DBWI: What if atomic bombs were real?

What if atomic bombs, today seen as an absurd movie trope, were actually found to viable and produced in real life (let's not get into the technical side, just assume some scientists somewhere made them work)? Who would use atomic bombs first? How would this impact the global climate and ecosystems?
 
Really depends on what's the minimum tech base & resource requirements to chum them out, if low & cheap enough it might just usher in the age of assless chap wearing techno barbarians hordes.
 
We’are trending into ASB territory here, but if they worked like they do in the more mainstream movies, they’re pretty much like huge firebombs. So instead of dropping thousands of firebombs, they drop one of these contraptions and a while city goes up in flames. Might have been more convenient against the Japanese in WWII, but cooler heads still prevailed in late September when the Emperor surrendered to the Allies and prevented Downfall.
 
Assuming both the Americans and the Soviets had them, WW3 would be a lot more destructive, there might have been no chance for there to be a coup against Stalin in 1952 that ended the war.
 
Exactly how powerful are these hypothetical bombs? The numbers I recall were beyond fantastic.

I heard some people predicted something like twenty thousand tons of TNT, which isn't even the craziest one. I think there was one Russian film where they claimed a bomb could get up to fifty "megatons" of TNT in terms of explosive power.

But yeah, warfare after WW2 becomes a lot less common, since such destructive weapons would likely mean countries would go to war a lot less.
 

Anchises

Banned
What if atomic bombs, today seen as an absurd movie trope, were actually found to viable and produced in real life (let's not get into the technical side, just assume some scientists somewhere made them work)? Who would use atomic bombs first? How would this impact the global climate and ecosystems?

Personally I think atomic bombs as a movie trope were just something that foreshadowed the reality of the Destructive Balance of OTL.

The massive American attacks on the Japanese home isles with B and C Weapons broke their will to fight on.

Both Superpowers knew about the huge stocks of B and c weapons and about the sheer destructive power of conventional arsenals.

Atomic bombs were just a convenient way to portray this in movies. A massive "super bomb" is just a more "sexy" way to depict apocalyptic weapons on a movie screen. Nobody wants to see the nasty shit that Russia and the US have in their depots. A super bubonic plague or this modified typhus that the Russians used in the Middle East is just too nasty to depict.
 
I heard some people predicted something like twenty thousand tons of TNT, which isn't even the craziest one. I think there was one Russian film where they claimed a bomb could get up to fifty "megatons" of TNT in terms of explosive power.

But yeah, warfare after WW2 becomes a lot less common, since such destructive weapons would likely mean countries would go to war a lot less.

*looks at entirety of human history*

When's the last time people successfully banned weapons because it was too deadly? The pope tried his best but alas that didn't pan out. Rules of war regarding banning of chemical weapons were thrown right out the door as soon as the The Great War bogged down in the west.

Generally the only weapons to be discarded were the ones that aren't deadly enough (or ease of use). If atomic weapons ended up not being used it'll be because they are not deadly enough, or too much a pain to use effectively.

I mean, people were totally proclaiming a new "balance of terror" when the USA's "Star Grid" Ortillery system (which is basically large rods being dropped from orbit) came online and guess what, that shit got used when they couldn't dig out some goat herders out of the mountains (okay former mountains, but you get the point).
 
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We’are trending into ASB territory here, but if they worked like they do in the more mainstream movies, they’re pretty much like huge firebombs. So instead of dropping thousands of firebombs, they drop one of these contraptions and a while city goes up in flames. Might have been more convenient against the Japanese in WWII, but cooler heads still prevailed in late September when the Emperor surrendered to the Allies and prevented Downfall.
It would be a lot different than a firebombing operation. 1 plane instead of hundreds is much more difficult to track and be warned of. Firebombing campaigns also didn't totally destroy the area they hit, the Tokyo raid, which itself had an anomalously high casualty rate, had a 7% casualty rate in the targeted area. A nuclear blast will damage much more, though casualties will drop off as a function of distance.

I heard some people predicted something like twenty thousand tons of TNT, which isn't even the craziest one. I think there was one Russian film where they claimed a bomb could get up to fifty "megatons" of TNT in terms of explosive power.

But yeah, warfare after WW2 becomes a lot less common, since such destructive weapons would likely mean countries would go to war a lot less.

Those are kinda lowball estimates and include sophisticated allowances for inefficiencies. Nuclear bombs are believed to release a large quantities of x-rays, which then superheat the air, creating an explosion. I tried to read some of the papers going into the calculations they used to estimate yield and I couldn't understand any of the equations they were referencing. The differences between the two are due to utilizing different designs. The Russian Film using a fission nuclear bomb to power a fusion nuclear bomb seems like one of the coolest things ever. There's a paper circulating online about using a series of conventional explosives to compress Deuterium gas. It actually seems completely viable, and it avoids many of the problems of making nuclear weapons. We know the mass defects and if we can figure out how much material is needed to carry out a chain reaction, figuring out the yield is fairly easy. The hard part about making these weapons is figuring out what materials and how much we need. I think experiments were performed upon elements with fairly short half-lives, as these are the least stable, but the results are classified. There was an incident where that a bunch of high level physicists, several of whom had made significant discoveries before WW2 and won Nobel Prizes, were killed, or at least it is assumed they were, at some point they just stopped publishing papers.
 
*looks at entirety of human history*

When's the last time people successfully banned weapons because it was too deadly? The pope tried his best but alas that didn't pan out. Rules of war regarding banning of chemical weapons were thrown right out the door as soon as the The Great War bogged down in the west.

Generally the only weapons to be discarded were the ones that aren't deadly enough (or ease of use). If atomic weapons ended up not being used it'll be because they are not deadly enough, or too much a pain to use effectively.

I mean, people were totally proclaiming a new "balance of terror" when the USA's "Star Grid" Ortillery system (which is basically large rods being dropped from orbit) came online and guess what, that shit got used when they couldn't dig out some goat herders out of the mountains (okay former mountains, but you get the point).

Well, we haven't seen B-weapons deployed in quite some time due to them being too deadly... to your own forces. Those viruses can linger in the region for DECADES, making them next to impossible to occupy. If atomic weapons had a similar side effect, then they could be held back for similar regions.
 
Well, we haven't seen B-weapons deployed in quite some time due to them being too deadly... to your own forces. Those viruses can linger in the region for DECADES, making them next to impossible to occupy. If atomic weapons had a similar side effect, then they could be held back for similar regions.

True. From what I've heard, the hypothetical radiation could spread through wind patterns and the ocean, so even if one country falls victim to the atomic bomb, it could have side effects all the way across the world, making it a huge risk. But who would really know?
 
Well, we haven't seen B-weapons deployed in quite some time due to them being too deadly... to your own forces. Those viruses can linger in the region for DECADES, making them next to impossible to occupy. If atomic weapons had a similar side effect, then they could be held back for similar regions.

True. From what I've heard, the hypothetical radiation could spread through wind patterns and the ocean, so even if one country falls victim to the atomic bomb, it could have side effects all the way across the world, making it a huge risk. But who would really know?

A lot of the problems with B & C weapons is that the enemy (in terms of one from any of the major powers) can effectively protect themselves against it (back in the day it's a simple gas mask for everyone and their horse, nowadays it's comprehensive environmental layer suits & vehicles for the military, genetic engineering for the agriculture sector). The real reason they're not used much these days is because they're not use much in recent decades is that they're not all those effective against military targets.

The hypothetical nuclear weapons would still have a explosive effect (and supposedly being its main effect) so they would still have a use against regular military units (even those prepared against side effect of B & C weapons).
 
Well, they couldn't be any worse than the tungsten rods dropped from orbit, could they? A cluster of then, and instant annihilation of the targeted area. On the other hand, those things are EXPENSIVE! If these atomic bombs are less expensive, they could be deployed in large numbers. Also, Orbital artillery requires vast infrastructure, and is easily seen, so tiny places can't build it. If a new generation of atomic bombs is portable, bad things could happen--a later day Al Capone holding New York for ransom? Fundamentalists blowing up a center of "sin" is also a frightening possibility.
 
Well, they couldn't be any worse than the tungsten rods dropped from orbit, could they? A cluster of then, and instant annihilation of the targeted area. On the other hand, those things are EXPENSIVE! If these atomic bombs are less expensive, they could be deployed in large numbers. Also, Orbital artillery requires vast infrastructure, and is easily seen, so tiny places can't build it. If a new generation of atomic bombs is portable, bad things could happen--a later day Al Capone holding New York for ransom? Fundamentalists blowing up a center of "sin" is also a frightening possibility.
If they're cheap enough for even the crazies to build them in numbers, then civilization collapses and only the crazies will rule over the rubble. Remember, some of them sees the collapse of civilization as a feature rather than a flaw...
 
Exactly how powerful are these hypothetical bombs? The numbers I recall were beyond fantastic.
Most of the work on this has been done by a rather obscure German physicist Prof. Einstein (well regarded for his work on the photoelectric effect, but his ideas about the atom are generally thought to be those of a crackpot). He suggests that mass can be transformed into energy, with the ratio being the square of the velocity of light. That suggests 1kg of mass destroyed would be equivalent to 10^17 J of energy - for comparison Dynamite has an energy content of 5 x 10^6 J/kg. Therefore - very roughly - such an "atomic" bomb would be 20,000,000,000 times more powerful than the same weight of dynamite.
That's a rather generous explanation of the effects though - it is well known, for instance, that two small bombs are more use than one big one in terms of destructive effect. Worse, the equation only suggests that matter and energy are interchangeable - he was never able to suggest a means by which this could be achieved, and the equation itself suggests that any such enormous release of energy would end up with most of the energy "condensing" back as mass afterwards anyway. The potential to make very big bombs is certainly there if anybody ever figures out how to do it, but my personal opinion is that they would most likely be much smaller than in popular depictions: I suspect the upper practical limit is maybe 500 tonnes of dynamite equivalent, with the effect being much more heavily disposed towards extremely high temperatures (and thus the emission of light and soft X-rays) than blast and shock. As such they aren't likely to have much value for the obvious military applications of a very big bomb (hardened targets such as bunkers and the like) - which probably explains why no serious effort has ever been made to find a way of making them work.
 
Most of the work on this has been done by a rather obscure German physicist Prof. Einstein (well regarded for his work on the photoelectric effect, but his ideas about the atom are generally thought to be those of a crackpot).
Oh come on, it's preciously his crackpot theories on the atom that made him famous, at least to RTS gamers. Who can forgot the Command & Control series in which he was kidnapped by the evil Soviets to build atom bombs to turn the tide of WWIII?

What do you mean no one like RTS wargames? You guys suck.
 
Oh come on, it's preciously his crackpot theories on the atom that made him famous, at least to RTS gamers. Who can forgot the Command & Control series in which he was kidnapped by the evil Soviets to build atom bombs to turn the tide of WWIII?
That's more than a trifle unfair. His work is at least consistent with what is known of why the sun shines (spectrographic analysis fairly convincingly suggests that the formation of helium in the sun from hydrogen is happening, and the small mass difference is broadly consistent with Einstein's theory on the mass:energy equivalence), but there is a fundamental problem in that the power density of the sun is very roughly the same as that of a healthy cow, which doesn't make it much of a weapon!
 
That's more than a trifle unfair. His work is at least consistent with what is known of why the sun shines (spectrographic analysis fairly convincingly suggests that the formation of helium in the sun from hydrogen is happening, and the small mass difference is broadly consistent with Einstein's theory on the mass:energy equivalence), but there is a fundamental problem in that the power density of the sun is very roughly the same as that of a healthy cow, which doesn't make it much of a weapon!

O0Y970


Certain comedians would disagree with you.
 
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