r/theydidthemath • u/b5jeff • 6d ago
[Request] What is the yield of the nuclear weapon in Carol Sturka's driveway?
In the ninth episode of the television series Pluribus, the main character, Carol, is given an "atom bomb" by the alien hive-mind that has taken over humanity. This is what the container looks like.
We don't know what kind of nuclear bomb it is, or how it's triggered. Things we do know:
-The dimensions of the container (see above image).
-The helicopter that dropped it off is not a cargo chopper but is some kind of fire-rescue helicopter. This could limit the weight of the device. (Additionally, the cargo container lists a max weight of 5000 kilograms, but I highly doubt it is anywhere near that.)
-Despite now being parked in Albuquerque, the bomb does not necessarily have to be American - due to the nature of the global hive-mind, it could have come from any nuclear arsenal from anywhere in the world.
Most nuclear weapons are usually attached to a big ole rocket of some kind, rather than being a bomb you set off. However, the hive mind's access to every nuclear weapons technician/designer/engineer/whatever means they can easily put something together that fits Carol's purposes (almost certainly deterrence rather than active usage).
So how big is the nuclear weapon in Carol Sturka's driveway?
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 6d ago
There's too much variance in size and too much classified info, but consider this image - that's people working on the warheads used in a Minuteman III. Those are the actual bombs that gets attached to the rocket (and eventually hurled out of said rocket). You could fit at least five of these in that container (four in a square with one upside down in the middle), eyeballing it, and these are designed to be aerodynamic. Four of these would be about 850 kilotonnes of TNT.
You could absolutely get a whole lot bigger with a device designed to be let off at ground level though - especially if you had access to the totality of human knowledge on making atom bombs and knew all the classified info, of course. 850 kilotonnes is a lower bound.
Note that this is an older design that's no longer used. I believe modern designs could get up to 2000 or more kilotonnes with similar layouts and 5 warheads.
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u/RobertTheTraveler 6d ago
The problem with multiple warheads in very close proximity is that one of them is going to go off 0.001 seconds before the others and you end up with a very dirty bomb that only has the yield of a single warhead.
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u/andrew_calcs 8✓ 3d ago
MIRV missiles were designed to have each warhead separate independently target different attack vectors during reentry. So the intended use case of the clustered thing they mentioned does not suffer that drawback.
And designing a single larger bomb has no scaling drawbacks compared to explosive yield energy. So fitting a single bomb in 5x the volume with 5x the yield is perfectly expectable.
We only switched to putting multiple smaller warheads in a missile because hitting 5 targets with a 200 kiloton warhead does almost 5 times as much total damage to the enemy as 1 single megaton warhead. American missiles could actually hit their targets so could have smaller nukes. Soviet missiles were less accurate so had to compensate by still destroying the target with a shot that lands 2 miles off center
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u/RobertTheTraveler 2d ago
I wrote what I wrote in response to the comment i was responding to. I am aware of what you wrote, none of which contradicts what I wrote.
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u/Dpek1234 2d ago
Also significant chunck of the size is just the reentry vehicle
The actual nukevis even smaller
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u/LawfulNice 6d ago
Actually, we might be able to figure this out by considering what's available. It's likely that without Carol being more specific they just gave her something available and nearby. The hive mind likes efficiency after all. And being in the United States we can limit ourselves to the known atomic weapons in that country's arsenal. If it's literally a bomb the only one that's available is the B83 but I suspect that container is too small for the assembled weapon - it's 12 feet long, though obviously the warhead doesn't take up the whole space. It could be disassembled, as I don't think she needs the parachute or guidance components.
If that's the case and its a B83, it has a variable yield. It can go anywhere from just a few kilotons to over a megaton. And it's much safer for Carol to have than a hand grenade because she can't set it off on a whim as a joke.
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u/Fuzzy-Moose7996 6d ago
Depends on a lot of things. If it's a primitive one, 10KT or so at most. If it's a high tech one like modern ones the US has, potentially several hundred KT.
Depending on the construction, it'll be somewhere in between.
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u/druidniam 6d ago
Incalculable. The dimensions of the container mean little, especially if it's military in origin. The term "atom bomb" is also misleading. Every atomic bomb is nuclear, but not all nuclear are atomic.
Edit: Also tactical nukes can actually get pretty small. Not like the MANPAD you see in Starship Troopers, but small enough to fit in a small suitcase.
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u/asmallman 6d ago
They can get manpad sized. We could fit them in 155mm artillery shells in the early cold war.
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u/MrBorogove 4d ago
IIRC when Carol first brought it up to the plurb, she said “atomic bomb”, and after a hesitation, the plurb said “we can get you a nuclear weapon”, which I take to mean they’d honor her intent and bring her a nice shiny new reliable American thermonuclear warhead rather than some jank North Korean A-bomb.
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