To destroy the world, only 10 fusion bombs are needed

Business Insider said that as soon as World War II ended, scientists developing atomic bombs dropped on Japan had anticipated the number of nuclear weapons needed to destroy the world.

American historian Alex Wellerstein shared a recently published secret document in 1945, stating that scientists at the Los Alamos Experimental Center, which built the atomic bomb, made the conclusion arguing that "only 10 to 100 versions of Supers bombs of this type" are needed to spread pain to all humanity.

That was the time when nuclear weapons manufacturing was in its infancy. However, scientists can still determine the potential power of weapons they are developing."The" Super "bomb outlined in this document is the kind of weapon that we today call a thermonuclear bomb , " Wellerstein said.

At that time, scientists believed they could build a weapon with 10 to 100 megaton damage (equivalent to millions of tons of TNT). For comparison, the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan) had a destructive power of about 15 kiloton, or 0.015 megaton. That means, the nuclear weapons that were later built are thousands of times more powerful than the bombs.

Image of Tsar Bomba bomb explosion.

The threat that nuclear weapons bring does not stop at explosive power. Scientists claim that "radioactive substances will destroy the world" because of the atomic bombs with uranium . Exposure to radiation will increase the rate of cancer, birth of a child with deformities and other genetic diseases.

Mr. Wellerstein said that the concerns about radiation from nuclear weapons in 1945 have not yet appeared, and that this problem was not mentioned until 1963, when the US "stopped testing nuclear weapons on the face." land within the framework of the Nuclear Prohibition Treaty ".

By a simple calculation, we can see that 100 bombs of 100 megaton bombs exploded at the same time, causing an explosion of 10,000 megaton. According to Mr. Wellerstein, this is the number that documents in a 1953 study identified as "going to raise the magnitude to extreme levels".

During the Cold War, large nuclear weapons were in the hands of the US and the former Soviet Union, but fortunately never used.

In recent decades, the US and Russia have begun disarming nuclear weapons, so according to Mr. Wellerstein, "the risk of contamination worldwide is not as great as it used to be." "The current concern is that the amount of carbon released from nuclear weapons can adversely affect the Earth's climate."

In the past, the United States and the Soviet Union had blown up super bombs in tests. They detonated a 15-megaton bomb in 1954, while the Soviet Union detonated the Tsar Bomba, a thermonuclear bomb that destroyed 58 megaton.