Here’s another couple of entertaining graphics for the edification of those who didn’t grow up with Bert the Turtle:
“Mike” is the Ivy Mike test, America’s first thermonuclear device, “Bravo” is “Castle Bravo,” the first test of a “dry” nuclear device that used a powder, lithium deuteride, rather than liquid hydrogen isotopes as fusion fuel. Castle Bravo “ran away” beyond it’s projected yield resulting in Very Bad Things for some unsuspecting Japanese fisherman and coming close to killing a lot of spectators. It was quickly weaponized into our first generation of H-Bombs. It was about the size of the one Slim Pickens rode down to cinematic immortality.
The Tsar Bomba was the biggest device ever set off. Kruschev wanted a hundred, but there was literally nowhere in the USSR (and thus in the world) where a bomb that size could be set off without killing someone.
Yields in this graphic, from left to right are about 10 kilotons for Little Boy, twenty kt for the Trinity test in New Mexico, ten megatons for Ivy Mike, fifteen megatons for Castle Bravo, and 60 megatons for the Tsar Bomba.
Here’s a scale that lets you get a sense of the blast size for any given yield.
Most of the warheads in the U.S. arsenal delivered by by land or submarine based missiles are in the 475 kiloton range because bigger warheads produce more and bigger fallout clouds and, more importantly, a few smaller warheads dropped in on a given target on a suitable schedule designed to prevent fratricide do more damage than One Big Bomb because of the physics of explosions. We also have a stock of gravity bombs with yields of up to one megaton. Most American nuclear weapons may have “dial-a-yield” that enables their yields to be adjusted downward from their maximum yield.
The atomic bomb, with all its terrors, did not carry us outside the scope of human control or manageable events in thought or action, in peace or war. But when Mr. Sterling Cole, the Chairman of the United States Congressional Committee, gave out a year ago – 17 February 1954 – the first comprehensive review of the hydrogen bomb, the entire foundation of human affairs was revolutionized, and mankind placed in a situation both measureless and laden with doom.
. . .
What ought we to do? Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world? It does not matter so much to old people; they are going soon anyway; but I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind.
Winston Churchill, 1955.
What’s depicted in these two graphics is what Churchill was talking about. And what a lot of people decided we ought to do in 2016 was make, or through inaction allow, Donald Trump to become president.