Former spymasters who become media “talking heads” need to be under added scrutiny to ensure they don’t reveal state secrets, the UK Parliament’s intelligence watchdog has said. It called for top spies who do so to be punished.

VIDEO: There have been more than 2,000.

How many nuclear bombs have been detonated? Atmospheric testing All told, of the over 2,000 nuclear explosions detonated worldwide between 1945 and 1996, 25 % or over 500 bombs were exploded in the atmosphere: over 200 by the United States, over 200 by the…

The visualization features 2,153 nuclear detonations that have taken place.

Just in case you were wondering.

Answer (1 of 3): Well, look at the numbers, which are generally specified in kilotons, or megatons.

For example, the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were around 20 kilotons. Now, each kiloton is about 4.184 \times 10^{12} joules, or 4.184 TJ…

It's not just the radiation you need to worry about.

If we want to understand how much area or land a nuclear bomb destroys, we have to know the nature of different kinds of nuclear weapons.

On July 16th, 1945, the United States conducted the world's first test of a nuclear weapon. Less than a month later, two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing about the end of the Second World War. No nuclear bombs…

August 1945 will forever be remembered as one of the most dramatic months in the history of mankind, when nuclear weapons were used in warfare for the first and last time to date. Tragically, this powerful weapon was aimed at civilian targets: on August 6…

Answer (1 of 2): A supernova can never, ever, happen for the Sun, it is too small by at least 8 times.

It is a solo star, and does not have a WD companion, so that when the Sun goes Red Giant, and the White Dwarf companion accretes matter from the red giant…

Within a 6-km (3.7-mile) radius of a 1-megaton bomb, blast waves will produce 180 tonnes of force on the walls of all two-storey buildings, and wind speeds of 255 km/h (158 mph). In a 1-km (0.6-mile) radius, the peak pressure is four times that amount, and…

Posted in r/NoStupidQuestions by u/stupre1972 • 834 points and 145 comments

Nine countries hold the 13,000 nuclear weapons in the global stockpile. That's less than during the Cold War but it doesn't change the fact that these bombs are still a threat to global humanity. So how do they work and are we close to nuclear war?