nuclear-news

• British tabloids recently reported that Russia could trigger tsunamis with nuclear “mole” missiles buried near US coasts.
• The claim was rejected by both nuclear weapons experts and the alleged source of the idea.
• Underwater nuclear detonations can trigger large waves, but they’d be nothing compared to natural tsunamis.

Nuclear weapons are as awesome as they are terrifying. In an instant, their explosions can vaporise people, level cities, and obliterate military forces.

But could this fearsome power be harnessed by Russia or other nuclear nations to lob deadly tsunamis against an enemy coastline, as British tabloids recently reported?

If you ask a nuclear physicist, you’re likely to be laughed out of the room.

“It would be a stupid waste of a perfectly good nuclear weapon,” Greg Spriggs, a nuclear-weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told Business Insider in an email.

Here’s why it doesn’t make sense and where the myth came from.

The science of nuclear wave-making A nuclear weapon detonated below the ocean’s surface can cause great devastation.One need not look further than the underwater US nuclear weapons tests of the 1940s and 1950s, including operations “Crossroads Baker” and “Hardtack I Wahoo” to see why. These underwater fireballs — roughly as energetic as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki in August 1945 — burst through the surface, ejecting pillars of seawater more than a mile high while rippling out powerful shockwaves.

Some warships staged near the explosions were vaporized. Others were tossed like toys in a bathtub, sinking them. Others sustained crushed or cracked hulls, crippled engines, and other damage from the shockwaves. And — notably — the explosions roughly doubled the height of waves to nearby atoll islands, flooding inland areas there.

Yet Spriggs says it’s unlikely that even the most powerful nuclear bombs could come close to unleashing a significant tsunami.

“[T]he energy in a large nuclear weapon is but a drop in the bucket compared to the energy of a [naturally]-occurring tsunami,” he said. “So, any tsunami created by a nuclear weapon couldn’t be very large.”…….. https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-mole-missile-nukes-science-debunked-2017-5#fpIqZtOJ2Hes3kQ4.99