It was decided that a full 100 Mt detonation would create a nuclear fallout that was unacceptable in terms of pollution from a single test, as well as a near-certainty that the release plane and crew would be destroyed before it could escape the blast radius.
The radius is 65 km. Estimated number of victims - about 2.5 million people.
So a 10-megaton bomb detonated at an optimal altitude might do medium damage to a distance of 9.4 miles (15 kilometers) from ground zero, but a 100-megaton bomb “only” does the same amount of damage to 20.3 miles (33 kilometers).
Soviets. Andrei Sakharov in 1961 proposed a torpedo with a nuclear 100-megaton warhead, such a torpedo, could be fired at a safe distance by fitting it with a timing mechanism. Then it would explode at the right time, causing a tsunami.
It has been estimated that a 10,000-megaton war with half the weapons exploding at ground level would tear up some 25 billion cubic meters of rock and soil, injecting a substantial amount of fine dust and particles into the stratosphere.
How powerful is a 1 gigaton bomb? A USAF document mentions that a gigaton-yield nuclear weapon detonated in space at 150km altitude could deliver a thermal pulse to the ground sufficient to set 28,500 km^2 on fire (18x London's area), without further radiation or fallout.
Potentially, the weapon would render thousands of square miles of Earth's surface unlivable for decades.
Poseidon is a post-doomsday weapon unlike ever seen in any previous arms race. Formed like a giant torpedo, the weapon is nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed, and can allegedly travel down deep with intercontinental range.
If you dropped a nuclear bomb into the crater of an extinct volcano, you would flatten the mountain out a bit but you wouldn't set the volcano off because there wouldn't be any pre-existing upwelling of magma.
Tsar Bomba (in Russian, Царь-бомба) is the Western nickname for the Soviet RDS-220 (РДС-220) hydrogen bomb (code name Vanya). Detonated by the Soviet Union on October 30, 1961, Tsar Bomba is the largest nuclear device ever detonated and the most powerful man-made explosion in history.
Russia's Tsar bomba: World's most powerful nuclear weapon of mass destruction - World News.
A new video simulates the explosion of thermal nuclear weapons in the Challenger Deep. Tsar Bomba is the most powerful nuclear bomb ever made. One bomb would be stanched, but a million could easily destroy the Earth.
But assuming every warhead had a megatonne rating, the energy released by their simultaneous detonation wouldn't destroy the Earth. It would, however, make a crater around 10km across and 2km deep. The huge volume of debris injected into the atmosphere would have far more widespread effects.
The world's largest nuclear device ever to be set off, the 50 megaton Soviet “Tsar Bomba” – detonated in a remote arctic test site in 1961, creating the most powerful man-made explosion in history – would kill an estimated 5.8 million people if it were dropped on London, according to Nukemap.
It continues: “The corresponding radius of effect for a 1000 megaton bomb would be 100 miles, that is to say, an area of about 30,000 square miles would be affected and in clear weather would have an even more devastating effect.
Yielding an explosion of 50 megatons the "Tsar Bomba," as it is sometimes called, was about 3,300 times more powerful than the 15 kilotons nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) also states that it is very unlikely that a nuclear blast could trigger an eruption of Yellowstone.
Even a few inches of ash (which is what much of the country can get) can destroy farms, clog roadways, cause serious respiratory problems, block sewer lines, and even short out transformers. Air travel would have to shut down across much of North America.
The resulting inferno, and the blast wave that follows, instantly kill people directly in their path. But a new study finds that some people two to seven miles away could survive—if they're lucky enough to find just the right kind of shelter.
A lot of great technology was developed during the Cold War. Things like GPS, the internet and microchips were all developed as part of the arms-race tech boom. Unfortunately, so was the Novichok nerve agent, the world's largest nuclear weapon and Russia's doomsday device, just to name a few. You read that right.
Russia is planning to launch a new division of the Pacific submarine fleet equipped with lethal Poseidon nuclear-capable torpedoes, reported by TASS, a Russian state-backed media outlet. This fleet is expected to become operational by the end of 2024 or the first half of 2025.
Although a success, Tsar Bomba was never considered for operational use. Given its size, the device could not be deployed by a ballistic missile.
A declassified document shared by nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein gives the verdict that scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory and test site reached in 1945. They found that "it would require only in the neighborhood of 10 to 100 Supers of this type" to put the human race in peril.
The study published in the journal Risk Analysis describes Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu as the island countries most capable of producing enough food for their populations after an “abrupt sunlight‐reducing catastrophe” such as a nuclear war, super volcano or asteroid strike.