Title. I was browsing r/shockwaveporn a bit ago and saw that many if the explosives are airbursts. If I’m not mistaken, the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were airburst too. Why?
In: Physics
When a bomb detonates close to/on the ground, the shockwave is actually bounced back up into the explosion. This can lessen the devastation the bomb might have caused otherwise.
Detonating in the air allows for a much greater shockwave to form and devastate a larger area because it takes much longer for it to reach the ground and be reflected off.
This comes with a tradeoff- obviously, detonating a bomb at ground level will annihilate everything directly underneath/around the point of impact. An airburst munition trades complete destruction of the area directly underneath the detonation for a much wider area of destruction.
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