re: #67 Charles Johnson

Have to disagree here - definitely not big enough to be a nuke. We’re talking several orders of magnitude. A nuke would have completely leveled a large area (depending on how many megatons it was) and there would have been many more people dead.

Yes and no. Technically the 21 ton TNT equivalent yield reported for the Tianjin blast is exactly in line with the blast effect of the Davy Crocket nuclear device. Of course most of the lethality of the Davy Crocket’s W54 warhead came from prompt release of radiation, and not the blast yield.

Battlefield nuclear rockets and artillery, by the by, have to be the craziest damned things we ever invented.