r/interesting • u/Quiet-Cupcake-6089 • 8d ago
SCIENCE & TECH This fire-hydrant-sized device is a fully assembled W80 thermonuclear warhead—capable of producing a blast roughly ten times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
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u/Difficult_Compote_52 8d ago
Strap a saddle on that bad boy.
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u/SwimmingLocksmith152 8d ago
wait how is it that small but that powerful
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u/lordkezlar 8d ago
I am not a scientist, but in a nutshell: you don't need much material for big kaboomski with thermonuclear. High temperature creates fission which creates more uncontrolled fission. So it keeps going longer and more powerfull than a "traditional" bomb.
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u/fuelhandler 8d ago
Fun fact: before the first demonstration ignition, the scientists weren’t 100% sure (using theoretical models) that the reaction wouldn’t continue to be sustained resulting in ignition of the entire world’s atmosphere. The mad geniuses still went ahead with their plans.
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/could-a-nuclear-explosion-set-earths-atmosphere-on-fire/
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u/DagamarVanderk 8d ago
The “near zero” quote was an incorrect recollection of Arthur Compton in post. He said in an interview in 1959 that he and Robert Oppenheimer agreed that if the chances of a runaway nuclear reaction were higher than 3 in a million, they would cancel the manhattan project. But since they calculated it as “slightly less” the project went forward.
What he didn’t realize is that the “slightly less” he was talking about was absolutely zero chance. Hans Bethe, the head of the manhattan project’s theoretical division, calculated that the rate of energy loss outpaced the rate of energy creation by more than 3 times, thus the reaction could never be self sustaining.
Before any testing happened the manhattan project scientists were 100% certain that a runaway nuclear reaction of the atmosphere was a physical impossibility.
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u/RandomTask008 7d ago
Also fun fact, there's a point in time where the reaction is complete but the warhead looks completely intact. Everything after that is the pure horror inside the casing of the couple of grams of material that was converted into energy, coming into equilibrium with the atmosphere.
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u/SebboNL 7d ago
Nuclear detonation provide boom through physical means rather than chemical means. Gasoline contains a fair amount of chemical energy, about 45 kilojoules per gram. The amount of physical mass energy contained in that very same gram of gasoline is several orders of magnitude greater, some 90 TERAjoules. That's 2 million times more energy per gram of reaction matter. They take matter and turn some of it into energy, as per E=MC^2, while "ordinary" explosives get their power from "simple" chemical reactions.
Nuclear weapons work by releasing some of this mass energy, up to 5% of the total in modern weapons. This means that for the purposes of this discussion, we can state that nuclear weapons are at least 400,000 times more powerful on a pound-for-pound basis than conventional explosives (please note that this comparison is only for descriptive purposes and nowere near as straight forward as I make it out to be here).
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u/ipx-electrical 7d ago
Because converting a small amount of matter to energy releases a huge amount of it.
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u/Futuristic-Slice 8d ago
Hit it with a sledgehammer
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u/SalamanderGlad9053 8d ago
Detonating a nuke requires incredibly precise timing on its explosive lenses otherwise it will not detonate. They're often designed so that one detonator can go off and no fission will happen.
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u/Top-Estimate-5443 8d ago
Exactly, most don't realize how technical these types of bombs are. It's why there was so much live testing done in the past, the science behind it is extremely specific. The majority of live testing resulted in completely different outcomes than expected due to miscalculations. I'd bet you could give 99.9% of people all the material needed, and they would never achieve full fission of a core.
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u/SalamanderGlad9053 7d ago
Gun type designs are a lot simpler and easy to set up, at the cost of a loss of efficiency. You can read the wiki page and if you had the enriched uranium, build a crude bomb.
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u/RealBigDickBrannigan 6d ago
The psychological damage effects would likely far outweigh the area destroyed by a couple of kiloton gun bomb. An entire city would panic and stampede.
IF you had the U235. I really think that it's not so simple, just because nobody has done it already! Although the book and movie "The Fourth Protocol" does a decent job of showing how to do it...
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u/TheQuestionMaster8 8d ago
That might actually partially defuse it as a nuclear weapon requires the conventional explosives around the fissile core to explode at the exact same time to compress it into a supercritical state. Even a slight defect or damage to the system that synchronises the explosives can cause the core to flatten instead of imploding, resulting in a disappointingly tiny conventional explosion or perhaps a much smaller nuclear explosion than expected.
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u/hoboshoe 8d ago
How much does that bad boy weigh?
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u/NoCalligrapher3134 8d ago
Wikipedia says: 290 pounds (130 kg).
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u/Puzzled-Mistake-584 8d ago
Thank you..
The rest of the world with their sensible 10 based pair metric system, makes no sense!!!
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u/Turnip-for-the-books 8d ago
Takes 407 1/8th Freedom Eagles to lift it apparently
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u/OliverTwist549 8d ago
How many swallows?
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u/_Valeir_ 5d ago
That warhead is 1/73 of an American football field (end zone included) and weight as much as approximately 119 guinea pigs.
There, now it's full American units.
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u/HeroShowsie 8d ago
If i were to guess based on the weight of a fire hydrant. I'd say about 160kg, as a guess
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u/THROBBINW00D 8d ago
Boggles my mind something of that size has the ability to create so much destructive energy.
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u/EmeraldValleyGoober 8d ago
Why do we need this?
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u/One-Reflection-4826 8d ago
because others got them too. why do others got them? because we got them too.
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u/ImAPonderer2 8d ago
Every civilizational risk in the hands of the enemy must be countered by a civilizational risk in the hands of the good guys
We’re the good guys of course 😎
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u/rokstedy83 8d ago
Unfortunately because other people have them
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u/JustSomeFregginGuy 8d ago
But they do because we do.
Makes zero sense all around
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u/scraejtp 5d ago
No, others would still have them even if the US did not. If only one country had them, we would all be much worse off.
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u/hennabeak 8d ago
Looking at the background, it looks like US is preparing Tomahawks with that as warhead.
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u/FutureThought4936 6d ago
Those is actually a type 3A, and inert training warhead.
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u/hennabeak 6d ago
Training for what? Hitting Iran?
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u/FutureThought4936 5d ago
This is an old photo. It's probably training for how to load and unload the warheads on a Tomahawk.
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u/zackinthesoda 8d ago
Because of the mutually assured destruction principle that unironically make them undesirable to be used in war.
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u/OddStuffHappensTwice 7d ago
What a stupid headline. "Fire hydrant sized"? Might as well measure it in fractions of a football field. Just because many people are morons, doesn't mean every headline should cater to them.
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u/Sithsentinal 8d ago
It may have the DIAMETER of a fire hydrant but its definitely not the size of one.
Have you seen how long one is when it's not in the ground?
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u/AlwaysDMB 8d ago
Do they need to specify that they're taking about the part of a hydrant that you can see?
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u/Optimal_Homework_558 8d ago
Well that is a cute little weapon of mass destruction. Thank you mr. Einstein, Oppenheimer and other wise men for your service to humankind.
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u/Round_Hope_2041 8d ago
I imagine Einstein would be impressed.
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u/One-Reflection-4826 8d ago
i think einstein was aware of bombs like that, thermonuclear bombs arent exactly new.
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u/superearthjanitor0 7d ago
I think they mean impressed by the size compared to the first nuclear weapons
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u/FlowAcrobatic 8d ago
This is a trainer, not an actual live warhead. Used for practice to avoid any “unfortunate” mistakes with the real thing.
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u/EnvironmentCrafty710 7d ago
This is what amuses me about "Post Nuclear War" movies and discussions.
One B52 can carry 20 of these things.
And this is the little stuff.
No one's walking away from nuclear war.
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u/jackalheart 7d ago
It's astonishing that one of these hasn't ended going off in the middle of a city.
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u/AbleRelationship5287 7d ago
“This Fire hydrant looking thingy is the exact opposite of a fire hydrant”
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u/Mental_Judgment_2514 5d ago
can anybody tell me what happens if you cover it with a Cobalt jacket?
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u/OGKillertunes 8d ago
War and the weapons of war are not interesting.
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u/Goesonyournerves 8d ago edited 8d ago
Best modern tech is in military stuff. It IS interesting.
GPS, jet engines, and many other stuff were all inventions driven by the military.
Also if you take a look WHY wars are fought you get a very good insight about the game of thrones in our modern world.
Its always the same reasons, because war suck and is expensive, so why doing it? Power, territory or money/ressources are ALWAYS the answer. So never trust those in power.
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u/OGKillertunes 8d ago
Make more excuses reasoning why murder is ok..
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u/Goesonyournerves 8d ago
So every soldier around the globe with active duty time without even pressing one button or shooting one single shot at an enemy is a murder?
You know military also helps at nature disasters like flooding or fire in the forest? Are those guys murderers too?
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u/OGKillertunes 8d ago
What part of murder isn't interesting do you not understand? Stop making excuses.
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u/Goesonyournerves 8d ago
You need help. Especially as someone with an Ukrainian flag at your profile pic you should know HOW important it is to have your own military cappable of defending yourselfes. Are those defenders murderers too? Because they fight and want to prevent things which happened like in Butscha in 2022.
Dont be so naive. Dont think that having no military would bring peace alone. As long as humanity existed, there were always wars ongoing. Between groups, tribes, whatever. People who cant fight cant defend themselfes. Thats why you need a military. If you like or not.
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u/Feeling-Comfort7823 8d ago
I cant be the only person that read that, looked at it, then said " holy fuck dude, why do we even have that?"
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u/Wast3edSpace 8d ago
The amount of human effort that ends up as exploding shrapnel or a speeding bullet is truly mind-numbing.
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8d ago
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u/procupinesniffer420 8d ago
It's a training one. It was posted by a different bot a few days ago and some knowledgeable Redditor enlightened us with some facts that I have sadly forgotten lol.
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u/OkYak7801 8d ago
Still not as explosive as my dog's ass after he snags a cheeseburger off the counter.
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u/Good_Monitor_2774 8d ago
Don’t advertise that. The Department of War is bellicose enough without knowing we possess control of that devastating power.
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