Moderator: Alyrium Denryle
Ah, thank you. Every day I learn something new.Admiral Valdemar wrote:The Tsar Bomba was rated for 100 MT output. The later stages, however, were replaced with lead for fear of the explosion being capable of igniting the atmosphere and other fanciful pie-in-the-sky risks. So it only achieved around the 50 MT mark, the exact yield was hidden for some time by the Soviet gov't.
Humans are sort of like cockroaches: a highly adaptable generalist species. We're naturally a generalist species to start with, and we can use our intelligence to survive in places where we otherwise could not (such as the Sahara desert and the Arctic). So I'm pretty sure than in any realistic nuclear war or ecological collapse scenario humanity would survive. Civilization might not but the species would go on and hopefully eventually rebuild.CoyoteNature wrote:Biosphere does not equal people, microbes could be Biosphere; we might still be extinct and the planet would live on. Take a few million years to evolve upwards, but still live on.
The primary concern was the danger to the pilot, which isn't all that fanciful--even with the yield halved and the bomb's descent slowed down with a large parachute, the pilot barely got out of the blast in time. The 50MT figure is probably rather accurate, considering it was both the design goal of the altered bomb and corroborated by Soviet observations. The Americans estimated it to be 57MT, but they were neither on-site nor had access to the bomb design; the Soviets simply saw no reason to correct them.Admiral Valdemar wrote:The Tsar Bomba was rated for 100 MT output. The later stages, however, were replaced with lead for fear of the explosion being capable of igniting the atmosphere and other fanciful pie-in-the-sky risks. So it only achieved around the 50 MT mark, the exact yield was hidden for some time by the Soviet gov't.
Didn't Krakatoa's fallout have a noticable effect for two years?Darth Wong wrote:Don't be ridiculous; there have been volcano eruptions during geologic history which were more powerful than all the world's nuclear weapons combined, and while they created global climactic effects, these were (relatively) short-lived, as per the models in question. Weeks or months, not years.
"Noticeable" and "catastrophic" are two vastly different concepts. The nuclear winter scenario claimed catastrophic long-term global effects, not just "noticeable" effects. In fact, their predictions of the effect of a full-scale nuclear exchange (half a year of near-total darkness, freezing temperatures worldwide) were strikingly similar to the effects of the K-T asteroid impact ... which would have involved an estimated 100 million megaton impact: vastly greater than the few thousand megatons the two superpowers could lob at each other.Xeriar wrote:Didn't Krakatoa's fallout have a noticable effect for two years?Darth Wong wrote:Don't be ridiculous; there have been volcano eruptions during geologic history which were more powerful than all the world's nuclear weapons combined, and while they created global climactic effects, these were (relatively) short-lived, as per the models in question. Weeks or months, not years.
The Toba and Yellowstone eruptions are believed to have had a 6-12 year cooling period IIRC. Granted, these are vastly in excess of what the world nuclear arsenal is capable of.
Actually recalling the book, and more recent studies of the Yucatan blast, their estimates of such a nuclear exchange vastly exceeded the effects of the meteor impact in question.Darth Wong wrote:"Noticeable" and "catastrophic" are two vastly different concepts. The nuclear winter scenario claimed catastrophic long-term global effects, not just "noticeable" effects. In fact, their predictions of the effect of a full-scale nuclear exchange (half a year of near-total darkness, freezing temperatures worldwide) were strikingly similar to the effects of the K-T asteroid impact ... which would have involved an estimated 100 million megaton impact: vastly greater than the few thousand megatons the two superpowers could lob at each other.
