[Torg] what's the damage value of a nuclear bomb?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 9/1/07, Benjamin Grant <benn at 4efix.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Seriously, curious what the DV of a nuke would be.
>
>

I can't find my regular article on this.. but I have answered this for
other people and will add it to my FAQ soon.

A nuclear weapon has 4 damage effects. The first is the initial
radiation which travels at the speed of light, but falls off at a high
rate due to absorbtion of air. The second is the thermal radiation of
the blast, and the third is the blast wave (which causes most of the
destruction beyond 1-2 miles. The fourth is the residual radiation
which causes poisoning.

Depending on where you are to an explosion you will be affected by 1-4 of them.

A 1 Mton explosion is listed as 4.6x10^15 Joules.
A 1 Kton explosion would then be 4.6x10^12 Joules
1 kg of Dynamite is 4.6x10^6 Joules

Doing a rough match of 1 Joule =~ 1 DV, 10^2 Joules would be 10. (A
generic rifle bullet has 4x10^3 Joules which is 16... however the 3G
rules are better on figuring out things here).

>From this,  10^6 Joules should be ~30, with 1 kg of explosision being
release~33. An 1Kt bomb would then release about a value of 64 joules
in energy. A 1 Mt bomb would release about 79.

Now for a 1 Mton air blast is 50% air blast, 35% thermal radiation,
10% residual radiation and 5% initial gamma ray radiation. The effects
of each of these are different depending on where etc you are.

You can consider everything within a range of 17 to be in short range,
and medium would be 20 and long range would be 23. In the short range
area, you get the initial radiation ~70. The thermal radiation has a
value of 76 and the air blast due to Mach waves and reflections might
actually have a value over 83 or so. The effects fall so that the
initial radiation might cause blindness at the horizon (~45-160 km)
which the air wave blast may only cause large scale damage to 40 km or
so. The residual radiation could have a poisoning effect for 1000's of
km.

The largest nukes tested seems to have been the Russian Tzar-bomb. It
seems to have limited to 50 MT due to using Lead as an outer lining
versus using a third Pu/U layer.. which would have increased the yield
to 100-150MT and the poisoning effects by 1000x. The yield seems to
fall off after a certain amount that is limited to our technology.
Cyberpapacy/Tharkhold bombs might actually be able to get past that..
but maybe by using alternative technologies via anti-matter and such.

A 100 MT bomb would have been in the 93 range from its blast effect.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"