Popular Mechanics: What If We Blew Up All The World’s Nukes at Once?
For starters, it would be a very, very bad day for mankind.
Sometimes it's best not to think about just how many nukes are out there.
Nuclear weapons are enormously destructive devices capable of level entire cities, and arguably ending human civilization in the case of an all-out nuclear exchange. But what if humankind, for some bizarre reason, decided to set all of them off at once? The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt followed this thought experiment to its apocalyptic conclusion, and it’s not pretty.
The explosive yield of nuclear weapon is typically measured in kilotons, or thousand tons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima is typically calculated at 16 kilotons, or 16,000 tons of TNT. The W-87 warhead carried by the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile has a yield of 300 kilotons. The B83 nuclear freefall bomb, carried by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons, or 1,200 kilotons.
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WNU Editor: It would definitely be mankind's worst day.
