If we want, Can we just keep making the Nuclear device more powerful? Is their a potential limit?
Like for example can we create a bomb 10 giga tons powerful i.e 200 times the power of tsar bomba or 660000 times more powerful than hiroshima bomb or about 0.01% of the estimated power of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs
In: 4
As long as you can keep fusing hydrogen the only limit is your engineering capabilities
At some point though the extra megaton starts not really making much of a difference
Depends on what you mean by nuclear weapons. Technically supernovae could be consider nuclear weapons in an extremely rough way.
Relavent [what if](https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/)
A supernova at a distance of the sun would be “brighter” that a nuclear weapon detonating in your face by several orders of magnitude.
The [Tsar Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) was pretty big — about 27 tonnes. Yes — you can make bombs as big as you want, but if you want to deliver it to someone *else*, you start to need a ship or something to get it there.
After a certain point you start to get diminishing returns. Stuff like the [Tsar Bomb](https://youtu.be/YtCTzbh4mNQ) looks really scary and is a good propaganda piece, but wasn’t really practical due to the high cost. A lot of the dangerous radiation (which is a good thing when it comes to nukes) was just thrown into space and wasted, and while the blast wave was gigantic, the same amount of destruction could have been done cheaper with several smaller bombs.
So yes, we could theoretically keep getting bigger, but there’s there’s an upper limit on usefulness so there isn’t a reason to do so.
Old school fission bombs had a soft cut off of how effective they could be. After a while they started to get really inefficient in terms of yield vs how much material was used.
Modern thermonuclear weapons on the other hand have no such limitation. They can basically be scaled infinitely with the only limitation being how big of a bomb you can build. Tsar Bomba was basically a proof of concept by the USSR to see if thermonuclear weapons could in fact be made to an absolutely insane scale. The answer was yes, but there where other limiting factors. The bomb was too big to fit on a missile and had to be dropped from a bomber. Not a huge issue except no Soviet bomber could realistically carry the thing. They ended up having to basically cut weight on their biggest bomber and it was barely enough. Even then the pilots still had issues clearing the blast radius.
In short yes you can build really big nuclear weapons, but there are a bunch of other engineering problems that pop up when you start building really big and heavy bombs.
I’ve wondered this as well!
Also i wonder what’s stopping many countries from building atom bombs, surely they have scientists that can make one? Why wouldn’t they want at least one as a security if the country goes to war? Did they only make a couple of bombs to drop on Japan and never made more bombs?
So many questions…
others have explained why there’s no limit, but I really wanted to share how edward teller designed and proposed building a 10 **gigaton** device
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/
The only limit is the amount of fuel and the weight of the weapon. US weapons scientists definitely contemplated a weapon in the 10 gigaton range (known as the SUNDIAL).
The reasons not to build weapons that large (and why modern weapons are much smaller than the weapons of the 1950s and 1960s) are a) the _damage_ done by such weapons does not scale linearly with the energy release (it scales at a cube root), so a weapon 100X more energetic than the Hiroshima bomb does not destroy an area 100X larger than it, but a smaller amount; b) the _weight_ of the weapon does (at a given level of weapon design sophistication) increase roughly linearly as a function of yield (so a weapon 100X more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb at the same level of sophistication would be 100X more heavy — the Hiroshima bomb is a bad comparison here, because it was unusually unsophisticated, but the basic statement holds once you are talking about thermonuclear weapons); and c) there really aren’t targets that need yields that large (even if you want to destroy an entire metro area, you don’t need weapons in the gigaton range — 10 megatons or so, esp. in a few warheads, will do ya fine), especially if you increase the accuracy of your delivery vehicles (so you can’t miss).
So big bombs have diminishing returns on use of fuel and the damage caused by it, and are very hard to guarantee that you can get to your target. From the early 1960s onward the trend was towards making very compact bombs in a “medium” sort of range (a megaton to a few hundred kilotons) that you could launch accurately and reliably, because that is a much more “credible” threat.
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