re: Nuclear bomb question

That is not right. Fat man and little boy were two different applications of nuke tech. Little boy was more powerful.

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Well, not exactly

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So why not build all nukes the size of a football? Bc size matters

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From a tactical standpoint it’s more to do with the purity of the fission material and the efficiency of the explosion.

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This is a different discussion

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I'm thinking more in lines of unlimited energy, solving all our current problems and heading out to space to find some green women.

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You sound like Capt. Kirk

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Is a nuclear bombs destructive power limited by the size of the bomb that they can fit in a plane or on an icbm?

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To a certain limit, yes.

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Basically if size was not a constraint could a nuclear bombs destructive power be unlimited?

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Yes.

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Is a nuclear bombs destructive power limited by the size of the bomb that they can fit in a plane or on an icbm? Basically if size was not a constraint could a nuclear bombs destructive power be unlimited?

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ISTR an atomic bomb can't be much larger than 500 KT or so, but a hydrogen bomb is limited only by how much fuel and stages it has. It always seemed to me there had to be a limit, because it's a fricking bomb, which means it blows itself apart. Indeed, the design of these things is all about keeping the active materials together and thus active for as long as possible. But yeah, delivery constrains yield. The "harbor bomb" was conceived to get around that. Float a 100 MT bomb into a city harbor, and you don't have to get that close. BTW, ISTR reading Teller saying there were practical limits to destructive power, such that as it increases, you ending up ejecting a hunk of the atmosphere into space faster rather than continuing to increase the area of destruction.

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What if a country whose conventional military was weaker and they were easily contained by anti missile technology created a massive nuclear bomb built into the earth that was strong enough to cause planet wide destruction? Basically a nuclear device used as a suicide explosive on a global scale. Is this possible?

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"Cobalt bomb" is a type of doomsday weapon, but it poisons the whole Earth with radioactive Cobalt-60. A more targeted doomsday device is the EMP. I don't think a nuke could actually blow up the Earth.

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Fat man and little boy were two different applications of nuke tech. Little boy was more powerful.

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That's backwards. Little Boy was at most 15 KT, while Fat Man was 20 KT. They were different designs, with Little Boy being a gun that shot a subcritical U235 bullet into a subcritical stationary hunk of U235. Very dangerous due to possibility of accidents. If somehow the bullet got loose and got even near the hunk, it wouldn't explode, but it would get hot as hell and release a lot of radiation, a mini-meltdown. Fat Man imploded a subscritical sphere of Pu239, which was less prone to accidents; the implosion would have to take place and go mostly right for it to do anything. They had to make implosion work, because they couldn't make a gun out of Pu due to its spontaneous fission rate overcoming the maximum muzzle velocity they had of 3000 ft/sec. That is, with the bullet flying toward the stationary mass at 3000 ft/sec, the Pu hunks would react and melt before they could assemble and explode, and at best, you'd get a fizzle, a low yield and pointless event.

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Little Boy was at most 15 KT, while Fat Man was 20 KT.

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True and why I suggested to him he was out of his element. He did understand they were different designs.

But, frankly, the Manhattan Project team considered Fat Man to be a relative failure - they thought they had learned from what happened at Trinity (which was an implosion device like Fat Man) and felt they could achieve improvements - Trinity was ~22kt, Fat Man was about ~21kt. They used the information from Trinity to adjust detonation heights (mach stem effects, mainly) of both Little Boy and Fat Man, but also thought they could squeeze a few more kt out of the net yield of Fat Man based on their testing(although ultimately, the Trinity Device and Fat Man were remarkably similar where it counted).

However, the reason they never tested the uranium "gun" design was they knew it couldn't "not" work if constructed properly. Although they couldn't make a "Plutonium" gun, they considered incorporating Plutonium (target) and Polonium-Beryllium (gun components) into Little Boy's overall Uranium Gun concept, IIRC, but that recommendation came too late to change the final design.

Regardless, the scientists knew the Trinity/Fat Man design was the way forward for a fission device. And, recall these early devices, from an engineering standpoint, were limited to the degree they had to be flown and delivered to the target by a B-29. So, the modified aircraft's capacities of takeoff weight and bomb bay volume were the limiting factors for the final devices.

OT Baws are experts on everything from nuclear weapons to mens fashion.

Depends on how much background radiation from the big bang it has calculated will be absorbed into the flux capacitor. It's basic science.

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Fermi Paradox

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People who believe in Fermi, probably believe in the Easter Bunny.