How many megatons

But for a change in its design to rein in some of the power it could unleash, Tsar Bomba was supposed to have been twice as powerful. One of the architects of this formidable device was a Soviet physicist called Andrei Sakharov — a man who would later become world famous for his attempts to rid the world of the very weapons he had helped create.

Sakharov began work on a layered fission-fusion-fission device, a bomb that would create further energy from the nuclear processes in its core. This involved wrapping deuterium — a stable isotope of hydrogen — with a layer of unenriched uranium. The uranium would capture neutrons from the igniting deuterium and would itself start to react.

Sakharov called it the sloika , or layered cake. This breakthrough allowed the USSR to build its first hydrogen bomb, a device much more powerful than the atomic bombs of only a few years before. Sakharov had been told by Khrushchev to come up with a bomb that was more powerful than anything else tested so far. The Soviet Union needed to show that it could pull ahead of the US in the nuclear arms race, according to Philip Coyle, the former head of US nuclear weapons testing under President Bill Clinton, who spent 30 years helping design and test atomic weapons.

And then it did a large number of tests in the atmosphere before the Russians even did one. The original design — a three layered bomb, with uranium layers separating each stage — would have had a yield of megatons — 3, times the size of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

The Soviets had already tested large devices in the atmosphere, equivalent to several megatons, but this would have been far, far bigger. Some scientists began to believe it was too big. Before it was ready to be tested, the uranium layers that would have helped the bomb achieve its enormous yield were replaced with layers of lead, which lessened the intensity of the nuclear reaction.

The Soviets had built a weapon so powerful that they were unwilling to even test it at its full capacity. And that was only one of the problems with this devastating device. And, if the bomb was as powerful as intended, the aircraft would have been on a one-way mission anyway. The power of the bomb persuaded nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov to renounce nuclear weapons Credit: Science Photo Library. Even where nuclear weapons are concerned, there can be such as thing as too powerful, says Coyle, who is now a leading member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a think tank based in Washington DC.

Von Hippel agrees. Things moved in a different direction — increasing missile accuracy and multiple warheads. Tsar Bomba had other effects. Von Hippel says that Sakharov was particularly worried by the amount of radioactive carbon 14 that was being emitted into the atmosphere — an isotope with a particularly long half-life.

Sakharov worried that a bomb bigger than the one tested would not be repelled by its own blastwave — like Tsar Bomba had been — and would cause global fallout, spreading toxic dirt across the planet.

Sakharov become an ardent supporter of the Partial Test Ban, and an outspoken critic of nuclear proliferation and, in the late s, anti-missile defences that he feared would spur another nuclear arms race.

But what if humankind, for some bizarre reason, decided to set all of them off at once? The explosive yield of nuclear weapon is typically measured in kilotons, or thousand tons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima is typically calculated at 16 kilotons, or 16, tons of TNT. The W warhead carried by the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile has a yield of kilotons.

The B83 nuclear freefall bomb , carried by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, has a yield of up to 1. Altogether, there are an estimated 15, nuclear weapons worldwide.

Individually, each of these weapons could do incredible damage. Kurzgesagt estimates that if the world's supply of nukes were used evenly on its large cities, the global arsenal would be enough to kill three billion people, with 1, nukes left over. Equivalent megatonnage is defined as the actual megatonnage raised to the two-thirds power:. This relation arises from the fact that the destructive power of a bomb does not vary linearly with the yield. The volume the weapon's energy spreads into varies as the cube of the distance, but the destroyed area varies at the square of the distance.

Thus 1 bomb with a yield of 1 megaton would destroy 80 square miles. While 8 bombs, each with a yield of kilotons, would destroy square miles. This relationship is one reason for the development of delivery systems that could carry multiple warheads MIRVs.

Home Science Effects of Nuclear Weapons The Energy from a Nuclear Weapon The Energy from a Nuclear Weapon One of the fundamental differences between a nuclear and a conventional explosion is that nuclear explosions can be many thousands or millions of times more powerful than the largest conventional detonations.

The energy breakdown from a nuclear explosion Approximately 85 percent of the energy of a nuclear weapon produces air blast and shock , thermal energy heat.