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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Seen it, read it, and aware of why it was ignored at the time - the ability to make such a weapon, as relayed by Einstein, was a hearsay tale of speculation.

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.

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.

And sail the ship into Berlin?

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?

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.

Like Castle Bravo, if the timescale is accurate the scale is obvious to anyone who has seen explosions/bombs before. That being, huge and destructive on a scale previously impossible.

I think you’re making my point though - literally no one could really comprehend or believe such a thing was even possible. Ever.

Until they saw it happening.

So of course it got dismissed until it was essentially inevitable.

> Like Castle Bravo,

The Tsar Bombe footage* had warships in the frame for scale? That's certainly news to me.

> the scale is obvious to anyone who has seen explosions/bombs before.

Okay, fair point - so how big or small was this nuclear explosion then? (No banana for scale, but there is a human for reference): https://i0.wp.com/blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads...

Sure, there's no real challenge to lookup the test series via name in the URL for answers, but bear in mind, watching live IRL as the bubble expands the question for casual humans is how far away is that explosion? ( Fermi had distance, time, and shockwave force at distance to work with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem )

* 1961 Tsar Bomba hydrogen blast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtCTzbh4mNQ

bigger than anything ever seen on the planet before, with the fireball going into the stratosphere. but then you know that.

what even is your point?

if Roosevelt (or any other leader at the time) had seen that footage, he’d be shitting his pants and funding anything and everything going in that direction ASAP. which is mine.

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