Megatons

[flashpig]

I can't quite get it in perspective. I hear the largest bomb ever tested was 50megatons, but I have no idea how big this is. I've heard it broken down into calories - I think 1Megaton = 10,000,000,000,000,000 calories. What would be a calorie? A match? A lighter exploding? A firework?

How many megatons is the largest bomb? Or, if it's been put out of action, how big would it have been?

[Hamish]

This is related to the amount of energy relased not the mass of the bomb. It relates to TNT I think, therefore it is the same explosive force as 50 million tonnes of TNT. if TNT has a dencity of about 2g/cm^3 then that is 20kg/m^3. this means that the volume occupied by this much TNT would be about 2.5 million cubic meters - a bit more than you could fit in the average building I think.

[flashpig]

Cheers, that's sorted out the size scale, but I haven't used ANY TNT, so it doesn't

So what would one tonne of TNT do? One thousand? 22 thousand blew up Nagasaki. But I have no sense of scale when it comes to explosions.

[delboy3]

The Soviets' Tsar Bomba, test-detonated in 1961, was estimated to have yielded nearly 60 megatons of TNT, and they had the capability of building a 100-megaton device. However, due to impracticalities over size and delivery, this monster bomb was never built.

To give some comparison, the IRA bomb which destroyed several buildings in Manchester in 1996 was just over 1 ton of TNT. Multiply that by 100 million, and you can imagine what would be left of the place, i.e. ****** all. Hey - stop cheering, I live there...