This means that Iran is over a decade away from being able to threaten Israel even if they were technically proficient and had the desire. Even if Iran was competent at producing its uranium, it would still take over 6 months to create enough for one bomb. To obliterate even 1/100th of Israel’s territory (85 sq mi) would require over 25 bombs, assuming the same destruction patterns as Hiroshima. In order to destroy Israel, Iran would need to build many weapons. A modern city with properly stocked bomb shelters would see much less devastation. As it’s made clear in the book Hiroshima, many of the deaths were actually due to the firestorm that raged through the city’s wooden buildings and the reason why around 70,000 died in the aftermath was because they had no clean water, food or medical attention. The area of total and massive devastation was around 2 miles in diameter, however, Hiroshima was not a modern city and they were not prepared for an attack. In Hiroshima, around 70,000 people died from the direct effects, with another 70,000 dead within a few months. Hiroshima was attacked by a uranium-based weapon, and an attack by Iran would be similar to this scale, not the hydrogen-based weaponry that we were worried about Russia using during the Cold War. This means that one fusion missile is 300-1000x more powerful than a fission bomb. When talking about the individually targeted warheads, multiple warheads detach from the same missile (the missile is known as MIRV‘d) with the currently used Trident missile containing 8 warheads for a total of around 4 megatons. Fusion weapons use hydrogen to create the primary explosion (there is actually a fission-based trigger that explodes in order to start the fusion) and those weapons range between 500 kilotons for independently targeted warheads to 20 megatons for large but mostly obsolete bombs. Fission weapons use either enriched uranium or plutonium to produce the explosion, and most weapons are between 14 and 20 kilotons. A 2000 pound bomb is a standard sized bomb dropped by planes to attack targets in war, while nuclear weapons are talked about in terms of tons of TNT. The measurement for large explosives is to talk about the equivalent amount of TNT that would be needed to produce the same effect. The problem is that in common parlance we call both fusion and fission based weapons “nuclear” even though fusion bombs are orders of magnitude more powerful. The implication is that a single nuclear attack would be sufficient to “wipe Israel off the map” which is absolutely not true in the slightest. Both the State of Israel and the Jewish People are far more interested in survival than revenge. Holly’s recent post about Obama offering Israel an “umbrella” of deterrence contained an assertion that I’ve often seen and drives me absolutely crazy.ġ) A nuclear strike against Israel could kill almost half of the Jews in the world (as well as many Christian and Muslim Arabs) and would threaten the survival of the Jewish People.

Fusion vs fission chart