Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog: Beirut Blast: How Many Kilotons?
Yesterday a massive explosion ripped through Beirut, Lebanon from the city’s port:
Sometimes you do calculations and get a result that you know must be wrong, and you report them anyway so others can spot your errors. Reports had the explosion shattering windows 10 kilometers away, and doing damage to the Beirut airport, so I set out to calculate the explosive yield using the Nukemap, based on shattering windows at the airport (the 1 psi overpressure ring) and ignoring radiation effects. (The nukemap interface is far more user friendly than the “Nuclear bomb Effects Computer” at the back of Samuel Glasstone’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.)
Here’s the map with the resulting 1 psi ring just reaching the airport:
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WNU Editor: According to the above calculations, the blast was about 1.98 Kilotons.
