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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzzard" data-source="post: 1272340" data-attributes="member: 3003">The current 'standard' is not 1 megaton. It is more on the order of about 200-300 kilotons (the range really goes from 100-500 or so, but 200-300 covers the majority of the U.S. arsenal- foreign weapons use higher yields). Sub based missiles have tended to be more powerful since they are a touch less accurate (thus more like 300 kilotons). Land base would tend to be closer to the low end. The Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, was about 15 kT. The Nagisaki bomb, Fat Mat, was about 20 kT yield. Thus, yes 50 megatons would be 2500 times Nagisaki. Keep in mind, though, that destructive power, while of course being related to yield, is not a linear correlation. You see the explosion from the nuke has to fill a volume (or at least the surface of a sphere), thus blast effects will go as the square root( or cube root- I'm only fairly knowlegable, not an expert) of the yield. Thus, while your 50 mT bomb entails 2500 times the energy of Fat Man, it will only have a result about 50 times it in terms of the amount of land affected. Current state of the art involves the use of MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicles) missiles which contain a number of smaller nukes (in the afforementioned yields) which when distributed properly will result in much more ground being covered by blast than a higher yield weapon of the same weight. I believe the highest yield nuke still in service is in the Russian inventory (they might have de-commissioned them), which is the SS-18, which pops off at 18 megatons (this is specifically designed to turn Cheyenne mountain into a crater). Then highest which has ever been detonated by mankind was a 50 megaton bomb set off the the USSR (in the 60s methinks).buzzard</blockquote>

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