Here’s the Ever Fortune, a recently launched Evergreen F-class container ship: That’s OK, but I don’t think it’s very intuitive-the mind simply can’t grasp the magnitudes. Typically they are measured in tonnes of TNT equivalent. Existing bombs are already very destructive.Ĭurrent thermonuclear bombs are stupidly powerful. It’s likely possible to create smaller versions, but there’s little interest in doing that, for the reasons below. That is to say, it would be difficult to use these things in war. (They did survive-the shock wave caught the plane and it dropped 1 km in the sky but then recovered.) Even with a special paint to reflect heat, it was estimated that the flight crew only had a 50% chance of survival. The bomb required a 1.6 km 2 parachute, and a specially modified plane to carry and drop it. For comparison, a modern 737 freighter has a total payload of around 18 tonnes.

But it was large (8 meters long and 2.1 meters wide) and very heavy (26 tonnes). Ivy Mike looked less like a “bomb” and more like a “factory”. the W76, W78, or W80) are only 5-20x more powerful than Little Boy. The largest American bomb (the B83) is eight times less powerful than Ivy Mike. Yet today, almost all deployed nuclear warheads are smaller, and there’s little interest in making them bigger. In 1961, Tsar Bomba was the largest man-made explosion in history, 2,500 times more powerful than Little Boy. The first demonstration of this principle was Ivy Mike in 1952, an explosion 500 times more powerful than Little Boy. The outer fusion reaction creates a huge number of neutrons that make the inner fission reaction much more complete.

Roughly speaking, fusion bombs wrap a layer of deuterium and tritium around a fission bomb. Thermonuclear weapons use another principle: If deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen with extra neutrons) are put together at very high temperatures, they will fuse into helium, generating energy in the process. This quickly eliminates the critical mass, meaning most of the atoms never undergo fission at all. While such weapons are very destructive, they are “inefficient” in that as the bomb starts to explode, it pushes the uranium-235 atoms away from each other. The Little Boy bomb detonated over Hiroshima in 1945 was a fission weapon where a critical mass of uranium-235 created a chain reaction of atoms splitting into lighter atoms, releasing energy and neutrons. Delivery systems are getting more accurate. The surface of the earth is a two-dimensional manifold. Existing bombs are already very destructive.

Largest fission bomb