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

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 9/2/07, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

I forgot references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzar_bomb

>From this information a 50 MT bomb has a short range of 4.6 km where
all effects occurred at the same time/place. The thermal radiation had
a long range of 100km (25) where it was probably a 15 or so at that
range.. atmospheric focusing had a range of 1000km (30). The big issue
from the articles on big nukes is that 1/2 or more energy punches
holes out of the atmosphere and so your damage yield goes down
probably exponentially as more energy just pushes the atmosphere up
and out .

-- 
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"