Why am I doing the research for you on this?. I’m telling you what the physics are – not trying to argue with you or convince you of anything!. If you are interested enough – do the research yourself.

If you want something Janet and John to play with, to make it all a bit easier to understand, this gives a very basic idea of blast zones in pretty picture format: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/gmap/hydesim.html?ll=-73.9971,40.7223&yd=500&si

That will show you that for a 10kt weapon the 15psi blast zone is 0.33 mile or about 1700ft. For a 500kt weapon that zone is 1.21 miles or about 6300ft. So, for a 50-fold increase in yield you are actually looking at a blast effect increase less than a factor of 4. That figure is for a groundburst but shows the basic problem with your premise.

Airburst extends that figure perhaps 10% but you still have the issue of optimal burst height. The optimal burst height for the 15kt weapons dropped on Japan was 1500ft give or take. As yield increases that altitude increases and increases the distance from the burst to the target.

Remember that for a burst at 4-5k ft altitude that the detonation would have to be made within about half a nautical mile of the carrier for it even to be within the immediate effects zone. Nukes dont come with an impact fuse Dionis and even if it manages to burst directly over the carrier at 5000ft its still 5000ft away!.

As you’ve been told all along weapon designers know, even the Russian ones, that damage from a nuclear warhead, to a ship, comes from blast wave and shock effect not from trying to get large lumps of steel to change state into plasma. Understand that that is what the designers have aimed to achieve with their missile warheads.

4 500 feet (average of your numbers) = 0.74 nautical mile

This still puts it within the immediate effects zone. And yes, obviously, not an impact fuze but and airburst.

Russia to build nuclear-powered 60,000-ton aircraft carrier

MOSCOW, February 27 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s new-generation aircraft carrier will be nuclear powered and have a displacement of up to 60,000 metric tons, a United Shipbuilding Corporation executive said on Friday.

Vice Adm. Anatoly Shlemov, the company’s head of defense contracts, said the new carrier was still at the drawing board stage, but its blueprint and basic specifications have already been defined.

He said the carrier will serve as a seaborne platform for new-generation fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft, in particular, a fifth-generation fighter that will replace the Su-33 multirole fighter aircraft currently in service, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

“It will be a fifth-generation aircraft with classic horizontal take-off and landing capability,” the admiral said.

Shlemov said, unlike in the past, the new aircraft carrier would not be armed with cruise missiles, which were not part of its “job description.”

He said that at least three such carriers were to be built, for the Northern and Pacific Fleets.

The executive offered no timeline on the project, saying it was not as yet clear which shipyard would get the contract.

The new carrier has an estimated price tag of $4 billion.

So far the Russian Navy only has one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov Project 1143.5, built in 1985, with a displacement of 55,000 metric tons, a crew of 1,500, and capability to carry more than 50 aircraft.

60,000 tons light is like the ULYANOVSK!

As Schorsh states Dionis that site is suspect. You need to be a bit more careful with your sources – maybe you should find a website that is a bit more authorative than that of a student with an anti-nuclear agenda!.

As stated before, even if the student knew what he was talking about, you are trying to directly scale off yield and, once again, nuclear detonations do not do that. By this, keeping it at its very simplest level, I mean that doubling the yield of the weapon does NOT equate to a doubling of blast effect/radius. Look at Schorsh’s formula and you will see how it works.

We then come to Gary’s point that if you could place a nuke aboard a CVN or on a barge alongside it and detonate the weapon – then you might get the effects you are anticipating – annihilation of some areas of the ship through the heat pulse. You are not going to get that off a missile warhead though. The need to do that kind of damage to a ship is simply unnecessary and would be a waste of the nuclear warhead.

Again as stated the warhead would detonate at optimal burst height for its design yield so that the maximum coverage area possible with that warhead would be achieved. An airburst a few thousand ft up will see the carrier largely out of the immediate-effects zone, but, the blast will still knock it out of action, kill crew, destroy aircraft etc, etc.

Jonesy, your rhetoric isn’t helping your argument at all here. If you want to be even remotely credible here, I suggest you post some sort of yield-to-effect calculator for us to use.

If Little Boy / Fat Man could destroy a city, a warhead with 50x the power is going to cause off the scale damage to a naval vessel.

“According to Encarta, the damage radius increases with the power of the nuclear bomb, approximately in proportion to its cube root. If exploded at the optimum height, therefore, a 10-megaton weapon, which is 1,000 times as powerful as a 10-kiloton weapon, will increase the distance tenfold, that is, out to 17.7 km (11 mi) for severe damage and 24 km (15 mi) for moderate damage of a frame house.”

This leads me to believe that a 500KT weapon, will double the blast of the suggested figures above in this page.

Remember, the Czar Bomba turned rock into ash in its air burst explosion. While being off the scale in terms of power, a closer air burst, even 1000ft above a carrier, it going to cause the majority of it to either fall apart or burn.

In the tests mentioned the airburst weapon scorched paint and damaged masts/antenna on heavier vessels and, again from memory, pushed an aircraft carrier about a quarter of a mile. Not a chance of a ship getting vapourised though!. Shock damage aplenty and with vessels with running engines and embarking live ordnance you have a great risk of fire and sympathetic explosion – getting a Nimitz to go foomp and disappear in a cloud of component elements though….not very realistic!.

A Granit’s 500kt warhead will cause massive destruction

http://www.magnetbox.org/archive/aol/nuclear.html

Site that 10kt (50 TIMES less) than a Granit, vaporizes .5 miles.

Go figure. The Nimitz would be reduces to nothing – for the most part. I’m not suggesting it would disappear though 😛

That’s the point. Cheyenne is basically the ONLY super hard target in the USA, apart from individual ICBM silos. Those 20mT warheads might work against the former, but are worthless against the latter on a large scale.

Soviets were known to have first-strike destruction capability of most Minuteman silos – are you suggesting the lower current numbers is what has made this stop for Russia?

Thats about right TVI. Provided you get warning, which all of the big supersonic ship-killing missiles definitely provided, EMP can be mitigated by the simple act of isolating the antenna/waveguides from the electronics. Essentially there is nothing magical about EMP – its basically ‘just’ a surge current that will short circuitry. Stop that current making it to the circuitry and its not going to have much impact beyond the antenna. Obviously more advanced electronic scan systems are more vulnerable.

For ‘conventional’ radar types the antenna damage need not be critical as the ‘follow-up’ strike would have to be outside the EMP radius so as not to get fratricide-killed by the EMP themselves!.

This argument is medium-rare. 😉 Not quite cooked well enough.

You might know you have a few unidentified objects flying your way, or even missiles – but how can you just guess they are being sent for EMP damage? For all you know, they might start more systems up for defenses – and fall right into the trap?

Not to mention doesn’t EMP / nuclear explosion aftermath interfere with radar even after the blast? Might have to dig up an article about this – can’t remember off the top of my head.

Funny, such missile have destroyed more than of the heavy Russian AShM’s, Royal Navy destroyers come to mind.

Could you be any more generic? The systems huge footprint and yet non distributed nature make it inefficient for ship design and it offers nothing that a combination of western gun and missile based CIWS do not.

The differences (advantages) in the CIWS might be minute, I’ll give you that much.

But there’s no way you can win any argument with Yakhont vs Exocet non-sense, badly defended RN destroyers aside 😉