>And the missile was armed. Schlosser says that the explosive force of the warhead on a Titan II is nine megatons, which is three times the force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it had detonated, most of the state of Arkansas would have been wiped out.
That is the scariest thing I have read in a while. I always had the impression that there were a lot of active steps in a bomb actually exploding.
The largest nuclear detonation set off by the United States was Castle Bravo. It was fifteen megatons. It had serious fallout issues, but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon.
And the largest nuclear detonation of all time was the Russian Tsar Bomba, clocking in a 50 megatons, vice the 15 for Castle Bravo. The explosion broke windows over five hundred miles away. But even then, structures > 75 miles away mostly survived, so it still wouldn't have destroyed an entire state the size of Arkansas.
And supposedly, the original design was for 100 megatons, but they dialed it back because of fallout concerns.
>but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon
I don't know, what you are referring to here, but to my opinion, given the distances of a relatively wide area with very limited population, the results where grave enough. Generations of the inhabitants where contaminated and had babies with many defects or deaths born. I guess the descendants of these poor people still struggle with the effects of this bomb.
Given such an event in or near a city of the US, I guess not only one city might get wiped out but the effects would be very real and destructive in a very big part of the US.
"Horrible effects" and "wiped out" mean very, very different things and can't be used interchangeably, especially if you're writing an article that pretends to be serious.
That is the scariest thing I have read in a while. I always had the impression that there were a lot of active steps in a bomb actually exploding.