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862
863

Amazing photo of a hydrogen bomb explosion (i.imgur.com)

submitted ago by The_Curly_Council

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[–]googlelover42 19 points20 points ago

I've had this problem before. Just put a couple of pieces of toilet paper in the water before you use it. No back splash!

[–]yelawolf 2 points3 points ago

I love you

[–]vinrock 30 points31 points ago

Fun Facts!

That is an image of the French 'Licorne' nucler weapon test at Mururora Atoll in 1970 with a nuclear yield of 914 kilotons.

This is an image of the most powerful destructive device ever witnessed by humankind, the Russian Tsar Bomba. With a nuclear yield of 50 megatons the fireball was 2.2 miles with a destructive radius of 22 miles.

The second largest nuke ever was Castle Bravo, detonated by the United States in 1954 and having a nuclear yield of 15 megatons or just under 1/3 the potential of the Tsar Bomba.

[–]AngelOfLight 36 points37 points ago

Fun fact: Castle Bravo became the second largest detonation by accident. Its predicted yield was 4 to 6 Mt, but the physicists hadn't counted on the fact that Lithium-7 (which they assumed to be inert) was in fact highly reactive, decaying into Tritium (Hydrogen-3) and releasing two neutrons, a regular captured neutron and also a so-called "fast" neutron.

This unintended reaction increased the amount of fuel available to the fusion stage (the "secondary") by almost 250%.

The miscalculation meant that several thousand islanders (which were supposed to be outside the fallout zone) were irradiated and had to be evacuated and treated. There was one fatality - a radio operator aboard a small Japanese fishing boat died of radiation poisoning, while several of his crew-mates suffered radiation burns resulting in life-long scarring and disfigurement.

[–]vinrock 13 points14 points ago

Fuck yeah dude, fun facts own.

[–]motherpsycho 16 points17 points ago

Fun fact : there's a penis in that cloud.

[–]Wayfarer21 1 point2 points ago

looked like broccoli to me

[–]motherpsycho 0 points1 point ago

You can't tell me you don't see the penis in the middle

[–]huggableplum 1 point2 points ago

Didn't that test accidently destroy an entire island?

[–]slackinfux 6 points7 points ago

You may be thinking of the the Ivy Mike test, which left a gigantic crater in place of the island of Elugelab at Enewetak Atoll. Ivy Mike was the first full-scale test of a thermonuclear device by the US and the first megaton class blast with a 10.4 MT yield. Source

[–]snorgsniffer 0 points1 point ago

Fun fact within the fun fact: Though CB is counted as a nuclear/fusion detonation, around 80% of da bang was actually produced by fission.

[–]AngelOfLight 0 points1 point ago

Correct. The bomb had a U-238 tamper which served as a neutron and X-ray reflector (its purpose was to reflect free neutrons and X-rays back into the core in order to sustain and increase the energy of the fusion chain reaction.

U-238, unlike it's more unstable isotope U-235, is relatively stable. However, it can be forced into fission with a suitable supply of "fast" neutrons and ultra-high temperature - such as that supplied by a fusion reaction. Since a U-238 atom has a much higher binding energy than U-235, fissioning natural Uranium results in the release of far more energy than a U-235 reaction, as well as the fusion stage. This was actually predicted by Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, who came up the the "staged" design.

[–]farewelltokings2 12 points13 points ago

Castle Bravo wasnt the 2nd largest test, it was the 6th.. but still the US's largest.

  1. Tsar - 50MT - 10/31/1961
  2. Test 219 - 24.2MT - 12/24/1962
  3. Unnamed Novaya Zemlya Test - 21.1MT - 08/05/1962
  4. Unnamed Novaya Zemlya Test - 20MT - 09/27/1962
  5. Unnamed Novaya Zemlya Test - 19.1MT - 09/25/1962
  6. Castle Bravo - 15MT - 03/01/1954

Source

[–]vinrock 1 point2 points ago

Oh shit you're right, derp!

[–]Calpa 5 points6 points ago

I happen to have spent the last hour watching nuclear detonation videos on Youtube.

[–]theculchie 2 points3 points ago

I highly recommend the documentary "Trinity and beyond" .

[–]ifyouwereahotdog 1 point2 points ago

exactly.

[–]cohrt 5 points6 points ago

also the Tsar was only half its proposed yield so the delivery plane could escape the fireball

[–]bbdesigncof 1 point2 points ago

Was anyone killed from the Tsar Bomba?

[–]G-Winnz 4 points5 points ago

Nope. It was dropped was dropped on Novaya Zemlya, way up north that originally had a few hundred natives living on it, but the Soviets moved them all out in 1957 before they started getting all nukey (the Tsar Bomba was dropped in 1961).

[–]Rinx7 0 points1 point ago

Tsar Bomba was originally designed for around 100 Megatons but at that size the destruction range would be too high for the Bomber that dropped it to escape.

[–]we_love_dassie 12 points13 points ago

High speed shot of a nuclear fireball 1ms after detonation

[–]shootr45 5 points6 points ago

The white "spikes" coming out of the bottom of the blast are the towers support wires vaporizing.

[–]999mal 1 point2 points ago

Actually they are wires being held up by balloons so they can measure the shock wave. http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/SmokeTrails.html

[–]reddiculon 1 point2 points ago

Actually they're talking about the white spikes which seem to be coming out of the fireball, which are in fact the support wires of the tower vaporising. This is known as the Rope Trick Effect.

[–]we_love_dassie 0 points1 point ago

How come the tower it self doesn't suffer the same effect?

[–]FistMissile 1 point2 points ago

Looks like an X-Ray. I suppose it kind of is.

[–]Loucke 1 point2 points ago

That is terrifying and awesome at the same time.

[–]dogsarentedible 8 points9 points ago

We'll.... meet again....

[–]Divine_Igniter 2 points3 points ago

Looks almost aquatic.

[–]huggableplum 1 point2 points ago

That's my thought as well. Like a squid or cuttlefish or something attempting to leave orbit

[–]plinsdad 2 points3 points ago

Where was the bomb located within that column?

[–]silentkill144 5 points6 points ago

Everywhere.

[–]rattiger 2 points3 points ago

because fuck the coral reef

[–]RoboNerdOK 0 points1 point ago

IIRC this was air-dropped. The USA started using barges after a while because real estate was getting scarce after a few multi-megaton craters.

[–]MONDARIZ 0 points1 point ago

This is the French Licorne shot July 3, 1970 over the Pacific atoll of Mururoa (air balloon test yielding 914kt).

[–]rattiger 0 points1 point ago

you mean that an air-dropped bomb makes less damage to the atolls?

[–]RoboNerdOK 0 points1 point ago

With respect to catering, yes. Overall environmental impacts? That's another story.

The greatest reason most countries started using balloons, barges, and such was the scarcity of land to mount the precision electronics and optical equipment. The air drops were more for the sake of testing the deliverability of the weapons (in the pre-ICBM days).

Modern warheads are far lighter and can even "dial-a-yield". Plus the need for live testing is greatly diminished because computing power can accurately predict weapon performance with far less expense and time than a live shot. If that were not the case, I wouldn't doubt for a second that many nations would hesitate to shoot them off like packs of firecrackers.

[–]RoboNerdOK 0 points1 point ago

Darn phone, that should be "cratering".

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points ago

We used to be so good at vaporizing atolls.

[–]xenoph2 1 point2 points ago

Gotta love hydrogen bombs.

[–]douglasg14b 4 points5 points ago

Not even that, this was a sub-megaton explosion, tiny in comparison to the other bombs tested later.

It only looks so impressive because you can see the cloud in direct relation with the ground and the shape of the ground.

[–]statusone 1 point2 points ago

Doesn't matter how cool it looks, we are still testing new ways to kill people...hmmm, bummer

[–]EccentricFox 3 points4 points ago

Fun fact: fatalilities from war decreased after the advent of the nuclear bomb and MAD. And now you know!

[–]Frostxtq 0 points1 point ago

True, but now the potential for destruction is far increased and seeing as how we can't really trust ourselves not to start another big war, that's not a good thing.

[–]MiyegomboBayartsogt 1 point2 points ago

A dazzling harbinger of lasting peace.

[–]migslayer 1 point2 points ago

I might just be hungry but that explosion looks delicious, I can't explain it but I want some hot creamy coffee nao :)

[–]elede616 3 points4 points ago

Does this H-bomb also generate radioactivity as Hiroshima nuclear bomb?

[–]rocketsocks 2 points3 points ago

Yes, but to a different degree relative to the first nuclear weapons, depending on design.

The basic principle of modern nuclear weapons is explosive implosion, meaning that you focus the energies of an explosive inward to compress materials and set off a nuclear chain reaction. As it turns out you can use a nuclear explosion for this purpose as well, creating a multi-stage bomb where the 2nd and further stages are compressed to a much higher degree than conventional explosives would enable. This makes it possible to make use of fusion reactions, usually using Hydrogen isotopes (such as Deuterium and/or Tritium), thus the name "H-bomb". However, it can also be used to implode a large fission bomb as well, or a mixed fusion/fission bomb.

And this is the way most modern "H-bombs" work, they are fission-fusion-fission devices which generally get most of their yield from fission reactions even though a substantial amount of the yield (perhaps even as much as half) comes from fusion. Overall such devices don't generate substantially less radioactive fallout than pure fission devices, though they could in theory be designed to do so (the Tsar bomba test being a good example of how that's possible).

[–]elede616 0 points1 point ago

Wow! Thank you for taking the time to explain all these things?

[–][deleted] ago

[deleted]

[–]psifusi 8 points9 points ago

Fusion weapons

The other basic type of nuclear weapon produces a large proportion of its energy in nuclear fusion reactions. Such fusion weapons are generally referred to as thermonuclear weapons or more colloquially as hydrogen bombs (abbreviated as H-bombs), as they rely on fusion reactions between isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium).

[–]DJ_Epilepsy 7 points8 points ago

"Now a fusion bomb hasn't been invented yet"

Wat.

And also, it's very much possible to create a fusion reaction that won't melt its "containment unit". The reaction is suspended with crazy complex magnetic fields. We are just having trouble suspending it for more than a few seconds.

And yes, any type of nuclear weapon will produce ionizing radiation.

[–]captain_manatee 0 points1 point ago

i thought that the issue was the ways we can figure out how to contain the reaction work, but take more power than is produced.

[–]DJ_Epilepsy 0 points1 point ago

That could be part of it. I can't imagine it's cheap to sustain those magnetic fields for long.

[–]Glass_of_Milk 0 points1 point ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon#Fusion_weapons

[–]Hicks254 0 points1 point ago

And that folks is how we can with many upon many of those turn the earth into a giant ball of cosmic dust

[–]MONDARIZ 0 points1 point ago

This is the French Licorne shot July 3, 1970 over the Pacific atoll of Mururoa (air balloon test yielding 914kt).

[–]KIAranger 0 points1 point ago

Does anyone else see a face of anguish near the middle of the smoke?

[–]Sneakyferret 0 points1 point ago

For such an old photo the quality is impressive!

[–]Lord_of_Womba 0 points1 point ago

That my friends is what we call cauliflower.

[–]NocturnalGamer 0 points1 point ago

I hate anything man-made that is capable of such destruction.

[–]DrEddgarAllenPWN 0 points1 point ago

Isn't that how Xenu killed all those people?

[–]Colonelvonjazz 0 points1 point ago

Cool photo it may be but it's still disgusting

[–]marchingpigster 0 points1 point ago

Beautiful. I wish we could have more of these.

[–]paranoidbillionaire 0 points1 point ago

You don't really get a good sense of how large it is until you realize that it's happening on the horizon.

[–]SimilarImage 0 points1 point ago

Age User Title Reddit Cmnt Points
1 week Microsoftt Bikini Atoll Nuclear Detenation here 17 114
1 month Microsoftt Bikini Atoll Nuclear detonation. here 370 1632
9 months et_Spiritus_Sancti boom. here 44 195

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[–]LeftyRedMN 0 points1 point ago

Ha Ha! That cloud looks like a mushroom.

[–]airetupal 0 points1 point ago

Beautiful, yet, terrifying. Better not. Ever.

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