How is it possible to detonate a nuclear weapon underground without a huge part of the planet imploding?

Answer 1

Testing nuclear weapons above ground has been globally illegal for many years. Such test explosions take place down deep old mine shafts or specially drilled holes (packed with rock before actual detonation).
It's interesting to watch. The ground heaves upwards in a shallow dome but no dust or gas is blasted out into the atmosphere. Then the dome collapses into a shallow depression because the assortment of rocks around the device has been pulverised to dust and takes up less volume afterwards. The ests done so far have only been poerful enough to do this over an area of a few football pitches. So don't panic.
The collapsing part is a bit like filling a container with flour/sugar/corn flakes and then shaking it so the contents settle and take up less room.

Answer 2

seems you don't really realise the scale of the things at play here ;-)

the Earth is 12'800 kilometers across (8'000 miles). The most powerful nuclear bombs ever detonated had major effects up to maybe 10 or 15 miles, IN THE AIR. But underground the effects would be felt over much shorter distances, maybe only a couple miles.

Now compare a couple miles, with 8'000. That's about the size of a large micro-organism, to you.

To do any damage to the planet I guess you'd need a bomb at the very least a million times larger than the largest one ever detonated (which was around 45 megatons), i.e. something of the order of magnitude of 45'000 gigatons. And you'd need to find a way to install it a couple hundred miles below the surface at the very least.

And that bomb would probably weigh around 25 million tons, about as much as 40 fully loaded giant oil tankers. Now how you'd get that down to such depths, I don't know.

Not to mention the cost of course.

Bottom-line: looks like w/o the help from aliens with advanced technology (such as the Vogons in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) there is no way we'll be able to blow up the planet.

This being said, if we were really dumb, we probably have enough nuclear weapons to cause a major extinction of life on the surface...

Answer 3

You do it underground for several reasons, including...
- harder for spies to detect
- less radiation fallout to worry about
- least amount fo damage done.

When the detonate them underground, they make something of a hole, but not anything nearly big enough to 'implode'! Natural caverns are far bigger than the biggest bomb site, and they don't make the world collapse.

You seem to be FAR exaggerating the effects of a nuke. Remember, most nukes today run UNDER 1 Megaton, or a million tons of TNT. Mt. St. Helens erupted with about 24 Megatons of force, and Hurricane Katrina ran about 10 Megatons (although some estimates rank it at 300M).

If the planet can absorb the energy of hurricanes, tornados, volcanos, earthquakes, etc. almost without blinking, a nuke blast is peanuts.

Answer 4

I think you need a lesson in the size of the Earth. However big we think nuclear explosions are, they do not threaten the Earth itself. It is the atmosphere (or rather biosphere - atmosphere and ocean) that we are concerned about, and they form just aminute fraction of our planet.

When a large volcano erupts (Krakatoa, Tambora, etc) they leave holes in the crust hundreds of times larger than a nuclear weapon. But even these are just gofer holes compared with the Earth.

It's funny but since we went into space and sent back whole pictures of the Earth, people start thinking the Earth is small. 400 years ago when it took 3 years to sail around the world, people knew how big it is.

Fact: the atmosphere weighs about 5000 trillion tonnes.

The Earth itself is over 1 million times that weight (6 billion trillion tonnes).

Also, I think you will find over the last few centuries, we have made bigger holes digging coal.

Answer 5

Because compared to the power of any of the earths stresses, the power of a nuclear bomb is tiny. For example the Hiroshima bomb had the equivilent energy of a level 6 earthquake on the richter scale...hardy earth shattering.

Answer 6

There is a hell of a lot of earth and rock to go through before you get to the earths core !, i dont know how far down they put them but the explosion causes what earth and rock it comes into contact with to melt and fall in on itself - i think ??.

Answer 7

Yeah, the americans do it and bunker buster bombs are nuclear

Answer 8

Small bomb....big planet.