[AR] Re: Damascus AR Incident
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2017 02:23:07 -0500 (EST)
On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Andrew Burns wrote:
...the detonation of one point will never produce a full yield but may
produce a sub-kiloton yield involving some fission. That may not sound like
a lot but it still means that in an accident with one of those devices where
one of the detonators goes off (which is entirely plausible) the device
could still produce the equivalent energy of hundreds of tons of HE, which
is going to be a big deal if it's near a populated area...
Not a very big deal; potential radioactive contamination is the big issue,
except quite locally.
Bear in mind that *half a megaton* (equivalent energy release) 23km from
Chelyabinsk broke a lot of windows and caused a bunch of flying-glass
injuries, but didn't do much more. Yeah, it helped that the 23km of
separation was straight up, putting the blast in very thin air, but even
so, that's a thousand times the energy and all it did was break glass
and shake things up.
2.9kt in the center of Halifax (the Halifax Explosion of 1917) did heavy
damage for about 2.6km, plus a lot of broken windows and flying-glass
injuries farther out. So for a fraction of a kiloton, blast isn't going
to be a major issue except within perhaps a kilometer.
Henry
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