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Wikipedia says that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of about 16 kilotons of TNT. 600k of those would be 16*600 megatons, or 9600 megatons. That's 96 times more than the original target yield of 100 megatons for Tsar Bomba.

I don't know if that's possible, but it makes sense that it would "reduce a region the size of France to ashes." Maybe the design had a lot of stages.

▲ cjbgkagh a day ago | parent | next [-]

IIRC there is no hard limit on the size of a hydrogen bomb. That said many small nukes operating as a cluster cover more area for the same material due to the inverse cubed law.

▲ dghlsakjg a day ago | parent [-]

AFAIK, you can just pack as much fuel as you want into the secondary to scale the size of a thermonuclear bomb. So yeah, there is no size limit. Interesting aside; the US had the dial-a-yield mechanism that allowed one bomb to deliver a selectable amount of energy, not sure what the mechanism for this was, however.

As to your second sentence, pretty sure that’s what a MIRV is.

	▲	chickenbig 19 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> not sure what the mechanism for this was, however. Boosting (injection of deuterium/tritium into the centre of the pit) causes a large increase in yield because fusion generates lots of high energy neutrons that go on to fast fission your (still compressed) pit. `According to one weapons designer, boosting is mainly responsible for the remarkable 100-fold increase in the efficiency of fission weapons since 1945.` https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon
	▲	dboreham 20 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Variable yield weapons presumably still exist. Particularly depth charges iirc. Usually the yield can be selected between two or more fixed levels rather than a continuously variable input. Often this is implemented with tricks such as disabling the secondary and/or disabling boosting in the primary.

▲ a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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