SLAM: The craziest missile of all time
Вставка
- Опубліковано 27 січ 2022
- The Supersonic Low Altitude Missile or SLAM (not to be mistaken for the later AGM-84E Standoff Land Attack Missile) was a nuclear-powered weapon with practically limitless range that could lob 16 hydrogen bombs at targets before using itself to engage one more. It was truly a weapon best left on the drawing board.
C-5 Galaxy launching ICBMs: • America really launche...
📱 Follow Sandboxx News on social
Twitter: / sandboxxnews
Instagram: / sandboxxnews
Facebook: / sandboxxnews
📱Follow Alex Hollings on social
Twitter: / alexhollings52
Instagram: / alexhollingswrites
Facebook: / alexhollingswrites
This is a comically destructive missile, quite literally a world ender to an absurd degree
M.A.D. was histories greatest dick measuring contest. America wanted to nuke the moon, Russia built an atom bomb so big it leveled a forest and 2000x the power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US made nuclear artillery, and Russia built military units designed to blitz through nuclear wasteland and take territory that had been bombed. A fitting name since M.A.D. was pants shittingly insane.
hilarous
The legacy of project Pluto is that the guidance system for the AGM-69 SLAM was developed into that of another cruise missile people might be familiar with, the Tomahawk.
Yep! Just came to post that - TERCOM came out of the SLAM project.
Nice!
@@thedungeondelver well, that and the Pershing II guidance system.
The missile knows where it is at all times because it knows where it isn't.
Tacit Rainbow.
One way they suggested testing the SLAM was to, seriously, tether it out in the desert and fly it in circles, like a giant wire-controlled model plane.
😂😂😂
Like a kid with a pet bee
One hell of a bee. lol
@amandahugankiss4110 After watching the video, I'm shocked they ever thought that was possible. It constantly poops radiation and has the highest decibel level and jetwash over pressure of anything, ever. And these mfs said, "Can we tie it to a string?"
@@CatsAgainstCommunism that will kill everything you hold dear
There was also a U.S. program to develop nuclear-powered jet engines for use in aircraft. A massive test rig (about three stories tall) they used is on display at the EBR-1 Atomic Museum near Arco, Idaho. It's a long way from anywhere but you'll see stuff you never imagined existed.
Hehe, I bet it was done too
@@Dave-vy8wgNo cancelled due to extreme high cost and budget cuts.
Kenedi kilmi bum ameri gut covek jes ameri ju kilmi kenedi 😢❤
@@theselector2310 lmao sure just like the f117
@@Dave-vy8wg People didn't really like the idea of our nuclear powered aircraft crashing on the ground and creating an EPA super fund site. That was probably the major reason it was canceled. If you didn't build one then you could implore others not to build one either.
The USA also had hypersonic missles in the 60s. It was called the Sprint it was a Mach 10 nuclear warhead ABM.
Yea I laughed so hard on all of the media fear about the new "HYPERSONIC" MISSILES!!!! Though Russia is better in quality control than China, it is NOT that good. Quality control/equipment maintenance has been incredibly bad as proven over the years in Russia Land.
@@Dimythios Totally apples and oranges. It's the capabilities with the hypersonics that's the issue today. Previous designs like Sprint had very short ranges, no loiter or offensive capabilities. Plus ABM is a lot less useful than tactical hypersonic munitions.
@@otm646 ... The US Air Force was working on the Douglas GAM-87 Skybolt (AGM-48 under the 1962 Tri-service system) was an air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM) developed during the late 1950s. The basic concept was to allow US strategic bombers to launch their weapons from well outside the range of Soviet defenses, as much as 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from their targets. To do this in an air-launched form, a lightweight thermonuclear warhead was needed. Initially, the W47 from the Polaris missile was selected, but it was later replaced by the W59 from the Minuteman missile. The idea being that B-52’s carrying 4 of these Mach 12 hypersonic missiles, would loiter outside of Soviet territory during a time of crisis ready to be used or recalled ... McNamara canceled it figuring subs armed with Polaris SLBMS was a better option!??
@@gags730 … Exactly, this is why the US is taking so long to develop hypersonic weapons, they’re trying to develop them for actually being of use in tactical combat use rather then only strategic use? But as you pointed out - the cost - one hypersonic weapon for $100 million vs the US bought 144 Tomahawk block IV for $200 million that can and have been used in military actions!
yeah i saw the video of it yt, like bruh it glow red just from friction with air 🤣🤣🤣 it reach mach 10 in 15 second from what i read. but I think the missile was designed for short range intercept against MRV. i bet my money on sr72 hypersonic bomber drone version, at mach 6 it can drop a tungsten rod glide penetrator and will destroy anything it hits. hypersonic missile? how about hypersonic attack bomber that can be re armed on air thank to x64 gremlin research.
I first heard of Project Pluto from a story that Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine ran back in the 80's. They gave it the nickname "The Flying Crowbar". Simple, deadly and as durable as "a bucket of rocks". Even the engineers at the time were saying "do we REALLY want to build this f*****r??"
As a manager i would fire him regardless of his importance to the program, you must be all in on a project, how else can i be sure you given all you had to give for the project. Yes there could be a set back firing a good engineer, but good or not you cannot have negative energy near a program like that. So you can never be sure he withheld ideas that could lead to success. Call is sabotage by withholding ideas.
I loved reading A&SM through the 80's and 90's. I spent many a Sunday afternoon reading it cover to cover. It lost some of its magic in the mid 00's. Maybe that was just me getting older.
@@John-100 Dr. Strange love, I presume.
SLAM, had at its core, the first of the modern High Operating Temperature ceramics. Development of the ceramics and testing of them was a major part of the project. The reactor used plutonium to super heat air rammed through the ceramic core.
Beryllium Oxide was the ceramic used. Working with Beryllium is dangerous all by itself.
MAD was what we got. I remember growing up about a mile from a SAC and a mile from a Boeing assembly plant. By the time I was 8 I had found out that my house was in the crater if we fought the Russians. At that point this formerly innocent child realized that he was not going to make it through a nuclear conflict. No matter what the newspaper said, personally I was going to lose that war.
Worked at LTV in the 60's. Was planned to be launched from Alaska. China and Russia were safely in the crosshairs.😂👍🇺🇸
Ya think that would leave America safe?? Even a dozen or less big fusion nukes dropped anywhere would cause a nuclear winter everywhere:/
@@TheZacdes America will never be "safe"! Only the strong survive in geopolitics. Grow up.🦅🇺🇸
they may need to be again apparently.....
@@TheZacdes and that's just outright wrong lmao
Only the real survive, CIYY OF PACOIMA Stoopid!! SO KCUF UOY!!
The history of nuclear weapons in 16 minutes. wow.
I learned so much from this video. Pluto = slam missile
And now I know what these quotes / expressions:
"going to the slammer," "thrown into the slammer," or "He did hard time in the slammer" all finally means.
Thank God, the third world war would be the last. Madmen's dreams. Greetings from Dr. Strangelove.
History of nuclear weapons in one sentence.
Build them, use two, fear them.
Ah yes, the flying crowbar
That is a nice expression. Well done.
@@superwout I actually stole it from a Wikipedia article about this missile lmao
I read an article about it in one of the early issues of AIR & SPACE mag. It was a scary thing, and still is.
Amazing work as always. One of my favorite channels on UA-cam.
I can't believe something like this was actually being designed at one point. That's wicked scary 😨
Hate to break it to you, but Russia announced recently they've developed a variant of it to get past US ballistic missile defense systems. So these are back on the menu.
Cowardly, vile, and despicable. So perfectly human. That's scary. 👀
Should listen to the guys who developed it. Terrifying!
@@JohnSmith-sk7cg Russia says a lot of things, their military capabilities are 🐶💩 as shown with their most recent conflict. They'd have zero chance against a super power without nukes involved.
To be fair tons of things get designed without any real plan of building the thing, more of a concept. There was a space rocket once designed that would have essentially been an engine that had continuous small nuclear detonations to act as the propulsion, and some concepts for planes, tanks, and ships are absolutely insane like multi barrelled tanks, the famous Flying Flapjack aka the Avrocar, or the american flying aircraft carrier, not to mention some concepts for nuclear powered airplanes that could fly for days non-stop.
I love that Coors was involved in the process.
The banquet beer.
Yeah, that was a "wait, what?!?" moment for me when I first read about it.
But they were the ones with experience extruding ceramics into specific shapes.
You launch it from near shore, over the ocean. You don't start the reactor until it's a few miles out to sea. Then you enter soviet airspace from over the poles, or the Pacific. Still crazy, but not crazy because you irradiate your territory. It's a weapon only usable in the global nuclear war, so the incidental radiation it emits probably wouldn't be noticed when you consider the fallout that thousands of tens of nuclear weapons will cause.
He mentioned that the reactor was UNSHIELDED. So, even without producing 513 megaWatts, it would still emit a LOT of deadly radiation. Also to keep weight down, it's likely that the large number of heavy 'moderating rods' used in reactors to control the rate of fission would be kept to an absolute minimum in an airborne reactor. If true, then even at its lowest power state, it would still be running hot enough to require continual cooling via. passing large volumes of air, radiating the air as well.
@@gregparrott You don't have to launch all the systems you use on the ground. You could use a big water cooled lead plug that gets left on the launcher. And a reactor moving at mach 3 just doesn't give you a lot of exposure even if you are unfortunate enough to have to fly right over you.
It's certainly not a weapon you can use outside of a full-blown global nuclear war, but given the war will have blown up and set fire to every town with a population over say 500,000 in the entire northern hemisphere...
@@gregparrott Mind that this is thermonuclear war, I imagine there were going to be a lot of Nuclear reactors suddenly becoming "unshielded" and probably quite widely dispersed in the atmosphere very soon. The actual material/radiation output compared to that is practically miniscule for any given area. The em is less of an issue as long as its a ways up and a steel roof away. Have to think of the week/month after
@@k53847 Oh the reactor itself doesn't have that much time over you, but the fuel is in direct contact with the air it uses to propel itself, and bits of the fuel will also leave with it. This is bad and will irradiate huge areas under it, or also the ocean. It would almost not matter if the reactor uses plutonium as fuel, because plutonium is one of the most toxic chemicals known to humanity, so toxic that the most effective, by cost to effect ratio, way to use plutonium as a weapon would be to just poison water with it. The SLAM missile is a seriously bad idea, always has been, always will be, no amount of mental gymnastics along the lines of "you can use it, you only have to wait until the moon has started waxing and rotate your right pinky toe anticlockwise while standing in a fairy ring" changes that. That kind of inflexibility in its usability also makes it a bad weapon.
If thousands of nuclear weapons are used, then mankind is over
9:28 Can we all just stop and pay respects to the bravery and sacrifice
of the close in air support and monitoring preformed by these pigeons.
Amen
Did you notice that the flew before impact? Unless that missile was subsonic, pidgeons must have sensed that there was an impending impact without the senses known to us
@@JeanAlesiagain3 Ah yes, such exotic senses as... "sight."
Puh HA! Too funny. 😅
It occurs to me that a nuclear ramjet would be useful for exploring the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and maybe Venus.
Jupiter and Saturns atmosphere is just giant storms. Venus is possible
N ramjet would survive the atmosphere of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune or Uranus. They have winds clocked at hundred of miles per hour. No missile can sustain fly in those conditions. They will be break apart as easily as Cassini did.
@@midobecker9251 The earth has winds of hundreds of km per hour. You use doppler radar to find and avoid them unless you want to use them, like the jet streams.
@@k53847 Mr. we are not talking about 250 or 300 km/h winds for few hours. We are talking about 900 mph winds sometimes even faster in all directions. Saturn and Jupiter have storm the sides of several Earth with endless winds. The red spot have been churning around for hundred of years and you are comparing these conditions to Earth. The pressure alone will pulverized anything we have ever build no missile absolutely no missile can withstand such conditions. NONE!
@@midobecker9251 Ramjets get over 3000 mph in earth’s atmosphere. Gas giant planets may be more turbulent, so program it to fly at only 1500-2000 mph or so. That would be more necessary at lower higher pressure altitudes. We can build airframes to handle the stress with existing techniques. Testing the engine would be the problem as it was for SLAM.
The sensors I have in mind would be mapping and altitude radar, and chemical samplers to find out what was actually in the atmosphere at different altitudes.
There was a couple of UFO encounters back in the 60s that left an above average radiation. There was a whole section of asphalt road removed after one of these. Probably coincidence.
it was swamp gas.
Not a hope. These things would have cruised high up to avoid shoot down and to fly fast enough for its jet to function. So probably 30 000 feet high or about 10 km.
If all 500mJ leaked out as any energy you like sound/ heat /radiation you chose the combination then a single square meter area on the ground should experience peak energy of 0.4 joules so less than half a joule. For example a egg sized rock thrown hard has about 30 joules of energy.
Maths height is 10000m number of square meters in a sphere is 4 pie radius squared.- 1 256 600 000 square meters. Then 500 000 000 joules / that big number = 0.4 joules per square meter. Basically nothing. And the missile was insanely fast so at 10k up at Mach 10 it would effect you for 7 seconds at the most
It’s a terror weapon. Talked up never built never flown. The rockets were so heavy they couldn’t fly. They tried with NERVA and failed time and time again to get a flight weight nuke rocket.
@@danielleriley2796 it'd have to fly a hell of a lot higher while hypersonic. Even at the notionally high 30000 feet, the air is pretty damned dense for such travel, even our space capsules have slowed to subsonic by that altitude due to the density of the lower atmosphere. Think 100k feet, you'd be more on target and avoid essentially impossible stresses on the airframe and obscene temperatures generated by the denser lower atmosphere.
Also, the story is bullshit as to radiation, it didn't spew reactor fuel, it did release a lot of gamma, x-ray and neutrons though, along with some daughter isotopes from the fission. Stay away from its exhaust, it'd be fairly safe, given its cruise altitude. It'd only come down for its terminal maneuver into its final target.
Oh, NERVA did actually fly - without fuel, only ballast, just to see if the aircraft would be stable. Thankfully, they never lit off either for actual full power flight testing, not too sure if any might have or not have flown at low power, although I think that any benefit would be dubious at best. Low power doesn't equal producing usable thrust and the damned things were so radioactively hot, survival of a flight crew was questionable at best.
Still, regardless of who would actually release such a product from the insanity factory, they'd most likely be suborbital single stage to suborbital altitude, then skip for range, then penetrate the upper atmosphere for the remainder of Mr Toad's Wild Ride.
All, while ICBM's and SLBM's passed one another in their own suborbital pathways into oblivion.
Still survivable, in a way. The Bikini Atoll is now habitable - as long as one doesn't eat the food or drink the water, lest one get a hell of a dose of cesium-137 and strontium-90 (mostly). Safe to stay there to visit and even spend a week there, if you bring your own food and drink. So, we'd be safe enough, just bring a century or so worth of food and water.
I'll wait. ;)
And yeah, I worked on them long ago. A stupider weapon I have yet to discover. Nukes are like having a handful of thermite grenades, while standing on top of a refinery tank full of gasoline. There won't be any winners in that game of chicken.
So, go toward the light, my children! Go toward the light!
@@spvillano the reactor would erode as it ran, and allow small chunks of reactor to shoot out the back.
that was in the 80 probabli some kind of nuclear vtol test beed
Saw you on Twitter and I subscribed instantly. Great channel! THANK YOU!
There was briefly available for sale a plastic model kit. You can still find posters of some of the blueprints. I often think of putting such up for cube art where I work.
Right next to the Project Orion design proposals.
Don't know the exact date, but there was a movie that was made that pretty much had a scenario of this particular missile. The scenario was that every so many minutes it flew around the earth and in doing so each time it created a burned bath that everything was incinerated.
The Lost Missile (1958)
ua-cam.com/video/Lq_iDefX7AM/v-deo.html
That film was called "The Lost Missile". It involved an fusion-engined alien craft knocked into a 5 mile high orbit around the globe by a Soviet surface to air missile. Music by Alexander Courage of Star Trek fame.
Thank you for being both informative and entertaining.
Keep us up to date man! Thank you
NB-36 was also a test platform for a nuclear propulsion engine. Although, the method was different.
Subsonic, but a very similar concept. Use heat from the reactor to expand the air.
The NB36 just added a power turbine to drive a compressor. It's a jet engine without any fuel burning.
I would love to see the NB-36 project re-explored. Back then, they chose the massive Peace Maker due to it's size and lifting capacity since reactors and reactor shielding were so heavy in those days.
However, in the modern day, we have reactors that are much smaller and more efficient. And we've become more effective with our shielding. The issue is still pollution, but I do wonder how low we could get the negative effects compared to now.
@@Nurhaal the trick is to make some kind of casing that won't break and splatter the inside of the reactor all over the countryside in the event of a crash.
Or, conversely, a reactor design that wouldn't be dangerous if it did get scattered all over. I think a pebble-bed type would work.
@Scott Kenny it's gotta be harder than that I would think. We've had designs for reactors that are impossible to melt down due to using physics based mechanical design so that reactors will shut down even with no aux power, no pumps and no coolant flow. But things got immensely more complex when we are talking about a crash where the physical apparatus can fail and thus ruin such safety features.
Were you suggesting a pebble bed because such a design would easily scatter and thus keep any thermal run away from occurring after a crash?
@@Nurhaal yes, I believe the pebble bed is the best design available _assuming that the reactor vessel will break._
Given the level of destruction that a crashing aircraft goes through, I don't believe it's possible to make a reactor vessel that won't break apart.
I also want a passively safe reactor, though I'm not sure how well that will work in an aircraft, considering how much residual heat there is in the system.
As a side note, kerosene/diesel/jet fuel makes a wonderful radiation shield. US submarines have a huge fuel tank for the emergency diesel that's the entire width and height of the hull that is placed specifically for shielding (it fills with water from the bottom so there's always *something* in the tank)
Thanks man, that was a great one
It’s never a war crime the first time
I remember the Hound Dog missiles hanging under the wings of my father’s B-52.
Maybe i missed it in the video, but if all those extra rockets attached to the SLAM missile are just boosters to bring it up to speed. And with the actual missile being mostly hollow, as ramjets tend to be, where on earth did it store all these other "mini" nukes?
Watch more carefully there is a shot of the general blue print nose is sensors & guidance mid is 2 rows of 8 1 megaton h-bombs and aft is the propulsion plant, it is initially launched by several booster rockets.
It was a VERY LARGE missile, about the size of a locomotive.
That blueprint shot can be seen at 6:40. God that's an evil sumbitch.
As a student of modern capabilities, what fascinates me even more than nuclear arms is the concept of MAD applying to conventional warfare at any scale above brush-fire conflict. Considering the conventional capabilities today out-class defensive capabilities no "full scale war" would do anything except annihilate those involved, primarily their "means to conduct war". The casualties would be so high, the materiel loss as well, would mean that any large scale engagement is a loss for both parties. The offensive weapons setup in the defensive posture of Taiwan would annihilate most of China's attack... however, China would also do the same to Taiwan's weapons. The same goes for NATO vs the Federation. Both possess firepower in the conventional sense that make taking or holding positions impossible and that any attack would likely succeed but itself be wiped out. These were lessons learned from WWI, WWII, and Korea. We found out that as our conventional arms progressed that the ability to produce materiel and train soldiers began to fall behind the loss rate. Industrial War became, untenable. It is even more so today. Instead the nations decided on trade conflicts and in many cases political BUYING of nations vs any kind of open warfare. Wars didn't end, they just changed form to one which enabled them to be prosecuted without total destruction, without even accounting for nuclear weapons. So small brush-fire conflicts and asymmetrical conflicts in "client states".
A basic example of this in practice is take two fleets. Both fleets have ships which can launch 6+ anti-ship missiles at a salvo. Both fleets have ships with anti-missile defense systems which can only defeat about 2-3 missiles at a time. Each ship in both fleets cannot take more than one missile hit before being out of action.
Or most AT Missiles can kill the best tanks in service in one hit. Most combat teams have more than one. Even light armored vehicles with such missiles can take out a much more expensive tank. The tanks can easily take out the light armored vehicle. It becomes mutual destruction since both actions are delayed or a 3rd party fires on the survivor of the initial fight.
Soldiers are incapable of holding terrain with cover penetrating delayed fuse air-burst projectiles on the field, let alone fully automated small robotic vehicles that deploy such weapons without soldiers being even on the combat field. Trenches, concrete walls, nothing offers cover as the weapons on both sides can easily defeat this. This will result in massive casualties. You try to take an area and take it, only to have the counter offensive wipe you off the location as easily as you did those who held it first.
It makes a "World War" at this time, an insane idea, one which will ensure the economic destruction and de-peopling of any nation foolish enough to engage in unlimited warfare... again not even accounting for atomic weapons. This makes our current situation all the more dangerous as we have nations whom are quite willing to start the fire because their political power is slipping as their economies crash and their totalitarian edicts become more unfavorable. They are in a position where they have to do something to distract the population.. or very angry people will remove them from power, justly.
HEAR HEAR !
Well said and spot on. Unfortunately you have world leaders that do not and will not think about this when they initiate the final World War. It isn't a matter of IF. It is a matter of WHEN it will happen. We already know it is coming for over 2000 years. Book of Revelation 6:13
All your theorizing fails in Ukraine and in the future when Robotics and Atomics are fused into ONE WORKING SYSTEM.
More or less what was said after WW1….before WW2 happened.
Until you realize there are those in power who would glad see the earth depopulated.
I would not doubt it for a second that we don't have nuclear warheads in satellites right now
Fun fact
The original nuclear bomb and the Fatman Nagasaki weapon weighed over 10,000 lbs and used about 14 lbs of plutonium, which was surrounded by explosive lenses and was the size of an aircraft piston engine. Less than 20 years later nuclear scientists figured out how to build a plutonium implosion weapon small enough for an artillery piece that while not light could be picked up by one burly soldier. By the 1970's Russia / USSR had developed plutonium implosion bombs that were housed in backpacks like the kind hikers use. A scientist from Los Alamos said they could build a bomb small enough to use as a hand grenade, but they'd need someone suicidal enough to throw it
Saw the title and thought AGM84E. As an analyst in Desert Storm, I got assigned to an onsite BDA project to document targets hit with PGM. The SLAM(we knew it as the Harp-X) was one of the weapons. I remember being held outside one of the sites, while the SF security escort and the two 'civilian observers' retrieved and locked up some debris in a safe and kept it under armed guard until it got on a plane.
SLAM- the project the US never should have quit
Who said they quit
As a bomb delivery system it became obsolete before it was built. We didn't quit, we just found a safer way to do the job.
Dude for a UA-cam video. This is so information, and so well done. Hats off to you sir 👍🏼
"...powered by an unshielded nuclear reactor that would practically rain onto the ground as it flew..."
Malcom Reynolds: "REEEEVERS!!!!"
Was looking at the video and thought sucks being those troops walking toward the mushroom cloud with no NBC gear. Wonder how many developed issues due to that. A lot of stupidity happened during the cold war. All i can say to those servicemen is thankyou for your service.
William Powell,John Wayne,Susan Hayward and others developed terminal cancer from filming in Utah ... "The Conqueror"
I do not care if 5 million humans were preserved by not invading Japan,still not worth our planet for all species.
Was a mistake.....Chernobyl--Fukushima-3Mile Island all sending Radio Dust all over that still kicking up today..
The Liquidators risked and suffered for nothing,Russia learned nothing..
How about standing at ground zero during a live nuclear-tipped air to air missile test ua-cam.com/video/1VZ7FQHTaR4/v-deo.htmlsi=bL8EwqqqY-pSvlqW
It would need receivers to detect radars in operation that was unaffected by the Gamma Rays.
Seeing that "Coors Ceramics" logo brought me back. My dad was sub-contracted out from RTI to other companies and many military branches of the US. I was cleaning out the garage a month ago and came across a plastic thing that held something and it had the Coors Ceramics logo on it. He even did work for NASA for a couple of the space missions and even some cold war stuff on calculating how far and how much of a payload the Soviets could fly over here. I had to torture him to talk about stuff like that lol.
Fascinating piece! Well done to the creators!
The nuclear bombs of the 1940's pale in destructive energy to the hydrogen bombs in use today. The whole reason we worked on them is because it was decided that Atomic weapons (fisson only) were actually not feasible as a deterrent in any real sense since you'd require too many of them to do any real damage to an enemy.
Not really. The effectiveness of a bomb tends to drop off as its power increases. So it is much more efficient to use multiple smaller warheads than a big one unless you're targeting a major city. So your need lots of warheads no matter what maximum yield you can field.
@@BoraHorzaGobuchul yeah that's why the US started fielding MIRVs instead of hydrogen bombs. Much more efficient to hit Moscow with a handful of small warheads then 1 big one.
Bombs got really big in the 1950s but the US phased out most of its "city buster" warheads by the 1970s in favour of smaller, lighter, lower yield designs that could have multiple warheads per missile or be carried by fighter aircraft rather than just heavy bombers. When the B41 bomb was taken out of service (500 had been built), it reduced the combined yield of the deployed US deterrent by 12,500 megatons!
@@trolleriffic That's one thing I've used as an example in the past of how the US has technological superiority to the Soviets/Russians. The Soviets had more/larger nukes not because they were somehow more advanced and could build bigger nukes than us, but rather because the US developed longer range, more accurate weapons that didnt require as large a payload to take out the same target. As we're seeing now in Ukraine compared to the US in Desert Storm and the 2004 Iraq invasion the Russians have to level city blocks to take out a target whereas weapons like the Tomahawk can hit a specific room in a building a thousand miles away. I dont remember the exact numbers but in the 70s and 80s I remember hearing estimates that the Soviets would need something like a 50% larger total payload to take out the same targets, and that was back when we overestimated Soviet/Russian capabilities and the US weapons have only gotten more accurate since whereas the Russians are still using a lot of the same tech.
Why is this being described as insane? From a physics standpoint there's nothing to say it would work. If you're sending a nuclear warhead around the globe then sending in via a nuclear powered missile doesn't sound outrageous.
The issue is that the nuclear material has to be super hot. As in it spews out hunks of the fuel as it travels. The most destructive way to use a SLAM missle is to fly it back and forth over the target, littering it with nuclear fallout until you finally turn it into its target.
Meaning that your collateral damage to your own country and allies is MASSIVE. Not to mention that the particles could float hundreds of miles from the missiles path.
@@jonathanlunger2775 For certain there are down sides to the missile. The point of view from a late 50s to early 60s US standpoint is weapons with the reliability and range to reach the soviets were limited and the fear of a Soviet first strike was real. We would take one look at this today and say not a chance but from the perspective of the time it would be an option to at least consider.
The fact that is was nuclear powered, steerable like a cruise missile and could loiter long enough to circumnavigate the globe 4.5 times while dropping 17 nukes isn't insane? That makes you insane. Your statement is kinda insane...like really, really crazy.
@@wadopotato33 Well nuclear war is a little insane so building a nuclear powered nuclear delivery platform seams rational to me. If we start lobbing nuclear warheads at each other the radioactive exhaust from this missile would not be the top of my concerns.
@@RobertLutece909 I'm not advocating we build one. I'm just saying the late '50s and early '60s were a different time. We were still testing weapons above ground.
Very informative, thanks for sharing 💪🏾💪🏾💪🏾
Fascinating topic. Great vid
Kinda reminds me of the atomic hand grenade: The idea was dumped because nobody could possibly throw it far enough and survive.
I think the biggest problem was navigation:
Can’t use GPS, because satellites only just got invented.
Can’t do anything that requires any processing power, because it needs to run on a portable 60s computer.
Inertial guidance would work… briefly. Nuclear submarines of the era used it, and ended up wildly off course as a result. Can’t imagine hypersonic low level flight and it’s associated vibrations would help.
Apparently they planned to load it with best guess radar maps of the USSR, and have it navigate by comparison between its radar and those radar maps. Even if such a system could be made to work, as I understand it their guesses of those maps where so hopelessly inaccurate SLAM would have become hopelessly lost and bombed basically random locations.
Never knew INS was not viable on subs... not even LINS?
@@superwout They drift over time. Right now, the best accelerometers in the world will drift 50 meters in 17 minutes WHILE STANDING STILL because that's their level of precision.
Subs I think drifted like half a mile an hour. Which is a problem after a few weeks at sea.
Modern subs occasionally "top up" their navigation systems by surfacing or otherwise obtaining external location data, allowing them to reset the accumulated error in the inertial navigation system.
Like the cruise missiles that followed the SLAM was going to use terrain following radar navigation.
The computer required was however so large that defined the size of the missile at about the size of a 737.
Semiconductors shrunk the size the required missile down to an air launch able cruise missile by 1975.
@@HALLish-jl5mo I mean, 50 meters after 17 minutes is a lot more impressive than you're making it out to be, with that level of precision an ICBM can basically hit within 50m of its target anywhere in the world
@@dsdy1205 That's today, not the 1960s, and again, it's without vibration. And even then, an an inertial guidance system left on a desk for a day can only say it's within a 4km radius. That's a little better than a nighttime bombing raid at the start of WW2.
Holy shit. The whole thing from nose to exhaust is deadly. Literally 5 of these babies would shit on an entire continent in one flight. 😳
Great report - needed it a year ago!
It is usable as a second strike weapon.
I disagree. It is NOT a second strike weapon. It is used as a VINDICATOR - SAMSOM OPTION. NOBODY WINS. Anything living LOSES, PAINFULLY. NO GLOATING. THERE WILL BE NO SPOILS OF WAR.
With that range that's a lot of opportunities to find it especially if you can detect the radioactive crumbs it leaves. Trails turn into patterns that can be predicted?
Predicted? Not when it can turn all over the place for a very long time before impact:/ Leaving ABMs useless:/
I mean, given the range you could just have the missile fly in random circles around any target while irradiating the entire area, besides that a nuclear ramjet would most likely be hypersonic, so intercepting it wouldn't be very practical to begin with
You are making too many assumptions - Have you heard of a random number generator ?
You are forgetting intense neutron radiation FRIES ELECTRONICS
All sensors on tracking missiles would be fried
It's hilarious now to think about how batshit crazy the SLAM is. But back then.
Yeah, seems legit. Full send.
God, what a different time
So far I haven't seen anyone else wondering if this could have been launched from space using an orbital launch platform or some other type of spacecraft. By the time it entered the atmosphere it would already be going at a pretty good clip. If it was built now, I'm sure it would have a much better navigation and targeting system onboard.
I say just launch it from South Korea destroy North Korea flying thru china also and just blow up Russia in the process so your destroying 3 horrible counties in one hit
Considering its entire propulsion system literally relies on air to function, I kinda doubt it would work well in the vacuum of space lol!
If you are going to lift something like that to orbit. you might as well change your mind and lift something else. I think is was called THOR or maye THORS HAMMER. Essentially a Tungsten Steel telephone pole. All the damage of a nuke. Non of the radiation. Well, most of the nuke damage anyway.
@@EstorilEm You saw the word "space", stopped reading and immediately started -typing that message- shoving your foot into your mouth as possible, didn't'cha? lol!
But seriously, if you had indeed watched the entire video (paying attention, as well) *and* read the entire comment, you'd understand that what they said was very logical and reasonable -- at least insofar as to what _you_ thought makes it a nonstarter. Because no shit that it's an air breathing engine, but having it (or multiple) stored on an orbital platform, waiting for commands to deploy one (or multiple) which would likely have a small booster to get it on its way... it would now have the initial kickstart velocity, as well as gravity, to drive it into that much needed atmosphere, at the equally much needed extreme speeds required for the SCRAM Jet to function. (Something that would undoubtedly be done at high altitude anyhow, given there's less atmospheric drag but still sufficient oxygen.)
Exactly. Space would be the ideal launch point. Also the North or South pole.
The U.S has Electromagnetic Fusion Contain Engine Technology. This motor on a missile makes it the deadliest of all missiles in the world. If the U.S. has indeed been given the Technology from David Adair.
The missile is nearly instantaneous. Once fired it’s like the sun, the power is incredible and the missile would take moments not 30 minutes to reach Russia. Far faster then Hypersonic missiles.
russia built new weapons , U.S need to respond (ok the U.S hypersonic finished testing at last )
I like how you put in perspective the past leaders saw 2 world wars
This is easily the most American thing I've ever seen in my life and i couldn't be more proud
I had an astronomy professor at college who said astronomists had a theory that shortly after, in cosmological time, intelligent life develops in the universe it destroys itself with nuclear weapons.
Might be true. In astronomical time scale, "shortly" might mean 1000 years or even 100000 years. It's next to nothing compared to astronomical time scale.
So even if we don't nuke ourselves into dust within 100 years, we might very well do it in the remaining 99900 years, at it would still be considered as "shortly".
I'm hoping that humanity can get into space, so we won't be as likely to incinerate each other, but, knowing people, we'll probably establish nuclear weapons on other planets as well as on earth.
"Shortly after, in cosmological time, intelligent life develops in the universe it destroys itself with nuclear weapons."
All-out nuclear war would kill billions and set us back centuries, if not millienia... but I don't buy the nuclear winter argument kills all life argument. More like temporary nuclear autumn. The Chicxulub impact is estimated to be around 100,000,000 megatons. Say all the nuclear weapons in the world at the moment are around 10,000ish megatons.. in other words the astroid that killed the dinosaurs was around 10,000 times greater than our current nuclear capability. And even then some of our early mammal ancestors managed to survive.
Fermi's Paradox might not be a paradox. There are extreme distances between star systems. The environmental conditions for a planet to develop anything beyond microbial life are clearly rare. And there are monumental time scales for intelligent life to develop from seed chemicals. We'lve only had the most basic technology to communicate with another star system for less than a hundred years (i.e. less than a 100 light year radius for radio waves). Most radio signals would degrade to background noise within a few light-years in pracice. Even picking up some short specialized extremely strong alien radio beam past 1000 light-year distance (like Arecibo transmitted a few decades ago) would be extremely lucky. y. On cosmological scalez, using radio waves to communicate is far worse than using smoke signals for transalantic communication.
Then consider 'intelligent life" might be a relative term. If life is too primitive it has no ability to communicate with other planets. If it's far more evolutionary advanced then it might have no interest in starting up a chat sesssion. Would we try to communicate with our ancestors a billion years ago when they were basic multicellular life? What would what we call intelligent life be like after a billion more years of evolution?
It short, it seems to add up to the possibility any intelligent life on similar level of technology and interested in communicating with the other is so extremely far apart it's probably not in range of their quant technology.
@@georgepalmer5497 "probably establish nuclear weapons on other planets as well as on earth."
It gets worse. Tsar Bomba weighed about 27 tons and yielded around 50MT. That could be duplicated with only about 1.2 kg of anti-matter. Albeit we currently lack the engineering knowledge to create vast quantities of antimatter, from a physics perspect it's already theoretically possible to build a single bomb that could destroy an entire planet.
And of course it gets much worse. Everything in the universe seems to be made of quantum fields including space itself. Some physicists speculate that quantum fields as they exist are not in a ground energy state and that if anything in the universe ever reached a lower energy state it would trigger a cascade spreading out at the speed of light. In other words, it might be possible (but not certain) that space/time itself could be made to collapse under the right conditions.. .destroying the entire universe.
Given how even during the height of the cold war, global nuclear warfare wouldn’t have caused the extinction of the human species, I think there is a reason why that is just a theory.
If you're not familiar with the term "nuclear triad" you're not alone. Former President Trump had never even heard of the nuclear triad while he was going around saying things about how he "knew more about The Nuclear" than anyone else.
False info.
Great article. You never fail to impress me. Thank you.
Did a pretty good job on this one Alex, I've done a lot of research on this and your are error free on this! A lot of articles I read in videos I watch have a lot of wrong information.
I haven't noticed if you've ever done anything about nuclear powered airplanes
If I remember correctly there's still some engines in Utah on display.
U.S.studied it, but never built it. Russia actually built at least 1 and launched it to spew radiation all over. I think the Russian weapon was crazier because they were insane enough to actually build and use one.
95% of global cancer hike is from irresponsible Use,testing, accidents up until now.
Actually they tried recently. It blew up on the testbed.
That explosion in 2019 killed 5 of their scientists. Let's hope it was a major setback to the program.
I worked the Navy SLAM project in the 90's Standoff Land Attack Missile which was Basically a Harpoon with a TV Seeker head
Excellent stuff bro
Given the Russian use of hypersonic missile in the Ukraine and their testing of nuclear powered missiles do you think the US may develop a cleaner version of the 1950's era SLAM?
The Mach 3 B-71 Valkyrie bomber was supposed to get air breathing nuclear gas turbines. Two designs were test run in the 1960’s… (and still exist in Nevada).
3:43 the lads get out of their trenches and walk towards a nuclear explosion that they can visually see. Wonder what happened to them
They took a pretty significant radiation dose. Though they did avoid most of the prompt radiation from the explosion by being in the ground.
It was about like being in Hiroshima or Nagasaki immediately after the bomb dropped.
Lmao who, nothing to see here move along
OMG raDiaTion! Seriously, most of the radiation comes from the flash. Assuming you're upwind, you're fine.
@@wilfdarr the early bombs were very inefficient about turning uranium or plutonium into energy, which means that all the unburned fuel is nicely divided into dust.
While uranium is an alpha emitter and your skin will stop an alpha particle, breathing in any of that dust means that your lungs are not protected by your skin. Which then turns into a full-body dose.
@@ScottKenny1978 Yup. And all that dust is down wind. Which is perfectly safe.
Who needs a big stick when you could Wield a tree trunk?
How creative man is when it comes to destruction
Doomsday weapons are always interesting, if terrifying... Could you cover other such systems Poisiden, Dead Hand, a potential cobalt bomb (which is way more 'doomsday' than other system: irradiating the entire planet for decades... Yikes.)
What really will blow your mind is what they are doing now and how destructive the systems that they have now. The rail gun is a crazy gun that doesn't use any explosives at all and can cause some big time damage just with canetic energy. I think that one of the new tri hule ships has one of the guns on it now. The last time I heard they were trying to get the rail gun to fire over the horizon accurately and they were close to doing it a few years ago. But it doesn't have the same kind of power that this missile had.
Bro I remember watching a thing on the rail gun where they hit a target dead center from dozens of miles away. They don’t have explosives but they’re super expensive and hard to maintain. Apparently they break after a couple shots. But I’m sure they aren’t keeping us in the know about it’s actual capabilities.
You think that’s crazy bro have ya seen the navy’s new patton list?!?!?
Compared to nuclear weapons, rail guns are pea shooters. They're impressive in their own right but totally different league to the really destructive stuff. The recently cancelled US Navy railgun project had a 32 megajoules muzzle energy - compare that to the smallest US nuclear weapon ever deployed, the W54 which produced 42,000 megajoules in its lowest yield setting and 4,200,000 megajoules in its highest.
Yep this it definitely the most dangerous weapon in the world
Enjoyed your video and I gave it a Thumbs Up as a support
While its true that some cheramic componenet was used in the engine, it was not entirely ceramic. The reactor tubes was made of nickel alloy and the reactor duct was made of Hastelloy C, and the controll rods was made of Hafnium. The base block maximum temperature was calculated to 2430F, while, yes, very hot, compare to modern jet engines, really not far of, pretty much on par. Most of the subsystems was cooled to just under 2000F.
One of the features of the engine is that it use neutron reflectors enable it to be very small, this would also limit the neutron loss from the engine, really not making it that radioactive.
The component that was made of ceramics is the moderators becasue they would sustain the most heat (~2500F), made out of Beryllion oxide.
The idéa that the engine would produce a lot of radioactive dust i can´t find any evidance for. This seams to be one of those things that was made up in the 70tys. There is no reason to believe it would lose part of the integral part of the reactors.
Of cause, the air passing throw the reactor would be highly irradiate, and there for radioactive, this is not that much of a problem that people might believe. The half-life of irradiated oxygen is only 26 seconds, of nitrogen its only 7 seconds and 109 minutes for Argon. The only thing left is the 0.0015% carbon that is tied up on CO2 that does have a longer half life, about 5000 years.... The so called .. Carbon 14. The thing is, carbon 14 is really not that dangerous, we eat it every day in rather large quantities. The relative smal amounts made by the slam would not really change that outcome.
So you might believe i´m guessing, well i´m not, we know this is true for sure, becasue open circuit air cold reactors have actually been tried on mass. Wind-scale reactors was used for years on in UK with really very little radiation.. that is.. until the fire. What happen in the fire was that the fuel roads start breaking apart and flying away as dust.
The filters in Windscale was not a radiation filter, but rather a dust filter, it was there to collect irradiate dust, not actually irradiate air. Prior to the fire, the filters really didn´t to anything.
The claims of 100-240 deaths is not from scientific literature, but rather from activist literature. We know now from Chernobyl that what we fist should see in a radiated environment is thyroid cancer with children. This is a good indicator because its very uncommon. By the way, don´t listen to people saying "5 time increase in thyroid cancer".. When they say that its from 0.2 on average a year to 1 one specific years.. If we see nothing over 50 times increase in thyroid cancer for children, there is really nothing there. Thyroid cancer is fairly easy to treat and most children (like over 99%) survive. Typically we should suspect 1/10 (or less) cancer death in low level population wide cancer than thyroid cancer with children
Thyroid cancer after windscale was in the single digits for years after, indicating that the amount of cancer death increase have to be way lower than 100-240 people
I’m no peace nick and I’m surely no nuclear warhawk. However, I think this missile was an object of real insanity by those “thinking they would protect us”. I am glad cooler heads finally prevailed because the mentality for such a weapon reminds of the man riding a hydrogen bomb down to its target in Doctor Strange Love.🤡😂
That man was Slim Pickens..!
@@steveshoemaker6347 Thanks. I always liked Slim Pickens. I just couldn’t remember his name. Great actor.😂👍🏻
Yeak, but Pickens was just a low level officer performing an assignment. The generals were the ones who were the crazies.
I disagree. It was NOT MEANT TO PROTECT US. This beautiful doomsday weapon was a POISON PILL ...A SAMSON OPTION ....A REVENGE WEAPON.....YOU KILL THE CAT WITH YOUR BEAR HANDS....THEN YOU LOOK IN THE MIRROR...BUT YOU HAVE NO FACE.
"Mr President, we cannot allow a nuclear-powered cruise missile doomsday weapon gap!"
"Come on and SLAM! Welcome to the jam!" 🎶
The tac nuke cannon movie at 4:45 couldn’t be more quintessential.
Hypersponic is proabably the most overblown tech since the cavitating torpedo. Please do not compare them with Atomic Weapons.
The military leaders at the start of the nuclear arms race, like General Curtis LeMay came from a World War where even atomic bombs were not as deadly as the fire bomb raids over populated areas like Tokyo. If a raid that killed 10,000 was "good", wouldn't a raid that killed 30,000 or 100,000 people in a "militarily significant area" be better? And there was always something militarily significant to be bombed. And why take so many planes, air crew, maintenance and logistics assets to drop thousands of fire bombs (incendiary bomblets) when one big nuke would work as well. Just have to make sure your nuke is bigger than their nuke, and some of your nukes survive their first strike (because you would "never" strike first, right?) to be able to nuke them 'til they glowed. So bigger is better, more is never enough, and fastest of all is way too slow.
And with an attitude like that the world is doomed to nuclear armageddon....... MUTUAL assured destruction remember, not one side winning, both sides DEAD. Comprehend what it really means when the fight your talking about, are quite literally THOUSANDS of nuclear bombs being dropped, its game over for most life mate, there are no winners......... There is no bombing anything until it glows, you do that you kill yourself, its mutual death......Its incredibly ignorant to ignore the fact its mutual assured destruction and it doesnt even take that many, hundreds not thousands, and in a full blown war, its thousands that will get launched......We are all truly FUCKED if that happens.........We will ALL be glowing...
@@Piddlefoots ... This is why MAD worked. The memory of the victories in WWII faded and were replaced by growing awareness of the incredible toll. The military commanders like LeMay, who was Goldwater's VP choice in 1964 began to retire and be replaced by the majors, captains, and lieutenants who were on the WWII front lines. Coupled with the disaster of the Vietnam War every night on the evening news, the true impact of nuclear war hit home.
While the military-minded people who always assumed there would be no reaction continued to talk of tactical nukes, atomic artillery, and dirty bombs the leaders in the US and USSR realized there would be no winners, and nuclear arms reduction talks began.
For great movies about the Cold War see
"Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb" (1964),
"Fail-Safe" (1964), and "WarGames" (1983)
For a more intense view, read the book "Fail-Safe"
I cannot believe we've made it through all of the years without this weapon..
Some of that footage is used for a Remy Zero song " Impossibility". My Uncle worked for Coors geochemistry.
Great, a flying Chernobyl. This decade just keeps getting better and better.
The first nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was technically speaking,a dud. Approximately 1/3 of the fissile material actually detonated. The shotgun style of bomb was not that effective,as horrible as that sounds. The next one, that was dropped on a suburb of Nagasaki. There were a number of japanese citizens who survived Hiroshima,and ironically, took shelter in Nagasaki. Another fact that always stuck with me, among the survivors, if they were exposed to the flash, what they called the Pika, if they wore white, they were burned but survived, whereas if they wore black, they were incinerated. White reflects light, black absorbs. Info from the book 'THE LAST TRAIN TO HIROSHIMA
Ahhhh, I can smell the dawns early light.
Sounds really good not as a weapon but for space flights.
Skip to minute 5 ! Thats when he finally talks about the rocket! You can thank me later!😉
Please, with deepest respect to the excellent research put into this video and the equally good footage, try to avoid terms like "craziest" missile, and "insane" design. The depth of investigation that went into this video deserves more than the near-illirerate hyperbole that's normally used by much younger, less informed people. It's a serious subject, albeit fascinating, and your coverage is way too good to downgrade it at the outset. Cheers!!
It is about the craziest missile and most insane design. I would call that accurate and not at all hyperbolic. I think your idea is insane.
What an insane weapon.
I disagree. It was a beautiful application of scientific know-how. If we had no panicked, we would've have by now NUCLEAR-POWERED SPACE SHIPS.
@@amauryll I agree with the possible use of nuclear technology for the betterment of humanity but as a weapon of mass destruction it's quite M.A.D..... har har. I made a funny. Death and destruction of whole continents is cool in theory but in practice it's quite sad. Inversely modern societies have an exaggerating fear nuclear fission plants. aThe whole duck, cover, and kiss you but good bye mantra was drilled in the American subconscious a bit too well a half century ago.
What an excellent acronym for a weapon 😊
All ICBMS are hypersonic they have speeds of up to mach 25 at reentry. The thing that makes the new hypersonics so dangerous is maneuverability while at hypersonic speed to evade air defense systems.
Good to know there's at least one weapon it's creators dared not use.
Oh we have a bunch of them we don't dare use. SLAM was one that was too scary to even *build.*
After puberty, 13 or 14 years old. Grade 8 or 9 we used "the bomb will drop before I will" as excuse for vice. First smoke, first drink and hopefully that's all. We lived 15kn from Niagara Falls, we saw the documentary on Nukes and priorities. We were 20 seconds before being in shadow only, 20 sec blinded by the light. Seeing each other in xray for a nanosecond. It was a mantra from the 60's. We were cool in our burgeoning.
Thanks again🇺🇸
all war should be a pillowfight and a handshake
When even the MIC thinks you've gone too far:
I watched this on the toilet and fell asleep. Now I gotta figure out the last thing I remember
I think a month or so ago they announced they had it and working
don't forget multiple war head missiles
How BIG such a contraption would need to be?!
Pure insanity!
Imagine a bigass missile with the Coors logo on the side dropping hydrogen bombs all over.
Dennys breakfast slam is insane