WI: US/USSR tested a 1000 megaton bomb?

No, it wasn't. Some other scientists found that nuclear winter might be less severe than Sagan first claimed which was then jumped on by the winnable nuclear war hawks as a repudiation. But debunked it was not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate

It was the leftists at Discovery magazine IIRC that "re energized" the belief in nuclear winter.

At any rate, I've never seen an unbiased group of scientists that provided evidence that nuclear winter was a serious danger.
 
It was the leftists at Discovery magazine IIRC that "re energized" the belief in nuclear winter.

At any rate, I've never seen an unbiased group of scientists that provided evidence that nuclear winter was a serious danger.

Then the Nuclear winter would make global warming less of a problem.
 
Then the Nuclear winter would make global warming less of a problem.

It's been proposed. Not kidding - not using nuclear bombs, obviously, but using aircraft to disperse particulates in the upper atmosphere, to block sunlight. On paper, the cost is pretty reasonable - about $20 billion per year per degree Celsius. But nobody really knows what the side effects would be, and it doesn't do anything about ocean acidification.

For what it's worth, I'm agnostic on nuclear winter. I don't really trust the new studies, because they seem to be making some assumptions they do not justify about how high the ash from a city fire will get lofted, and I don't really have the relevant skills to judge their climate models. But that doesn't mean they're wrong. I would just feel a lot more confident in these studies if there were more then, like, two people still doing them.
 
a space test is going to be horribly expensive and require on-orbit assembly.

Would it really?

10 Tsar Bombas (assuming that the 100 MT design would weigh the same 27 metric tons the original did, and that yield scales linearly with weight) is 270 metric tons. That's not much different from the mass of a fully-fueled rocket stage (the S-II massed 480 tonnes fully loaded), for a big enough rocket. Which suggests to me that you could test such a bomb in a Starfish Prime-style test using the first stage of a moon rocket to launch into a suborbital trajectory.

I don't want to think about the EMP and radiation belts that detonating a gigaton-yield bomb in the exosphere would produce, though.
 
Would it really?

10 Tsar Bombas (assuming that the 100 MT design would weigh the same 27 metric tons the original did, and that yield scales linearly with weight) is 270 metric tons. That's not much different from the mass of a fully-fueled rocket stage (the S-II massed 480 tonnes fully loaded), for a big enough rocket. Which suggests to me that you could test such a bomb in a Starfish Prime-style test using the first stage of a moon rocket to launch into a suborbital trajectory.

I don't want to think about the EMP and radiation belts that detonating a gigaton-yield bomb in the exosphere would produce, though.

That's why you don't do it suborbitally, and hence why it needs on-orbit assembly. Or a souped-up Saturn-V or equivalent.
 
That's why you don't do it suborbitally, and hence why it needs on-orbit assembly. Or a souped-up Saturn-V or equivalent.

Just how tall can you make a suborbital flight?

Put another way, if N-1 were just launched straight up, could it throw 270 tonnes past the upper end of the radiation belts?

EDIT: Of course, if it's a dud, you've got 270 tonnes of hydrogen bomb set to burn up in Earth's atmosphere...
 
Just how tall can you make a suborbital flight?

Put another way, if N-1 were just launched straight up, could it throw 270 tonnes past the upper end of the radiation belts?

EDIT: Of course, if it's a dud, you've got 270 tonnes of hydrogen bomb set to burn up in Earth's atmosphere...

Heck if I know. Personally, though, I wouldn't want to test that thing inside GEO - even without EMP etc., the X-ray radius is probably pretty wide, and I wouldn't want to knock out any satellites.
 
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