jmccombi@bbncca.ARPA (Jon McCombie) (11/24/83)
Of course the scenes showing the aftermath were understated/unrealistic. The war depicted what MIGHT have happened if 10-megaton warheads were dropped. It is my understanding that no major power maintains missles with < 20-megaton warheads; usual firepower is more like 100-megatons. As the producer (or was it the director?) said in an interview (quoting from memory...): "Sure, if we'd been completely realistic, the film would have been real short: introduce the characters, show the flash, pan the crater, roll the credits". Nothing more. Bi-i-i-i-lions and bi-i-ilions of square meters of fused silica parking lot.
jmccombi@bbncca.ARPA (11/24/83)
Relay-Version:version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site duke.UUCP Posting-Version:version B 2.10 5/3/83; site bbncca.ARPA Path:duke!decvax!bbncca!jmccombi Message-ID:<345@bbncca.ARPA> Date:Wed, 23-Nov-83 21:19:54 EST Organization:Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma. Of course the scenes showing the aftermath were understated/unrealistic. The war depicted what MIGHT have happened if 10-megaton warheads were dropped. It is my understanding that no major power maintains missles with < 20-megaton warheads; usual firepower is more like 100-megatons. As the producer (or was it the director?) said in an interview (quoting from memory...): "Sure, if we'd been completely realistic, the film would have been real short: introduce the characters, show the flash, pan the crater, roll the credits". Nothing more. Bi-i-i-i-lions and bi-i-ilions of square meters of fused silica parking lot.
ld@hpda.UUCP (Larry Dwyer) (11/28/83)
#R:bbncca:-34500:hpda:18300003:000:1352
hpda!ld Nov 27 18:25:00 1983
Of course the scenes showing the aftermath were understated/unrealistic.
The war depicted what MIGHT have happened if 10-megaton warheads were
dropped. It is my understanding that no major power maintains missiles with
< 20-megaton warheads; usual firepower is more like 100-megatons.
Dropping a 10 megaton warhead on the silos near KC is an extreme-
ly ineffective way to destroy them. It is more likely that an
array of MIRV missiles with 10 500 kiloton weapons each would be
dropped on each cluster of 10 silos. Since the film stated that
there were blasts from Sedalia through Green Ridge and Windsor,
the targeting appeared to be the ICBMs and their control rooms.
If the attack was preemptive, then the silos are the primary tar-
gets and the Soviets should use the smaller MIRVs. If the attack
was not preemptive, then the silos are assumed to be empty and of
little value, hence large cities become the targets with over-
sized payloads (possibly the retaliatory 10-100 megaton variety).
I suspect that the Soviets cannot change the payloads in a few
minutes based upon whether the US attack was preemptive or not.
Of course, the Soviets are not likely to have as good a targeting
system as we do, so they may resort to large payloads and hope
that close is good enough.
Larry Dwyer
ucbvax!hpda!ldhenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (11/29/83)
Jon McCombie observes:
The war depicted what MIGHT have happened if 10-megaton warheads
were dropped. It is my understanding that no major power maintains
missles with < 20-megaton warheads; usual firepower is more like
100-megatons.
Not true. 10 megatons is an *enormous* warhead for a missile, there are
no 20-megaton missiles that I'm aware of, and nobody has ever even tested
a 100-megaton bomb. (The USSR did test a 67-megaton bomb that could most
likely have been upgraded to 100, which is where the 100-megaton number
comes from.)
The typical warhead for Minuteman missiles is a few hundred *kilotons*.
Poseidon warheads are typically 20 kilotons. I'm not sure about MX and
Trident, but I believe they're similar. The only US strategic weapons
that carry multi-megaton bombs are the manned bombers, and these days
even they tend to carry larger numbers of smaller warheads. The Soviet
weapons are similar, although they do have one quite large ICBM that
might carry a few megatons.
Why? Two reasons. First, all those megatons aren't really necessary.
Remember that a measly 13 kilotons smashed Hiroshima, a sizeable city,
pretty badly. Second, multi-megaton bombs are terribly inefficient.
Most of the power goes into re-re-re-devastating the central area.
The radius of destruction scales as somewhere between the square and
cube root of the power of the bomb, so it grows slowly with bomb size.
To get a bigger area of destruction, several small warheads are a
much better approach. The really big bombs are useful only against
something like a deep-buried military base that needs to be smashed
*hard*. Not many of those. For ICBM silos, accuracy is more important.
In fact, a major argument against the development of the H-bomb in
the early 50's was that there was no legitimate military requirement
for it: A-bombs of various types could meet all known needs. This
is still true today, although it is often *easier* to build the more
substantial warheads as fusion bombs.
In short, hundred-megaton bombs are the stuff of poorly-written
novels (like Down To A Sunless Sea, a real turkey), not reality.
Most real warheads are small fractions of a megaton. Of course,
they'll still kill you just as dead if you're under them...
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henrywrbull@aluxp.UUCP (12/03/83)
THAT'S RUBBISH!!! Typical warheads on Minuteman missiles are typically in the 100s of kilotons range not mega-megatons. If memory serves me right, Titan II warheads were(are? They still around?) approx. 10 megatons each (no MIRVs) No nation has ever built a 100 megaton nuclear device although the Russians claimed to have one in East Berlin in the 1970 time frame - Typical Lies. Just a brief comment. I hope public education in this country hasn't sunk so low that people don't have enough sense not to frolic about in fallout like it's the first snowfall of the year like what was depicted in TDA. WR Bullman