perfidy

An interesting bit in the the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists forwarded to me by a coworker. The author makes the case that the firestorm caused by a large nuclear blast will (for 100kton+ nukes) almost certainly be greater in extent than the blast zone.

Seeing as I work about four blocks north of the White House, I think it is safe to say that I will be well within the zone of "100% fatality" should someone light off a city killer within the District of Columbia. Now, if it was only a pony nuke - Hiroshima size or smaller, I might survive, depending on where exactly it went off. Unlike Hiroshima or other WWII-era Japanese cities, DC is built largely of stone, which should provide greater blast and fire resistance than a city made of, say, paper.

Interestingly, I was reading a while back that in many respects, a nuclear weapon is less effective than the equivalent amount of conventional explosives. The reason being is that while there is a tremendous amount of oomph in a nuke, it is very, very concentrated. Beyond a certain point, the stuff in the immediate vicinity of a 15kton bomb cannot be destroyed any more. But if you dropped 15,000 one-ton bombs in a grid pattern over a city, you would do more damage, because the destructive forces would be more evenly applied.

The great advantage of nukes is not their destructive power per se, but rather that so much destructive power could be delivered with significantly less effort. From thousand bomber armadas to a single plane. The economy of force is what made nukes so attractive to military planners. Political considerations made nukes unwieldy as a battlefield weapon, and we were stuck with conventional weapons for decades.

However, new technology has brought us to the same point. Precision weapons make it possible, again, to destroy targets with a nuke-like economy of force. A single plane with an appropriate load of smart munitions can destroy any given target. With dumb bombs, thousands of planes would be required to have even a outside shot of destroying a given target. *

I would wager that nuclear weapons will not be used in anything resembling a regular war in our lifetimes. With the advent of precision weapons, there's just no point to using nukes. The political fallout would cause more damage to the user than the bomb would to the enemy.

Where I would imagine their use is as a weapon of terrorists, a mad regime, or in space.

* [Wik] And if you're not familiar with the history of strategic bombing, you'd be stunned at how ineffective bombing was in the era before precision guided weapons. Post war calculations showed that pretty much the entire US Air Corps would have been needed to ensure that a single city was knocked out, and stayed knocked out, for the duration of the war. Bombers hitting their target was akin to winning the lottery. High altitude 'precision' bombing was a joke.

There were only two ways to ensure that a target was actually destroyed. One was to go in real low and slow. That tactic had the unfortunate side effect of leading to enormous casualties among the bomber crews. The other was to intentionally cause large scale firestorms with incindiary bombs. The fires would spread far beyond the blast zones of the individual bombs. This tactic had the unfortunate side effect of killing tens of thousands of presumably innocent civilians.

[alsø wik] Here are some nifty websites that allow you to calculate the blast effects of nuclear weapons:

• Here's a couple simple ones that operate like your basic loan repayment calculators.
  
• From FAS, a more sophisticated one that overlays blast radii on selected US cities.
  
• And here is the famous asteroid impact calculator, which allows you to contemplate the devastation caused by truly large explosions.
  
• Finally, a silly site that calculates the blast effects of nukes on spaceships.