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First you have to realize that the yield of the explosion of an atomic bomb is not a fixed value, the US has designed and fielded pure fission atomic bombs with yields as low as about 10 tons of TNT to as high as 500 kilotons of TNT and using fusion in the design yields as high as 25 megatons were designed and fielded. The USSR designed a 100 megaton bomb (but only tested it at 50 megatons and never actually fielded it). Edward Teller proposed designing a gigaton range bomb but the design was rejected as having no military value (most of the blast of such a bomb would just go upward, just blowing all the atmosphere directly above the burst off into space). There is no theoretical limit for an atomic bomb that uses fusion to drive the fission of depleted uranium (U--238 which cannot support a neutron chain reaction but will fission from high energy fusion neutrons, and is plentiful).

The energy released from the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa has been estimated to be equal to about 200 megatons of TNT (about 4 times that of the largest atomic test ever done: the USSR's 50 megaton device mentioned above). But unlike an atomic bomb Krakatoa's fallout was not radioactive.

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8y ago

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