Is their a limit to the power of nuclear weapons

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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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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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