Stuff Blowing Up / Real Life

• Above-ground nuclear weapons tests were mostly this, especially later on. After a point, they weren't testing to see if it worked, or what it could do, they were just blowing stuff up for the sake of blowing stuff up. The higher-ups usually justified it as intimidating the filthy communists/capitalist pigs.
  • Tsar Bomba being a 50 megaton atomic bomb that the Russians let off during the Cold War, the largest ever tested. Could have been 100 megatons on paper, but the Russians were concerned about fallout and the fact that the plane dropping it wouldn't have escaped the blast radius even with parachute retardation, so it was scaled down for the one that was made and detonated. ^note Most early airdropped atomic weapons had parachutes so that the drop plane could get out of the blast zone of the weapon. Since this affected the aim of the bomb a lot and generally let them drift off target, the bombs had to have massive yields to ensure that even being off-target by a few miles wouldn't matter too much due to the massive blast radius. The invention of ICBMs and reasonably accurate delivery of warheads allowed for nuke yields to scale back to less overkill
• Ultimate example: The Big Bang!
  • Properly described, the Big Bang wasn't really an explosion at all, but more like a balloon swelling up at a steady rate. The phrase "Big Bang" was concocted by an advocate of the rival "steady state" cosmological theory, and was intended to poke fun at the notion that the universe arose from a single point's expansion. But the idea of all creation bursting forth from the mother-of-all-Bangs was so captivating that this trope supplanted the swelling-balloon image in popular culture.
  • With that said, it wasn't exactly a slow process either. Under the Cosmic inflation model, in just a very tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang (assuming cosmic inflation was not the Big Bang itself) the Universe expanded at least^note And likely even much more a factor of 10ˆ26 times.
• BLEVEs, Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosions, sometimes backronymed as 'Blast Levelling Everything Very Effectively'. Essentially caused when liquid reaches its boiling point and builds pressure inside the containing vessel until it explodes.
  • For an example of how powerful one of these are, here is a well known example that occurred in Murdock, Illinoisafter a train derailment.
• Someone at the Chinese space program didn't get the memo that reusable rockets are meant to be launched in places where the boosters can be recovered safely. At first, this was due to geopolitical concerns - launching rockets in the East where they'd fly over South Korea and Japan isn't exactly a good idea - as tensions have slightly relieved themselves, construction work on new spaceports is still slow going. This ultimately means that the Chinese administration has adopted an 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality to rocket launches, even if that means a village in the Chinese countryside gets flattened in a huge explosion in the process.
• Grain elevator dust explosion, triggered by sparks from seized bearing. Dust explosions in general. It may be fun when MythBusters do it on small scale, but larger ones have been known to level the entire neighbourhood.
• The Halifax Explosion earns the distinction of being the most devastating accidental, non-nuclear explosion in history, leveling an entire neighborhood and was powerful enough to generate a deadly tsunami.
• Before the term went to describe the use of anti-personnel and anti-vehicle explosive devices, mine warfare was the practice of digging a gallery under an enemy fortification or trench line, make a chamber, fill it with explosives and blow up the whole thing. This kind of mine warfare reached the apex on the Italian front of World War I, where the Italians and the Austro-Hungarians, having to deal with otherwise unconquerable positions on the top of mountains, started blowing them up this way, ultimately resulting in the 34th explosion literally blowing up the top of an Italian-held mountain and making both sides stop before things got really out of hands-especially as the Italians were putting together a bigger bomb when they stopped.
• The largest deliberate artificial non-nuclear explosions were the "Minor Scale" and "Misty Picture" ordnance tests, conducted by the United States government to gather data and test the resilience of military hardware against the sorts of blast and heat effects that could be caused by nuclear attacks.
• In his book Project Orion, George Dyson says of his father who worked on Project Orion, Freeman Dyson, that physicists love explosions. He shares an anecdote about how when he was cooking breakfast on a gas oven, he accidentally turned the gas valve up too high, causing a flash of flame to burst out as his father was entering the room. Freeman's reaction was to say, "Oh good, an explosion!"
• Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 phablet smartphone was notorious for defective batteries combusting; one user had his phone blow up on him while he was sleeping in a hotel room and another phone-splosion destroyed a car, to name a couple of examples. Airlines started banning the very presence of the device (even powered off, even with the batteries taken out) out of safety concerns, and Samsung recalled it at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
• Supernovae, where an entire star is blown up to kingdom come, either after accreting too much matter from a companion and inducing a runaway nuclear fusion (Type Ia) or after ending up with an iron core -which cannot be fused to release energy-, and the star's remaining layers collapsing over it (the rest). To give a sense of scale, a star going supernova can briefly outshine the entire galaxy it's in (consisting of hundreds of thousands to hundreds of billions of stars or more.)
• One of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in history was created by an Soviet N1 rocket, the launch vehicle for the Soviet equivalent of the Apollo Program. During its second launch, a fuel pump ingested a loose bolt and exploded inside the rocket. This set off a chain reaction that caused the rocket's engines to shut down, dropping it back onto the launchpad. The entire vehicle blew up on impact, destroying the launch tower along with it. The Soviets never did get an N1 into orbit.
• Watch any documentary about the early days of NASA and you'll probably see a montage of several Vanguard and Atlas rockets blowing up, usually right after they're launched (fortunately, these were unmanned test flights). Reporters jokingly referred to such rockets as "Kaputnik" or "Stayputnik," plays on the Russian satellite Sputnik.
• A microwave stuffed with oil and tin foil can explode thanks to overheating by microwave reflection as well as air pressure.

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