I think kurzgesagt didn't mean that all of humanities nukes combined are the same level of power as Sundial, just that there are enough nukes to thoroughly remove human civilization from the surface of the planet. Wildly different scenarios, but functionally the same end result.
I also think they meant more “to effect” rather than “to scale” yeah. If we really wanted to we could have set off every one of those nukes and while not as instantly devastating, it still most likely would have wiped us out
Even if they say that, they are patently false. It would destroy the economy and lead to untold millions dying yet the planet or even human civilization is way more resilient than that. Entire countries were genocided to such levels that only a fraction of their population remained. They bounced back within decades. Humans would adapt to the new environment, like they always do. What would change is the current face of the economy, political structures and with that... pretty much it'd dislodge most people in power. There's a reason why there are some looney nuclear accelerationist assholes who think a nuclear apocalypse would be the most fertile ground for starting a "better" civilization.
@@Voxelgd Yeah, this guy seems to love nitpicking at things that are obviously not meant that way. Not hating, it's overall a good video but it's a bit annoying.
My interpretation of the statement that we already did build sundial is not that it would have the same effect, or literally destroy the world, it's that what we have created would *effectively* do the same by ending human civilisation as we know it. Assuming all bombs went off, as thats the comparison, and that they were launched at targets specifically to cripple ourselves as a species, even if the result is not nuclear winter etc etc, it's catastrophic beyond belief. We are so globalised that even dispersement of our nuclear arsenal is too much to handle.
Kurzgesagt truly does think we can kill all humans with nuclear weapons, so I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt here. They've stated this in the past.
@cortster12 I don't recall them ever stating we would be capable of wiping out every single human with our current arsenal, just that it's a distinct possibility that even possessing nuclear weapons allows. That a civilisation might destroy itself is no unlikely thing, and nuclear technology makes that possible, after all.
@@Saphy115 I explicitly recall them saying in an earlier video that we can kill ourselves multiple times over with our nuclear stockpiles, which is a false rumor.
@@cortster12Kurzgesagt oversrates the effects of nuclear weapons in general. The whole concept of nuclear winter is still debated. Severe global effects of nuclear war may only last a year or two, not decades as previously thought. Sundial's explosion wouldn't be a world ending event. Those monstrously large weapons have one massive issue - the effects of nuclear explosions do not vary linearly with yield. Explosions are a three dimensional objects, and the things we target are esentially two dimensional - a lot of energy is simply lost to space. There are very few structures that can survive blasts larger than a megaton, so any weapon larger than that is simply undesirable. Sundial's airburst or ground explosion would be extremaly dirty, because of the size of it's fireball. It could potentially contaminate an area the size of a continent and that was the main "fear factor", although it's hard to predict how deadly that contamination would be. Resulting wildfires have a rather small chance to cause a nuclear winter, but local effects would be catastrophic. The most effective way to use Sundial is probably an high altitude explosion, somewhere between 70 and 100km above the ground ( it poses extreme logistical challenge though). That kind of explosion would be a certain "country killer", while being relatively clean, relying on the thermal pulse alone. With that much yield, we can expect anything flammable that is not hidden behind the curvature of the Earth to instantly ignite. Imagine one explosion causing massive firestorms covering the area of France, pure hell. This may in fact cause a nuclear winter.
@@dawid12301dMy understanding is Sundial wouldn’t be “delivered”, you would have it domestically. You detonate it and guarantee everyone dies globally to nuclear winter. You’d never use it, but it’s the ultimate deterrent.
"how big of a nuclear bomb do you need to compensate for your insecurities" Yeah I'm thinking you design it with low enriched Uranium so that we can make it the size of a small moon.
“No we didn’t” Spends the next few minutes qualifying. There is a reason they said “kind of” we all understood, and then ‘well actually’ needed to taste his toes again.
Dr. Strangelove: "Yes, but the whole point of the doomsday machine...is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?" Russian Ambassador: "It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises."
Brilliant film! The thing is in that movie the doomsday device would detonate automatically if it determined there had been a nuclear strike. They removed human control because no human being would actually press the button when the time came. And everyone would know this. But if a computer automatically detonates the device if certain conditions occur then its out of human hands and therefore a credible threat.
The reasons the nukes got "unreasonably powerful" and why so many of them were made at the height of the Cold War were actually practical and reasonable at the time. It wasn't just a race of the bomb yield. The idea was that to prevent an enemy nation from wiping you out in a sudden nuclear first strike, your own nuclear strikes would have to be able to wipe them out even if you were making the second strike urgently and with less than ideal preparation. But targeting systems, especially for ICBMs, were lagging behind, while interception capabilities and technologies to harden important facilities or camouflage them against air and satellite reconnaissance were pulling ahead. Which led to the idea that if current enemy capabilities can be expected to intercept let's say 5 incoming missiles at a particular target, then you better have six missiles for that target and the warheads on every single one better be big enough to destroy that bunker even if the ICBM "misses" by the maximum expected accuracy margin from that missile.
And as was recently proven on the Israel strike, they other side may have very advance anti-ICBMs but if I throw something like a 1000 to 1 missile to their defense system a few of those will definitely hit something. There is always a point where building defense systems is overcome by sheer number of attacks. It has always been easier to destroy things than to create things. Sure there will be moments when defense gets ahead but after some time we can always figure out a hole in the system to exploit. Computer security has been consistently showing us that you cannot have a perfectly invulnerable system and still be able to use your computer that serves its function because a truly perfect computer defense is one which does not connect to the outside world but also one that no human can even access. At that point, might as well have a rock in the shape of a computer. And even then, someone will try to crack that rock and they succeed. And by the end you just have to people trying to smash each other's rock.
Yeah, nukes countering nukes. That was the main reason for their growth in number and also the main reason why START worked. If both sides agree that they will not use as many warheads then suddenly you don't need so many of them, either. This is partially also the reason why delivery systems were counted separately and are a lower quantity. That and the fact you need some warheads surplus for practical reasons.
One should not forget why the nuclear arsenal was that big in the first place. the logic behind it was, that in order to achieve a 95% successrate of destroying a choosen target, you needed more than one bomb in case it fails, gets shoot down or destroyed befor launch. most of it wouldnt be used in a first response, nor in an attack. the other question that comes up is: what was even targeted. if only a few nukes make it to the southern hemisphere, ppl could very well survive there.
The comparison with an asteroid impact is valid up to a point. The Sundial is equivalent to around an 800m asteroid impacting Earth. If we then look at bigger asteroids, like the Chicxulub impactor at around 10km, the comparison falls short. The dinosaur-killing impact is estimated at around 70 teratonnes - 7000 times Sundial
The problem is one of physics. Once the fireball is large enough to actually escape the atmosphere, the energy dissipates into space and having nothing to heat, ceases to have any impact on earth. Hence, the full yield version of Tsar Bomba would've actually had less than its theorized yield, due to the fireball being capable of escaping into space. Teller have one idea, the Super, aka the hydrogen bomb, all of his other ideas literally never panned out. He repeatedly overstated in experiments the x-ray lasing effects within a thermonuclear device, which while present, was weak and at most, 1% efficient and useless beyond the confinement of the tamper. Didn't stop him from huckstering Brilliant Pebbles to Ronnie Raygun for billions of wasted tax dollars. That eventually blew up in his face when it was finally revealed through auditing that his test results were fabricated and ahem, quite liberally interpreted, in short, bullshit. He kept trying to sell that zany plan until he was banned from the White House. It's pretty damned ugly when Reagan even bans you! He singlehandedly tanked the reputation of a National Laboratory for many years. Back to the super dooper bomb, the fireball rises and exits the atmosphere, it'll carry rapidly dissipating gas that's rapidly cooling, the reaction long spent and hence, minimal to no EMP beyond the initial burst and emit no meaningful yield beyond around 60 - 80 megatons, still potent, but not anything even continent killing. The worst effects being from ground burst, which would contaminate a continent and spread love and appreciation globally via increased cancer rates. Want a proper doomsday device, go with a cobalt bomb in the megaton yield range, detonate a few and that'll actually be more effective and make "On The Beach" a valid plotline - although mixing between hemispheres is minimal in this context. And start a likely civil war, given most of the population would not agree that democracy is a suicide pact.
An 800m asteroid impacting earth at what speed? Size isn't the full equation when it comes to asteroid impacts. Different sizes can cause a 10 gigaton explosion, depending on their velocity, and thus energy.
@@x_MoonlitShade average impact velocity has been around 17 km/s, with a minimum of 11.2 km/s at a 45 degree angle. The destructiveness dependent more on the density of the impacting object. The level of destructiveness seeming to be as much density dependent and even if the object airbursts rather than impacts. An example being the Tunguska event, which has largely believed to have been an airburst, as no impact crater was ever found, but fragments have been recovered. The airburst estimated to have occurred of an object moving around 27 km/s at 30 degrees angle to the ground and at 5 to 10 kilometres, devastating 2,150 km^2 of forest for a Torino scale of 8 and generating ground shocks of an estimated 8 Richter scale. That's a badda big boom!
@@spvillano For sure, there's a likely average velocity for the vast majority of impactors, simply due to the fact that the vast vast majority of impactors on earth come from the asteroid belt. It is, however, possible for impactors to be from the kuiper belt, oort cloud, or even extrasolar. These would each have vastly different speeds compared to an impactor originating from the asteroid belt. Sure, those are going to be much less common, but I still feel that saying only the size of an asteroid doesn't give the full picture. Size and speed are both needed to describe an impact's energy.
@@spvillano Very good point. The laws of scaling dont really work after your bomb gets powerful enough since it will essentially punch a hole in the atmosphere and a lot of energy will go that way
"The other side being there's a deterrent to having nuclear weapons that everyone's afraid to use them so they're afraid to go to war" Um, you might want to sit down for this Tyler....
Oh, lord, young people today that don't have context. "Nuke" for microwaves was black-humour but it stuck. When we started calling microwaving "nuking" in the 80's, when the fear of a nuclear WW3 was very real, using it got a chuckle for mocking our own paranoia. (Some people really hated it reminding them of the coming tragedy.) With the Soviet Union showing signs of crashing, we didn't know if it would go out with a malicious "bang". The dark humour defrayed when it didn't happen.
Who’s young people exactly? You realize a lot of us in our late 20’s who had parents grow up in the 70’s and 80’s so we understand the lingo pretty well, I’m 29 turning 30 next year and my mom grew up in the 80’s and my grandparents were born in 57 and 61 so I understand the phrase pretty damn well, it seems a lot of the older generations can’t seem to stop generalizing and grouping young people together especially not knowing how they grew up and who was in their lives!
@@CajunReaper95 People generalize, get over it. Obviously some people would know but I am sure quite a few people have never thought too deep about it.
@@yugihlh an actual extraterrestrial threat that wouldn't exist if we become an interstellar species. by then we would have the capability to either block, dodge, or counter the threat
There are for sure valid reasons to be scared of AI, namely, humans losing their ability to reason. If you can get any answer you want by asking AI, what need have you to figure anything out? Reason is a muscle, if you don't use it you lose it.
And people have this weird flaw that when another person says something then others are happy to question them, when a machine says something people are strongly inclined to treat it as unquestionable fact.
and also capitalism!! they are tools that in theory should be used to make repetitive work easier for the worker, but what is bound to happen is people getting paid less because AI can do a shitty job in place corporations using AI to make shitty illustrations and not paying someone for it is an example
3:10 Like you said, it has downsides... and those downsides are potentially massive and thus perfectly valid to be worried about. Complacency allows evil and wrongdoing to thrive. Something as impactful as AI has to be handled with care to minimize the negative impact on human life and our relationship with doing and feeling useful and appreciated.
Don't forget that the tests of bigger and bigger bombs also came to effect humans living in the vicinity. Causing cancer, birth defects and many more tragic problems.
The funniest fact is that you can put here a quote from a Kubrick movie... "Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh!?"
Project Sundial sounds a lot like cobalt bomb. And US Minuteman are from the 70's. We have 50 year old tech defending us. Nice fact: the use of floppy discs in launch facilities has fairly recent been decommissioned
I agree that the fear of nuclear power and ai are pretty similar, only dangerous when not handled properly or some worst case accident. What I don't agree with is that, the part of the video that was talking about the fear they must have lived in of nuclear WEAPONS specifically.
You're correct. It wasn't the fear of the nuclear weapons. It was the fear of the other side and what it might do. Mutual assured destruction, which seemed like the only way to deal with this, meant that neither side had first strike capacity, but that both sides had second strike. That was the fear, especially since this doctrine depended on both sides following the rules.
Humanity came to a point at wich wars are pointles because no side can win anymore if you get into a war with someone with a nuclear bomb and you have a nuclear bomb at the and you will just boath lose
3:08 Yes but so much change happened so fast in those 50 years (1900-1950) socially as well as technologically, that it became a stressful, mind bender to those that spared an inkling of thought about it. For those that went with it, I guess it was a heck of a ride..... until they hit a brick wall in the 70's.
Doctor Who (before they ruined it) had a similar sort of thing as a plot device, but with a more specific purpose - basically a last option for humanity if earth was invaded and the alternative was considered to be worse than death.
Deny the enemy their prize, the ultimate "screw you." If humanity is about to be destroyed, might as well take the enemy out with us and destroy what they killed us to take. If you're only thinking of your own nation instead of all of humanity, the same logic can apply.
Reminds me of the three bodied problem series too lol. Although nukes where pretty obsolete in that universe, aliens had a solar system ending weapon that changed 3d space into 2d space 😂
It was named the “Osterhagen Key”, Martha Jones was given it by a UNIT general during the Dalek Invasion of Earth in the episode “The Stolen Earth” that aired in June 2008 and was set in London and Cardiff in 2009. Strategically placed nuclear warheads in various locations such which as Germany, China, Liberia and Argentina would somehow blow up the Earth in case a scenario such as the one mentioned in the original comment was met. This was done in the episode to basically prevent the Daleks from seizing Earth and having the correct amount of planets to eliminate life from reality in their master plan (all cooked up by Davros of course).
The czar bomba was designed as a multi stage weapon which was conceivably able to go to 3 or 4 stages. Russia has a deadmans switch system as a doomsday weapon. Also Edward Teller hated the soviet union and it was his hatred that drove the development of the "super" so when the Soviet union detonated its "cake" I wouldn't be surprised if Teller didn't want to go bigger.
No, he was a nuclear optimist. If his hatred drove his hydrogen bomb development then he wouldn't have proposed ideas like burrying thermonuclear bombs as mining charges or many other ideas how to use nukes for "civilian" uses. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Sundial was just the classic scientist thing of trying to secure more government funds for a ludicrous project which sounds impressive to politicians. He just miscalculated. Given what kind of person he was I wouldn't be even surprised if Teller wanted to detonate the multi-gigaton nuke in order to study its effects and see what's different compared to Castle Bravo or other multi-megaton tests. Again, Edward Teller was Kubrik's main inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, mixed with Werner von Braun.
The best I know is the Nova Bomb from Halo, 4.7 million megatons of yield, it blew up an earth size planet in the book, and its moon due to how its process of detonation works.
best I’ve read is the supernova bomb from Life, the Universe, and Everything (3rd book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series). it would just destroy the whole universe through *very* complicated ways
In any form of reality, 4.7 million megatons, however destructive for life, are less than a joke of an earth sized planet... it;s less than the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs to be exact!
I think the idea is that there were so many technological advancements, and there was a lot to learn, that lots of people weren't sure about the change, as a more modern example, 5G towers were rumoured to cause cancer, science proved it wrong, vaccines also made people unsure. All of this could, I guess, confuse people a bit, but I think they exaggerated it in the video.
You know that there is no need for tritium (or only first fission trigger need little bit of tritium boost) all thermonuclear devices are breeders: tritium from lithium-6. And heavy water and lithium are not so hard to find.
Teller wasn't even present at Operation Ivy. He'd stormed off the project because they wouldn't let him direct it, so he watched a seismograph in the basement of the geology department at UCB (or UCLA; I dunno), and saw the signal registered at what he'd presumably known to be the rough "H-hour". He then called a friend with the coded message, "it's a boy!". I always found that kinda amusing. I used to think he must've been a totally evil dude, but it turned out he was way more complicated than that. There are things I've read where I've identified with Teller, and even felt deeply sad for him. It's definitely a strange thing to feel for someone who was so determined to unleash the destructive potential of our knowledge, but I felt it. Also, I've heard hydrogen bombs referred to as "fission-fusion-fission" weapons, as the natural uranium tamper can fission from fast neutrons released by the fusion reaction. Castle Bravo was the shot that underestimated the yield and contaminated a vast swathe of the Pacific and killed Japanese fishers. It was because they presumed - with devastating consequences - that the lithium-7 created in the fusion reaction would not itself fuse. They found out that it did.
There's a Rednblacksalamander picture on Cara where a scientist is presenting doomsday Clock 2.0 which was your bog standard sundial, saying "if you can read it at midnight, that's bad."
You know, the description of the detonation sounds VERY much like the description of a Super-volcano eruption... only with radioactive contamination added for spice. It probably wouldn't kill off humanity, but it would probably kill off a little over 99% in a few years.
Thankfully, the two operate on entirely different mechanisms. Sundial has little over 2000 tonnes and then whatever gets caught in the blast. Yellowstone Eruption, at the low end, would release over 2 trillion tonnes of volcanic ash. Why it matters? Because an ice age like this is caused by insane amounts of these fine particules blocking out sunlight. For reference a handful volcanoes erupted across the world between 1810 and 1815 which caused the Year Without Summer. It resulted in poor yields but the whole crisis was less disruptive than the current Russo-Ukrainian War. Even detonating Sundial it is doubtful the nuke can cause that. Again, difference between mechanisms. One has a comparatively tiny mass going extremely energetic. The other has monumental mass going quite energetic from the forces of eruption. Just as how a car crash has similar kinetic energy to the explosion of a particularly big firecracker.
I think what he meant by they are the same thing is that they are an equal threat they both have the potential to destroy everything it's not an equal amount but it's an equal threat
Watching the og video, gotta ask. Who the fuck looks at someone attacking one country and goes, "Yeah, we're gonna kill everyone else". That's like watching someone get stabbed and responding with a full scale military war.
I remember one Serbian gunman that shot an Archduke, indeed did start a world war. The reason we toned down yields was multiple, for one, lower yield meant lower weight, so more MIRVs per warhead bus. For another, increased precision meant I didn't have to have a yield sufficient to blast 20 miles, as the warhead landed only hundreds of feet at worst from the target. But, Tsar Bomba showed one other thing, at half yield the device was detonated. Ironically, due to its design and inert tamper, it literally was the cleanest device ever detonated. But, at the full yield, it was calculated repeatedly that the fireball would escape the atmosphere and instantly dissipate, ending weapons effects once the fireball made it into space. Basically, beyond Tsar Bomba's yield by a dozen or so megatons, nukes cease to scale upward in destruction and were already at diminishing returns to begin with. Another bit of trivia, Tsar Bomba's fireball was prevented from touching the ground by its own shockwave that was reflected by the ground. There's imagery of that effect available here on youtube.
@@x_MoonlitShade in this case, plans to make plans, no evidence that even plans exist, just that some research was conducted and shuttered once those in charge learned of the research. Crazy was that anyone listened to Teller. He leveraged a desire for bigger and badder to develop the hydrogen bomb, which Oppenheimer as director had opposed, contributed to the witch hunt against Oppenheimer to gain support for the bomb and was notorious for coming up with all manner of vaporware. Add to that Teller's incessant claiming credit for the design, much of which has been attributed to Ulam, didn't endear him to many for good reason. One of the biggest "sins" in science being that of "credit stealer". He, going so far as to initially refuse to sign the patent application for the warhead design due to wanting to deny Ulam credit for any contribution to the design. The research, considered inevitable though, went on with minimal oversight due to the security of such research. Insane was how much of Teller's work got ignored by Teller, the work shunted to Fuchs, who was the primary source of information that was leaked to the Soviets. But then, the entirety of the project itself was an expression of insanity. But then, one singular characteristic of humanity was, every new rock discovered ended up being used to hit another human over the head with.
I think people are vastly overestimating the power of nukes. Hundreds of those things have been detonated throughout history and... if nobody told you about it, you'd never even know. Not exactly apocalyptic.
do ya got a vid for reacting to the "detonate al nukes in the amazon" video? the 2nd half talking about draining all nuclear material on earth to build even more and explode that with the "ground splashing like water" is fun animation
This is the difference between those of us who grew up in the cold war, and those who came in the peace that came afterwards. Those who grew up afterward simply don't understand the ideological conflict that was underscoring all of this. Soviet aggression was real and a serious threat to Western democracy. Our response was disproportionate, but you forget that the Soviets had been invaded by the west several times until finally, Nazi Germany came in and slaughtered millions. Nuclear deterrence, including multiple bombs of various sizes, kept the peace until the stalemate was broken with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Those who have grown up with the benefit of that peace simply don't understand the degree to which a conflict between ideologies mattered. Those who grew up afterwards live in a world where socialism and communism are ideas rather than real things commanding millions of troops.
I disagree that those who came after necessarily don't understand it. In fact, with all due respect, I DON'T think you understand it. We know now that the USSR was a paper tiger. They did not have the productive capacity to pose an existential threat to the world order. This was a country that spanned ELEVEN time zones, stocked with virtually every natural resource in abundance. In their population, they had leading lights in a myriad of fields. Indeed: their founders (e.g. Lenin, Trotsky, etc.) were brilliant, too: Lenin spoke something like 9 or 11 languages. Despite all of this, the USSR was ALWAYS an economic cripple. There is a regrettably persistent myth that the failure of the USSR was singularly due to corruption, knock-on effects of totalitarianism, their particular bureaucracy, etc. These all did play a role. But it was the absence of a market economy that did them in. Their planning bureau simply was not capable of acquiring nor effectively utilizing the information it needed to effectively plan the economy. Money prices are essential for establishing a common unit of account--s common denominator. This made it extremely difficult to choose the best plan out of all the possible ones. They relied on pricing data from outside the country To guide them in setting prices.
Communism is utopian. Marx himself wrote that it would exist in the far future. Its not that we can't understand it. It's that our governments abused us with endless propaganda campaigns and madness like HUAC.
Germany I could agree with you but the ussr not even close to being correct, the Soviets didn’t have the money nor technology to be a threat to any other nation, they didn’t have the funding nor the technology and training required to be an actual threat, the Japanese found out quickly what happens when you poke the bear, the ussr was talking out their ass hoping to scare everyone into not retaliating and fighting back against them which probably wasn’t the smartest move considering they were at a disadvantage, all it turned out to be is a scare tactic and that’s it!
the nukes may be smaller today but they are basically cluster nuke bombs now with most missiles being armed with 8 or more low yield bomblets on an mirv system, i guess they figured serval smaller bombs over a larger area is more damaging then 1 large bomb
Funnily enough, the United States almost had its own 100 megaton monstruosity, "Flashback", the size of the bomb ( dud, testbed, mockup, whatever you'd like to call it, it was basically packed with instruments ) meant it peeked out of the B-52's strategic ordnance drawer, requiring the doors to be removed in order to fit it. This is all somewhat speculation, and there might've been whole variants of 100 megaton bombs, namely the BTV or "Big Test Vehicle".
If it existed, I personally don't think sundial would actually ever be detonated. I think it only ever existed as a deterrent, and losing a war is a lot better of a situation to be in than ending the world.
@@FonVegen Oh, it would definitely do that. But there's a minor issue with that idea. The estimated size of the bomb for project Sundial is 1000 to 2000 tons. So, it's a tad heavy. The Sea Dragon (a design proposed in 1962) would have had a capacity of 550 tons to low Earth Orbit. So, getting such a payload to the moon would have been quite the achievement. The Falcon Heavy has only launched ~7 tons to Geostationary orbit.
Tyler is completely misrepresenting the Castle Bravo nuclear weapon test that yielded 15 Mt vs. the predicted 6 Mt. The scientists were not "unsure" about the yeild: they were extremely confident in the predicted yield. They were just wrong because something happened that was unpredicted. This is because Lithium 6 changes its behavior when hit with fast versus slow neutrons and that had never been observed before and thus could not be accounted for in the model. the Wikipedia article on Castle Bravo is very accurate, so you can get the details there.
When he says "we basically built sundial" he means we basically can destroy human civilization and sundial would just do the same thing. Dispersed destruction is a lot more efficient than 1 single bomb so you need way less megatons in warheads. That's why we have MIRVs
We aren't even remotely close to it. I think people confuse infrastructure with civilization. Potentially billions may die due to either living in major cities or just because infrastructure collapses and it can no longer save them. Yet billions more would survive and would be none the wiser. The effects of mass nuclear weapons is seldom studied but we can be reasonably sure that the most severe impact is from the actual explosions and what they destroy, the rest are peanuts in comparison. It is a terrible outcome, no questions about it. Yet overinflating and wrongly portraying the effects of nuclear weapons is one of the reasons we are still destroying the environment. Nuclear energy is becoming more expensive each time some uninformed lawmaker is made to further regulate it. Meanwhile we kill hundreds of thousands of people through carbon emissions alone... or trying to greenwash it by making even more polluting batteries which then get charged by coal powerplants.
Can you look at ASP isotopes or ASPI they apparently are going to be able to make unlimited halo from nuclear waste? Does this seem plausible the CEO seems like a scam artist to me.
That thing would mainly destroy a big part of the USA. And it would be too large to transport anywhere, so there is not realla much you can do. The scaling also does not work like that, 200 times TSAR bomb does not mean 200 times radius or whatever. The aftereffect would likely be far less actually, because the explosion would just throw most material into space. It would likely have a bigger effect if build under water to create a Tsunami or alike - but for that you don't even need such masses. It's also very likely that such a bomb would in great parts just destroy itself before being able to actual fusion all the material involved. Overall a weird idea. The TSAR Bomb was already too big too be effective - and those moderen ICBM with "smaller" (still several times bigger than Hiroshima, though) warheads but then 10+ of them, so you could actually hit and destroy 10 cities with those (and it doesn't matter much if some parts of those survive, there's a crater right in the middle of it plus fallout) are more terrifying, especially because you can have so many of them and send them all around the globe. Soviet method made far more sense with the "dead hand" = if you try to kill them, you will 100% die by nuclear annihilation. This is more: if you try to kill us, we will nuke ourselves (and not that anyone even ever cared to conquer the USA - well, after the Europeans who created it via genocide and slavery).
Here is a recommendation for you to do commentary on. It is on the channel Practical Engineering and called "Why Are Cooling Towers Shaped Like That?" He builds some miniature towers and demonstrates how they work by boiling water under them.
3:15 -- People are afraid... Many people fear the unknown. And many don't try to understand the world around us, and just expect others to just tell them the answers...
Um the Soviet Union did test the tsar bomba on October 30, 1961 which is easily verifiable…I am surprised you didn’t research that before making the video.
This may exist at the intersection of multiple power grids, such that if they all fail and no power is supplied for longer than 48 hours, it activates. Or it may not.
Castle Bravo test underestimated the yield because they used lithium and one isotope that thought would not contribute to fusion, but the cross section of lithium 7 was bigger than they estimated. but 60% of the lithium used was lithium 7. They expected only lithium 6 to contribute....well...they were wrong basically doubling the yield.and several fishing ships from Japan were heavily contaminated. An d they repeated the error with Castle Romeo (how many letters there are between Alpha and Romeo?) and all living nearby needed to leave their homeland.
13:20 If you go this big, you'd only need deuterium and tritium for the second stage, that would already generate enough power that the third stage would work with regular hydrogen which is cheap and easy to get.
Basically what I thought of the idea that we kind of have it already is that humanity did make the firepower to end civilization. Even if it wouldn't be near the destructive power of Sundial. By targeting major cities you could kill half of humanity almost instantly. Then targeting transportation and distribution centers, any global communication and trade is destroyed. The contaminents in the atmosphere could cause nuclear winter, but I too agree any temperature drop wouldn't be significant. However any contamination would be devastating. Not only the nuclear fallout itself but other chemicals and toxins from the many other sources caught up in the blast itself would rain down across the world, following weather patterns. This would kill most crops and render the soil near useless for a few years at least and without transportation to move food around this would cause insane starvation. So while nowhere near as bad I could easily see the vast majority of humans dying and society completely breaking down, following a 1960s cold war all out nuclear attack.
The idea of the Teller-Ullam device (our staged device like it is more commonly called) was to have a bigger yield...but quickly it was noticed that it had another use: to make a bomb of the same yield it would use much less uranium or plutonium. When it became obvious that big bombs had little military value as precision of the delivery system became much higher (you hit half the distance the destructive power is 4 times bigger). Today most bombs are staged (and some countries use boosted devices only) because you need less nuclear fuel: it is a energy intensive thing to enrich uranium. Notice I didn't used the term hydrogen bomb because some not even use hydrogen (you can use lithium) and no practical difference in yield today exists. Interesting fact: in USA research, development and storage of devices with less than 20KTon is forbidden. The rationale is that a government would be more willing to use smaller nuclear weapons (yeah the Genie air-air is no more). Ohh another thing VERY FUCKING BODY gets wrong including Kurgezzagt: the stages is a fission-fusion_FISSION device the fusion does not contribute to the explosion per se it generates neutrons that are reflected back to the primary enhancing its FISSION and making it more efficient (less nuclear fuel) and leveraging the yield. The contribution in energy from the secondary is less than 15% I estimate.
It's very simple actually. 10 Gt in a single explosion is less destructive than 1000x10 Mt. Assuming you get to explode them all, of course. You simply cover more territory by distributing energy. For the same reason destruction of an asteroid is very dangerous. If most of it still enters the atmosphere, consequences will be worse than a single powerful impact.
During the Cold war, (Was at the centre of the action!) YES there were over 70,000 nukes world-wide! (54,000 in USSR with 23,000 active nukes and the other 31,000 held in reserve in various states of assembly/disassembly due to terrible Soviet quality control and contamination issues!) plus 18,000 during the 1970's/1980's (26,000 was peak arsenal!) on the USA, French, UK side. There were a LOT of nukes the public did NOT know about!
Not sure if you read comments, possibly a dumb (naïve?) question: Space 1999 and many sci-fi series rely on "nuclear powered thrusters" for their spaceships and mech vehicles... I heard in the 50s-70s there were experiments to make a nuclear-powered plane and rocket boosters, but is that viable? In Space 1999 the nuclear power was modular, in large cubes they could move with something similar to a forklift. I have no idea how that would work, they would rely on steam or some other material that turns into gas to provide thrust.
Talk about taking the whole "Death, destroyer of worlds" concept to next level. Also, Doctor Strangelove had the Soviets take the _next_ logical step and automate the detonation sequence: Their "Doomsday Device" was set up so that if a nuclear detonation was detected anywhere on Russian soil, it would go off _automatically_ and render the entire Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years by salting the atmosphere with irradiated cobalt isotopes.
Tambora erupted with a force of about 12 gigatons. However the energy was not released in one large blast still about 100 thousand people died from the climate effects. My guess is that the bomb would be about as destructive as this. Given that the explosion would be in the us the death toll would most likely be in the hundred millions or billions due to the collapse of agriculture.
I think kurzgesagt didn't mean that all of humanities nukes combined are the same level of power as Sundial, just that there are enough nukes to thoroughly remove human civilization from the surface of the planet. Wildly different scenarios, but functionally the same end result.
they also do say "we kinda did build it" not "we did build it"
I also think they meant more “to effect” rather than “to scale” yeah. If we really wanted to we could have set off every one of those nukes and while not as instantly devastating, it still most likely would have wiped us out
Even if they say that, they are patently false. It would destroy the economy and lead to untold millions dying yet the planet or even human civilization is way more resilient than that. Entire countries were genocided to such levels that only a fraction of their population remained. They bounced back within decades. Humans would adapt to the new environment, like they always do. What would change is the current face of the economy, political structures and with that... pretty much it'd dislodge most people in power.
There's a reason why there are some looney nuclear accelerationist assholes who think a nuclear apocalypse would be the most fertile ground for starting a "better" civilization.
@@Voxelgd Yeah, this guy seems to love nitpicking at things that are obviously not meant that way. Not hating, it's overall a good video but it's a bit annoying.
My interpretation of the statement that we already did build sundial is not that it would have the same effect, or literally destroy the world, it's that what we have created would *effectively* do the same by ending human civilisation as we know it. Assuming all bombs went off, as thats the comparison, and that they were launched at targets specifically to cripple ourselves as a species, even if the result is not nuclear winter etc etc, it's catastrophic beyond belief. We are so globalised that even dispersement of our nuclear arsenal is too much to handle.
Kurzgesagt truly does think we can kill all humans with nuclear weapons, so I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt here. They've stated this in the past.
@cortster12 I don't recall them ever stating we would be capable of wiping out every single human with our current arsenal, just that it's a distinct possibility that even possessing nuclear weapons allows. That a civilisation might destroy itself is no unlikely thing, and nuclear technology makes that possible, after all.
@@Saphy115 I explicitly recall them saying in an earlier video that we can kill ourselves multiple times over with our nuclear stockpiles, which is a false rumor.
@@cortster12Kurzgesagt oversrates the effects of nuclear weapons in general. The whole concept of nuclear winter is still debated. Severe global effects of nuclear war may only last a year or two, not decades as previously thought.
Sundial's explosion wouldn't be a world ending event. Those monstrously large weapons have one massive issue - the effects of nuclear explosions do not vary linearly with yield. Explosions are a three dimensional objects, and the things we target are esentially two dimensional - a lot of energy is simply lost to space. There are very few structures that can survive blasts larger than a megaton, so any weapon larger than that is simply undesirable. Sundial's airburst or ground explosion would be extremaly dirty, because of the size of it's fireball. It could potentially contaminate an area the size of a continent and that was the main "fear factor", although it's hard to predict how deadly that contamination would be. Resulting wildfires have a rather small chance to cause a nuclear winter, but local effects would be catastrophic.
The most effective way to use Sundial is probably an high altitude explosion, somewhere between 70 and 100km above the ground ( it poses extreme logistical challenge though). That kind of explosion would be a certain "country killer", while being relatively clean, relying on the thermal pulse alone. With that much yield, we can expect anything flammable that is not hidden behind the curvature of the Earth to instantly ignite. Imagine one explosion causing massive firestorms covering the area of France, pure hell. This may in fact cause a nuclear winter.
@@dawid12301dMy understanding is Sundial wouldn’t be “delivered”, you would have it domestically. You detonate it and guarantee everyone dies globally to nuclear winter. You’d never use it, but it’s the ultimate deterrent.
Can't wait to hear your intro without the "little" over 10 years of experience :D and hear "with over 10 years of experience" :D
Unfortunately won't happen, at the moment he's out of the industry I believe.
@@idris4587he said he still works in the field
@@idris4587 a little over 10 is still above 10
@@Core-Frisk he left fairly recently
@@snorlaxXsnorlax I never said that he didn't have over 10.
"how big of a nuclear bomb do you need to compensate for your insecurities"
Yeah I'm thinking you design it with low enriched Uranium so that we can make it the size of a small moon.
I loved this quote and if it's Tyler's-- bravo because you don't get to drop a quote like that every day. It's a very concise and poignant question.
That's no moon...
“That’s no moon”
"sore loser bomb" lol
The humour of it aside, that was actually a great way to describe it.
Make super weapons that puts everybody in constant tension with each other: 😊
Making a safe, efficient energy source: 😡
“No we didn’t”
Spends the next few minutes qualifying. There is a reason they said “kind of” we all understood, and then ‘well actually’ needed to taste his toes again.
Dr. Strangelove: "Yes, but the whole point of the doomsday machine...is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?"
Russian Ambassador: "It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises."
Mein Fűher I can walk!
Brilliant film! The thing is in that movie the doomsday device would detonate automatically if it determined there had been a nuclear strike. They removed human control because no human being would actually press the button when the time came. And everyone would know this. But if a computer automatically detonates the device if certain conditions occur then its out of human hands and therefore a credible threat.
gentlemen! you can’t fight in here, this the war room!
@@poindextertunes best line of that decade
18:20 "not one man had the power" vs "humanity built enough nukes to kill the world more than one time...."
The reasons the nukes got "unreasonably powerful" and why so many of them were made at the height of the Cold War were actually practical and reasonable at the time. It wasn't just a race of the bomb yield. The idea was that to prevent an enemy nation from wiping you out in a sudden nuclear first strike, your own nuclear strikes would have to be able to wipe them out even if you were making the second strike urgently and with less than ideal preparation. But targeting systems, especially for ICBMs, were lagging behind, while interception capabilities and technologies to harden important facilities or camouflage them against air and satellite reconnaissance were pulling ahead.
Which led to the idea that if current enemy capabilities can be expected to intercept let's say 5 incoming missiles at a particular target, then you better have six missiles for that target and the warheads on every single one better be big enough to destroy that bunker even if the ICBM "misses" by the maximum expected accuracy margin from that missile.
And as was recently proven on the Israel strike, they other side may have very advance anti-ICBMs but if I throw something like a 1000 to 1 missile to their defense system a few of those will definitely hit something. There is always a point where building defense systems is overcome by sheer number of attacks. It has always been easier to destroy things than to create things. Sure there will be moments when defense gets ahead but after some time we can always figure out a hole in the system to exploit. Computer security has been consistently showing us that you cannot have a perfectly invulnerable system and still be able to use your computer that serves its function because a truly perfect computer defense is one which does not connect to the outside world but also one that no human can even access. At that point, might as well have a rock in the shape of a computer. And even then, someone will try to crack that rock and they succeed. And by the end you just have to people trying to smash each other's rock.
Maximum expected accuracy margin: they call it CEP or Circular Error Probable.
Yeah, nukes countering nukes. That was the main reason for their growth in number and also the main reason why START worked. If both sides agree that they will not use as many warheads then suddenly you don't need so many of them, either. This is partially also the reason why delivery systems were counted separately and are a lower quantity. That and the fact you need some warheads surplus for practical reasons.
_"sore loser bomb"_
Okay, that's the perfect name for this bomb.
One should not forget why the nuclear arsenal was that big in the first place. the logic behind it was, that in order to achieve a 95% successrate of destroying a choosen target, you needed more than one bomb in case it fails, gets shoot down or destroyed befor launch. most of it wouldnt be used in a first response, nor in an attack. the other question that comes up is: what was even targeted. if only a few nukes make it to the southern hemisphere, ppl could very well survive there.
The comparison with an asteroid impact is valid up to a point. The Sundial is equivalent to around an 800m asteroid impacting Earth. If we then look at bigger asteroids, like the Chicxulub impactor at around 10km, the comparison falls short. The dinosaur-killing impact is estimated at around 70 teratonnes - 7000 times Sundial
The problem is one of physics. Once the fireball is large enough to actually escape the atmosphere, the energy dissipates into space and having nothing to heat, ceases to have any impact on earth.
Hence, the full yield version of Tsar Bomba would've actually had less than its theorized yield, due to the fireball being capable of escaping into space.
Teller have one idea, the Super, aka the hydrogen bomb, all of his other ideas literally never panned out. He repeatedly overstated in experiments the x-ray lasing effects within a thermonuclear device, which while present, was weak and at most, 1% efficient and useless beyond the confinement of the tamper. Didn't stop him from huckstering Brilliant Pebbles to Ronnie Raygun for billions of wasted tax dollars.
That eventually blew up in his face when it was finally revealed through auditing that his test results were fabricated and ahem, quite liberally interpreted, in short, bullshit. He kept trying to sell that zany plan until he was banned from the White House. It's pretty damned ugly when Reagan even bans you!
He singlehandedly tanked the reputation of a National Laboratory for many years.
Back to the super dooper bomb, the fireball rises and exits the atmosphere, it'll carry rapidly dissipating gas that's rapidly cooling, the reaction long spent and hence, minimal to no EMP beyond the initial burst and emit no meaningful yield beyond around 60 - 80 megatons, still potent, but not anything even continent killing. The worst effects being from ground burst, which would contaminate a continent and spread love and appreciation globally via increased cancer rates. Want a proper doomsday device, go with a cobalt bomb in the megaton yield range, detonate a few and that'll actually be more effective and make "On The Beach" a valid plotline - although mixing between hemispheres is minimal in this context.
And start a likely civil war, given most of the population would not agree that democracy is a suicide pact.
An 800m asteroid impacting earth at what speed? Size isn't the full equation when it comes to asteroid impacts. Different sizes can cause a 10 gigaton explosion, depending on their velocity, and thus energy.
@@x_MoonlitShade average impact velocity has been around 17 km/s, with a minimum of 11.2 km/s at a 45 degree angle. The destructiveness dependent more on the density of the impacting object.
The level of destructiveness seeming to be as much density dependent and even if the object airbursts rather than impacts.
An example being the Tunguska event, which has largely believed to have been an airburst, as no impact crater was ever found, but fragments have been recovered. The airburst estimated to have occurred of an object moving around 27 km/s at 30 degrees angle to the ground and at 5 to 10 kilometres, devastating 2,150 km^2 of forest for a Torino scale of 8 and generating ground shocks of an estimated 8 Richter scale.
That's a badda big boom!
@@spvillano For sure, there's a likely average velocity for the vast majority of impactors, simply due to the fact that the vast vast majority of impactors on earth come from the asteroid belt. It is, however, possible for impactors to be from the kuiper belt, oort cloud, or even extrasolar. These would each have vastly different speeds compared to an impactor originating from the asteroid belt. Sure, those are going to be much less common, but I still feel that saying only the size of an asteroid doesn't give the full picture. Size and speed are both needed to describe an impact's energy.
@@spvillano Very good point. The laws of scaling dont really work after your bomb gets powerful enough since it will essentially punch a hole in the atmosphere and a lot of energy will go that way
2:56 thats just an American thing. Im British, and i have never heard any of my fellow countrymen use "nuke" in that way.
"The other side being there's a deterrent to having nuclear weapons that everyone's afraid to use them so they're afraid to go to war"
Um, you might want to sit down for this Tyler....
He's Tyler the nuclear engineer not Tyler the political scientist
Oh, lord, young people today that don't have context. "Nuke" for microwaves was black-humour but it stuck. When we started calling microwaving "nuking" in the 80's, when the fear of a nuclear WW3 was very real, using it got a chuckle for mocking our own paranoia. (Some people really hated it reminding them of the coming tragedy.) With the Soviet Union showing signs of crashing, we didn't know if it would go out with a malicious "bang". The dark humour defrayed when it didn't happen.
Who’s young people exactly? You realize a lot of us in our late 20’s who had parents grow up in the 70’s and 80’s so we understand the lingo pretty well, I’m 29 turning 30 next year and my mom grew up in the 80’s and my grandparents were born in 57 and 61 so I understand the phrase pretty damn well, it seems a lot of the older generations can’t seem to stop generalizing and grouping young people together especially not knowing how they grew up and who was in their lives!
@CajunReaper95 You might want to see a doctor and have that narcissism looked into.
@@CajunReaper95 People generalize, get over it. Obviously some people would know but I am sure quite a few people have never thought too deep about it.
If humanity is able to become an interstellar species, this bomb will likely become a thing.
I was thinking the same thing, the only benefit to our arsenals is defense from an actual extraterrestrial threat
@@yugihlh an actual extraterrestrial threat that wouldn't exist if we become an interstellar species. by then we would have the capability to either block, dodge, or counter the threat
There are for sure valid reasons to be scared of AI, namely, humans losing their ability to reason. If you can get any answer you want by asking AI, what need have you to figure anything out? Reason is a muscle, if you don't use it you lose it.
And people have this weird flaw that when another person says something then others are happy to question them, when a machine says something people are strongly inclined to treat it as unquestionable fact.
and also capitalism!! they are tools that in theory should be used to make repetitive work easier for the worker, but what is bound to happen is people getting paid less because AI can do a shitty job in place
corporations using AI to make shitty illustrations and not paying someone for it is an example
so google? lmao
So basically when the aliens have their mothership within firing range, we chuck a sundial at it lol
3:10 Like you said, it has downsides... and those downsides are potentially massive and thus perfectly valid to be worried about. Complacency allows evil and wrongdoing to thrive. Something as impactful as AI has to be handled with care to minimize the negative impact on human life and our relationship with doing and feeling useful and appreciated.
Don't forget that the tests of bigger and bigger bombs also came to effect humans living in the vicinity. Causing cancer, birth defects and many more tragic problems.
cant wait for the antimatter age.
Youre a hippy kind of engineer. The world needs more of you bro. God bless man
The funniest fact is that you can put here a quote from a Kubrick movie... "Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh!?"
How the hell do you test a doomsday device?
Probably proofs of concept
On another planet
Um... on Mars maybe 😅
You don't test it, that's the scariest part
@Kilming "That's it... I'm gonna use it!" *Hits button, nothing happens* "Damn."
Project Sundial sounds a lot like cobalt bomb. And US Minuteman are from the 70's. We have 50 year old tech defending us. Nice fact: the use of floppy discs in launch facilities has fairly recent been decommissioned
I agree that the fear of nuclear power and ai are pretty similar, only dangerous when not handled properly or some worst case accident.
What I don't agree with is that, the part of the video that was talking about the fear they must have lived in of nuclear WEAPONS specifically.
You're correct. It wasn't the fear of the nuclear weapons. It was the fear of the other side and what it might do. Mutual assured destruction, which seemed like the only way to deal with this, meant that neither side had first strike capacity, but that both sides had second strike. That was the fear, especially since this doctrine depended on both sides following the rules.
Imagine receiving an interstellar message saying, "You earthlings need to touch grass and chill" 😂
"Deez Hummiez From Old Terra are Fukking Dakka Junkies Boss"
Humanity came to a point at wich wars are pointles because no side can win anymore if you get into a war with someone with a nuclear bomb and you have a nuclear bomb at the and you will just boath lose
If I remember correctly, the original payload of a B-52 Bomber was four 25 Megaton bonbs.
3:08 Yes but so much change happened so fast in those 50 years (1900-1950) socially as well as technologically, that it became a stressful, mind bender to those that spared an inkling of thought about it. For those that went with it, I guess it was a heck of a ride..... until they hit a brick wall in the 70's.
Yep
Doctor Who (before they ruined it) had a similar sort of thing as a plot device, but with a more specific purpose - basically a last option for humanity if earth was invaded and the alternative was considered to be worse than death.
Deny the enemy their prize, the ultimate "screw you." If humanity is about to be destroyed, might as well take the enemy out with us and destroy what they killed us to take.
If you're only thinking of your own nation instead of all of humanity, the same logic can apply.
Reminds me of the three bodied problem series too lol. Although nukes where pretty obsolete in that universe, aliens had a solar system ending weapon that changed 3d space into 2d space 😂
It was named the “Osterhagen Key”, Martha Jones was given it by a UNIT general during the Dalek Invasion of Earth in the episode “The Stolen Earth” that aired in June 2008 and was set in London and Cardiff in 2009.
Strategically placed nuclear warheads in various locations such which as Germany, China, Liberia and Argentina would somehow blow up the Earth in case a scenario such as the one mentioned in the original comment was met.
This was done in the episode to basically prevent the Daleks from seizing Earth and having the correct amount of planets to eliminate life from reality in their master plan (all cooked up by Davros of course).
@@theorangeoof926"Osterhagen" being an anagram of "Earth's gone" 😏
I kinda agree with you that nuclear exchange won't end life on earth, but it would be major war that the most number of people would suffered.
The czar bomba was designed as a multi stage weapon which was conceivably able to go to 3 or 4 stages. Russia has a deadmans switch system as a doomsday weapon. Also Edward Teller hated the soviet union and it was his hatred that drove the development of the "super" so when the Soviet union detonated its "cake" I wouldn't be surprised if Teller didn't want to go bigger.
No, he was a nuclear optimist. If his hatred drove his hydrogen bomb development then he wouldn't have proposed ideas like burrying thermonuclear bombs as mining charges or many other ideas how to use nukes for "civilian" uses. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Sundial was just the classic scientist thing of trying to secure more government funds for a ludicrous project which sounds impressive to politicians. He just miscalculated. Given what kind of person he was I wouldn't be even surprised if Teller wanted to detonate the multi-gigaton nuke in order to study its effects and see what's different compared to Castle Bravo or other multi-megaton tests.
Again, Edward Teller was Kubrik's main inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, mixed with Werner von Braun.
The sore-bomba is a way better name
The best I know is the Nova Bomb from Halo, 4.7 million megatons of yield, it blew up an earth size planet in the book, and its moon due to how its process of detonation works.
best I’ve read is the supernova bomb from Life, the Universe, and Everything (3rd book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series). it would just destroy the whole universe through *very* complicated ways
In any form of reality, 4.7 million megatons, however destructive for life, are less than a joke of an earth sized planet... it;s less than the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs to be exact!
the best one i know is the superflat tnt world some dude made in minecraft. it would dwarf the big bang by a lot
That’s only 4.7 teratons
My dad was born in 1912. His brain was never broke by all that stuff. Neither was anybody else’s that I grew up with.
I think the idea is that there were so many technological advancements, and there was a lot to learn, that lots of people weren't sure about the change, as a more modern example, 5G towers were rumoured to cause cancer, science proved it wrong, vaccines also made people unsure. All of this could, I guess, confuse people a bit, but I think they exaggerated it in the video.
“The sore loser bomb” I love that.
0:48 I knew from this moment when I watched the OP it was Teller. He was insane.
You know that there is no need for tritium (or only first fission trigger need little bit of tritium boost) all thermonuclear devices are breeders: tritium from lithium-6. And heavy water and lithium are not so hard to find.
Teller wasn't even present at Operation Ivy. He'd stormed off the project because they wouldn't let him direct it, so he watched a seismograph in the basement of the geology department at UCB (or UCLA; I dunno), and saw the signal registered at what he'd presumably known to be the rough "H-hour". He then called a friend with the coded message, "it's a boy!". I always found that kinda amusing. I used to think he must've been a totally evil dude, but it turned out he was way more complicated than that. There are things I've read where I've identified with Teller, and even felt deeply sad for him. It's definitely a strange thing to feel for someone who was so determined to unleash the destructive potential of our knowledge, but I felt it.
Also, I've heard hydrogen bombs referred to as "fission-fusion-fission" weapons, as the natural uranium tamper can fission from fast neutrons released by the fusion reaction. Castle Bravo was the shot that underestimated the yield and contaminated a vast swathe of the Pacific and killed Japanese fishers. It was because they presumed - with devastating consequences - that the lithium-7 created in the fusion reaction would not itself fuse. They found out that it did.
Nobody knows more things Nuclear than Tyler.
"Belt-fed Nukes" is going to be the name of my band.
3:07 yeah that's true, it's only natural to be afraid of something you don't understand, and the public isn't very good at understanding
hes so passive agressiv
The "sore loser bomb" is actually a perfect name for it?
I knew it when i watched kurzgestag yesterday, that you will hop on it asap xD checked my notification today like every hour or so waiting :D
One thing I'm curious about are Nuclear Lances aka Casaba Howitzers.
There's a Rednblacksalamander picture on Cara where a scientist is presenting doomsday Clock 2.0 which was your bog standard sundial, saying "if you can read it at midnight, that's bad."
Amazing and very exact commentary, very very interesting, thanks a lot for posting!
To feel secure no nuclear bomb.
You know, the description of the detonation sounds VERY much like the description of a Super-volcano eruption... only with radioactive contamination added for spice.
It probably wouldn't kill off humanity, but it would probably kill off a little over 99% in a few years.
Thankfully, the two operate on entirely different mechanisms. Sundial has little over 2000 tonnes and then whatever gets caught in the blast. Yellowstone Eruption, at the low end, would release over 2 trillion tonnes of volcanic ash. Why it matters? Because an ice age like this is caused by insane amounts of these fine particules blocking out sunlight. For reference a handful volcanoes erupted across the world between 1810 and 1815 which caused the Year Without Summer. It resulted in poor yields but the whole crisis was less disruptive than the current Russo-Ukrainian War. Even detonating Sundial it is doubtful the nuke can cause that.
Again, difference between mechanisms. One has a comparatively tiny mass going extremely energetic. The other has monumental mass going quite energetic from the forces of eruption. Just as how a car crash has similar kinetic energy to the explosion of a particularly big firecracker.
I think what he meant by they are the same thing is that they are an equal threat they both have the potential to destroy everything it's not an equal amount but it's an equal threat
We should keep all those nukes to turn them against aliens when they show up!
So the crazy scientist made dinosaur asteroid bomb 😂
Watching the og video, gotta ask. Who the fuck looks at someone attacking one country and goes, "Yeah, we're gonna kill everyone else". That's like watching someone get stabbed and responding with a full scale military war.
I mean, that’s kind of what the original video was about. The idea was so insane that not even the US military wanted to build it.
I remember one Serbian gunman that shot an Archduke, indeed did start a world war.
The reason we toned down yields was multiple, for one, lower yield meant lower weight, so more MIRVs per warhead bus. For another, increased precision meant I didn't have to have a yield sufficient to blast 20 miles, as the warhead landed only hundreds of feet at worst from the target.
But, Tsar Bomba showed one other thing, at half yield the device was detonated. Ironically, due to its design and inert tamper, it literally was the cleanest device ever detonated. But, at the full yield, it was calculated repeatedly that the fireball would escape the atmosphere and instantly dissipate, ending weapons effects once the fireball made it into space.
Basically, beyond Tsar Bomba's yield by a dozen or so megatons, nukes cease to scale upward in destruction and were already at diminishing returns to begin with.
Another bit of trivia, Tsar Bomba's fireball was prevented from touching the ground by its own shockwave that was reflected by the ground. There's imagery of that effect available here on youtube.
That's the *entire point*. A doomsday weapon is insanity, and despite it not being built, the fact that there were plans for it at all is crazy.
@@x_MoonlitShade in this case, plans to make plans, no evidence that even plans exist, just that some research was conducted and shuttered once those in charge learned of the research.
Crazy was that anyone listened to Teller. He leveraged a desire for bigger and badder to develop the hydrogen bomb, which Oppenheimer as director had opposed, contributed to the witch hunt against Oppenheimer to gain support for the bomb and was notorious for coming up with all manner of vaporware. Add to that Teller's incessant claiming credit for the design, much of which has been attributed to Ulam, didn't endear him to many for good reason. One of the biggest "sins" in science being that of "credit stealer". He, going so far as to initially refuse to sign the patent application for the warhead design due to wanting to deny Ulam credit for any contribution to the design.
The research, considered inevitable though, went on with minimal oversight due to the security of such research.
Insane was how much of Teller's work got ignored by Teller, the work shunted to Fuchs, who was the primary source of information that was leaked to the Soviets. But then, the entirety of the project itself was an expression of insanity. But then, one singular characteristic of humanity was, every new rock discovered ended up being used to hit another human over the head with.
its called “deterrence”
I feel like my ego would be satisfied with 1 tonne tnt equivalent.
If Sundial had been completed I think it likely would have been detonated near the Yellowstone Caldera for maximum destructive effect.
We should get to the only 1 nuke and place it in a museum 😂
I think people are vastly overestimating the power of nukes. Hundreds of those things have been detonated throughout history and... if nobody told you about it, you'd never even know. Not exactly apocalyptic.
do ya got a vid for reacting to the "detonate al nukes in the amazon" video? the 2nd half talking about draining all nuclear material on earth to build even more and explode that with the "ground splashing like water" is fun animation
This is the difference between those of us who grew up in the cold war, and those who came in the peace that came afterwards. Those who grew up afterward simply don't understand the ideological conflict that was underscoring all of this. Soviet aggression was real and a serious threat to Western democracy.
Our response was disproportionate, but you forget that the Soviets had been invaded by the west several times until finally, Nazi Germany came in and slaughtered millions. Nuclear deterrence, including multiple bombs of various sizes, kept the peace until the stalemate was broken with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Those who have grown up with the benefit of that peace simply don't understand the degree to which a conflict between ideologies mattered.
Those who grew up afterwards live in a world where socialism and communism are ideas rather than real things commanding millions of troops.
I disagree that those who came after necessarily don't understand it. In fact, with all due respect, I DON'T think you understand it.
We know now that the USSR was a paper tiger. They did not have the productive capacity to pose an existential threat to the world order. This was a country that spanned ELEVEN time zones, stocked with virtually every natural resource in abundance. In their population, they had leading lights in a myriad of fields. Indeed: their founders (e.g. Lenin, Trotsky, etc.) were brilliant, too: Lenin spoke something like 9 or 11 languages.
Despite all of this, the USSR was ALWAYS an economic cripple. There is a regrettably persistent myth that the failure of the USSR was singularly due to corruption, knock-on effects of totalitarianism, their particular bureaucracy, etc. These all did play a role. But it was the absence of a market economy that did them in. Their planning bureau simply was not capable of acquiring nor effectively utilizing the information it needed to effectively plan the economy. Money prices are essential for establishing a common unit of account--s common denominator. This made it extremely difficult to choose the best plan out of all the possible ones. They relied on pricing data from outside the country To guide them in setting prices.
Communism is utopian. Marx himself wrote that it would exist in the far future.
Its not that we can't understand it. It's that our governments abused us with endless propaganda campaigns and madness like HUAC.
Germany I could agree with you but the ussr not even close to being correct, the Soviets didn’t have the money nor technology to be a threat to any other nation, they didn’t have the funding nor the technology and training required to be an actual threat, the Japanese found out quickly what happens when you poke the bear, the ussr was talking out their ass hoping to scare everyone into not retaliating and fighting back against them which probably wasn’t the smartest move considering they were at a disadvantage, all it turned out to be is a scare tactic and that’s it!
the nukes may be smaller today but they are basically cluster nuke bombs now with most missiles being armed with 8 or more low yield bomblets on an mirv system, i guess they figured serval smaller bombs over a larger area is more damaging then 1 large bomb
Funnily enough, the United States almost had its own 100 megaton monstruosity, "Flashback", the size of the bomb ( dud, testbed, mockup, whatever you'd like to call it, it was basically packed with instruments ) meant it peeked out of the B-52's strategic ordnance drawer, requiring the doors to be removed in order to fit it.
This is all somewhat speculation, and there might've been whole variants of 100 megaton bombs, namely the BTV or "Big Test Vehicle".
If it existed, I personally don't think sundial would actually ever be detonated. I think it only ever existed as a deterrent, and losing a war is a lot better of a situation to be in than ending the world.
Practical Engineering released a video about cooling towers yesterday.
a bomb large enough to instantiate false vacuum
nope.
ITS OVER 9000 MEGATONS.
Ok boys, we have a design and manufactured our Sundial bomb. Where do we test it?
The Moon. Not only will there be no life to harm, it'll send a message visible to a lot of people if you time the test right.
@@FonVegen Oh, it would definitely do that. But there's a minor issue with that idea. The estimated size of the bomb for project Sundial is 1000 to 2000 tons. So, it's a tad heavy. The Sea Dragon (a design proposed in 1962) would have had a capacity of 550 tons to low Earth Orbit. So, getting such a payload to the moon would have been quite the achievement. The Falcon Heavy has only launched ~7 tons to Geostationary orbit.
@@FonVegen the rocket that we would need to send it there would demolish all life faster than the sundial itself just due to sheer size and thrust
The only thing I nuke are hot pockets!
Just kidding I don’t eat hot pockets …
Tyler is completely misrepresenting the Castle Bravo nuclear weapon test that yielded 15 Mt vs. the predicted 6 Mt. The scientists were not "unsure" about the yeild: they were extremely confident in the predicted yield. They were just wrong because something happened that was unpredicted. This is because Lithium 6 changes its behavior when hit with fast versus slow neutrons and that had never been observed before and thus could not be accounted for in the model. the Wikipedia article on Castle Bravo is very accurate, so you can get the details there.
He also said the tsar bomba was untested which isn’t even remotely true, the Soviet Union tested it on October, 30 1961.
12:53 you only need fissile material for the "blasting cap"
When he says "we basically built sundial" he means we basically can destroy human civilization and sundial would just do the same thing. Dispersed destruction is a lot more efficient than 1 single bomb so you need way less megatons in warheads. That's why we have MIRVs
We aren't even remotely close to it. I think people confuse infrastructure with civilization. Potentially billions may die due to either living in major cities or just because infrastructure collapses and it can no longer save them. Yet billions more would survive and would be none the wiser. The effects of mass nuclear weapons is seldom studied but we can be reasonably sure that the most severe impact is from the actual explosions and what they destroy, the rest are peanuts in comparison.
It is a terrible outcome, no questions about it. Yet overinflating and wrongly portraying the effects of nuclear weapons is one of the reasons we are still destroying the environment. Nuclear energy is becoming more expensive each time some uninformed lawmaker is made to further regulate it. Meanwhile we kill hundreds of thousands of people through carbon emissions alone... or trying to greenwash it by making even more polluting batteries which then get charged by coal powerplants.
So Dr Strangelove got it backwards. USA was the one that developed a doomsday bomb burried in their backyard.
Can you look at ASP isotopes or ASPI they apparently are going to be able to make unlimited halo from nuclear waste? Does this seem plausible the CEO seems like a scam artist to me.
To compensate? Hmmm probably 3 and a half Sundial.
506 Terraton nuclear bomb only one acceptable
That thing would mainly destroy a big part of the USA. And it would be too large to transport anywhere, so there is not realla much you can do.
The scaling also does not work like that, 200 times TSAR bomb does not mean 200 times radius or whatever.
The aftereffect would likely be far less actually, because the explosion would just throw most material into space.
It would likely have a bigger effect if build under water to create a Tsunami or alike - but for that you don't even need such masses.
It's also very likely that such a bomb would in great parts just destroy itself before being able to actual fusion all the material involved.
Overall a weird idea. The TSAR Bomb was already too big too be effective - and those moderen ICBM with "smaller" (still several times bigger than Hiroshima, though) warheads but then 10+ of them, so you could actually hit and destroy 10 cities with those (and it doesn't matter much if some parts of those survive, there's a crater right in the middle of it plus fallout) are more terrifying, especially because you can have so many of them and send them all around the globe.
Soviet method made far more sense with the "dead hand" = if you try to kill them, you will 100% die by nuclear annihilation.
This is more: if you try to kill us, we will nuke ourselves (and not that anyone even ever cared to conquer the USA - well, after the Europeans who created it via genocide and slavery).
one thing they didn’t point out is the EMP that would knock out, one would assume, all electronics in the world. thats a huge problem obviously lol
Cant wait to see your reaction to "lets teach cavemans how to build a Nuclear bomb"
Here is a recommendation for you to do commentary on. It is on the channel Practical Engineering and called "Why Are Cooling Towers Shaped Like That?" He builds some miniature towers and demonstrates how they work by boiling water under them.
3:15 -- People are afraid... Many people fear the unknown. And many don't try to understand the world around us, and just expect others to just tell them the answers...
Um the Soviet Union did test the tsar bomba on October 30, 1961 which is easily verifiable…I am surprised you didn’t research that before making the video.
Dr. Rodney Mackey😂
This may exist at the intersection of multiple power grids, such that if they all fail and no power is supplied for longer than 48 hours, it activates.
Or it may not.
Castle Bravo test underestimated the yield because they used lithium and one isotope that thought would not contribute to fusion, but the cross section of lithium 7 was bigger than they estimated. but 60% of the lithium used was lithium 7. They expected only lithium 6 to contribute....well...they were wrong basically doubling the yield.and several fishing ships from Japan were heavily contaminated. An d they repeated the error with Castle Romeo (how many letters there are between Alpha and Romeo?) and all living nearby needed to leave their homeland.
13:20 If you go this big, you'd only need deuterium and tritium for the second stage, that would already generate enough power that the third stage would work with regular hydrogen which is cheap and easy to get.
"Who would actually deploy this?" Give me one and find out.
i literally sound like edward teller when making my mc tnt mod
Basically what I thought of the idea that we kind of have it already is that humanity did make the firepower to end civilization. Even if it wouldn't be near the destructive power of Sundial. By targeting major cities you could kill half of humanity almost instantly. Then targeting transportation and distribution centers, any global communication and trade is destroyed. The contaminents in the atmosphere could cause nuclear winter, but I too agree any temperature drop wouldn't be significant. However any contamination would be devastating. Not only the nuclear fallout itself but other chemicals and toxins from the many other sources caught up in the blast itself would rain down across the world, following weather patterns. This would kill most crops and render the soil near useless for a few years at least and without transportation to move food around this would cause insane starvation. So while nowhere near as bad I could easily see the vast majority of humans dying and society completely breaking down, following a 1960s cold war all out nuclear attack.
The idea of the Teller-Ullam device (our staged device like it is more commonly called) was to have a bigger yield...but quickly it was noticed that it had another use: to make a bomb of the same yield it would use much less uranium or plutonium. When it became obvious that big bombs had little military value as precision of the delivery system became much higher (you hit half the distance the destructive power is 4 times bigger). Today most bombs are staged (and some countries use boosted devices only) because you need less nuclear fuel: it is a energy intensive thing to enrich uranium. Notice I didn't used the term hydrogen bomb because some not even use hydrogen (you can use lithium) and no practical difference in yield today exists.
Interesting fact: in USA research, development and storage of devices with less than 20KTon is forbidden. The rationale is that a government would be more willing to use smaller nuclear weapons (yeah the Genie air-air is no more).
Ohh another thing VERY FUCKING BODY gets wrong including Kurgezzagt: the stages is a fission-fusion_FISSION device the fusion does not contribute to the explosion per se it generates neutrons that are reflected back to the primary enhancing its FISSION and making it more efficient (less nuclear fuel) and leveraging the yield. The contribution in energy from the secondary is less than 15% I estimate.
We did not build sundial, we build its parts and spread them around the world and called them nukes
did you ever hear about the hotels in vegas that had nuke viewings in the 50s i think it was, where you.could watch a test go off from your hotel room
Of course you would know about hotels funni angel guy
It's very simple actually. 10 Gt in a single explosion is less destructive than 1000x10 Mt. Assuming you get to explode them all, of course. You simply cover more territory by distributing energy. For the same reason destruction of an asteroid is very dangerous. If most of it still enters the atmosphere, consequences will be worse than a single powerful impact.
During the Cold war, (Was at the centre of the action!) YES there were over 70,000 nukes world-wide! (54,000 in USSR with 23,000 active nukes and the other 31,000 held in reserve in various states of assembly/disassembly due to terrible Soviet quality control and contamination issues!) plus 18,000 during the 1970's/1980's (26,000 was peak arsenal!) on the USA, French, UK side. There were a LOT of nukes the public did NOT know about!
Not sure if you read comments, possibly a dumb (naïve?) question: Space 1999 and many sci-fi series rely on "nuclear powered thrusters" for their spaceships and mech vehicles... I heard in the 50s-70s there were experiments to make a nuclear-powered plane and rocket boosters, but is that viable? In Space 1999 the nuclear power was modular, in large cubes they could move with something similar to a forklift. I have no idea how that would work, they would rely on steam or some other material that turns into gas to provide thrust.
"Who would actually deploy this?"
Putin, Kim Jong, Bush Jr.? The likes of these people you know.
Talk about taking the whole "Death, destroyer of worlds" concept to next level.
Also, Doctor Strangelove had the Soviets take the _next_ logical step and automate the detonation sequence: Their "Doomsday Device" was set up so that if a nuclear detonation was detected anywhere on Russian soil, it would go off _automatically_ and render the entire Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years by salting the atmosphere with irradiated cobalt isotopes.
i am become death?
7:32 OMG it's a nyanbomb! Made of poptarts, no doubt.
Tambora erupted with a force of about 12 gigatons. However the energy was not released in one large blast still about 100 thousand people died from the climate effects. My guess is that the bomb would be about as destructive as this. Given that the explosion would be in the us the death toll would most likely be in the hundred millions or billions due to the collapse of agriculture.