Nuclear detonation

The energy released from a nuclear weapon detonated in the troposphere can be divided into four basic categories:

Depending on the design of the weapon and the environment in which it is detonated the energy distributed to these categories can be increased or decreased. The blast effect is created by the coupling of immense amounts of energy, spanning the electromagnetic spectrum, with the surroundings. Locations such as submarine, surface, air burst, or exo-atmospheric determine how much energy is produced as blast and how much as radiation. In general, denser media around the bomb, like water, absorb more energy, and create more powerful shockwaves while at the same time limiting the area of its effect.

When an air burst occurs, lethal blast and thermal effects proportionally scale much more rapidly than lethal radiation effects, as higher and higher yield nuclear weapons are used.

The physical-damage mechanisms of a nuclear weapon (blast and thermal radiation) are identical to those of conventional explosives, but the energy produced by a nuclear explosive is millions of times more powerful per gram and the temperatures reached are briefly in the tens of millions of degrees.

Energy from a nuclear explosive is initially released in several forms of penetrating radiation. When there is a surrounding material such as air, rock, or water, this radiation interacts with and rapidly heats it to an equilibrium temperature (i.e. so that the matter is at the same temperature as the atomic bomb's matter). This causes vaporization of surrounding material resulting in its rapid expansion. Kinetic energy created by this expansion contributes to the formation of a shockwave. When a nuclear detonation occurs in air near sea level, much of the released energy interacts with the atmosphere and creates a shockwave which expands spherically from the hypocenter. Intense thermal radiation at the hypocenter forms a nuclear fireball and if the burst is low enough, it is often associated with a mushroom cloud. In a burst at high altitude, where the air density is low, more energy is released as ionizing gamma radiation and x-rays than an atmosphere-displacing shockwave.

In 1942 there was some initial speculation among the scientists developing the first nuclear weapons that there might be a possibility of igniting the Earth's atmosphere with a large enough nuclear explosion. This would concern a nuclear reaction of two nitrogen atoms forming a carbon and an oxygen atom, with release of energy. This energy would heat up the remaining nitrogen enough to keep the reaction going until all nitrogen atoms were consumed. Hans Bethe was assigned the task of studying whether there was a possibility in the very early days, and concluded there was no possibility due to inverse Compton effect cooling of the fireball.Richard Hamming, a mathematician, was asked to make a similar calculation just before Trinity, with the same result. Nevertheless, the notion has persisted as a rumor for many years, and was the source of black humor at the Trinity test.

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