Talk:Tsar Bomba

Contents

1 old talk 2 2005 3 "If" 3.1 Further investigation 4 Hosiery trivia 5 Names in Cyrillic 6 The sentence regarding 'the Sun' needs a unit of time to be meaningful 7 A humongous exaggeration?

old talk

Template:Onlinesource2004

This page, "Tsar Bomba" says about Hiroshima:

"If detonated at full yield, the force of this bomb would have been approximately 6,500 times the 15-16 kiloton bomb detonated at Hiroshima."

But the "Kiloton" wikipedia, which points to this page, says:

"The Little Boy weapon dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of approximately 13 kilotons. Thus, a megaton is equivalent to roughly 77 Hiroshima bombs."

Could the authors discuss this and resolve the difference? The person who wrote 13 kilotons may have knowledge no one else on the web seems to.

The estimates of the Hiroshima bomb are all over the map -- I've seen it pegged by relatively reliable sources at ranges from 12 to 18 kt. It was not a controlled setting, obviously, so there are some difficulties in calculating such a figure exactly. Hence, I imagine, all of the "approximately"s. --Fastfission 01:58, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)

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Does anyone happen to have some image or video material of this bomb, or does anyone know if such material exists?

Video of the bomb's explosion is in Peter Kuran's Trinity and Beyond documentary. --Fastfission 01:58, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There is also a 20 minute film about the bomb, which is where the material in Trinity and Beyond comes from. But I don't know if that film can be found anywhere.

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"Tsar Bomba [...] was the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated."

Was or is still the largest? That should be clarified.

Well, it doesn't exist any more, so "is" might not be entirely accurate. :) Bryan 16:16, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

2005

It is ridiculously unlikely that anyone will set off a nuclear explosive larger than the Tsar Bomba anytime in the foreseeable future. I don't think it needs to "as of 2005" categorization in there, which implies that this designation is likely to change anytime soon. If someone sets off a +50MT explosive (a weapon larger than any warheads kept by any of the declared nuclear powers and of extremely limited military and political value in today's geopolitical climate), I will personally update the page if I, or Wikipedia, am still around. ;-) In most cases I think the policy would make sense, but in ones which are extremely unlikely to change anytime soon (or if they did, it would be a tremendous and massive world event), I don't think it is necessary to stick with if it makes the entry look awkward. --Fastfission 05:06, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Don't be so sure. You cannot vouch for all. North Korea, China...

I will personally update the page if I.... Yep. "if". That's the problem. There are some basic rules which are better not to try to oversmart, unless there is a really serious reason. "Awkward" is not one of them. And IMO there is nothing awkward in the entry. Tastes differ. In adition, the date serves as the hint, a red flag for the future editors to recheck, whether the statement is still valid. Mikkalai 07:52, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. This is not, after all, a discussion of something long-past, like the Roman empire. Because there's ambiguity, I say default to the version that is least likely to cause confusion instead of the shorter one. --Milkmandan 08:06, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)

Do you guys know how big a 50 megaton blast is? The largest bomb set off by the United States was only 15 MT -- less than a third of that! China has not tested a nuclear weapon for eight years (and nothing anywhere near that large), the North Korea couldn't set off a 50 megaton blast if it wanted to (as the article points out, 50MT is approximately 6,500 times the power of the crude Hiroshima bomb which is closer to the potential capability of North Korea). The Tsar Bomba was not just the largest in history, it was by far the largest in history. My argument is that it is awkward because it implies that this is only a momentary statistic (i.e. "the fastest mile ever ran, as of 2005.." something which is liable to change from year to year) but hasn't changed in 30 years and has no sign of changing anytime in the future. The Tsar Bomba was the result of a particular context in history (the era of bigger-is-better bombs, which was over within a few years; and was meant to be a ridiculous and dramatic show of force as the Soviets broke the test ban), and does not need to be noted with "as of 2005." It will not be changed anytime soon, it will hopefully never be changed. If you do not understand why this is, then you likely do not understand why this was such a unique event.

If you are going to insist on adding such a ridiculous qualifier to this entry, I am going to insist that, for the sake of consistency, you change the entry of Tsunami which states "The magnitude 9.0 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake triggered a series of lethal tsunamis on December 26, 2004 that killed over 160,000 people, making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history", to have the qualifier of "as of 2005" on the end of it. It's exactly the same situation, except at least the tsunami is a natural disaster which doesn't need political or technological context to happen again--it's even MORE likely to be temporally based! While you are at it, you can also change the line at Mount St. Helens which reads: "It is most famous for a catastrophic eruption on May 18, 1980. That eruption was the most deadly and economically destructive volcanic eruption in the history of the United States." After all, it could change tomorrow!

There is no "ambiguity" here. It was the largest nuclear weapon in history, it was the largest nuclear explosion in history. Period.

As for the awkwardness, can you image changing the Tsunami page to reader that it was the "deadliest tsunami in recorded history as of 2005"? Can you see why that is an odd sentence on the one hand, and also qualifies a sentence whose strength is in its being a grand statement? It would be like saying that the Holocaust was the largest systematic killing of the Jews in history, as of 2005. It has a definite effect -- to imply the record is tenuous -- and I don't think it is a good one or necessary in the case of something like the Tsar Bomba. Again, if you don't understand where the Tsar Bomba stands in relation to other nuclear explosions, you really don't understand the issue I'm talking about.

And trust me, if someone sets off something larger than 50 MT, this page will be flooded with people who are just aching to update it with the fact that it is the #2 nuclear explosion in history. If you can't see why this is ridiculous, perhaps you don't understand the history of nuclear testing very well, and should defer to someone who does (which is conveniently, in this case, me). --Fastfission 19:02, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

If you stand that we don't understand the nature of nuclear testing, then I must say that you don't understand a principial difference between the wikipedia and a printed encyclopedia. The printed one has a natural timestamp: the date of print. And when Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) says that Sir Brillinghat caught the largest fish ever in history, I understand that it could be quite possible that in year 1956 Abu Farhun ibn Gurqamzai could have caught an even bigger fish. Wikipedia does not have this natural time reference, and exactly for this reason the rule is established to keep statements independent of the current moment. And I see nothing outrageous in your proposal about tsunami. Thanks for the hint, I will go and edit it accordingly. Mikkalai 20:33, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

As for "flooded", please allow me to be sceptical. The most recent example. The articles about the history of the Soviet Union are an arena of heated editing. Nevertheless, until yesterday not a single one said anything about the moment of the declaration of the state. What is more, the main article contained a ridiculous date of July 4 1924 (or something), and no one flooded to fix it. And the examples abound. Soon there will be half million articles. But the number of non-occasional editors hardly exceeds several thousand. (I am not sure; may be I am too pessymistic; I will recheck). Mikkalai 20:40, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think you're missing the point about the magnitude of the event if this record were to be surpassed. This is not the "largest fish ever in history," something which is an event which is restricted to a certain amount of natural serendepity and variation. My argument is that the likelihood of this changing in the next 50-100 years is extremely low, and if it were to change it would be so large of an event that if anybody still gave a damn about Wikipedia, this would be the obvious page to look at for all of the many contributors who know anything about the history of nuclear weapons. It is not worth putting a silly "as of 2005" qualifier in there for this reason, and stylistically qualifying a sentence like that in such a way implies that it is a tenuous record. It was not a tenuous record, it was a one-time event undertaken for a specific purpose. It is not reasonable to assume it will change anytime soon; I think if you understood the issue a bit better you'd see that is true. It is on the level of changing a sentence which said, "The automobile is a primary method of conveyance in California," to say "as of 2005." Sure, it might change, but if it does, it will be dramatic. It doesn't need the qualifier which would imply it is a very tenuous thing. (if you've been to California, you'll understand this) --Fastfission 01:57, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Also, I wouldn't be so skeptical that people wouldn't change this if it changed. The magnitude of the event would be quite large: if a country set off a bomb which was even half the size of the Tsar Bomba it would be reported on the front page of every newspaper in the west. If someone set off a weapon which bypassed the size of the Tsar Bomba, you can be guaranteed that such a comparison would be made by the endless stream of commentators in the world. There wouldn't be any way to ignore it--that's the size of the event I'm talking about. It's not only extremely unlikely for this record to change, but if it did change it would be an event so large that there would not be reasonable to assume that future Wikipedians would be able to ignore this page.--Fastfission 02:05, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'd also like to point out that because these entries are all GFDL, this page is legally copied—and, in fact, there exist a number of different versions scattered around the web. [1] (http://www.searchspaniel.com/index.php/Tsar_Bomba) [2] (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Tsar+Bomba) [3] (http://www.smartpedia.com/smart/browse/Tsar_Bomba) [4] (http://therfcc.org/tsar-bomba-110433.html) are a few examples, and Google shows at least three more pages of this! [5] (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22it+was+dropped+from+a+Tu-95+bomber.%22&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&filter=0) While it's likely that these pages will get automatically recopied from the Wikipedia, it's certainly possible that one of these will remain unupdated despite all the work that may occur here when events change the facts. I'm not saying that we have a responsibility to cater to a need like this, but including some time of temporal qualifier fixes all of these problems simultaneously. --Milkmandan 00:57, 2005 Jan 4 (UTC)

I hardly think we are obgliated to make sure that other pages update their information. If they cared about ti (they don't, I am sure) they'd put timestamps of their last database dumps on their pages. In any event, I don't find such a concern compelling when talking about something as fanciful as this record changing anytime soon. With things where there is at least a small reasonable chance of it changing soon, I agree with the principle completely.--Fastfission 01:57, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This is why we have a "last modified" note at the bottom of each page. Think about it: a person might die any time but we write "born 1950" in biographies, not "born 1950 and still alive as of 2004". The "as of XXXX" links should be reserved for information that changes continuously -- for example the GNP of a nation, as an aid in editing. Fredrik | talk 02:35, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The Soviet Union article had this last mod thingy changed every 27 minutes, yet for about a year it contained the D.O.B. of 1924. Mikkalai 02:43, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Anyway, count me convinced. Mikkalai 02:40, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

"If"

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)

Further investigation

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)

[6] (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html) 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)

If it'll make everyone happy, I'll look into what the scholarly sources (Holloway) say about this. I'm under the general impression that the above line is the common understanding though. Replacing the tamper with the non-fissile lead would have cut down on the yield quite dramatically, and most of the "dirty" aspects of hydrogen weapons come from their final fission stage (the natural uranium tamper). Most sources say that Sakharov said it was designed to have been at least 100MT at full yield (though yields are apparently often not something which can be realiably predicted ahead of time when you start getting into such complicated reactions as a multi-multi-multi stage weapon like this would require). I'm fairly sure that Kuran's Trinity and Beyond says this as well, but that's not much of a scholarly source (though he obviously consulted some degree of literature on it). Impractical for war; primarily a political symbol. I'm fairly sure little was learned from the blast -- it was not an experiment, it was a symbol: "Look what we can do." As a technical trick it is only impressive to a certain degree -- it was just a scaling up of what could already be done with thermonuclear weapons by the late 1950s. The real question is why to make them that big, and the answer (Soviet politics) is fairly localized. At least, that's how it is depicted in English-language sources, though they are often notoriously off in terms of the Soviet nuclear program (the only one I trust almost unconditionally is Kojevnikov because his Russian is the best and he is notoriously suspicious of simple explanations).

Which recent Russian sources are you referring to?--Fastfission 23:44, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hosiery trivia

So here's the second Google hit, then: [7] (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html). 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)

I appreciate your diligence in proving your point. Nevertheless I have to disagree. For an industry to be disrupted it must exist in the first place. The person who produced this funny trivia had no idea how Soviet lingerie in 1960s looked like. Silk and nylon stockings were considered luxury, and their production was negligible, since in Soviet Union the production decisions were not made by market, but by state planners that controlled state-owned plants. Nylon stockings were considered waste of country's efforts. Moreover, only naive person can think that parachute nylon is of the same quality as the one used in stockings. This was a totally separate industry, and always under good care, being of military purpose. It is well-known now that a significant amount of military production was carried out in a disguised way at civil enterprises, so in a sense parachute industry could have disrupted Soviet hosiery indeed, but this was the whole state policy, rather than an occasional glitch. Mikkalai 16:20, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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)

I finaly found out what material was used for parachutes in Soviet Union at these times. It was acetate rayon and percale. Removing this nylon bullshit, probably invented by some paparazzi. Mikkalai 00:26, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Could you please source that? Bryan 01:30, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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)

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)

I have no knowledge of the veracity of the claim, but maybe we can make everybody happy if we change the line to:

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)

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)

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)

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)

Names in Cyrillic

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)

The sentence regarding 'the Sun' needs a unit of time to be meaningful

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).

Over what period of time is this "entire power output of the Sun" measured? Ground 22:26, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Since the power (more specifically luminosity) of the sun is being expressed in watts, it doesn't require a unit of time (or more accurately, it already includes one). It's not a total amount of energy, but a measure of energy flow per second (which is to say, power). It might be better to replace "entire" with "average", since I think that's what's being expressed with the 386 yottawatt figure (which is perhaps from this article). The 5.3 yottawatt figure is also an average, being apparently back-computed from the total energy output and an estimated duration of the explosion.

A humongous exaggeration?

"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)