Destroying the planet X times over...

[Kurgan]

I've seen a lot of ranting and raving and wild numbers thrown around with regards to the idea of "destroying the world" with nuclear weapons over the years.

I hear people say that Russia or the USA alone had enough nukes to "destroy the world" three, four, seven, seventeen, hundreds or even thousands of times over.

Now I've read that the whole "Nuclear Winter" thing from the 70's and 80's was overblown (did specialists deliberately skew the figures to make their cause for sound disarmament more convincing?)

Considering I'm not a nuclear physicist or expert on nuclear weapons, I'm curious as to what others have found, the best facts and figures, and how much nukage (in megatons) the world has ever possessed (not just at any one time, but total) that we know of.

I assume that when people talk about "destroying the world/planet/earth" they are really either talking about the utter destruction of human civilization (ie: all cities destroyed, all governments disrupted) which would seem the easiest thing to do, or the massacre of all human life.

Yet I've heard people claim that even without Nuclear Winter, we could "sterilize" the planet (no life, period, ever again) using nukes.

I'd always had the impression that at any one time the world had less than 10 megatons total, and that the dino-killer asteroid was much greater than this, and so to me it logically seemed that while a full scale nuclear war would be a bad bad thing for us, it wouldn't necessarily be the end of all life as we know it. And even if it were done execution style by some Q type entity intent on using our nukes to exterminate us willingly, the planet would survive...

I've done lots of good searches and stuff but ultimately there's a lot of stuff to sift through and make sense of. Are my impressions way off? How much megatonnage could we possibly bring to bear ("all the firepower that's ever existed..") in a "best case scenario"?

And just as a side note, isn't the firing of one of the Acclamater from AOTC's guns more powerful than the dino-killer asteroid?

[Kurgan]

It's late and I forgot about Mike's calculator... so I guess a 5 exaton airburst would create "near total fatalities" with a radius greater than the circumference of the earth, but I'm sure that's vastly beyond anything anything that's ever existed...! Is this the minimum to "sterilize" the planet? Any other insights?

[Ma Deuce]

did specialists deliberately skew the figures to make their cause for sound disarmament more convincing?

They most certainly did: Stuart Slade explained in detail how they did this on the Divine Salamis board Linky: this post also outlines the effects of a "no-holds-barred" worldwide nuclear exchange in the early/mid 1980s (he didin't actually mention the date, but he did specify the world's entire nuclear arsenal totalling 67,000 warheads for the scenario, which is about right for that time period). Suffuce it to say, in this scenario, there were 400 million initial casualties, which grew to 1.2 billion in the aftermath. While there were some global cooling effects significant enough to cause crop failures in the scenario, they were temporary and nowhere near the "Nuclear Winter" predicted by Sagan.

The "conclusion" some have made that the US or Russia could destroy the world multiple times over was arrived at by the simplisting formula of taking the casualty figure produced by Hiroshima, dividing that by the yield of Little Boy, and multyplying it by the total yield of the US, Russia's or world's nuclear arsenal.

And just as a side note, isn't the firing of one of the Acclamater from AOTC's guns more powerful than the dino-killer asteroid?

Nope: the K-T event which wiped out the Dinosaurs was estimated at 50-100 teratons, vs. 200 gigatons for one shot from an Acclimator gun. By comparison, the total yield of the world's nuclear arsenal never got above 30 gigatons or so, and is probably about 5-6 gigatons today

[Kurgan]

Yikes, I made serious typos in that first post. I meant to say 10 gigatons not MEGA tons. That would have been absurd in the extreme (even if it's still falls short of your 30 gigatons figure).

And I should have realized right away that I was off by three decimal places on the dino-killer. Sorry!

And thanks for the reply!