Guess the MegaTons of This Nuke

[DBTrek]

You forgot to add the radioactive fallout, click on radioactive fallout in the settings and then look again.

Wild, it shoots a ray of fallout across Redmond which would be bad news for Microsoft. But South, West, And North Seattle still seemed to make out ok. Not that I’d want to walk around in a city whose center is a radioactive crater or anything. Just surprised so much of the city would survive a 50kt strike.

[heydaralon]

North Korea’s 50kiloton nuke doesn’t even get all of Seattle, what a joke.

Good luck getting it over the pacific. Those retards have been struggling with the missile delivery aspect of their nukes for quite some time. How many nukes are they supposed to have at this point?

[Smitty-48]

You forgot to add the radioactive fallout, click on radioactive fallout in the settings and then look again.

Wild, it shoots a ray of fallout across Redmond which would be bad news for Microsoft. But South, West, And North Seattle still seemed to make out ok. Not that I’d want to walk around in a city whose center is a radioactive crater or anything. Just surprised so much of the city would survive a 50kt strike.

Well, in reality tho, the bomb is bigger than 50 kts, 50 kts is not a hydrogen bomb, it's gonna be more like 500 kts, and when I airburst 500 kts over Capitol Hill, I get 284,810 killed, 343,320 wounded.

[Smitty-48]

North Korea’s 50kiloton nuke doesn’t even get all of Seattle, what a joke.

Good luck getting it over the pacific. Those retards have been struggling with the missile delivery aspect of their nukes for quite some time. How many nukes are they supposed to have at this point?

No they haven't, they just test shot the Hwasong-15 ICBM; 4500 nautical miles straight up into orbit, which equates to about 10,000 nautical miles if they shot that across the Pacific, which means they can hit the east coast, NYC is in range now.

[DBTrek]

Well, in reality tho, the bomb is bigger than 50 kts, 50 kts is not a hydrogen bomb, it's gonna be more like 500 kts, and when I airburst 500 kts over Capitol Hill, I get 284,810 killed, 343,320 wounded.

Well ... yeah, 500kts over Seattle pretty much gets the whole thing (barely). But the experts at Wikipedia say Kim Jong Un can only swing a 50kt stick. So you’re talking about a payload 10x stronger than he can deliver.

[Smitty-48]

Miniaturization is hard, megatons are easy.

If they don't bother to MIRV, and just mount a unitary warhead, they at this point would have the capability to deliver something like 5 megatons, to a range of 10,000 nautical miles.

Once they've mastered the two stage design, all you have to do to make it multimegaton, is add a few more liters of lithium deuterium.

[DBTrek]

Damn! Dropping Tsar Bomba on Seattle reaches from the Olympic Penninsula to the friggin Cascades. Let’s leave Russia alone.


Fuuuuuuck that

[Smitty-48]

The power of the H-bomb is all about fusion, the hard part is getting the first stage plutonium implosion to initiate fusion in the second stage, but if you can do that, then the power is exponential, because the hydrogen in an H-bomb is contained in a powder called lithium deuteride, and it only takes a relatively small amount of that, to get to megatons.

[DBTrek]

The power of the H-bomb is all about fusion, the hard part is getting the first stage plutonium implosion to initiate fusion in the second stage, but if you can do that, then the power is exponential, because the hydrogen in an H-bomb is contained in a powder called lithium deuterium, and it only takes a relatively small amount of that, to get to megatons.

So lithium deuterium is like magic, nuclear, fairy dust? That’s what you’re telling me? Just sprinkle a dash on to turn your kilotons into megatons?

[Smitty-48]

The power of the H-bomb is all about fusion, the hard part is getting the first stage plutonium implosion to initiate fusion in the second stage, but if you can do that, then the power is exponential, because the hydrogen in an H-bomb is contained in a powder called lithium deuterium, and it only takes a relatively small amount of that, to get to megatons.

So lithium deuterium is like magic, nuclear, fairy dust? That’s what you’re telling me? Just sprinkle a dash on to turn your kilotons into megatons?

Basically, yeah, because you're talking about fusing atoms, the plutonium implosion bombards the atoms of hydrogen contained in the lithium deuteride with neutrons, causing them to fuse, which is where you get the megatons, and there's a lot of atoms, in a very small amount of deuterium.

The tricky part was coming up with the lithium deuteride, taking the power of a big bottle of liquid hydrogen, and cramming it down into a tiny bottle of powder, but America already figured that out for them, back in the 1950's. it ain't that high tech, this is 1950's tech.

America went from 15 kiloton Hiroshima, single stage fission, to 15 megaton Castle Bravo, two stage fusion, in a space of nine years, and America didn't have anybody figuring this stuff out beforehand.

These are proven designs, which are 70 years old, everybody understands how they work, it's just a question of a) acquiring the weapons grade materials, and b) refining the manufacturing process to bring it all together.

The North Koreans have been working on this for forty years, they already figured out the hard parts quite some time ago.

North Korean nuclear physicists know what everybody elses nuclear physicists know, and they're highly motivated, if you give them the parts, they'll put it all together, it's just a matter of time.