How many hydrogen bombs would it take to destroy the world?
That depends on what you mean by “destroy the world”. If you mean completely annihilate the world so that all that is left is an expanding cloud of dust, then the answer is probably that it would take thousand to millions of times more bombs than currently exist of much greater yield that any that have ever been built. In order to completely destroy Earth, you would need a weapon capable of actually throwing the materials that make it up outward with sufficient force to reach escape velocity. Hydrogen bombs are incapable of this. The atmosphere would slow the debris from such an explosion too much for it to escape. Additionally, there would not be enough hydrogen in all of the water on Earth to build enough bombs to accomplish the complete destruction of Earth. Now, if you mean how many H-bombs it would take to destroy all life on Earth, I don’t know what the numbers would be, but it would still take more than are present in all of the arsenals of the world. In order to insure that you
Far more than any of us could possibly imagine. In spite of doom and gloom fantasies, humans lack the ability to destroy the world. We also lack the ability to destroy all life on it. However, we do not lack the ability to do substantial damage to the flora and fauna sharing this planet with us. But life has always pulled through and has gone on to diversify beyond our wildest dreams. It has been opined that god has an inordinate fondness for beetles – some 350,000 known species – so, perhaps, the next period might be that of the beetle. There have been three major and several minor decimations of species over the history of this planet that have identified with some confidence. These have occurred over relatively short periods of time geologically, but a very long period of time in terms of human life. The most recent, at the end of the Cretaceous period (~65 million years ago), changed the ecological balance on the earth by removing the dinosaurs as the dominant species. The largest
