“Any engineering types here want to guess at how it compares to a nuke going off.”
Interesting exercise. With Google/Wiki nobody has to guess or even be an engineer.
Wiki gives the formula for explosive energy as a function of magnitude (x) as (10^(x))^(3/2) in kg of TNT. That means a 7.2 quake is 63.1 megatons of TNT explosive equivalent.
According to Wiki, the largest U.S. nuke is up to 1.2 megatons TNT equivalent. The Trident missile warheads are each .475 megaton.
So my answer is around 52 of the big nukes or 132 Trident warheads or 16 1/2 Trident missiles if we are talking the treaty limit of 8 warheads per missile.
The article notes that most of the energy of an earthquake is absorbed by the crust and not transmitted to the surface (which would explain why shallow quakes are more destructive than deep quakes of the same magnitude). On the other hand, much of the energy of a nuke is transmitted to the surface. That is kind of the point of the weapon.
