World leaders and top officials from 47 countries will descend on Washington, D.C., this week for a conference on how to halt the production of nuclear weapons and keep them out of the wrong hands. (For a comprehensive guide to who's showing up to the conference and what each nation is looking to get out of it, click here.)
Exactly how large is what President Barack Obama calls "single biggest threat to U.S. security"? See for yourself.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has put together a handy "Nuclear Weapons Effects Calculator." This application provides a top-down view of the blast radius of a nuclear weapon detonation in a major metropolitan area near you.
Of course, the impact resulting from a nuclear detonation is only part of the story. Let's not forgot about the effects of radioactive fallout carried by wind.
Again, FAS has an interactive tool to simplify the effects of a catastrophic nuclear detonation. Take a look at the "Fallout Calculator." Here, we can see how fallout travels following a nuclear impact on major world city (the previous applications only featured American cities).
One of the key variables to determining the impact of a nuclear explosion is the weapon yield. As you'll see using the tools provided by FAS, the larger the weapon yield, the larger the multi-colored overlay appears on the map.
Weapon yield is not the size of the bomb itself, but rather the explosive impact of the bomb itself. A warhead with a one kiloton weapon yield for example, would equal the power of 1,000 tons of TNT. A one-megaton warhead would have the explosive potential of one million tons of TNT.
The weapon yield of warheads in the U.S. arsenal range anywhere from .01 kilotons -- the lightest including what was known as the Davy Crockett system -- to 25 megatons. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union even constructed a warhead, called "Tsar Bomba," with a theoretical yield of 100 megatons. (To see a video of the Tsar Bomba test -- the largest nuclear device ever tested, click here.)
To put this into a historical perspective, the bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a yield of 15 kilotons and 21 kilotons respectively. Last year, North Korea tested a small nuclear device, which analysts estimate had an explosive yield of three to eight kilotons.
Now that we have the tools to analyze the broad strokes of the impact of one nuclear warhead, we have to consider: Exactly how many of nuclear weapons are out there today?
Last week, Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a new START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement. Between the two nations, the United States and Russia combined have around 90 percent of the global stockpile of nuclear arms.
Under the treaty, the United States and Russia would be limited to 1,550 on deployed ICBMs (inter-continental ballistic missiles) and deployed SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles). The pact, however, does not account for thousands of warheads that are inactive or not mounted on missiles. It also grants both sides seven years to comply with the agreement, so we're stuck with the arsenal we have for the moment (and neither treaty has been ratified by their respective governments, so it's not yet law, but that's another story).
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the organization responsible for the Doomsday Clock, has estimated that there are around 23,360 nuclear weapons globally. Of course, this is far lower than the peak of nuclear competition during the Cold War, when the United States alone had an arsenal of 32,193 warheads and bombs in 1966.
Russia leads the pack with an estimated 13,000 warheads, though the Bulletin readily admits that the status of a large swath of Russian warheads is unclear. The United States comes in second with 9,400 warheads in its arsenal -- active and inactive. France, China, Britain and other nuclear nations trail far behind.
Considering we have just seen the impact of a single nuclear warhead thanks to the tools provided by FAS, exactly how much damage could 23,360 nuclear warheads produce?
Sure, it depends on whether they were all detonated by land or by air. The explosive yield of each individual warhead certainly plays an important role in determining the blast radius of every single impact. Wind speed, too, will affect fallout distribution.
It's very difficult to estimate the precise impact of the simultaneous impact of this arsenal (and admittedly extremely unlikely to happen). Needless to say, it's enough to wipe out our entire planet several times over.
But back to the original question that start this post: Exactly how large is the nuclear threat to U.S. global security? Big enough to draw leaders from 47 different countries to Washington for the largest conference since the founding of that United Nations.
That's big. Tsar Bomba big.
Image credit: Getty Images
Tags: Doomsday, Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism
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