually settled on the Teller-Ulam design.
• In nuclear science, a "working design" is not the same as a weapon that is ready to be tested let alone one that has had serial production. This is due to the difficulty in obtaining nuclear material, assembly, etc.
• "Joe 4" was detonated 9 months after "Ivy Mike", and development was accelerated by the "Ivy Mike" test (i.e. the "Joe 4" weapon was not sitting in-inventory waiting to be tested). Yes this was a deliverable weapon but a small one at that, and as per Point 2 was not a versatile design. Additionally, although a deployable weapon, deployment was limited (I've never come across the numbers -- if anyone has them, please post).
• Yes, 1952's "Ivy Mike" test device was not a deploy-able weapon but laid the foundation for practical modern thermonuclear devices (using a staged or Teller-Ulam configuration). At this time the Soviets were pursuing a dead end while the American were on the track of a modern thermonuclear weapon. A weaponized version of "Ivy Mike" was produced 4 months after the "Joe 4" test, but - like "Joe 4" - had limited deployment (in this case, 5 produced and only 1 B36 capable of deployment and retired after ~ 8 months in light of improved weapons as per the next point).
• By the time of the first "true" Soviet hydrogen bomb test (RDS-37) in 1955 that used the Teller-Ulam design, the Americans had already tested several additional hydrogen bombs in Operation Castle. By the end of the 1954, the Americans had deploy-able hydrogen weapons in-arsenal. To date, production led to 5 EC14, 5 EC16, 5 EC17, 10 EC24, unknown number of Mk17 and Mk 24 (note that the EC16s were eventually rebuilt into Mk17 weapons). This was followed by widespread production of the Mk 17 and Mk 24 - in addition to the new B21 - the following year. In short: by the time of the first "real" (i.e Teller-Ulam design) Soviet hydrogen bomb test, the Americans had several hundred of these weapons in-inventory. The first deploy-able American hydrogen weapons were not introduced in 1955.

 

Certainly, the Americans eventually out-produced the Soviets. And their bomb was better, although the Soviet not quite real hydrogen bomb was first.
It wasn't that small too, for the reason the destructive power of nuclear devices don't scale linearly. 1.2MT American bomb wasn't three times more powerful than 400kT Soviet one, but approximately only 2 times more.

But the point was it was a parallel development, although the Soviets constantly claimed the bad Americans created new weapons all the time and they, despite being peaceful like white seals, were forced to do the same.

 

The Americans out-produced the Soviets in the beginning. Given the latency of Soviet nuclear weapons production throughout this period, I suspect that the number of production RDS-6s bombs was <10, and production of these would have overlapped with the early EC14 devices (and possibly others!). The "Joe 4" test occurred in August 1953. In February 1954, the first deploy-able American EC14 bombs were introduced. These were rapidly followed by the other bombs listed in my previous post. How long after the "Joe 4" test were the production Soviet bombs ready? Your statement should be reversed to say "The Soviets eventually out-produced the Americans" (in the 1970s).

Again, if you have access to Soviet production figures, please post them. I'd be very interested in seeing these.

I assume you're referring to the concept of "Equivalent Megatonnage". This is not relevant here, as I do not state that the American weapon was "x" bigger than the Soviet one, nor is there an accepted proportionality factor that makes a bomb considered an hydrogen bomb. I only made the observation that RDS-6s (aka "Joe 4") was a weak hydrogen bomb in an inflexible package, and was a technological dead end. Note that the same yield (400kT) could have been achieved with a conventional fission bomb -- as was the case with the US 500kT Mk18.

Another important factor to consider with a nuclear weapon is the percentage of the yield that is attributed to fusion and the percentage attributed to fission. RDS-6s was ~20% fusion, which is about the maximum limit of such a "layered" design. The Teller-Ulam design can be up to 95% from fusion (although I should note that "Ivy Mike" was only ~23% fusion). If we want to get into semantics here, some in the West refer to RDS-6s as a "boosted" fission bomb due to this low maximum fusion yield. I agree with that opinion. On this topic, note that the first "boosted" fission bomb was the "George" test executed as part of Operation Greenhouse in 1951 -- more than two years before "Joe 4".

It was a parallel development, but chasing a dead end. It was Sakharov's "Third Idea" (Teller-Ulam design) that lead to the first "real" hydrogen bomb in the Soviet Union in 1955. His "First Idea" was a dead end, as was his "Second". I'm unsure what you are referencing with the rest of this. I don't see the relevance of referring to either the USSR or the US as the "bad guys". Both parties were in an arms race -- weapons development is what one does in an arms race.

 

It turns out the shadows are just Atomic Silhouettes of flash burning and not, as I thought, the vaporised remains of matter. :lol:

 

... There goes my Atomic Cremation service idea.

 

I know that there were differences between those designs. The point is nobody knew those details at that time, actually they knew nothing, even the power and the number of their bombs was unknown.
All they knew that on 8 August 1953, four days before the first RDS-6S was detonated, the then Soviet leader Georgy Malenkov declared that the USSR mastered production of hydrogen bombs:

And "both parties were in an arms race" but only one of them declared all the time that its intentions were entire peaceful being itself a hardcore totalitarian country with a huge army.
Whatever nonsense was going internally in the US it was incomparable with the true nonsense going on in the Warsaw Pact countries. At that time the people living there were told that American newspapers demanded that every woman and child in the "peaceful" communist countries was exterminated and their houses razed to the ground. And that was just the beginning. The brainwashing was incredible there.

 

Evidently you aren't aware because you're making sweeping accusations and dismissals with a strong pro-Soviet bias. Who is "nobody"? The physicists certainly were aware of the details. Before testing RDS-6s, Soviet physicists knew that the design was of limited utility. Sakharov's own papers show that he/his team were putting effort into other designs prior to the test exactly for this reason! RDS-6s was pushed through in the aftermath of Ivy Mike not because it was a good design, but because it was guaranteed to work (being that it was effectively a fission bomb with added fusion fuel for some extra kick). Are you saying that the Soviets didn't know the capacity of the Americans and vice-versa? That is certainly correct but I fail to see how that's relevant to your original post (which was, paraphrasing, the Soviets were just as or more advanced as the Americans in the H-bomb race [wrong] and the Americans had a "POS" design [wrong]).

Refer to my original post. There is a big difference between testing and production. A propaganda statement should under no circumstances be considered a reliable source. "Ready to test 1 bomb" =/= "Mastering production". Again, if you have access to the production figures please post because I'd very much like to see them. Until then, I doubt that at the time of "Joe 4", the Soviets had multiple other "hydrogen" bombs in-inventory. Yes, I recognize that both the US and USSR fear-mongered off the other to justify development, testing and deployment of advanced weapons systems. It was not a one-sided street.

I'm totally lost as to what you're referring to here. However, it appears irrelevant to your original thesis. If you want to move onto morality and propagandizing during the Cold War, maybe someone else will pick up from here -- I won't be. If you'd like to discuss the technical aspects, by all means please continue.

Cheers!