Talk:Tsar Bomba/Archive 1

message: Why so far north? Why not in Semipalatinsk Test Site?
:Probably to avoid local nuclear fallout contaminating inhabited areas. Even Castle Bravo caused a fallout plume that was 280 miles long - and it had only a third to a quarter of this test.--Cancun771 10:14, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Why is not detonated in Kazakshtan 

message: :If detonated at full yield (~100 Mt), the force of this bomb would have been approximately 6,500 times the 15-16 kiloton bomb detonated at Hiroshima and would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%.
Rather than speculative "if", I would like to see the actual comparison. There is no limit  for "if"s. What if they have made it 200Mt?, etc. This is good for a newspaper, but not for encyclopedia about the particular instance of a device. I am prepared to delete this phrase, especially the second half. No one knows what qualitative effects would have kicked in after duplicating the yield. And by the way, what was learned from the blast besides "it was visible 1000 km away"? Mikkalai 02:40, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No, the Tsar Bomba was designed to be 100Mt with a full load of fissable fuel. Thus, it is reasonable to comment on the maximum design capacity. Rsynnott 02:28, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

text: The Tsar Bomba had its yield scaled down by replacing the uranium fusion tamper (which amplifies the reaction greatly) with one made of lead to eliminate fast fission by the fusion neutrons. 
Mikkalai 07:52, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: also supports it, however, and is filled with a great deal more detail and references for them. I'll go through it tomorrow to compare and expand this article based on it. Bryan 08:05, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "If" 

message: http://www.vce.com/tsar.html, which is the souce of the statement, is full of incorrect details, and therefore lacks credibility. The phrase removed. 
The following phrase contradicts recent Russian sources.
:The Tsar Bomba had its yield scaled down by replacing the uranium fusion tamper (which amplifies the reaction greatly) with one made of lead to eliminate fast fission by the fusion neutrons. 
Mikkalai 07:52, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: also supports it, however, and is filled with a great deal more detail and references for them. I'll go through it tomorrow to compare and expand this article based on it. Bryan 08:05, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Further investigation 

message: So here's the second Google hit, then: . It lists the following reference for that specific bit of trivia: Thomas Reed and Arnold Kramish. 1996. Trinity at Dubna, Physics Today, November 1996, pg. 30-35. Bryan 07:57, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If the Soviet hosiery industry was of negligible size, then that just makes it easier to disrupt. And the quality of the nylon doesn't matter because they both use the same precursor chemicals. If the fact is well-supported, why are you so insistant on removing it from the article? Sorry, I reacted before I checked the latest diffs - you didn't remove it in the most recent edits, and in fact mentioned the same caveat I just did. I suppose I'm reacting so strongly because one of the things I like most about Wikipedia is the idiosyncratic little bits of trivia one can find about topics like these, so I like to preserve them where I find them. Bryan 20:35, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: Could you please source that? Bryan 01:30, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  I forgot to mention silk. I just run google search in russian languages for various combinations of "parachute", "material", "manufacturing", and besides the sites related to parachutes I have found quite a few factories that manufactured parachute fabrics. And by the way, these were not from hosiery industry, but from bed clothes industry. And also now I see that I am mistaken. The synthetic parachute material was called "капрон" ("kapron") in Russian. For some reasion I thought that "kapron" is kind of rayon. Now I double checked, and in fact kapron is polyamide, i.e., basically kind of nylon.  Mikkalai 03:18, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for double-checking. I hate to seem like I'm obsessing over this, especially after jumping to conclusions in the lines I struck out earlier and relying on a low-quality source right at the beginning. I really should have done more source-checking myself. I promise to do more of the work next time, if I can (don't know Russian, alas). As penance, I'll see if I can add some detailed material to a nylon-related article somewhere. Bryan 05:53, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: It has been said (though the story may be apocryphal) that the fabrication of this parachute required so much raw nylon that the negligible Soviet nylon hosiery industry was noticeably disrupted.
?? -Fastfission 22:22, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: I think a more appropriate solution might be to just stick the reference I dug up earlier in as a footnote, though I'll accept your compromise proposal if nobody else thinks so too. I may not have actually read the source document myself yet (I expect it'll be hard for me to dig up), but I nevertheless consider the reference's existence to be a lot more weighty than an anonymous editor's unsupported opinion that he finds this implausible. Mikkalai at least disputed it by raising good questions with verifiable answers that could have disproved the claim had they gone another way. Bryan 22:56, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: I don't care either way, but I'm betting the there won't be any specific reference in the Trinity at Dubna article, which I'm betting was just compiled from interviews with former physicists (who are as prone as anyone else to just circulate such funny stories/rumors). Physics Today articles on nuclear history are  not bad per se but they are not the most reliable historical source, IMO. --Fastfission 22:27, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The "possibly apocryphal" parenthetical probably is indeed the right one to go with, in that case. A second-hand account is better than nothing (and fine for an encyclopedia IMO) but I would have hoped for actual nylon production and usage numbers. Bryan 00:42, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Hosiery trivia

message: Directly relevant. Necessary for google search, to verify info etc. Who knows when individual articles will be created Mikkalai 05:10, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Names in Cyrillic 

message: "Since 50 Mt is 2.1x1017 Joules, the power produced during the explosion was around 5.3x1024 watts or 5.3 yottawatts. This represents a power just greater than one percent of the entire power output of the Sun (386 yottawatts)."
Should it not be the total energy output of the sun reaching the earth? Otherwise it seems to me to be a gross exaggeration No matter the answer, it should be elaborated in a way so that it will not be misinterpreted by physics illiterates(like me!) If I read the numbers below correctly you would need roughly two billion Tsar Bombas and not close to a hundred, to emulate the suns energy output for a second!
Energy Output Of The Sun In One Second 
Value In Joules: 385 septillion (3.85 x 10e26) 
Value In Megatons: 92.1 billion (92.1 x 10e10)
"Tsar Bomba" Nuclear Bomb 
Value In Joules: 209 quadrillion (2.09 x 10e17) 
Value In Megatons: 50 (5.00 x 10e2) 
Source: http://www.angelfire.com/sc2/Trunko/energy.html
1 megaton = 4.2 X 10e15 joules
50 megaton = 2.1 X 10e17 joules
The Suns output pr. sec. 3.9 X 10e26 joules
Thus you need around 1857142800  Tsar Bombas exploding at the same time and not a hundred to compete with the sun for a second.  
 Please correct my errors or if I am right correct the wikipedia. 
I was wrong. The entire fission-fussion proces takes place in ca. 0.000002 sec. creating an entire different value for watts. But It still think it should be ellaborated so as not to cause misunderstanding.
Johan "Apollo" Bressendorff(Denmark)Pietas 22:53, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yep, I spotted it. I'm new to wiki and didn't read the discussion first before making an edit. I hope the new wording of using energy instead of power clarifys this! 212.32.83.8 09:11, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A humongous exaggeration? 

message: The "1% power output" calculation seems to be correct in my opinion. An interesting aspect in this, is to compare the volume needed in the sun to generate that power with that of the Tsar Bomba. Sun has fusion taking place in a sphere of 20% of it's diameter. The processes in the bomb take place in a region of several meters. Thus the power density must be many times greater in the bomb, than in nature.
:That is understandable, because the bomb runs out of fuel much faster than the Sun. In the Sun the power is 0.3 W/m3, or 40 W/m3 in the 20% of its diameter.--Patrick 21:42, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: dense power

message: I doubt this was just for propaganda
they probably intended these to be used as real weapons.
If they wanted to do propaganda they would just dentonate a smaller bomb and make it look bigger
Dudtz 7/21/05 1:20 PM EST
:"Propaganda" does not always mean "lies"; detonating a smaller bomb and claiming it is in the 50 MT range would be very easy to detect; and the article outlines very clearly why this would have been an impractical weapon (too large in every respect). --Fastfission 17:22, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If you'd read the article, you'd see why it was impractical. Or you can just believe whatever makes sense to you without investigating whether or not it makes sense. Whatever works for you. --Fastfission 01:26, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Physics actually makes it easy to detect faked atmospheric nuclear bomb test results.  The nuclear fallout from the blast will contain proportions of transmuted elements in a predictable ratio depending on the overall yield.  As fallout from large bombs is detectable worldwide, and both the US and Russia flew aircraft specifically to filter high altitude air and catch fallout particles for analysis, both sides routinely knew exactly (plus or minus ten percent, perhaps) wha the yield was of each other's tests.  As a result, nobody lied about it... there was no point.  This is also where the confusion over actual yield came from.  The US fallout analysis from Tsar Bomba came in at a 57 MT yield estimate, slightly higher than the Soviet stated yield of 50 MT.  I don't know that anyone has ever sat down with the two sets of raw data, plus the Soviet ground and air observations, and tried to come up with a more precise number (I don't know that the Russians would make that info available now; I am not aware of anyone having asked for it).  Georgewilliamherbert 18:10, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not used as a weapon? 

message: Article has no info on aftermath. Is there a crater? How big is it? Damage to arctic wildlife? etc... -- Denis Vlasenko
I've found some info at http://www.bilderberg.org/hbomb.htm:
Some time after the explosion, photographs were taken of ground 
zero.  “The ground surface of the island has been levelled, swept 
and licked so that it looks like a skating rink,” a witness reported.  
“The same goes for rocks.  The snow has melted and their sides and 
edges are shiny.  There is not a trace of unevenness in the ground....  
Everything in this area has been swept clean, scoured, melted and 
blown away.”
:There are other descriptions (and the same ones) on a more reliable page here. It was detonated 4000 m above the ground so it wouldn't necessarily make a crater per se. --Fastfission 14:44, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aftermath? 

message: This article seems quite comprehensive. How about a FA nomination? - Fredrik | talk 11:53, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe we should put it up on peer review first? They usually come up with good suggestions. My only thought is it could use a little more on the political climate that lead to the creation of the bomb -- there's almost nothing on the motivation for creating it here. I believe Sakharov discusses this quite a bit in his memoirs. It should also be noted that this test was one of those done by the USSR to break the testing moratorium (1959-1961) as well. --Fastfission 14:01, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: According to the USSR statement on the moratorium in 1959, "Soviet Union will not resume nuclear testing provided the Western powers continue to observe a moratorium". So, there were  Western countries, which broke the moratorium, namely: France on February 13, 1960. See . Cmapm 01:22, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  FAC? 

message: Concerned Cynic, Halloween 2005. As is often the case in Wikipedia, the prose of this entry could use a good deal of polish, which I have supplied. This topic fascinates me because I can still recall the gloomy fall morning when I came to the breakfast table and saw the screaming headlines in the morning paper about a 100 megaton Russian test in Nova Zemlya. I was 9 at the time. Only a fortnight ago did I discover that
that test had been an airdrop, that the Bomba had been designed to minimize fallout, and that its weight and size rendered it hopelessly impractical. I have added a link pointing out that the USA built and deployed a similar weapon in those days.
I have not found one sentence discussing the possible impact on Nova Zemlya wildlife. My atlas also reveals 3-4 tiny settlements along the southern part of that island. Did they exist in 1961? If so were the inhabitants evacuated? Warned in any way?
*The U.S. weapon (MK-17) was about half the size of the pared down version, a quarter of the size of the full version. I also don't see what the B-28 has to do with this. I think the mentions of the weapons of other countries should be included as a comparison for yields, but explicit connections between those weapons (which were deployed as regular weapons) should not be made between this single, giant, show-bomb. --Fastfission 00:56, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Wildlife

message: Much of the discussion above is stimulating and well-written. I either agree with, or am not competent to challenge, many of the points raised. I would be nice if an Arzamas veteran were to go over the article closely.
:::Please sign your comments and please start doing edit summarys. Other editors have worked on this item and you owe them the courtesy of making your edits easy to follow. This has been discussed with you on several occasions by me and by others. DV8 2XL 20:10, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it'd be nice if the surviving ex-Soviet bomb designers would edit our articles. However, I'm not sure we should hold our breath on that. --Fastfission 01:51, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Calling All Arzamas Veterans... 

message: Would that video really be copyvio? I thought things created  before 1973 in the USSR were in the public domain in most countries, per ? (Did the Soviet government claim copyright on official produced materials?) --Fastfission 18:07, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Video

message: A user added the following note to my talk page, though it really probably belongs here. --Fastfission 17:04, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Not to mention dumping all these 'rogue states' (and terrorists) together as if they all want the same thing and cooperate all the time is something only silly people like GWB do... Nil Einne 15:59, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: From my talk page

message: When I first read the following, I couldn't believe it:
"Since 50 Mt is 2.1×10^17 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 3.9×10^-8 seconds or 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.3×10^24 watts or 5.3 yottawatts. This constitutes over 1% of the power output of the Sun (383 yottawatts) over the same time interval."
I then did the calculation myself and found it to be correct!  
However I have a small quarrel with how the information was presented.  The comparison should NOT be between a 39 nanosecond quantity of solar energy versus the Tsar Bomba's.  It should rather be a comparison of instantaneous power.  The Solar Constant is 1.37 kw/m^2.  Construct a control surface of 1 AU radius around the Sun.  1 AU = 1.49598x10^11 m.  The surface area of the control surface is 4 * Pi * [1.49598x10^11]^2 = 2.812298x10^23 m^2.  The total power of the sun is  3.852849x10^26 watts.  A megaton is 4.187x10^15 joules.  For 50 megatons (50 Mt) at 3.9x10-8 sec, the average power of the Tsar Bomba while burning its nuclear fuel was 5.3679x10^24 watts.  The instantaneous power of the Tsar Bomba while burning its nuclear fuel was 1.39% of the Sun!! However, it's inappropriate to compare the Sun's energy against the Tsar Bomba because the Sun is producing energy continuously while the Tsar Bomba only produced energy for 39 nanoseconds, e.g. over a one second period the Sun produced 1.8 billion times the amount of energy produced by the Tsar Bomba.  This number is closer to intuition since we and our technology are nothing compared to the Sun.
The 1.39% power rating raises an interesting question.  Thermonuclear weapons supposably burn like a match, i.e. the radiation from the fission trigger pre-compresses the thermonuclear fuel in the secondary section while a detonation wave propagates down the length of the secondary section starting from the fission trigger.  My intuition tells me that a 25 Mt explosion would have burned for only 1.95x10-8 sec.  Is this true?  Where did the 39 nanosecond burntime number for the Tsar Bomba come from?  Does the burn time scale linearly with weapon yield?  At some point the linearity should breakdown, e.g. if the secondary section is too long then it doesn't pre-compress properly or if it's too short, it doesn't have time to pre-compress before the detonation wave passes through.  Any nuke experts out there with clues about this?
BTW, it was a marvellous article!
Egg plant 04:30, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Amazing numbers!

message: When describing the test, the author states that "Failing such retardation, the bomb would have either reached its planned detonation altitude soon enough to turn the test into a suicide mission, or crashed into the ground at high speed, with unpredictable results"
Could someone elaborate on the "unpredictable" bit? My physics education stopped at GCE A-levels. What's so special about crashing a nuclear bomb into the ground? I mean, they do carry out underground tests, don't they?
:You should sign your questions/comments (use four ~ characters in a row, that creates the name/date signature you see the rest of us using...).
:As to the specifics... a nuclear bomb is generally actually pretty fragile.  If you deform or crack the explosives in the primary, it probably won't fire properly.  If you crack open the outer case around the primary and secondary, even if the primary fires properly then most of the energy will leak out, and you don't get effective compression and effective firing of the secondaries.
:Nuclear weapons designed to land on the ground, or hit the ground and penetrate some distance before detonation, require very special, high strength design to withstand the impact.  Other nuclear weapons often have a salvage or impact fuze that will fire them if they start to hit something solid (better early or off target than not firing at all).  Georgewilliamherbert 11:20, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Unpredictable" test results 

message: Someone responded to my above comment and changed the article to say:
"The Tsar Bomba is the most powerful explosive device ever constructed by humans, and its test is the largest detonation ever. Since 50 Mt is 2.1×10^17 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 3.9×10-8 seconds or 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.3×10^24 watts or 5.3 yottawatts. This constitutes over 1% of the power output of the Sun (383 yottawatts) over the same time interval."
The wording is fine and mathematically correct assuming the burn time was 3.9×10^-8 sec (thanks for making the revision).  However there still stands the question of whether or not the average power of a fusion weapon scales with size.  Obviously the energy released by the weapon will scale with size.  However it is quite possible that a much smaller nuclear explosion would create greater average power.  In order to reduce fallout, the Tsar Bomba used a lead jacket as a tamp rather than the usual U-238 tamp.  A weapon with a U-238 tamp probably had a greater average power level (the tamp would have been exothermic rather than endothermic).  The question boils down to burn time for a given yield.  
A question for nuke experts out there:  What's the burn time and yield for a modern state-of-the-art thermonuclear weapon?
Egg plant 19:59, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The burn time will depend to some degree on size, but not a whole lot.  The heating rate initially will depend on the compression and temperature at ignition, and time for the reaction to propogate will depend on the dimensions, but in general will propogate very quickly.  The Weapons FAQ entry on fusion weapon physics and engineering indicates an estimate of 20 ns for the fusion burn in a typical weapon.  Note however that unlike the time of the core burning, the time over which the energy is effectively released into the environment varys radically with overall yield.  Larger devices (multi-megaton) thermal pulses and fireball physics take seconds to evolve, unlike smaller weapons where it's milliseconds to fractions of a second at most.  What power you measure (power = energy / time) depends on where you draw the boundary conditions: inside the device or at the device's shell, or effective to relatively far away (outside the fireball radius) observers.   Georgewilliamherbert 20:58, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Did the Tsar Bomba's average power scale with size? 

message: *I recommend removing or putting a caveat on the Discovery Channel video posted (twice) at the bottom of the article.  It appears either Discovery Channel or the original Russian source fluffed it up, almost completely, with stock footage of Pacific and Nevada Test Site explosions, or from smaller Semipalitinsk tests, some of them fission bombs.  It does not look authentic at all.   -Rolypolyman 16:14, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Discovery Channel video is not authentic

message: Hyppothetically if such a bomb i.e 60-100 MT were to be detonated over the United States, as in a Hiroshima/Nagasaki scenario what kind of casualties could be expected?
:It would depend where in USA ofcourse.  From the 100 MT dirty bomb, the radiation alone would keep killing for years after the bomb exploded (not sure how long the radiation would linger, but people would be poisoned, and die off slowly).  - Annonomous
:: I am no scientist, but if, as the Discovery Channel video says, everything within 50km (30 miles) was obliterated, the fireball extended to 180km (110 miles), and it was dropped on New York: several tens of millions surely. The blast would easily reach Philadelphia, and people would probably die in Massachusetts. If it were dropped on a very densely populated country e.g. Bangladesh, maybe 100 million, far more than all the deaths caused by the bubonic plague and Spanish flu put together. That does not count the amount of people killed by a possible nuclear winter. If the bomb was 100 MT, a lot more. Or maybe not. LeighvsOptimvsMaximvs 16:58, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Casualties? 

message: I know the German DVD of Trinity and Beyond. But it shows only a short flash of lightning, no mushroom cloud or something like that. Does the US-Version contain more material? However, they also mixed up video clips from Castle Bravo with clips from another Bravo shot (maybe Romeo).', so it wouldn't be a big surprise if the US version used US test videos to illustrate the Tsar shot.--SiriusB 12:16, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Again: Test Video 

message: I am russian and Царь means king.
*I don't want to contradict but I'm fairly sure it is derived from Caesar and is more analogous with the English "emperor" than it is "king" (the latter I've usually seen translated as король). In any case, I don't see why we don't just write it as tsar, since that is a well-known word in English as well. --Fastfission 14:47, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think we shouldn't primarily because it's not tsar in Russian (correct?). If Царь is NOT tsar so it would be quite wrong to translate it as tsar. Especially since this is usually called the Tsar Bomba in English but the Soviets definitely didn't think of it as the Tsar bomba for two good reasons (because they didn't like Tsars and because Tsar XYZ is associated with impractical things) Nil Einne 15:55, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  its not emperor but king 

message: Just out of curiousity, in the phrase from the intro section "Developed by the Soviet Union, the ~50 megaton bomb was codenamed Ivan", would it be advantageous to replace the "~" with a "≈" - a double-tilde? I see that, according to the ~ article, the ~ is fine in English usage as the ≈ isn't usually available, but on Wikipedia, it is available. Might it look a bit more formal to use the ≈? --T. S. Rice 08:25, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Personally I think we could just keep the single tilde, since it is clear what it is meant to indicate and the context here is not mathematics (a double-tilde is less commonly known unless you have a scientific education). But I'm not sure it matters much either way. --Fastfission 15:58, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  ~50 MT vs ≈50 MT 

message: Members of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. Currently this article does not include in-line citations. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. Agne 20:16, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  GA Re-Review and In-line citations