No MIRV but maybee...more megatons pe nuke?

[AtomAnt]

Actually, I can't see how you would profit from having less nukes with more power. The thing is, that nuclear weapon blast radius goes approximately with cube root of it's yield, thus making 100MT bombs radius only around 10 times greater than the one of 100kT. It does, of course, deliver 1000times more energy to the hitpoint.

Here are comparative blast radiuses and yields of some nuclear weapons. Note that for example Tsar Bomba (56MT), although having almost 4 times the yield of Castle Bravo(15MT), has less than twice the blast radius of the latter. Point of super strong thermonuclear weapons was more in being able to deliver immense power to a single point rather than having large blast radius.



In other words: to have a nuke, capable of taking out two adjacent radars with a single hit, you would have trade up 20 or 30 conventional nukes for it.

[shinygerbil]

Surely that's a result of the simple rule that the radius of a circle does not increase at the same rate as its area.

[AtomAnt]

Surely that's a result of the simple rule that the radius of a circle does not increase at the same rate as its area.

Actually, it's about a sphere and it's volume.

[shinygerbil]

Alright, alright. The principle's the same.

[torq]

The same with MIRVs, by the way. Even though MIRVs theoretically have larger coverage, but not larger then some may think. For example, you can't hit cities located as close as Wash. D.C. and NY with a single missile (even the one equipped with MIRVs) since the distance between these two cities is already too great.

Look at the pictures:



These photos were taken during the Minutemen missile tests. As you see, the warheads enter the atmosphere very close to each other. MIRVs vere made for hitting multiple hardened targets within an area, not for hitting half of the continent.

[Cnl_Death]

I think that larger war heads could be a good idea, however if you had M.I.R.V's you would be able to strike multiple targets with 1 missile. greatly increasing your chamces of disabling your opponents strike capabilities. Though this is just my opinion

[Crazy Ninja]

M.I.R.Vs for naval nuking - now theres a thought