I’ve always wondered why only nuclear bombs detonate before hitting the ground and not the actual moment of impact. Does it affect the amount of damage? or does it reduce nuclear waste and radiation?
In: Physics
Reminds me of a story about one of my favorite High School science teachers. We were talking about atomic bombs and the incredible heat and energy — enough heat to disintegrate people and buildings that are close to the center. But, says my science teacher, you also get tremendous winds. Heat rises. Incredible heat rises quickly. As that heated air goes up, air must quickly rush in to replace it and that causes devastation that tornados only dream about. With an air burst, less heat is absorbed by the ground. “Why vaporize someone when you can push a building over on them?” says my science teacher. The bell rings and as we file out of class, he throws a thumbs-up at us, “So, keep ’em high!”.
Think of a water balloon. If it explodes at head level it will get more people wetter than if it popped at their feet
Well one thing also is that a nuclear explosion is not triggered by impact . Some bombs are designed to blow up on impact the impact triggers the explosion
Nuclear explosions are not triggered by an impact. You could drop a nulcear bomb from a plane and it could hit the ground and nothing would happen
There needs to be a specific trigger to denonate it , if the bomb hits the ground it could destroy the bomb and it wouldn’t actually trigger it would hit the ground and break apart and not exploid
Where the bomb explodes affects alot of things such as the blast damage, the amount of fallout, the pressure wave, etc… so depending on your goal you may opt for a mid air detonation or ground impact.
Pretend you have a baseball and a beach ball. Now imagine you have a row of empty cans lined up side by side. If you’re trying to knock as many of the cans down in one throw, the beach ball knocks down more.
Nukes are kind of like having a baseball in the middle of a beachball, where the radius of the beachball is filled with overpressure, shockwave, some thermal energy, a little radiation.
If you detonate at the right height a portion of the blast wave rebounds off the ground and then superimposes with the blast wave that’s still in the air – ie they add together – so you get an extra damaging blast wave traveling along the ground area.
If you detonate on the ground a bunch of the energy is instead either absorbed by the ground or reflected, but instead of doubling up with the wave spreading along the ground most of the energy gets reflected up into the air where it’s not doing much to anyone.
[Image showing how the waves add together – the small vertical stem at the ground level is the doubled up blast wave](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Mach_effect_sequence.svg/500px-Mach_effect_sequence.svg.png)
The bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deliberately detonated in the air in order to maximize the area that would be exposed to superheated air and catch on fire. If they had let the bombs detonate at street level in the city the buildings immediately around it would be destroyed but the total destruction would be less because the damage would be concentrated in a smaller area
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