"Forest Fire" responsible for a 2.5mi *mushroom cloud*?

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 09:53 AM 9/12/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 07:50:35AM +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>> On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, J.A. Terranson wrote:
>>
>> > "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
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.