How many nuclear missiles would it take to blow up the moon?

Here’s a piece from Gizmodo figuring that you’d need 9,000 bombs of the 15,000 kiloton “Castle Bravo” class to obliterate the entire surface of the moon.

Is it possible to blow up the moon?

The gravitational binding energy of the Moon is 120 million, trillion gigajoules. To blow it up, you’ll need to drill mine shafts hundreds of kilometres deep, all over the Moon, and drop a total of 600 billion of the largest nuclear bombs ever built down them.

How many nuclear bombs would it take to equal the Sun?

We get the astonishingly huge amount of 400 trillion trillion watts. To put this into a crazy context, every second the sun produces the same energy as about a trillion 1 megaton bombs! In one second, our sun produces enough energy for almost 500,000 years of the current needs of our so-called civilization.

What would happen if you blew up the moon?

Destroying the Moon would send debris to Earth, but it might not be life-exterminating. If the blast were weak enough, the debris would re-form into one or more new moons; if it were too strong, there would be nothing left; of just the right magnitude, and it would create a ringed system around Earth.

Can a nuclear bomb destroy moon?

The moon is roughly 2000 miles across with a surface area of 17 million square miles. A typical nuclear detonation could produce a crater much less than a square mile in area. It would then take at least 100 million of today’s nuclear weapons to just stir up the surface of the moon to a depth of around 100 m.

How many nukes would it take to destroy Earth?

The current global population is 7.8 billion which results in 23.4 billion tonnes of TNT or 23,400,000 kt. The average yield of a nuclear weapon is 500 kt which means you would need 46,800 nuclear weapons to kill everybody.

What would happen if an atomic bomb went off in space?

If a nuclear weapon is exploded in a vacuum-i. e., in space-the complexion of weapon effects changes drastically: First, in the absence of an atmosphere, blast disappears completely. There is no longer any air for the blast wave to heat and much higher frequency radiation is emitted from the weapon itself.

How many nuclear warheads would destroy the earth?

At this very moment, there are 15,000 nuclear weapons on planet Earth. It would take just three nuclear warheads to destroy one of the 4,500 cities on Earth, meaning 13,500 bombs in total, which would leave 1,500 left.

Could we detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon?

Yes, the Air Force actually once wanted to do this. A new video shows what would happen if we detonated a nuclear weapon on the moon. The lack of an atmosphere would make a nuclear explosion on the moon significantly different than one on Earth.

Can the air force blow the hell out of the Moon?

The Air Force wanted to surprise the Soviets and the world: Hey, look at what we can do. We can blow the hell out of the moon. Dr. Leonard Reiffel at the Illinois Institute of Technology, 1963. Reiffel knew he didn’t have the necessary expertise in-house to do this kind of a study.

Did the United States ever have a missile that could hit the Moon?

Not all the specific technical details of early American ballistic missile technology are clear (some things are still classified), but during an interview Reiffel gave later in life, he insisted we had the capability to hit a target on the moon with an accuracy of within two miles.

Why did the Air Force want to go to the Moon?

Sometime before May 1958, the U.S. Air Force asked the ARF team to investigate something truly out of the ordinary: the visibility and effects of a hypothetical nuclear explosion on the moon. The Air Force wanted to surprise the Soviets and the world: Hey, look at what we can do.