Summary

Graphic displaying the size, in megatonnage of the U.S. nuclear stockpile in 2006. Each dot represents 2 megatons. The dot in the center is greater than all of the bombing dropped by all sides in World War II, including the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The pink squares at the top represent the power of the warheads in one SSBN equipped Ohio class submarine (24 Trident II missiles).

Created by User:Fastfission in Inkscape.

 

This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Inkscape .

Data sources

Warhead counts taken from Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, "U.S. Nuclear Forces 2006 archive copy at the Wayback Machine," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 2006. Yields then taken from Nuclear Weapon Archive - The Enduring Stockpile.

The final table used to calculate megatonnage was:

With each dot signifying 2 Mt that means there are 1257 dots (most squares have 16 dots, some have 15 or 14).

Ohio class submarines carry 24 Trident II missiles with 3.8 Mt total yields (91.2 Mt total), so the pink boxes have 45 dots in them.

For the "total tonnage in World War II" estimate, I found a figure which put the total Allied tonnage against Germany as 1,588,062 t, the U.S. firebombing against Japan at 196,000 t, and the German tonnage against Britain at 13,000 t. Adding a nice round 40,000 t for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that puts us at 1.837 Mt. There are still a few unknowns in there but I think it is safe to say that it is unlikely that the rest of the bombing adds up to more than 162,938 t, and even if it does, 2 Mt is the right order of magnitude, which is all that is really important in something like this.

Licensing

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Fastfission. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: Fastfission grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

If you want to credit someone, credit "Wikimedia Commons." Otherwise don't credit anyone, that's fine by me. --Fastfission 14:59, 14 April 2008 (UTC)