President Ronald Reagan with Edward Teller (right)
Or physical Edward Teller wanted to discourage other countries from using armed force by creating a “doomsday bomb.” But the most powerful weapon ever conceived was never built.
The frantic race to build increasingly lethal bombs after the Cold War led the US, 70 years ago, to launch the Sundial project — the most powerful weapon ever conceived.
On paper, Sundial has a power equivalent to 10 billion tons of TNT, a destructive power never seen beforetells the
The Spanish newspaper adds that, despite the many conspiracies and secrecy surrounding the project, Sundial could have a weight of about 2000 tons and a power similar to that of a hydrogen bomb — which can be 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb — but on a much larger scale, as the YouTube channel suggests
On paper, this bomb, designed in the 1950s () by physicist Edward Tellerwould be the most powerful ever thought, capable of destroying all life on the face of the Earth — fearsome enough to deter other countries to resort to force, with fear of retaliation.
But all of this remained on paper. After some testing and preliminary drawings, the project was abandonedand even today, dozens of years later, little is known about this mysterious American plan.
Sundial (which literally means sundial) was a US megaproject that emerged in the context of the nuclear race between the Americans and the USSR.
During the Cold War, or global nuclear arsenal it even had more than 70 thousand nuclear bombsspread across submarines, silos and military bases.
But this special bomb was so big that El Confidencial referred to it as “the doomsday bomb”.
The bomb would have a structure known as “nuclear Russian doll”: a kind of mechanism in smaller bomb layers within an even larger structure that would give it enormous power.
Sundial’s first explosion would release X-rays that would generate, when transferred to the fusion core, a reaction so powerful that it could create a fireball 50 kilometers in diameter.
The impact would cause the atmosphere to be projected into space and whatever was encountered within a radius of 400 kilometers would be turned into ashes.
In addition to radioactivity, there would be other extreme long-term consequences: the cloud would block sunlight and cause a nuclear winter, says the Spanish newspaper.
“Despite the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1968 by 191 member states, there are others, such as India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, which did not sign or withdrew from the treaty“.
This is why, explains El Confidencial, we still live in danger of nuclear war. Countries like the US continue to invest in the nuclear fleet, and the China may even have more than 1000 nuclear weapons ready for use by 2030.
Meanwhile, there are still around 12,000 nuclear bombs in the world, enough to destroy human civilization several times over.
