The Gadget

The nuclear non proliferation treaty is being debated these days and proposals have been made to go from a non proliferation treaty to a real ban on nuclear weapons. With relatively recent evolutions in Iran, Korea building nuclear weapons technology and the US and Russia modernising their nuclear arsenal even non proliferation is under pressure and some see this as an argument to go for a ban. So far no country with nuclear weapons has joined the ban proposal so it is not off to a promising start. Having read a bit about the Manhattan project in the Feynman biography from James Gleick I went to read a bit on the atomic heritage site about how the atomic age started with the Trinity test and the explosion of the ‘gadget’. Before the gadget exploded no one was sure just how powerful it would be. It turned out to detonate with between 15 and 20 kilotons of force, slightly more than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. We all know what devastation that did. Although gadget seems a bit of a sadistic misnomer for the first atomic bomb, if you compare it to modern nuclear bombs the name may be ‘appropriate’ as these are roughly a 100 times more powerful. The most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated was 3000 times more powerful than the gadget. It has hard to imagine what kind of destruction such a bomb would cause if it were ever detonated over a city. I didn’t bother even looking but if you are interested you can see what the effect of a nuclear bomb exploding in a city near you would be on NUKEMAP. The site also has all the commonly available weapons in the arsenals as selectable presets so you don’t need to know anything about these weapons to get an idea what would happen if someone pushed the ‘wrong button’.