well you can survive the blast... ok... and you might survive the initial shower of radiation...

you will HAVE to get out of the fridge sooner or later though :P

Not to mention that rocks and metallts aswell as everything else within km's of the nuke centre will be melted..

Lets hope one drops without the 1 KM zone from scawens house is one ever drops there

Lol just joking but nukes are truly and amazingly scary invenction

Quote from george_tsiros :

calculate the potential energy if of all the atoms in a medium sized potato, every one in 10^10 has just one electron more... (just the order of magnitude... if you just don't want to do that, let me just say that the (electrostatic) energy that would be contained in that potato would be ****ING RIDICULOUSLY ENORMOUS just with one out of 10000000000 atoms having just one electron more)

how so? youd just end up with a slightly ionized potato

im not quite sure how much energy you need to ionize potato atoms though
the only likely candiate in the periodic table is 84 po which wiki mistakenly claims is polonium instead of potato... but it is apparently radioactive

Hmm, I find Atom bombs a thing of beauty and also an icon of power, worry, death and capitalism. I guess it's a double edged sword, their mushroom clouds have always made me wonder "how, and why they look like that", I've spent many an hour couped away watching the relative youtube videos, and I must say, better than watching Corination Street

Quote from Shotglass :

how so? youd just end up with a slightly ionized potato

something tells me that due to electrostatic forces it would explode rather spectacularly.

Quote from Crashgate3 :

Its easy to survive an anotimic bomb, even if you're right next to it. Just get in a fridge.





Or so George Lucas would have us believe.

Lol, yes saw that.
Anyway, as someone said, these are just fascinating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... M22eY&feature=related

Quote :

I would call it beautifull. The music fits the clip perfect.

You could try laying over some different music and see if it still has the same effect on you. Music is powerful like that, you can get entirely opposite emotional reactions by playing the same clip over with contrasting music.

When I was living in Turkey I discovered the nightly Turkish news had a soundtrack, which I thought was horrific. Injecting bias and all that.

PS, I've always found it interesting that some of the most beautiful creatures are the most dangerous/poisonous.

Quote from Electrik Kar :

You could try laying over some different music and see if it still has the same effect on you. Music is powerful like that, you can get entirely opposite emotional reactions by playing the same clip over with contrasting music.

When I was living in Turkey I discovered the nightly Turkish news had a soundtrack, which I thought was horrific. Injecting bias and all that.

PS, I've always found it interesting that some of the most beautiful creatures are the most dangerous/poisonous.

I totally agree with you on that. With music it would be much different.

Quote from wsinda :

They do?? The world has been on the brink of nuclear war a couple of times...

No, really?

I said there's an argument that they do, it's not something I particularly agree with. We may have been on the brink of nuclear war occasionally, but those that argue that they "keep the peace" would say that without nuclear weapons in those and other situations war may have broken out. The knowledge that nobody can win, particularly against a "super power", is what is supposed to stop these things before they start. Who knows if it has worked.
Has there ever been a formal military attack on/invasion of a nuclear equipped nation?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBIdH26Uqr8

"This is 4 times bigger than anything America has ever exploded." Soviet scientists built a 3-staged thermonuclear device, based on the Ulam-Teller design. This bomb, nick-named "Emperor Bomb", was 58 megatons. The explosion equalled to 58 million tonnes of TNT. The original was 100 megatons, but they scaled it down to prevent pollution"

:wow: nuclear fallout looks amazing.

Quote from sinbad :

The knowledge that nobody can win, particularly against a "super power", is what is supposed to stop these things before they start. Who knows if it has worked.

I don't think it has. In the "Fog of War" documentary, Robert McNamara is clear about the reason why the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't lead to war: "We just lucked out". He was closely involved (Defense secretary), and this opinion was with 30 years of hindsight, so it should count for something.

Quote :

Has there ever been a formal military attack on/invasion of a nuclear equipped nation?

Argentina's invasion of the Falklands is the only example that comes to mind. And perhaps the independence struggle in the French colonies (Indochina, Algeria). But in all cases it was not the mainland that was under attack. OTOH, a country that has nukes usually also has a good set of conventional weaponry, so it's hard to say what the main deterrent is.

just a note... almost any explosion creates the mushroom which most people associate with nuclear weapons.

even a match being lit can create something to that effect.

Probally just the size that is different? Now I don't want to think about it if you lights up a stick and a mushroom on that size pops


Either way, that Russian bomb, the biggest one, that's just mentally insane.. Blowing out windows even in Finland. I hope that one day these weapons will be destroyed (by safety ofc) .

the size and the time it takes for it to form etc is of course different, yes.

When talking about that - when seeing images of it it seems the shockwave is fast as hell, but the actually mushroom sloooow, is this right? Or have they slowed down the nuke blast so people can see it?
Allways wondered if they show it in real-time or slowdown

The shockwave is fast because its quite near to the camera (well its fast approaching the camera), the mushroom cloud is basically a rising parcel of really hot air heated by the blast, and so it is slower as it rises through the air, obviously when the bomb goes off the fireball expands very quickly, but in the videos the massive amount of light given off blows out the camera, so you usually can't see this happening.

Its the same with any large explosion.

mushroom are slow, because it's just a bubble of raising hot gas as a result of the explosion.

So then when watching nuke explosions you see them in real-time?
I guess the light is too bright to be able to see the explosion itself (screen goes white / camera for a sec, guess that is the point) .

You can tell, just by looking at it - it ain't healthy!

Edit : well, now you would not be as stupid that you stand watching it, to get your eyes screwed over and radiation damage..OH WAIT, I forgot - right, who were the smart ones testing them, and then stand watching at them to discover later they get owned?



I love USA

Quote from JJ72 :

mushroom are slow, because it's just a bubble of raising hot gas as a result of the explosion.

Actually, it is dust from everything that disintegrated in the explosion of the bomb...

First, the white bubble you see is compressed air, pushed away from the blast and destroying everything in it's path... The little air that's left is burned away instantly, which creates a very low pressure area where the bomb exploded, which sucks all the particles now floating in the air to its center... Wind sets in, and the cold air pushes the hot air upwards which then forms the typical mushroom...

Quote from The Very End :

the shockwave is fast as hell

it goes at exactly the speed of sound. that's what sound is anyway. mechanical waves propagating through the air.

Quote from george_tsiros :

it goes at exactly the speed of sound. that's what sound is anyway. mechanical waves propagating through the air.

I don't think that's quite accurate. Shockwave speed of an explosive is dependant on detonation velocity and can easily exceed the speed of sound.