Nuclear weapons in 40K.

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**Iron_Captain**

Grey Templar wrote:
Martel732 wrote:
Verviedi is correct. Nukes never go out of style, but they make for terrible narratives. Remember that most things in 40K can be killed by heavy stubbers. They have zero chance vs WMDs. Even a thermobaric device would do catastrophic damage to a 40K battlefield, but again, bad narrative.

One could use nukes as a plot device.

Omicron-9, a vital forge world, is under siege by a Tyranid fleet. Tactical assessment has deemed that the planet cannot be held. Time is needed to evacuate the vital materials and machinery from the main forge hive. Strategic nuclear weapons, deployed via missiles as well as ordinatus batteries deployed around the hive, are used to periodically wipe out the advancing waves of tyranids 100 km away from the outer defenses, along with longer range detonations to wipe out tyranid staging areas and breeding pits. Any that survive are easily held back by the forces in the surrounding defense works. The Tyranids quickly evolved radiation resistance, but nothing could protect from the sheer force of nuclear detonation. The vital materials were evacuated, along with most ground forces.

That could at least potentially make for a good narrative.

Except you wasted the Emperor's expensive and sacred nukes when you could have thrown a few million Guardsmen at it for the same result...
The Imperium has incredibly powerful weapons and artifacts (like deathstrike missiles) that could solve pretty much every problem. Yet the Imperium virtually never deploys such weapons, because they are sacred and valuable. Human life on the other hand, is incredibly cheap. Therefore the Imperium solves with infantry what more sane forces would solve with missiles. And because the story of how an army of heroic martyrs sacrificed themselves to buy some time against the unending Tyranid horde is way more inspirational and dramatic than holding the Tyranids at bay for a while with missiles. The Imperium cares about such things.

**KayTwo**

I would like to point out that in our world SSBN carries up to 24 Trident 2 missiles, and each Trident 2 carries up to 12 warheads with in its MIRV, usually a W-88. Each W-88 has a yield of about 475 kilotons. A kiloton has an equivalent energy value of 4.184 terajoules. So, 4.184 times 475 times 12 times 24 is 572,371 terajoules of energy carried by one submarine. Now, I don't have the science background to prove this, much less explain it, but when I was in I was taught that one SSBN had enough firepower to glass the planet over twice. I don't think we should under estimate what ever new developments there are to nuclear weapons in the future,cause they are plenty strong already.

**ross-128**

Well, sounds like your teacher exaggerated a teeny tiny bit. If a W-88 was dropped in the middle of Brooklyn it would flatten most of it, and whoever doesn't get flattened would be getting a major instant tan (by which I mean third degree burns if directly exposed to the flash). Lower Manhattan would get a bit toasty too, but anything north of the Empire State Building would be more or less fine, as would Queens. Relatively speaking. So one of these isn't even enough to level NYC, 24 of them certainly can't glass the planet. 24 of them could level Rhode Island, maybe.

Though that's still more than enough to vaporize an entire 40k board.

**Wyzilla**

KayTwo wrote:
I would like to point out that in our world SSBN carries up to 24 Trident 2 missiles, and each Trident 2 carries up to 12 warheads with in its MIRV, usually a W-88. Each W-88 has a yield of about 475 kilotons. A kiloton has an equivalent energy value of 4.184 terajoules. So, 4.184 times 475 times 12 times 24 is 572,371 terajoules of energy carried by one submarine. Now, I don't have the science background to prove this, much less explain it, but when I was in I was taught that one SSBN had enough firepower to glass the planet over twice. I don't think we should under estimate what ever new developments there are to nuclear weapons in the future,cause they are plenty strong already.

Yeah that's nonsense. For comparison the K/T event asteroid that struck Chicxulub released 418,400,000,000 terajoules of energy, and it failed to envelop the entire planet. A nuke doesn't even have the power to "glass" land in the first place.

**Grey Templar**

Yeah. While I don't think anybody knows exactly how many nukes there are currently, I don't think there have ever been enough nukes to actually destroy Earth. Destroy society as we know it? Sure. Literally sterilize the planet and all of humanity? Heck no.

You'd probably need to find a lot of uranium and plutonium deposits in space to get enough material to destroy an Earth sized planet with nukes.

**Wyzilla**

Grey Templar wrote:
Yeah. While I don't think anybody knows exactly how many nukes there are currently, I don't think there have ever been enough nukes to actually destroy Earth. Destroy society as we know it? Sure. Literally sterilize the planet and all of humanity? Heck no.

You'd probably need to find a lot of uranium and plutonium deposits in space to get enough material to destroy an Earth sized planet with nukes.

IIRC from some calculations I read you need to start pumping out hundreds of petatons to start doing permanent damage to a planet. Yottatons or more of TNT to actually destroy it.

**amanita**

Wyzilla is correct.

A 1 megaton bomb has around 4 x 10^15 joules of energy.

The volcanic blast at Tambora in 1815 released an estimated 8.4 x 10^20 joules of energy - an amount greater than the current estimated world nuclear stockpile.

It's been estimated that to reduce the earth to rubble it would require 10^31 joules of energy. An antimatter mass about the size of Mt. Everest would do the trick!

The earth is large, folks!

**Exergy**

amanita wrote:
Wyzilla is correct.

A 1 megaton bomb has around 4 x 10^15 joules of energy.

The volcanic blast at Tambora in 1815 released an estimated 8.4 x 10^20 joules of energy - an amount greater than the current estimated world nuclear stockpile.

It's been estimated that to reduce the earth to rubble it would require 10^31 joules of energy. An antimatter mass about the size of Mt. Everest would do the trick!

The earth is large, folks!

Destroying everything on the surface would be difficult
Turning the surface to moltant slag would be more difficult
Getting the earth to break up into pieces and blast apart would require overcoming the gravity well. A simply massive amount of energy.

**Flinty**

Grey Templar wrote:
Yeah. While I don't think anybody knows exactly how many nukes there are currently,....

10 second google search - about 15,000

http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/

Fair enough exact numbers may never be known, but this is the order of magnitude.