Ever since the first nuclear weapons test in the deserts of New Mexico and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have become significantly more powerful.
Since the first test in New Mexico by the United States in 1945, 2,475 nuclear weapons have been detonated across the globe.
Over 85% of those detonations have come from only two countries, however-- the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Only two of those thousands of detonations were ever used in a war-- the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II by the United States.
But those bombs were very small compared to modern weaponry.
The Hiroshima bomb produced an explosion of 15 kilotons, or 15,000 tons worth of TNT.
The bomb dropped on Nagasaki had an explosion of 21 kilotons.
But how much bigger can nuclear weapons possibly get?
The answer is, terrifyingly, much, much bigger.
The largest nuclear weapon currently in the United States
arsenal is the B83, which can produce a blast of 1.2 megatons.
To understand the scale from here out, one megaton is equal to 1 million tons of TNT, and that is equal to a 1,000 kilotons.
Remember that the Hiroshima blast was just 15 kilotons.
So that means that the B83 produces a blast 80 times more
powerful than that.
What I've been showing on this scale is only the size of the mushroom cloud that the bombs produced.
So to further add to the scale, we're going to place the size of Mt. Everest, here, and the average altitude of a commercial
airliner that you would normally fly on, here.
So the Castle Bravo bomb is the largest nuclear weapon ever
tested by the United States.
It produced a blast of 15 megatons, or about 1,000 times the scale of Hiroshima.
But even that pales in comparison to the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.
In October 1961, the Soviet Union created the largest man-made explosion ever in human history when they detonated this device-- known as the Tsar Bomba-- here, over this territory known as Novaya Zemlya.
The bomb detonated with an astounding force of 50 megatons, or about 3,333 Hiroshima blasts.
It was so powerful that it almost destroyed the plane that dropped it-- shattered windows as far away as Norway and Finland.
And the shock waves created by the bomb circled around the entire earth three times.
But this test was actually just a scaled down version of what was theoretically possible.
Although never tested, the Soviets did have plans to create a bomb that would be twice as powerful as even the Tsar Bomba-- a bomb so powerful that it would have produced a mindboggling 100 megaton blast, or about 6,666 Hiroshima blasts all together.
To get another sense of scale, let's imagine that Times Square in New York City would be the epicenter of these blasts.
You can test this stuff out yourself on the website Nukemap
after reading this post.
I'll provide a link for it after the end, but let's see the results first.
First off, we're going to show the size of this detonation,
which was caused by the recent North Korean test in 2013.
Following this, here is the size of the Hiroshima detonation,
which isn't really that much bigger.
But let's move on to the B83 bomb that we were talking about.
As you can see, it would affect a much larger area than the Hiroshima bomb.
But moving on past that to the Castle Bravo test, we can see how it truly dwarfs everything before it.
But even that blast is incredibly tiny when we move on towards the Tsar Bomba, as seen here.
And then finally, for our scale, we move on to how large the blast from the theoretical 100 megaton version of the Tsar Bomba would be.
The blast would be so powerful-- this is what the blast radius would look like if you were observing it from the International Space Station.
So the question then becomes, should any of this really worry you?
How many nuclear weapons exist today anyway?
Well, in total, there are estimated to be around 15,600 nuclear weapons in the world currently-- enough to destroy the entire planet dozens of times over.
But only nine countries control that stockpile, and 92% of those weapons are controlled by only the United States and Russia.
The other 8% of the global nuclear arsenal is controlled in descending order of numbers by France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea.
Israel is, however, highly secretive about its nuclear program and has never publicly confirmed nor denied the existence of their nukes.
It's just one of those things where everybody knows that they have them, but nobody really comes out and says so-- unless your name happens to be Mordechai Vanunu-- a man who did reveal details about Israel's nuclear program and spent 18 years in prison, including over 11 years in solitary confinement.
Also interesting to note, South Africa used to be in possession of six nuclear weapons, because the past apartheid regime was afraid of the 79% of the population that couldn't vote and communists trying to overthrow their government.
But they eventually agreed to dismantle all of them, which
makes South Africa the only country to ever acquire nuclear weapons and then voluntarily get rid of them.
Well, unless you don't count Ukraine, Belarus, or Kazakhstan, which all had nuclear weapons for a brief amount of time after they declared their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Ukraine is particularly awkward, because after their independence, they found themselves in possession of over 5,000 nuclear weapons, which would make Ukraine-- for a brief period-- the world's third largest nuclear power, and probably one of the most powerful countries on earth as a result.
They agreed to hand them all over to Russia in exchange for a super serious promise that nobody would violate their territory or borders in the future.
And we all know how that turned out.
As a result of that happening, it's doubtful that other countries would be thrilled to ever give up their nuclear weapons in the future.
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