

How Many Nukes Would It Take? - rflrob
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb/

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lhorie
Content on the site looks largely copied from other sources. I believe this is
the original

[http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-
to-s...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-stop-
worrying-and-love-the-bomb/)

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Semiapies
I think plagiarism is worth flagging for.

EDIT: And unflagging when someone re-points it to the original link.

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nevinera
That's a bit disingenuous - the explosive damage is a tiny fraction of the net
destruction a nuke can cause, especially if it's a windy day.

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yters
Good cite that the nuclear fallout is a big deal?

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arethuza
[http://www.amazon.com/Effects-Nuclear-Weapons-Samuel-
Glassto...](http://www.amazon.com/Effects-Nuclear-Weapons-Samuel-
Glasstone/dp/0160020360)

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rbanffy
To completely wipe out mankind?

I guess a couple hundred would be enough to nudge a passing rock into an
Earth-crossing trajectory. Better yet would be to use the fuel to power a
mighty big NTR attached to a comet and use its own water as propellant. This
would be a lot more discrete than a big blast, may provide for a quicker
intersection and also add a nice oomph to the comet for when it hits the
ground. I would also suggest hitting the Atlantic or Yellowstone as nice
strategies for maximizing destruction. Hitting Europe could yield the maximum
number of deaths in the first hours, but the other two may provide a larger
overall devastation.

And nothing would prevent you from using more than one comet. A string of
fragments, like SL9, could rain death from the sky very evenly across all
inhabited places.

In the end, it all depends on how long after launch you want to wait until the
last human is dead. If you require them to be all vaporized a couple minutes
by the end of the afternoon, then, perhaps, we don't have enough nukes. If you
are a villain with a little more patience, you could use them far more
efficiently to first render useless all emergency services (EMPs or
stratospheric detonations), then ruining food supplies (even small nukes could
start fires) and only then using the remaining firepower to wipe out whoever
is left.

It's doable. In fact, we may even be able to wipe out humanity without using
any nukes. Some politicians are much, much more destructive.

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mrinterweb
I suppose fallout is not factored into his equation.

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Perceval
Nor is population density factored in. Urbanization ought to make it easier to
kill the first 60% of the world's population. You probably don't need very
many bombs to achieve that. Trying to track down and kill every last human
being with nuclear weapons is impractical and beside the point.

If you kill 60% of the industrial, technologically advanced urban centers of
humanity, you have essentially destroyed civilization. Who cares if 40% are
still scampering around if they have no energy, no infrastructure, no
libraries, no communications, no industry, and agriculture spoilt by nuclear
fallout and potentially nuclear winter?

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abrown28
Looks like we don't have near enough nukes... need to get building!

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SamAtt
If it makes you feel any better the subsequent Nuclear Winter from the roughly
25,000 warheads in existence would be more than enough to finish off the rest
of us. Even if it didn't the 2.5 billion metric tons of soot thrown into the
atmosphere would destroy the ozone layer along with any hope of survival.

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Sthorpe
Otavio Good created a computer simulation on what it would take to blow us up.
<http://otaviogood.com/RandomStuff>

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arethuza
Why not got for the ultra messy fully loaded configuration of the "Tsar bomb"
design? 100Mt and a god awful amount of fallout.

I seem to remember that device could take out Belgium with blast but would
have killed people way back into Eastern Europe/Russia with its fallout.

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rbanffy
Tsar bomba was a very clean (as far as nukes go) bomb. Its yield was halved
for the test to reduce it even more.

There is little limit to how big you make a fusion bomb. If you have enough
Deuterium, you can make is as big as you like.

Or, at least, as big as you can carry.

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arethuza
Yes, the bomb tested was very clean because it was only two stage. Fission
primary and fusion secondary.

The full 100Mt design would have had the usual 3rd fission stage that would
have been _incredibly_ messy. Khrushchev announced they had a full 100Mt bomb
even though they could only really test a limited version of the design - not
really a weapon as it wasn't practical for a number of reasons.

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rbanffy
Keep in mind it's an unusually clean 50Mt device.

Who needs a 100Mt device anyway?

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arethuza
Politicians - so they can brag about their H-bomb being bigger than yours.

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mattmiller
A lot of nukes going off at once would cause a bunch of dust to go up into the
atmosphere and block out the sun for a long time. That would kill plants and
we would all starve or get sick and die. This is at least according to the
history channel.

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mhb
People interested in this will also like _The Road_ by Cormac McCarthy:

<http://www.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/B001OV2GRE/>

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dm_mongodb
but I live in Manhattan

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dustingetz
hit a couple capitol cities and civilization as we know it is gone. thats,
like, 20 nukes.

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dasil003
I don't think destroying the 20 largest cities would end civilization per se.

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smallblacksun
The damage radius from nuclear weapons can also be greatly reduced by hills
and such, so we are even better off than that.

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sabat
... to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never
know.

