Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnews!military
From: Brian Dickson
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Nuclear Devastation
Summary: "traditionally calculated" wrong
Message-ID: <6942@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 27 May 89 03:17:23 GMT
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From: Brian Dickson

In article <6844@cbnews.ATT.COM> hall@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (john hall) writes:
>>On the generic quality of "destroy the world n  times" statements.
>>
>>To the best of my knowledge this was traditionally calculated as:
>>
>>( Hiroshima + Nagasaki explosive power /  deaths from same) *
>>( explosive power used in scenario / worlds population ).
>
A method of calculation which gives a more graphic representation of the
destructive power of fission bombs is:

 (Hiroshima blast area) * (number of Hiroshima size bombs)
 -----------------------------------------------------------
 (radius of Earth)^2 * 4 * PI * 0.3 (30% of Earth is land)

which gives: (10^2 * PI) * (200000 (U.S. and U.S.S.R))
             ----------------------------------------------------
                   (6366 kilometers)^2 * 4 * PI * 0.3

which equals about 0.4 of the surface of the Earth. In other words, a saturation
bombing could place about 40% of the Earth's surface inside a lethal blast
radius of a nuke. Of course, this 40% includes northern Canada, Sibera,
Greenland, the Australian outback, both polar ice caps, etc. 63 000 000
square kilometers is a lot of teritory.

(Before I get flamed for the 200,000 warheads number, my source was a letter
to the editor of the Kingston Whig Standard from the person whose job it was to
count them. Most of them are artillery-type tactical nukes.)
--
Brian Dickson
Disclaimer: I have no opinion, the numbers speak for themselves.