User:Hookecho/sandbox/Nuclear Explosion

History[edit]
Main articles: Nuclear weapons testing, List of nuclear weapons tests, and History of nuclear weapons

The first man made nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945 at 5:50 am on the Trinity Test Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico in the United States, an area now known as the White Sands Missile Range. The event involved the full-scale testing of an implosion-type fission atomic bomb. In a memorandum to the U.S. Secretary of War, General Leslie Groves describes the yield as equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. Following this test, a uranium-gun type nuclear bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, with a blast yield of 15 kilotons; and a plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, with a blast yield of 21 kilotons. The United States' first thermonuclear weapon, Ivy Mike, was detonated on 1 November 1952 at Enewetak Atoll and yielded 10 Megatons of explosive force.On August 29, 1949, the USSR became the second country to successfully test a nuclear weapon. RDS-1, dubbed "First Lightning" by the Soviets and "Joe-1" by the US, produced a 20 kiloton explosion and was essentially a copy of the American Fat Man plutonium implosion design. The first thermonuclear weapon tested by the USSR, RDS-6s (Joe-4), was detonated on August 12, 1953 at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan and yielded about 400 kilotons. RDS-6s' design, nicknamed the Sloika, was remarkably similar to a version designed for the U.S. by Edward Teller nicknamed the "Alarm Clock", in that the nuclear device was a two stage weapon: the first explosion was triggered by fission and the second more powerful explosion by fission. The Sloika core consisted of a series of concentric spheres with alternating materials to help boost the explosive yield. In the years following World War II, eight countries have conducted nuclear tests with 2475 devices fired in 2120 tests.

In 1963, the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, pledging to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. The treaty permitted underground tests. Many other non-nuclear nations acceded to the Treaty following its entry into force; however, France and China (both nuclear weapons states) have not.[citation needed]

The primary application to date has been military (i.e. nuclear weapons), and the remainder of explosions include the following:


 * Nuclear pulse propulsion, including using a nuclear explosion as asteroid deflection strategy.
 * Power generation; see PACER
 * Peaceful nuclear explosions

Another devastating effect of nuclear war is Nuclear Winter. The Nuclear Winter idea become popularized in mainstream culture during the 1980s, when Richard P. Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James B. Pollack and Carl Sagan collaborated and produced a scientific study which suggested the Earth's weather and climate can be severely impacted, even by a small scale nuclear war. The main idea behind Nuclear Winter is that once a conflict begins and the aggressors start detonating nuclear weapons, the explosions will eject small particles form the Earth's surface into the atmosphere as well as nuclear particles. It's also assumed that fires will break out and become widespread, similar to what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the end of WWII, which will cause soot and other harmful particles to also be introduced into the atmosphere. Once these harmful particles are lofted, strong upper level winds in the troposphere can transport them thousands of kilometers and can end up transporting nuclear fallout and also alter the Earth's radiation budget. Once enough small particles are in the atmosphere, they can act as cloud condensation nuclei which will cause global cloud coverage to increase which in turn blocks incoming solar insolation and starts a global cooling period. This is not unlike one of the leading theories about the extinction of the dinosaurs, in that a large explosion ejected small particulate matter into the atmosphere and resulted in a global catastrophe characterized by cooler temperatures, acid rain, and the KT Layer.