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If every nuclear weapon on Earth were to detonate on the Moon would it have any effect to the moon other than a light show and some giant craters?
I doubt if anyone on this forum has the scientific knowledge to properly answer that question.
To me, the only possible effect would be to cause the moon to go off its present course - but even that would seem highly unlikely.
If every nuclear weapon on Earth were to detonate on the Moon would it have any effect to the moon other than a light show and some giant craters?
I don't know how accurate the information on the following site is - https://www.quora.com/If-all-nuclear...-the-crater-be, but according to it, the 2004 Sumatra earthquake which produced that destructive tsunami that killed many thousands of people released four times the energy of earth's combined nuclear arsenal.
And not to belittle the damage caused by the tsunami, and the deaths of all those people, but the only effect the earthquake had on the planet itself was to slow its rotation by an amount of time so small that only highly precise instruments could detect the change of rate of rotation.
Now the moon is about 1/4 the size of the earth, but it is still much too big for it to be adversely affected by the energy released by a simultaneous explosion of all of earth's nuclear weapons. A big crater would be about the only result.
Then again, the moon does rotate as it orbits the earth in what is referred to as sychronous rotation, completing one rotation as it completes one orbit of the earth and therefore keeping the same face toward earth. So perhaps the energy released by a combined explosion of all of our nuclear weapons might have some very small effect on the moon's rotation just as the energy released by the Sumatra earthquake did with regard to the earth's rotation.
Last edited by Michael Way; 03-10-2016 at 04:44 PM..
...Then again, the moon does rotate as it orbits the earth in what is referred to as sychronous rotation...
Yep, the moon is tidally locked to the earth, so we only see one side of the moon. The moon is drifting away from the earth, which can eventually result in the earth becoming tidally locked with the moon. When/if this happens only one hemisphere of the earth will ever see the moon.
If we did it when a new moon fell on July 4th? One hell of a fireworks show!
Otherwise? Nothing but some minor cosmetic effects and some temporary radiation.
Note:
The combined nuclear arsenals of the world - U.S., Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea - number a total of about 10,000 nuclear devices. It would be quite an effort to transport all those devices to the moon.
This is a job for Randall Munroe. Every week he answers absurd hypothetical questions, and he put a series of them together as a book. Here's his latest entry -- Eat the Sun
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The craters would fill in with melted cheese. All that would be missing is nachos.
1 joule = 2.39 megatons. The worlds nuclear arsenal is 2.6^22 joules x 2.39=32,197,671,448.11 megatons.
