America in any way possible. Folks have any idea how far NK is???

With China the mutual in mutual assured destruction comes in

the B83 bomb is the highest-yield nuclear weapon in the current US arsenal; it has a yield of 1.2 megatons (which is about 1/10th the "Mike" test bomb, there); the bulk of the US nuclear arsenal consists of W88 warheads (on ICBMs/SLBMs) with a yield of around 100-475 kilotons. The "Tsar Bomba" is the most powerful thermonuclear device ever detonated (50 megatons, designed for 100); no nuclear power has ever deployed a device that large (the largest in the US arsenal, ever, was 25MT, but those were all retired many years ago).

No operational nuclear weapon is in the Tsar Bomb yield.

Having said that, it hardly matters. Dropping a nuke of any suze would be devastating.

President Trump is like a very smart person with a very good brain. He doesn't need to be told stuff over and over again, and he's pretty sure that neither China nor Russia will get too mad if we lob a few nukes into North Korea. And our South Korean and Japanese pals will just be happy that someone finally did something about this long-standing problem. Trump is also almost positive that he heard once that nukes can be precision-programmed to blow up a very specific area. It's like the Microsoft Surface Pen, you know? You can practically define it down to the pixel.

And besides, even if President Trump isn't 100% correct, what's the worst that's likely to happen?

(A dumbass argument you can expect to see within the next 24-36 hours, only this time as a serious proposal.)

the world.

North Korea is an isolated totalitarian state run by paranoid kleptocrats* with far less to lose.

That "tiny" Hiroshima bomb is plenty to kill millions in a densely populated modern metro area. Comparing it to the Tsar Bomba is ludicrous, because there's no strategic value whatsoever is a bomb that big. That's the reason no one has built any bigger ones, since. a 50 Megaton Explosion is great for dick waving, but doesn't carry any appreciable war advantage over the 10 megaton version. Once you're talking hydrogen bombs, you're off the map, literally and figuratively.



* And yes, I know who is in the White House right now.

Last edited Sun Aug 13, 2017, 05:45 PM - Edit history (1)

however, if there is one, every single person on this planet is affected. not just and the north koreans.

The Tsar Bomba was a one-off Soviet weapon. After the test they never built another. Most modern nukes are far to the left on that chart.

Still a "tiny" 30kt bomb dropped on Seoul would result in millions of casualties.

Mostly meant to test the limits of how big of a bomb we could realistically produce. Most 'practical' nukes are in the <5MT range. There's very little reason to go over that because it just makes the bomb harder to deliver to the target, and a <5MT warhead is plenty of power to destroy a city anyway.