This is interesting and counterintuitive — because of how the energy proportions itself (e.g. visible vs. infrared), kiloton-range nuclear weapons are brighter than megaton-range weapons, apparently.pic.twitter.com/AgRnRpBY8Y
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Or rather, "energy is proportioned," to be a bit more grammatical. (Monday mornings, am I right?) Same document says that 45% of the fireball energy in kiloton-range shot was in visible spectrum, while it is only 25% in megaton-range shots.
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I have looked for a graph or equation that would give peak brightness as a function of yield, but not found anything obvious. Which is itself kind of interesting.
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I did find this interesting article from Nature, 1962, on the brightness of nuclear weapons — has some nice illustrations:pic.twitter.com/3E9BlUfBzV
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It has this graph which seems wrong to me — it assumes that the amount of visible energy is directly proportional to the yield, but that's not right. Article ends with a nice bit about whether aliens in nearby star systems could see nukes going off on Earth (probably not).pic.twitter.com/vnZUAramyr
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Poked around a bit and found these interesting diagrams (which are related to flash blindedness) which seem to indicate that indeed, lower-yield nuclear weapons are indeed brighter than higher-yield ones. Again, kind of an interesting and unintuitive fact.pic.twitter.com/EOBQ5n8xtL
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Bit surely 25% of megaton range is still way more than 45% of kiloton range ? Or am I missing something?
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Not necessarily... It's possible that brightness is a wonky curve. Megaton thermal effects have a lot of energy, but in a very long pulse period. If what matters is the "tightness" of the energy curve (e.g., more energy in small time), then kiloton might be brighter.
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Yes good point. I wasn't thinking about duration of brightness.
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Also, according to Glasstone and Dolan, the surface temperature of the fireballs don't vary much with yield (though the size does). So that kind of complicates it all, esp. if you have a smaller percentage of energy released into the visual spectrum.
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IIRC, we (USA) only had 4 tests that would fall into the "very large bombs" category: bravo, Yankee, Romeo and Mike.
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