On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 07:50:35AM +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:

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On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, J.A. Terranson wrote:

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"No big deal"? Who are they kidding?

A 2-mile wide cloud is WAY too big to be caused by a single explosion, unless REALLY big. The forest fire claim sounds more plausible in

At 09:53 AM 9/12/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: this

To make a crater visible from LEO it better had to be big. Does Oppau

ring

a bell?

How about that .3 kiloton AN explosion in France a little after 11.9.01? But you don't get much crater with an airburst --think about Trinity, where the tower was left standing. To get a crater, you have to bury the nuke (see SEDAN, PLOWSHARE), which BTW couples the shock very nicely into the ground. (You *can* destroy an underground bunker with a nuke, you just bury a 10 MT device. The fallout prevents its deployment though. Easier just to bomb the ingress/egress. http://www.fas.org/rlg/20.htm has some good ideas on this. In any case, you won't see the surface until the smoke clears. But the gamma, seismic (quakes don't start instantly), and opticals (double-pulse) will tip a nuke quite clearly.