it's not like this whole thread is about whether NOSTRADAMUS could predict the future, eh?

Ah, so this is is the famous david mabus. I have heard the legend.

You should take notice of the smoke trails on the right side of the image. Those are used to estimate the yield of the blast. Since they are well to one side, it ought to be clear that they missed the target.

So how can one miss a target with a nuke? Easily. The fact is that nukes are not gigantic “scrape a city to nothing” weapons. In fact, there is one guy who survived the blast at Hiroshima who happened to be only 300 feet (100 meters) from ground zero.

A real nuclear weapon is at most 10 to 20 times the yield of a typical bomb as used in WW2.

Note that I am not in favor of using nukes. However, that must of necessity take into account that I am not in favor of using 20 two ton bombs either.

Another exceedingly boring peudo-philosophical
diatribe about a scientific subject.

Don't waste your time with this one unlesss
you enjoy verbal masterbation.

 KB, do you also have geek cred on current conventional bombs?  What's the biggest and baddest non-nuke we use these days?

 From a science geek perspective, I gotta say, the bombs they're inventing these days are damn cool.  The compassionate human in me is mortified.

Um yah, his name was Eizo Nomura and he lived another 37 years, dying at age 84.

When the bomb detonated, he was in the basement of the building that today serves as the tourist information center. Other survivors from nearby the blast were a guy in a bank and the entire staff of the local Catholic church, all of whom were less than 500 feet away from ground zero.

More information can be had here:

http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/PhotoGlryMain/pgc/Hiroshima01a.html

Yes Kevin, I am aware that really freaking big bombs have been developed but there simply are no weapons in the megaton range in the US arsenal. In fact, the largest yield weapon in our arsenal has a yield of 450kt but it is also the least numerous of current weapons. Most of our bombs have a yield between 10 tons and 300 tons TNT equivalent.

In fact, of all the megaton rang bombs we ever did build, all of them were removed from our inventory by about 1964. So yah, most of the bombs that actually exist are on the small side for nukes.

Well, you could think of it this way, Hamby:

A few hundred years ago, if buddy got run through with a sword, he pretty much got to fall over and die of blood loss, infection or gangrene. All of those are, I imagine, extremely painful and relatively slow ways to expire.

By comparison, if a fuel-air bomb goes off right in front of you, a lot of times you just die instantly of shock. Your brain just switches you off and that's it. So, framing it that way, we can pretty reasonably say that even in terms of compassion for fellow human beings our weaponry has (well, some of it) come a long way.

Now, frankly, I'm not actually interested in thinking of it that way. I think it's just plain fucked-up that we have such large, expensive, dangerous and (by and large) unchecked organized military bodies still lurking around, ever after centuries of being shown why they're such a bad idea. 

Of course, that doesn't prevent me from agreeing that things that go boom and/or clank are themselves very, very cool.

Primarily nuclearweaponsarchive.org and the Federation of American Scientists (fas.org). If either of those sites cannot confirm the other, then globalsecurity.org tends to be a good source for confirmation.

Hey, you did ask.

OK, I did misread the date when the last B41 was taken out of the stockpile. That being said, they did start to remove them from service in 1963 to replace them with the MK-53. As far as either of them existing in any real way, what was built once can be built again, just not trivially. As easy to say that because I live near an auto parts store, that I have several cars.

In any case, B41 has not been part of the world for over thirty years and I will also note that that was after the date when we stopped making weapons grade material. The fact is that weapons grade material is probably the most expensive substances on the earth, so when old bombs were dismantled, the material was recycled into newer weapons.

As far as the B53, yes, there are 50 empty cases in the enduring stockpile but there too, the physics packages have been removed and recycled. From what I can see, they have basically been retained as a weapon of last resort. However, they have been replaced by the B61 earth penetrator which, once again is a small bomb. My sources say that there are 3150 of those ready to drop, which is about half of our whole damn arsenal.

Don't get me wrong here, they are still awesomely huge bombs but even so, you started this because you did not believe me that one can survive a nuclear blast from a minimal distance and live to be a little old man. Rather than standing corrected on that, you are trying to out geek me on just what a nuclear weapon can actually do.

Speaking of standing corrected, we do have 650 B83 weapons that can be dialed up to just over 1MT effective yield. I don't know how I missed those before.

That is so obvious and simple that one is forced to wonder how you inferred that from AIG's post, when he did not state it, and has never demonstrated himself to be a complete idiot.