Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured

> "and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm"

Supposedly, at Garwin's scheming, one of the creators wasn't aware the immediate application of the algorithms they were optimizing was nuclear weapons,

> "Tukey reportedly came up with the idea during a meeting of President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee discussing ways to detect nuclear-weapon tests in the Soviet Union by employing seismometers located outside the country. These sensors would generate seismological time series. However, analysis of this data would require fast algorithms for computing DFTs due to the number of sensors and length of time. This task was critical for the ratification of the proposed nuclear test ban so that any violations could be detected without need to visit Soviet facilities.[4][5] Another participant at that meeting, Richard Garwin of IBM, recognized the potential of the method and put Tukey in touch with Cooley. However, Garwin made sure that Cooley did not know the original purpose. Instead, Cooley was told that this was needed to determine periodicities of the spin orientations in a 3-D crystal of helium-3."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooley–Tukey_FFT_algorithm#His...

It’s a reference to this paragraph where they hypothesized about a 10,000MT bomb;

> All of which is to say that the idea of making hydrogen bombs in the hundreds-of-megatons yield range was hardly unusual in the late 1950s. If anything, it was tame compared to the gigaton ambitions of one of the H-bomb’s inventors. It is hard to convey the damage of a gigaton bomb, because at such yields many traditional scaling laws do not work (the bomb blows a hole in the atmosphere, essentially). However, a study from 1963 suggested that, if detonated 28 miles (45 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, a 10,000-megaton weapon could set fires over an area 500 miles (800 kilometers) in diameter. Which is to say, an area about the size of France.

Teller’s crazy ass wanted to build a 10,000MT bomb with a 1,000MT primary..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)

Your linked site for some reason doesn't include fallout by default, nor does it seem to factor casualties from it. Turn on fallout + surface burst, and a 100MT bomb's deadly fallout range goes from the center of France (where the label is on their map) to the center of Germany and I suspect that's an extreme underestimation, especially the conic they give.

It's also possible that the NYTimes is conflating facts by accident. Your demo link only accounts for single big-blast effects but the way you optimize damage with nukes is lots of smaller bombs, often in a single bomb - MIRV is one name for this. The reason is pretty simple. We approximate the explosive range as a sphere and the volume of that sphere is proportional to the cube (^1/3) of the yield.

So if you increase the yield by 10x you only increase the explosive radius by something like 2.15x. On the other hand, detonate 10 bombs side by side and you increase the radius by 10x. This not only maximizes damage, but also works to further nullify any sort of anti-missile defense. And 100MT would be well more than enough to obliterate France.

You can also kind of intuit this by thinking about 100MT means. That's 100,000,000 TONS of TNT explosive capacity. That's about 1.5 tons of TNT for each and every person in France. That's just a stupidly massive absurd amount of destruction.

Big boom booms are easy.

Nuclear bomb design research since the sixties is all about making them as clean and low yield as possible. These two goals are counters to each other, but once you've mastered it your nuclear arsenal becomes less of a garage queen and a lot more useful.

I think it's probably referring to this bomb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55uSCO5D2w

I think the key is proposed weapon, instead of practical weapon. It's a fascinating video, you should check it out!

Wikipedia says that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of about 16 kilotons of TNT. 600k of those would be 16*600 megatons, or 9600 megatons. That's 96 times more than the original target yield of 100 megatons for Tsar Bomba.

I don't know if that's possible, but it makes sense that it would "reduce a region the size of France to ashes." Maybe the design had a lot of stages.

Teller really, really wanted to build a gigaton bomb. That may have been what the author was thinking of.