The bomb was 'detuned' from a nominal 100 MT yield to a nominal 50 MT yield and yielded 57 MT. A 50 MT blast will give you a fireball about 7 miles in diameter and the troposphere is about 7 miles in thickness. Anything greater gives a fireball large enough that a lot of the energy is wasted by escaping uselessly into the stratosphere.
In theory, you can make a bomb with a yield just about as large as you want but there are utilitarian limits to what one might want to build. If one wants to devastate an opponent the results of several smaller bombs well placed can be much more effective than one big one.
Plutonium may be the trigger (or highly enriched uranium) but the yield comes largely from the fusion of a fuel such as lithium deuteride.
Of course, this all applies to fusion devices, primarily. For a fission only device there is no fusion fuel and the yields are considerably less.
I believe the Tsar Bomba also was a three stage weapon, fission-fusion- fission, I believe. The only US weapon that was three stage was the 25 megaton B-41, and it evidently was too big to be useful beyond the smaller number produced.
From my limited understanding there is no upper limit to the size of explosion, but the Tsar Bomba was physically so big that it took a modified TU-95 to carry it with resulting very limited range, so it was not considered an operational weapon. In fact the “doomsday weapon” in Dr Strangelove was the brainstorm of Rand think tank strategist Herman Kahn who envisioned a physically huge buried thermonuclear device (s) since there was no need for delivery, jacketed by cobalt-60 to spread fallout for 100 years.
Fascinating stuff.
Back to OP, I do wish our jackass in the whitehouse would focus on disarming our potential enemies first before disarming ourselves. All the other major nuclear powers, and many smaller ones, are actively building new weapons, and even Russia has indicated they have no interest to go below the present nuclear treaty with a new lower treaty, so any smaller US arsenal would be unilateral disarmament.
Thanks. I forget the difference between fusion and fission, someone told me here once but it’s gone from my head!
Destroy the earth is a silly environmentalist phrase as there are only a few ways to truly Destroy the Earth, but killing off EVERY SINGLE living thing to a single celled organism, is that possible?
Thanks :)