re: DOD releases the MOAB video

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Crazy to think the magnitude of nuclear power compared to conventional.

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MOAB's blast yield is about 11 tons of TNT.



This is a picture of the calibration test for the Trinity blast. That's 100 tons of TNT and the world's largest brass balls and the man attached to them standing on top. The largest conventional bombs tend to be around a ton of explosive, so that's 100 regular bombs that you think of or about 10 MOABS that guy is standing on top of. All they used it for was to film and document so when they set Trinity off, they'd have something to compare it to.

The Trinity blast was 200 times more powerful than that giant pile of TNT.

The largest weapons the U.S. ever tested were on the order of 750 times more powerful than Trinity. The Soviets went about 2500 times more powerful than Trinity and claim the weapon was scalable to 5000 times.

This is Trinity.



Nuclear weapons are just so powerful that it's hard for the human mind to get around them without actually seeing them; we just don't have anything in everyday life that's even comparable to the kind of energy released by a runaway nuclear chain reaction. Modern deployed weapons make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like Black Cats, and are nowhere near the biggest we've ever tested or deployed because as targetting got more accurate, we scaled back the yields because it was simply overkill. Which, in the context of nuclear weapons, is a strange idea.