JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 473
The largest, greatest explosion of all time as time itself, being the Big Bang, as explosion of immeasurable, incomprehensible magnitude. Among the sub-infinite explosions in deep space, the largest “observed” explosion was 120 star mass supernova 240 million light years away through the veil of Perseus.
Nuclear explosions are of course the largest man-made terrestrial explosions, the largest of these being the 50 megaton “Tsar Bomb” exploded over Noveya Zemlga by the Soviet Union—this is known as the Father of all Bombs. (The Soviets were making these enormous bombs to make up in destructive capacity and real estate damage for what they lacked in missile control—they couldn’t match the accuracy of the American weapons, so they developed bombs big enough so that the accuracy factor fizzled away by sheer nuclear tonnage.)
I guess though that the largest explosion is yet to come, not in the Rapture but in the Rupture: the possibility that a meteor will at some time strike the earth. A massive mass 30 kilometers across, say, hitting at the wrong place at a high speed could cause a Pacific-ocean sized disruption in the surface of the planet, the result being something like 150 trillion tons of explosive. I’m not sure how to illustrate this sort of tonnage, except that it might be something on the order of filling up the Manhattan skyline with TNT and blowing it up.
[ NOTE: I just found the memory that produced that last statement. In The Loom of God, Mathematical Tapestries at the Edge of Time, published by Plenum Trade in 1997), author Clifford Pickover thinks about craters and impacts of asteroids and such, calculating that an asteroid with a diameter of 20 km arriving at Earth at 40 km/sec would leave a crater size of 439 km (!) and have the equivalent power of 140 billion Hiroshima bombs, which would be about 20 of these bombs per person for everyone on the planet. The hole would be about the width of New Mexico, and have the equivalent firepower, as Pickover points out, of a coal train filled with high explosives that was 1.4 billion miles long.]
The more non-nuclear terrestrial explosions:
In 2005 the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal fire resulted in the explosion of 60,000,000 imperial gallons;
In 1985, the Defense Military Agency introduced the Minor Scale and Misty Picture explosions, which used 4744 and 4,685 short tons of ANFO, with a yield of about 4 kiltotons of TNT.
Texas City, Texas just about exploded in 1947 when the SS Grandcamp, loaded with 8,500 short tons (7,700 t) of ammonium nitrate (the equivalent roughly of 2.7 kilotons of energy) exploded in port (killing 581 and injuring over 5,000).
Also in 1947 was the Heligoland explosion, a 3.2 kilotons explosion of 4,000 long tons of WWII surplus ammo.
A 2.9 kt TNT explosion resulted from the collision of the SS Imo and the SS Mont Blanc in the harbor of Hallifax; the Mont Blanc carried 2,653 tons of explosives, including picric acid, killing 2000.
A miserable social tragedy took place in 1944 in Chicago (at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine) where questionable procedures of offloading munitions from a naval ship resulted in an explosion equivalent to about 1.8 kt, killing 320 sailors and civilians, most of the sailors being African Americans performing a task that was probably all screwed up. Just a month later a similar procedure was being undertaken, the Black sailors, this time refusing to participate and carry out what they saw as needlessly dangerous order, the result being the court martial of the 50 sailors (Port Chicago 50).
Some Bits in the Chronology of the Detonations of Nuclear Weapons (of the 2000 or so that have been used or tested in the last 54 years):
1945-07-16 Trinity, (USA) First fission device test, first plutonium implosion detonation
1945-08-06 Little Boy 15 kt (USA) Bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, first detonation of an enriched uranium gun-type device
1945-08-09 Fat Man 21 kt (USA) Bombing of Nagasaki, Japan
1949-08-29 RDS-1 22 kt (USSR) First fission weapon test by the USSR
1952-10-03 Hurricane 25 kt (UK) First fission weapon test by the UK, Montebello Islands, Western Australia
1952-11-01 Ivy Mike 10,400 kt (USA) First "staged" thermonuclear device test, not meant to be a deployable weapon
1953-08-12 Joe 4 400 kt (USSR) First fusion weapon test by the USSR (not "staged", but deployable)
1954-03-01 Castle Bravo 15,000 kt(USA) First deployable "staged" thermonuclear weapon using dry fusion fuel; fallout accident
1955-11-22 RDS-37 1,600 kt (USSR) First "staged" thermonuclear weapon test by the USSR (deployable)
1957-11-08 Grapple X 1,800 kt (UK) First (successful) "staged" thermonuclear weapon test by the UK
1960-02-13 Gerboise Bleue 70 kt (France) first fission weapon test by France
1961-10-31 Tsar Bomba 50,000 kt USSR Largest thermonuclear weapon ever tested.
1964-10-16 596 22 kt (PR China) First fission weapon test by the People's Republic of China
1967-06-17 Test No. 6 3,300 kt (PR China) First "staged" thermonuclear weapon test by the People's Republic of China
1968-08-24 Canopus 2,600 kt (France) First "staged" thermonuclear test by France
1974-05-18 Smiling Buddha 12kt (India) First fission nuclear explosive test by India
1998-05-11 Shakti I 45 kt (India) First potential fusion/boosted weapon test by India
1998-05-11 Shakti II 12 kt (India) First deployable fission weapon test by India
1998-05-28 Chagai-I 9–12kt (Pakistan) First fission weapon test by Pakistan
There were a few long faces at the Trinity test. I wonder at the reaction from those witnessing the Tsar Bomb? If we are not dispensable in this universe, we are at least consumable.
Posted by: Jeff | 19 January 2009 at 11:09 AM
I don't know about teeth-dropping at the Tsar Blast--guess that there must've been, if for no other reason than the success of the flight securing a pass from the long plains of Siberia...or a bullet in the back of the head.
As Uncle Joe Stalin used to say, "shit happens". You're right about humans in general.
Posted by: John F. Ptak | 19 January 2009 at 02:28 PM
Uncle Joe. Of course! I've been thinking it was Forrest Gump.
Posted by: Jeff | 19 January 2009 at 09:24 PM
Yup, yep. I shouldn't really mess around with Mr. Gump's intellectual property (and I mean it). Or lessen Stalin's bestiality.
Posted by: John F. Ptak | 19 January 2009 at 09:44 PM