points by bluGill 4 hours ago | 0 comments
If you go to the Los Alamos Science Museum you can see an original letter from Albert Einstein where he proposed that a nuclear bomb could be fit on a ship and sailed into harbor in 1938. A ship-sized nuclear bomb was not of interest to President Roosevelt at the time for a likely good reason. It's only when the UK realized that it wasn't a ship size. It was something that you could drop from a conventional airplane bomber of the day that the US became interested.
[–] defrost 3 hours ago
[–] lazide 3 hours ago
It was also a failure of imagination. A ship sized tsar bomba at the time would still be quite interesting - armor the ship like a Iowa class (or more), and give it an automated navigator (very doable at the time, plus or minus a mile or two), and it’s a war ender.
[–] gonzalohm 3 hours ago
And sail the ship into Berlin?
[–] lazide 3 hours ago
Wait until the wind is right, add some of the right contaminants, and you wouldn’t need to do so to poison all of Germany for at least a generation.
Also, Tokyo Bay.
For the Axis powers, it would be an even easier sell of course.
At least if any of them could believe - or even imagine - that it actually could exist or be as devastating as it was of course. And frankly, unless you saw the footage of an actual Tsar Bomba, how could anyone?
[–] defrost 3 hours ago
Footage of the actual Tsar Bomba has no scale, detonating as it did high up in the atmosphere - for anyone watching it might have been a really big or really small explosion.
For the first bomb ever made to immediately jump to Tsar Bomba size, or for it to utilise an understanding of fallout and contaminants that didn't exist prior to the Castle Bravo tests seems ... unlikely.
Some time later Mark Oliphant visited the US in person and walked key people through a circles and arrows on chalkboard breakdown of how such a thing would be actually possible.