@@Rock-Bottem1982 you're implying it and just being stupid in general. that's like saying people who work hard shouldn't be payed. it's ok, once you move out of your moms basement and start living life youll understand.
I always liked the scenario description of two people up to their necks in gasoline arguing over who was more powerful by the amount of matches they have.
yes, that sums up russia's nuclear weapons bluff over NATO, stopping NATO forces from physically deploying in Ukraine itself. Though it's very silly and overly cautious a decision. even Putin has said nuclear weapons would only be used if there was an existential threat to the continued existence of the Russian federation. Also adding that if Russia were to not continue existing, the putin would make sure the rest of the world was wiped out. no russia, no point in a world, to paraphrase Putin. surprisingly this is a conservative stance compared to ex president and prime minister or russia, medvedev, who stated that if ukraine tried to retake crimea, then the kremlin would respond with all its weapons (including nuclear)| the real threat is localised small nuclear weapons that would cause horrific casualties to civilians, but the radioactive fallout would not leave ukraine. even china of all states, has warned putin not to go nuclear. but it's the nuclear weapons of mass destruction that NATO is afraid of. and for no reason. because sending ground troops into ukraine , say 20,000 special forces soldiers, does not threaten russia' federation's continued existence as a nation, since the special forces would be confined to supporting ukrainian troops with expert soldiers, whilst training up the section of inexperienced civilian ukrainian soldiers , with no military action breaching russian itself. (the pre annexed ukranian territory russian land). which is why i've argued that this is a serbian-kosova war situation-where NATO carpet bombed serbia into surrender. but in this case, there isn't even need to bomb russia, only specialist troop deployment into ukraine, which would quickly end the invasion by means of a peace treaty of heavy russian concessions.
As somebody who had gasoline accidentally spilled all over his lap (and crotch) that would be INCREDIBLY painful lmao any sensitive skin literally starts chemical burning away. And I'm sure you can imagine what "sensitive skin" means in relation to my lap lmao
Way back in 1994 I was writing my high-school graduation dissertation on the topic of "Nuclear Energy". It was divided in 2 parts, one about nuclear plants and another about nuclear weapons. The final weapon I covered was the so-called "K-bomb". According to source material, this would ideally be a combination of a high-yield fusion device mostly consisting of Deuterium and Tritium used in "neutron bombs" and a large envelope of stable Cobalt (approx. 1 ton). According to the source material, detonating 10 to 100 such devices would be enough to produce and distribute enough Cobalt-60 to kill all life on land within its half-life. It wouldn't make any difference where on Earth you set it off, as long as it was detonated at high enough altitude where it would be carried around the globe by atmospheric winds. Thanks for a trip down memory lane.
America's nukes are becoming obsolete, they're 60+ years old, and with several countries working on hypersonic missiles that can intercept a nuke in space, adventually it will come to a point where a nuke can be taken out before it leaves its country of origin.
@@Skelath for all we know the us has updated its nuclear arsenal to include such weapons but have been better at keeping it under wraps seeing as it wouldnt give any good PR, like it does in russia (even there it isnt super popular)
I’m 99% sure that “salting the earth” wasn’t about “cursing” the city so much as it was about preventing food being grown there in the future thus preventing any larger settlements forming from the displaced survivors
Salt was VERY expensive and valuable and is water soluble so to literally prevent crops growing over the tens of thousands of acres needed to sustain a large city would be ludicrously impractical given the quantities involved. We're talking millions of tonnes of salt. It was a symbolic thing.
@@isbestlizard Thank you for saying it. “ it was a symbolic thing” a saying sort of. We beat them and salted the earth so they can never rise against us again!! No one was gonna waste that much valuable salt.
A small area where plants wouldn't grow would frighten people. They used a lot of salt in this small area, and it would spread when watered. A cursed city with a growing blight. But really you'd do it around the government building, city center, or statues of their Gods. Then the Gods had forsaken the city, a sign to leave. It was more of a saying though as salt was expensive, even for that.
It was often sufficient to simply collapse narrow mountain passes crucial for reliable trade, destruction of irrigation systems, the enslavement of anyone fertile or about to be fertile, the slaughter of the children boys, burning down ports, plundering of treasuries and anything else which would make economic and population growth back to what was impossible within enough number of generations.
Cobalt 60 is the radioactive deadly form of Cobalt. It is formed when Cobalt 59 (non radioactive form, the salt) absorbs a neutron from a fission of fusion . It has the following decays: Beta .317 MeV decay, Gamma 1.1732 MeV decay, Gamma 1.3325 MeV. These gammas are extremely high energy. I worked at Crystal River Nuclear Plant for 25 years. Our FSAR did not allow the use of alloys containing Cobalt 59 or Nickel 60 in the reactor building. It was explained to me by our health physics department that cobalt 60 is the 1,000,000 volt power line of gammas.
Yup; Colbalt and nickel were used in valve seats. As they wore out that stuff would up in the resin beds. You did not want to be near those filters, unless you were over 50.
The plus side of the high energy is that it interacts with matter less frequently, so it more likely will pass right through you compared to lower energy
Here's a terrifying fact about Cobalt-60: If you ever see a rod of the stuff, it will likely have a warning printed on it. That warning will literally tell you to drop the rod, run away, and notify authorities.
@@nicklasveva Probably not as U-235 is nowhere near as dangerous. It has a half life of 700 million years, meaning its radioactive activity is minimal compared to Co-60 with a half life of 5.3ish years. On google you can even see images of people holding plates of U-235
@@nicklasveva You should of course - I was referencing the feature of a warning being printed on it as I thought you were. Besides I doubt anyone would find a lump of shiny metal and immediately assume it's radioactive - and it is extremely unlikely that it'd ever get out of the right people's hands anyways.
Minor correction at 3:50: you wouldn't use Gold-198, Tantalum-182, Zinc-65 or Cobalt-60 in the bomb, but rather it's what you're aiming to create in the explosion. You would use Gold-197, Tantalum-181, Zinc-64 or Cobalt-59 in the bomb. Though, you do self-correct later in the video in the case of cobalt.
@@Lohanujuanand yet it is his channel and the script is written by his employee, if your mcdonalds order was wrong and you told the manager, would he just say “well tell my employee.” Or would they address and or correct the issue?
I think it was Oppenheimer who listed size and type of weapons with their delivery systems. For a very large salted bomb he just put “backyard”… he realised that it didn’t matter where on the planet it was detonated. The end result would be the same.
Thank you. I was wondering if this was what the Backyard Bomb referred to. I knew it was named as such since it didn't matter the location but didn't know if it was tied to a specific type of bomb
This is a paraphrased quote from the Sci-Fi novel “Neverness” by David Zindell: “We walk the brink of racial destruction because we are smart enough to build Nuclear weapons and stupid enough to use them”. A very good book if anyone fancies reading it!!
"Say to them: Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.” from: The Orchestra by William Carlos Williams (used in the Desert Music by Steve Reich).
Random question, would you rather survive through a nuclear wasteland, a zombie apocalypse, or an earth affected by major temperature shifts (all deserts, flooded areas, or frozen lands)
@@WhuDhat nuclear wasteland would only let me live a short time because of radiation poisoning, zombie-bois don't do a real, so I suppose climate change is the most likely to be able to survive the longest.
@@yacker7226 Zombies are possible...they just wouldn't be much of a threat. It'll never be a virus (because viruses don't operate that way, at all), or a bacteria (unless it were somehow a communal lifeform and lived in "hives"). Most likely it would be a parasitic fungus like a relative or mutation of cordyceps. It's spores would invade the body and begin growing tendrils through your own nerves, consuming and replacing them as it does, killing your body and animating the remains once it reaches your brain. . As a fungus, it would continue to feed on your decaying corpse (likely decaying somewhat faster as a result) as it shambled around blindly and randomly in search of more victims. It's not that it wouldn't be able to perceive what your senses could relay to the fungal "nerves", it's that as your body decayed, those senses would just cease to operate. Your eyes would cloud over and go blind, your ear drums would fall apart and you'd go deaf, the cilia in your nose would be gone almost immediately, making you unable to smell (probably a good thing, as a rotting corpse). The only thing you'd kind of have would be touch. . Odds are, the spores would be transmitted by inflicting any kind of open would with any part of its infected flesh. Splintered bone from a compound fracture, a bite, a scratch from exposed finger bones or broken fingernails. Or any of their gunk landing on an open wound or getting in your eyes or mouth or other opening. The real horror would be if the spores became airborne. . But, even then, infection would take a damned long time, and would probably be relatively easy to treat, unless it was somehow drug-resistant for really no reason. And still then, the zombies themselves would be so trivially simple to dispatch relatively safely, and they couldn't coordinate or even actually hunt anyone at all, that some decent protective gear would really be sufficient to survive. Zombies would be unable to hunt anyone down, would only be marginally mobile for a week or two at most, and within a matter of weeks would be completely decomposed. . The real problem then would be dormant spores constantly causing new outbreaks of zombies. There'd never be a way to get rid of them on a global scale. Either a cure would have to be found, or everyone would have to mask-up...forever. Especially if it got airborne. Then it could actually turn into a zombie apocalypse. It would never result in the end of humanity of civilization, but it would be an endless Hell of minor zombie infestations.
I used to weld Tantalum. There’s no forgiveness like in other non-ferrous metals (titanium, zirconium, inconel, etc.). You mess up the bead, you throw the piece out. This was often used in heat exchangers that would be in an extremely corrosive environment. If the environment was too corrosive, we would apply platinum dots as a sacrificial; meaning the product would attack the platinum first, before eventually attacking the Tantalum.
"I know not with what weapons World War 3 will be fought but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones" - Albert Einstein Also, we can produce anti-matter. All we need is better containment to trump any nuclear bomb ever created. We could literally "delete" things from existence forever in an annihilation.
The time Simon dedicates to the content across all of these channels is near unfathomable. It seems as if he must always be filming. I have absolutely 0 idea how he has that sort of energy (particularly social energy), it's incredibly impressive. Thanks to everyone behind this content, I've learned so many (horrible) things.
"On The Beach" was such a good book that when I joined the U.S. Navy I sited it as one of the things that influenced me to volunteer to become a NUC submariner.
@L S gotta search than. He read audiobooks before he became a UA-camr. Even wrote one himself. 8 don't remember what about I just found out about it when I searched Simon Whistler and found a really old interview from the before TIFO times. You know the dark ages when Simon had hair
@L S it's okay, if it helps, I never paid attention to appearances when seeking a mate. Personality is where it's at, since that's generally a mainstay of the relationship while appearance is not.
Great video as usual, thanks. I feel I want to just add this little detail. At 2:06 Simon states: "Although hydrogen bombs, which fall into the fusion category, typically include multi stages, which can include a fission stage..." Actually H-bombs are not typically multi stage weapons, they are always multi stage weapons (two stages usually). Also, it's not that they "can include a fission stage", it's that they must include a fission stage (as the primary). It is only mechanism powerful enough to start the fusion reaction (in the secondary stage) en-masse.
I was a advanced reader for my age when I read on the beach for the first time when I was nine. I'm a cold war child and still remember duck and cover drills. I just couldn't fathom mutual assured destruction and nobody wants t discuss a topic like this with a child. Even now I could go home and I remember where every fallout shelter is.
Ry show !!!!!! You knocked it out the field with that come back !!!. Lol I'm no joke going to see what this ry show is all about right now. Ill give you shot !! Lol ! But seriously this is sum scary stuff (LoL) to think about and could honestly happen 1 day in are life time !!! One thing I have learned is nothing last forever; and Man builds many tall beautiful objects, buildings,statuses,brigades, society,law and order!!! But man is also destroyers. Nothing that man has ever built from beginning of human time has lasted longer than a couple of years. This is because of human nature. Man is still a animal . No matter how much you dress up a pig ! A pig is still a pig. A human is a human. The way we live are life's and the way we interact with each other is unnatural. The are life's are scheduled and organized is unnatural. We are not ment to be in buildings (which are nothing but large cages) working and living. We are ment to live in packs and tight nit villages, and live in a way we everyone actions effects everyone and everyone action and jobs are just as important as anyone's else. Were everyone's work is praised. This is why I believe there is so much mental health and illness !!!! I believe are diets and just daily routine are not in line with are mind and body. And we live in a unnatural ways which cause stresses that are bodys are not ment to deal with. That is why we need to get back to the way we were living. Like even just a 100 years ago. Small towns and even big towns. Everyone knew everyone and everyone respected everyone. People would talk to each other. Neighbors talked to each other and ate together ( even if they didn't like each other) there were Neighborhoods watches (which in most cases they didn't even need, but for small things like dogs who ate chickens) and family functions. Poeple wanted to be together and live together. But know a days. Its every man for there self. Poeple don't make real friends these days. They just talk to you because they can use you or want something and once they get it they are gone forever. Kids don't know how to make lasting friendships and this is from media and the way of life. Which is a shame because they are going to miss out on life. And see there real joy in life is the small things and simple times where you watch a little kid lean to catch his first football or watch a wild animal just graze through the grass.we are doing a poor job raising are chilling and preparing them for life. We are doing a poorer job showing the world how to live in peace and how to raise your family and how to live a modern-day life. We are not being good leaders. Things must change for the better or things will just keep getting worst. War is really a option and nothing is forever
One of my favorite parts of all of Simon's channels is that even though he films all the videos in the same office space, he does them all at a camera angle and posture thats specific to each channel so you know which channel you're on even between the channels he uses his professional announcer voice on like this one
I read "On the Beach" and "Fail Safe" when I was in high school in the early '70's, and had nightmares about WWIII for many years after. A Co-60 bomb was also a plot element in one of the "Planet of the Apes" movies, as I recall. I wonder, how many people have died prematurely of cancer because of atmospheric testing of nukes before such tests were banned? Got to be tens of thousands by now. And at least that many more will be the eventual cost of the (totally preventable) Chernobyl accident.
In early 1960s a friend who i loved like a Dad before passing from cancer told of the cobslt bomb. That it could destroy the world. It was beyond my comprehension RIP MR BROWNING.
Well yes and no. Dead Hand is a fail-deadly system. Basically, a second-strike guarantee to protect against a decapitation strike. Around Moscow are various sensors. One being a luminosity sensor, one a simple radio receiver, and most likely a seismic, since nuclear weapons create a wave unlike anything else. If a warhead hit Moscow, the Dead Hand would go hot. It would listen for the radio signal, which is nothing more than Radio Moscow. If it found no signal, and the luminosity sensor detected a flash, it would wait a certain amount of time to make sure it wasn't a bad sensor or something, and if all the parameters were met it would then send the go code to the launch facilities. The US has the same, sort of. It's not a fail-deadly system though. It's called the ERCS. If, in the event of all leadership being taken out, which is highly unlikely, and the destruction of all other comms being unable to transmit the order, a missile with a comms package would launch from Vandenburg, fly over the US, transmitting the order. It still takes humans to input the codes, but it's more of a fail-safe than an automatic response, unlike Dead Hand.
The Emergency Rocket Communication System (ERCS) was deactivated in 1991. ERCS was to put a communication package into low earth orbit to broadcast a message to Strategic Air Command (SAC) units for a response. SAC was decommissioned in 1992 so there is no ERCS or SAC so your claim that the U.S. has some automatic system for launching an attack called ERCS is not true.
@@buckhorncortez Well I guess that'll be your little secret then. Don't get hung up on names. SAC never went anywhere. Only the name has changed. As did the ERCS. It's now the ALCS. As I said in my comment, it's not an auto-launch system in any sense of the word. The NCA would still need a human to initiate the system, and still need humans sitting in LCFs to punch it in. It's simply a means of sending the go code if every other asset, like TACAMO, Nightwatch, Looking Glass, and our sats were knocked out in a first strike. In no way was it or is it, an automatic response.
Simon does a great job, i grew up in a scientific community, my father and my neighbors were research scientists/professors, i can relate two stories about Cobalt60, first i was a 16 year old living in Bedford in the spring of 1966 my Father and i drove over to Cambridge where they had a cobalt 60 source where i would help my father ZAP bacteria spores with sub lethal doses of gamma radiation, i actually did the irradiating of the samples the other story was a year and half later back in Illinois as a junior in high school i walked to a neighbor two houses away and asked him "What is a dirty bomb?" my neighbor worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project developing the first atomic bomb he was a Harvard Phd in physics---- he answered "Tom you take a fission bomb and sheath it with 22 feet if cobalt 60" and he went back to reading his physics publications that was back in 1967 i still remember that conversation.
I have used Cobalt 60 to X-ray big thick metal things, usually I just x-ray normal pipe welds with Iridium 192, but for things very thick up to a few feet thick we use Cobalt because it's Rays penetrate deeper and thru denser materials
Actually they dont even need to salt their bombs. Staged nuclear warheads can do the same. Three or four staged thermonuclear warheads can cause long term radiation like a saltes bomb. That why this concept is outdated now.
Back in the '80's, I remember scientists commenting on the absurdity of nuclear war. They said "MAD" (Mutual Assured Destruction) was the WRONG assessment of full scale nuclear war. Instead, the correct moniker was "SAD" (Self Assured Destruction) This implied that even if one side did not retaliate, the nuclear fallout would be so extensive as to destroy the world, including the country launching the nukes.
That's been largely debunked. Although society would be in a very bad spot, with a good chunk of humanity dying out, there really isn't a world ending threat. We're talking about major cities being blown out, with large swaths of land becoming uninhabitable, and a very ugly struggle for food and water for population numbers that can't support itself anymore. All industries severely disrupted.
@@greenl7661 No, it would be MAD and SAD, with hundreds of 1000MT devices aimed at major cities, it basically covers the entire planet. So no point being fearful of nukes, the only thing to fear would be suffering in the fallout zones, rather than taken out by the initial blast.
@@tensevo ..no, it wouldn't. Unless you're in a big city you'd die due to infighting for last remaining bits of food. If you local population isn't super dense, you have supply of food and water, you'd likely survive the 'apocalypse'.
@@tensevo It depends; were it a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, other parts of the world like Europe, West Africa and the Eastern Americas could survive due to distance from Asia (albiet life would be changed forever for everyone) - were it between the United States and all its allies vs the neo-Soviet union+China then yeah game over.
Simon... You make an erroneous assumption at the end by assuming it is ONLY the USA and Russia that might use them. I suspect it is the small and even non-nation state actors that are the real problem.
Yeah. This is the "Mad Scientist Postulate". One of the central aspects of all technology from livestock to the atomic age is it puts an increased amount of energy in the hands of the individual. The Mad Scientist Postulate argues that human technology will rise until it reaches the point where a sufficiently small number insane or irrational actors can destroy all the productive capacity of the rest of the world. Once designer viruses or home built fusion bombs are in the range of technology a person has available in their basement, you can no longer assume that rational self-interest will prevent that person from doing more harm than all the rational self-interested people can prevent or repair.
Sort of True. It was Britain and Australia playing with Cobalt bombs. A less developed country or terrorists would need a supply of uranium or plutonium and enrichment capability.
It's only a matter of time before an attempt is made. It could be centuries, but all you need is the combination of the technology and the willingness either due to religious or meglomaniacal reasons. EG religious: because the world has gone to the devil, and that rather than to go down to defeat, "cleanse the world of the opponent's devil cult". EG meglomania- Rather than go down to defeat the meglomaniac presses the button on the cobalt weapon saying- If I can't have the world, then no one else can either. (I am still all powerful because regardless what my opponents do- they lose either way.) Concievably, an international regimen of rigorous inspections could be put in place to stall this scenario, but it would require strong cooperation between all nuclear powers.
Some Israelis have spoken of "The Samson Option", which is a theoretical plan to bring down the rest of the world in the case where the home country is facing extinction; basically holding the world hostage to ensure your own survival. Such a plan would be a good candidate to keep an eye on for cobalt bombs or other doomsday devices. Rational actors need not continue to be rational once they feel they have nothing to lose.
The best apocalyptic post nuclear war book I have read is "Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald. The hero of the book is known only by his number. You never get any character's names or even know what country they are from. All you know is that tensions have grown, they go underground, a push-button nuclear war is fought, and ... well, then the rest. The book is stunning for me because of how much pathos you come to feel for the main character without ever knowing his name or what country he fights for.
Minor correction here: It's incorrect to say that fusion weapons "can include a fission stage", but rather they absolutely ALWAYS do. The fusion stage is triggered by a fission primary, it doesn't work any other way.
I love that book and its adaptations. The endings are arguably happier than in "Threads." And the book was better than similar books like "Alas, Babylon." Somehow it had a happy ending.
Threads could ruin your life for years. A great movie but I cannot recommend it to anyone because I don't want to be responsible for its impact. I used to watch the Day After for entertainment again and again, wow look at those explosions, zap people getting vapourised, yay! Threads? My god no!
Jeeze, Simon, thanks for reigniting my fears from the 60's. I grew up an hour away from a first strike by target. Over the years I've learned to never underestimate the hatred or stupidity or greed of the human species. We're a pitiable bunch.
I'm currently about a 3-hour drive more or less downwind of Oak Ridge... On the bright side, if a nuke was to land in my back yard, I wouldn't have to worry much about regretting the politicians that led to it coming... ;o)
It's for this reason I've spent my entire adult life within striking distance of one, or most often several, primary targets. That way, my brain will be vaporized before any pain of the heat hitting my skin can reach the brain. No pain. I won't know much in advance that it's coming (probably).
Be surprised what a ground zero target is because it is not always military targets or cities. Sometimes it is small towns that sit on top of transportation junctions for multiple roads, highways, freeways, and rail, plus all of the power/telecom grip that typically follows transportation links.
I've spent my entire life living next primary targets, and at this point I've accepted and am glad that I'll most likely die in the flash, should it ever kick off.
"On the Beach" was in our living room bookshelf throughout my childhood in Los Alamos. In high school I finally took the time to read it. Though I lived in the birthplace of the A-bomb, I had never heard of cobalt bombs until I read the novel.
I read a book "Level 7", they were the last surviving humans at the bottom of the shelter of some kind. Yes, they died too. It's maybe fourty years later, and I still remember.
I remember reading On the Beach and other books like it in the 70s where scenarios were discussed using salted bombs. It scared the crap out of me tbh and the details and possible permutations were spelled out most gruesomely. And it seemed inevitable. Dare to hope. Dare to act.
Well, during cold war Ukraine WAS part of Soviet union, so when talking about cold war era stuff, it's not entirely wrong... If he simply googled "soviet monument" for picture, this could be easily made mistake. (honestly, even I, living in postcomunist country, couldn't tell it's not something in Russia... I actually thought it's just some cgi to give it proper feeling)
I'm kind of disturbed by the fact that cobalt bombs are so overwhelmingly powerful and horrifying that nobody has even _made_ one yet. Not even as just a threatening bluff.
They haven't been made because they're ridiculously overblown. Pure fiction. Everyday nuclear weapons used in a ground burst produce such lethal fallout it would be a waste of money and effort to put cobalt in any of them. That's what the experts say. Not just my opinion. No need to find yet more to be scared of when the current mundane reality should be terrifying to anyone with any sense. You don't need cobalt bombs to exterminate the human species. The same old bombs we've had since the 60s are more than up to the job.
Honestly, thanks for bringing back memories from my adolescence around 1970, when I first heard about Cobalt Bombs---and haven't heard mention of since. On a far cheerier note (that you briefly covered) cobalt is used in (at least) three different blue pigments: 1. Cobalt Aluminate (standard cobalt blue), 2. Cobalt Phosphate (what Windsor/Newton uses in cobalt blue dark, and 3. Cobalt Stannate (cerulean blue). All of them are lovely.
Also, the conversion to the radioactive form happens after bombardment by neutrons, not neutrium. I thought he might be using neutrium as a neologism for a gas of neutrons, but a Google search reveals that neutrium (or more frequently neutronium) is sometimes used to describe the extremely dense material inside of neutron stars, not the sort of hot stream of neutrons that you would get from a nuclear bomb.
I really liked this. I reminded me of another Science Fiction story. In the story scientists had managed to create a form of anti-matter fueled bomb. The bomb was not stable enough to place into a missle and lob at others, but instead the military had decided to create a series of bombs as a sort of deadman's switch, the ultimate MAD. So if the US was attacked the devices would go off. And the yield on the bombs and placement underground were so great the resulting cloud of radioactive dust thrown into the air would ensure a cold, radioactive death to the planet. And the bombs were built to essentially be armed and no one could in theory disarm them. You've all read that type of doomsday story. So in the story one scientist was drinking heavily in a bar unloading this ultimate secret of this existence of 50 such bombs on one of his friends, has was numb at the revelation and being told as he friend was obviously crossing the line saying anything. But then the kicker came in. Due to the interactions of magnectic fields keeping the anti-matter safe and aspects of quantum mechanics, there was a small chance every year that an atom of antimatter would get by the fields strike material and effectively self-detonate the bomb. But initially they calculated the odds of that being so low as any bomb would likely last a thousand years before it randomly went off (good enough for politicians). But they went and built 50 of these devices. And since each had a random chance each year of detonating the odds were 50-50 that in the next 20 years one would trigger the end of the world, randomly. And all they could do was sit, and wait, and hope....
An antimatter bomb, if you could create the antimatter, would be far more dangerous to the user than to the intended recipient. Antimatter in quantities visible to the human eye is the most dangerous stuff in the universe, which is why no one will ever atempt to make it. If a quantity the size of a pin head came into contact with matter, it would explode with the force of a blockbuster bomb, and keeping matter and antimatter apart is almost impossible.
I think you have to prime a fusion warhead with a fission explosion. They used to use a separate bomb to trigger the splitting of atoms, and then the fusion warhead facilitated the process of the atoms fusing into tritium and deuterium.
I remember commenting about the Belgarod sub and it's intercontinental nuclear tsunami torpedo on one of your mega-projects videos. Glad to see you ran into that weapons system when researching this video.
Haha, my high school chemistry teacher told us how to theoretically make these back in 1998 or so. He even drew us pictures. I wrote it all down. Ahh, memories. That teacher also liked to tell crazy stories about wrestling alligators while skydiving, or how he had all his fingers burned off with acid one time even though he actually had all his fingers as far as I could tell. But the cobalt bomb thing I knew was theoretically plausible because I looked it up myself afterward. I just realised Mr. Hughes is probably dead by now. That sucks. He was cool.
I wonder how many teachers will die not knowing the effect they had on us. I’m going to go to my old high school and thank some of my old ones, while I still can
I’m surprised that there was no mention of there ‘Alpha and Omega’ bomb in the original Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Which had a cobalt casing, according to one of the characters.
Also Auric Goldfinger tried to use a cobalt bomb to irradiate Ft. Knox. Really didn't need to as the gold is Au 196, and the 197 isotope is radioactive. Au 196 is the only stable isotope of gold. Longest half life for gold is 12 days, with the shortest in nanoseconds.
Now I live in a world that when I wake up the first thing I do is I check the news on my phone to see if a nuke has been dropped. Great times to live in
Don't my friend. We all have a personal clock ticking towards death anyways. Find peace and enjoy you're freaking life bro ✝️🙂 (I know that last bit might feel impossible but if I can, after witnessing devastating traumatic events, you can too- take steps toward peace... steps.)
Hi Marko..wow, similar thing with me except I turn on non-cable tv to a news channel first thing in the morning. I live a couple of miles from a primary target large military base, so, if the world goes stupid all I will see is a bright flash and then turn into a cloud of disassociated atoms. I have heart felt worry for the survivors who will not live long anyways. smh...😥
@@brandonhoffman4712 Im not sure there are adequate defenses against some of the new missile technologies. Especially for example SWARM missiles that can fractionalize
Why would you put a smile emoji after saying that? If nuclear weapons are used during this Russian war things will change so much that the shutdowns during Covid will look like nothing
A standard-issue hydrogen bomb has four explosive stages: The first stage is the chemical explosive that compresses the fissile material to start stage two, the fission trigger. Radiation and explosive vaporization of a shell compresses and heats a deuterium-tritium mixture to the the fusion point, starting stage three. Some neutrons from the fusion hit lithium and produce more tritium. Some neutrons from the fusion hit a depleted uranium wrapper causing U-238 to fission, the fourth stage. H-bombs the omit the fourth stage are called neutron bombs. They have a much higher radiation/blast ratio.
I read a short fiction story this week about Russian's automated system getting triggered by the US using 18 older missiles (clearing out their stockpile to get funding for new ones) as counter-missile weapons against a North Korean missile (launched for pride) that the Russian system didn't pick up. It's just the kind of posturing, bureaucratic nonsense that I could see happening, which made it painful to read.
Fusion is only possible in multiple stage devices, it requires a certain amount of heat. Basically a bomb will start out as fission to produce the heat required for fusion. If I remember right the Tsar Bomba was one such device. After testing it Russia never tried to make one bigger or repeat the process. I'm sure they manufactured more devices on the down low but they never tested more.
Great video and interesting. Cobalt bombs have appeared in popular media a few times. One of the best examples, being in Metro Exodus after was used on Novosibirsk by the USA.
"It would be crazy, it would be insane, it would be like blowing up your house to cook an egg" And six months later we have Putin acting veeeery insane. Living far away from major population centers, I've always expected to probably live if nuclear war happens. But Russia being led by a declining madman who also happens to be the one person in the world most likely to possess a cobalt bomb is not encouraging.
If there's ever an all out nuclear war it will be a total extinction event for the entire planet. All life will die. It is technically impossible for us to build any shelter from the fallout where we could survive long enough for the radiation level to decrease to safe levels. The experiments conducted to do that sort of thing have all failed. Staying alive be hard.
@@1pcfred If everyone were using dirty bombs like cobalt bombs, then *maybe* you could make the argument that nearly all humans would die, or nearly all terrestrial vertebrates maybe. But with normal nuclear/thermonuclear arms, generally airbursted, there would be nowhere near enough fallout to kill everyone. Global weather patterns will not spread it equally, either. So it's almost certain that not even all humans would die. Probably not even *most* humans. And there's *no way*, even with widespread cobalt bombs specifically placed to distribute fallout everywhere by some crazy supervillain, that all life on Earth would die. If nothing else, plenty of microbial life would survive, and there would remain many refuges for multicellular life too. Underground, inside of glaciers, portions of the ocean floor, microbial life in the atmosphere, etc...
@@delphicdescant it is possible that you simply do not fully appreciate the threat nuclear war poses. That would be down to a lack of knowledge or understanding. It is a topic that we don't really deal with in our day to day existence. Yet there are still facts out there if one seeks them out. Suffice to say in a total nuclear exchange this planet will be lifeless. You need to accept that as a fact. One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. 14,000 nuclear bombs and it's game over. But things are better today than they were. We used to have 70,000 nukes.
@@1pcfred I appreciate the conversation, but I do not have to "simply accept" what some youtube commenter insists. Nuclear fallout, and the risks of elevated radiation in general, is massively sensationalized in popular culture and on the internet, as I'm sure you can tell. However, I *can* rely on my physics degree and a calculator. No matter how many warheads exist, there aren't enough launching facilities to deploy them all before launching equipment is destroyed by counterattack. Launching facilities would, of course, be among the first targets. So only a small fraction of all existing warheads would actually get used in a MAD scenario. BUT, even if it were somehow possible to put all of existing warheads into the air at once, assuming that they're conventional thermonuclear devices meant for air bursting and not intentionally dirty ones, that would *still* not produce enough fallout to end all life on the planet. I'm not sure what calculations you're relying on, though, or what kind of radiation density you're considering "fatal to all life." If nothing else, surely you'd agree that the extremophile life living in the Chernobyl plant itself, literally subsisting off of the elevated radiation levels, is a counterexample to what you're saying, right?
@@oliverlaw02 Oh well doooooone, you've caught up with everyone else on the planet who've know where they got their name from for the last four decades.......
What a great video! You translated very technical terms into minutes and days and so on that makes it easy to understand just how deadly these bombs are. Let's hope that diverse groups of people work and discover ways of getting along with each other. Humans helping humans is the basic concept.
Some kids in Brazil found some cool looking stuff in a garbage dump. They opened it up and found some really neat looking blue stuff and played with it. Turns out it was some X-ray equipment with Cobalt-60 and they died.
That was just awful. It was a couple of adults looking for things they could sell. Unfortunately for all concerned, the contents of the container they chose were highly radioactive.
As a former nuclear warrior, this piece stirs up a nasty brew of memories. That we are all still around is a constant amazement and ongoing reaffirmation of Frank Zappa's maxim " There will never be a nuclear war because there is too much real estate involved ". Or as I like to put it, a war that kills or impoverishes even the most wealthy will never be allowed to happen. But then there is the universal tendency of human systems to malfunction, often at the worst possible time. Like I said, I'm constantly amazed we are still around, and would not be the least bit surprised to see a blinding flash in the sky at any moment. Nuclear PTSD anyone?
A friend's dad worked on the tests at Maralinga. While driving through the desert one day, his geiger counter went beserk. He stopped and found some metal balls, put them in a tobacco tin, then headed back to camp. When he got there everyone was running about in a panic, as all the counters were registering the approach of his find. The balls were Cobalt 60. He said it was so radioactive they had to put it in a lead box and stand a few yards away with their counters to get any sort of meaningful measurement.
The real question isn't what prompted his less than genius level response to finding them. It's where the h#ll did they come from - who made them - why? - and how the f@ck did they end up lying loose in the desert, unsecured, for your father to just pick up and take off with ?? Did someone decide that just pitching them out in the desert was an adequate way to dispose of them ??
@@jackreisewitz6632 handling that is more expensive and difficult due to being radioactive with a long half life so some places that use/used colbat 60 like hospitals for certain machines sometimes irresponsibly and illegally deal with it by leaving it in far away spots. theres been cases where the machines are sold for scrap without the radioactive stuff being removed after years in storage. as for this specific case its most likely knowingly dumped so some group didnt have to be responsible for it and figured some forgotten patch of desert was a solid place to do it.
@8:00 Is it just me or did anyone else get worried that Simon was putting out a blueprint for how a super villain could destroy the Earth?!? We've got too many Lex Luthor's on this planet & no Superman to rescue us
0:38 Simon of 2021: It is a tale of impending doom and heartbreak.. and thankfully it has never come close to even remotely happening..." 2022: Hold my beer...
Even saying it hasn't come close to happening is wrong because it very much has. There are a scary amount of stories where people almost fired their nukes from false alarms. All it takes is one dumbass and one false alarm and everyone dies.
Humans don't currently possess the power or mental fortitude to end the world, only life as we know it. The world was here 4.2 billion years before we crawled upon its surface and will most likely exist at least 4.2 billion years after humans evolved into whatever comes next. Our world was struck by an exo-planet which ripped the planet in two, giving us our moon. Yet the world just reformed into a ball and kept on trucking! I highly doubt we could do worse in the next 1,000 years if we tried our best.
Most developed nation will use fusion bombs, due to need to limiting the size of the weapon and assuring a decent yield. For neutron bomb this is more complicated to know. One interest of neutron bomb would be to stop (Russian) armored divisions, indeed a strong neutron flux could pass the armor of the tank and kill the crew. The French had developed the Pluton and Hades theater missiles to use from the French border on Russian advancing tanks (on German soil...). There is an interview of Mitterrand at the time from where one could hint those warheads could be neutron bombs... but nothing more, was the shrewd man playing one of his games or hinting a secret? It is possible to switch mode in nuclear weapons from different yield to "neutron bomb?" do countries with huge arsenals field neutron warheads? All this obviously classified information.
They are all fission weapons. They are boosted with fusion. There is no fusion bomb, or clean bomb. Even if they say it is " clean" they still have to use fission for the several million degrees to create fusion. They are all "boosted" fission weapons. A neutron bomb is a small yield thermonuclear weapon with a tamper that is transparent to neutrons with a very sharp cutoff of about 1000 yards. The weapon still destroys property it is just smaller and relies on radiation to kill. Most of the weapons use a mix of fission fusion fission. They go for like half and half. They made a few that were 90 percent clean but all of the weapons in the arsenal are "dirty".
@@pietristephane3537 The US does not have any neutron bombs. It never has. Before the planned neutron bombs could be fielded it was discovered that ordinary humidity in the atmosphere limited the neutron radiation to the same distance as the fireball. Thus the neutron enhancement was cancelled out, and they would have no more effect than the regular warheads. End of program.
@@KB4QAA read the other day that a large part of the non existent Israeli nuclear inventory has a large percentage of ERW warheads; non existent of course.
@@blindlemon9 so let me get this straight… his voice annoys you yet you come here to do what exactly? Hate comment? Hate view? If you hate him that much the fuck are you doing here?
JFI: The CSIRO, the Australian government’s biggest scientific research organisation, announced about 20years ago. They said that owing to nuclear testing in Maralinga, Australia, during the 1950s to 1963, I believe, about 20,000 extra still born deaths were attributed to the nuclear testing. The incidence of childhood leukaemia also increased substantially at this time. Now you say a cobalt salted device was tested in the country I live in with about 27 million others. The original inhabitants suffered more than any other group in our country. This is a blot on our land left by our ‘allies’ and colonial overlords.
Yes! Every time I find a new Simon channel I start watching in fear wondering if it’s “normal” Simon demeanor or “douchebag” Simon demeanor This is great!
Salting aside, there is a misconception about fusion or 'H' bombs. The fusion part is still really part of the 'trigger'. The main destructive force is still provided by fission - the heavy outer casings are uranium ('depleted, or un-enriched). The fusion reaction in the core (caused by an intermediate fission reaction of plutonium) releases an immense cloud of neutrons that hit the containment vessel and cause it to undergo the massive fission reaction that yields the bulk of the energy. See Teller-Ulam configuration.
Current tech is boosted fission (so conventional - fission - added fusion from d and t gas - more fission THEN thermonuclear since all that stuff was a trigger to create heat and pressure inside the shell. Also inside the shell is a fusion bomb that is the "real" thermonuclear part. Otherwise you still have pretty limited yields. No limit on how many iterations you can use for boosting. Packaging is the constraint. Huge bombs are physically huge due to multi stage boosting. Small-ish warheads are boosted fission, encased. Medium (ICBM) are two components in shell with first being more complicated.
Depends on the design of the bomb. Castle Bravo ran away to 15 megatons instead of the expected 4 or 5 because some morons miscalculated the fusion potential of lithium deuteride. It was the fusion fuel that made it the hugest bomb ever detonated by the USA, not boosted fission. The Teller-Ulam configuration merely calls for using the x-ray "pressure" of the fission primary to initiate the fusion secondary. Meaning it uses the high-energy photons of x-rays to get fusion started before anything else can happen. It does not concern fission casings or anything of the sort. Simply a way of initiating fusion in the fuel before the blast of the primary dissipates the fuel too much for sustained fusion to occur.
What i can't comprehend is the thought of anyone thinking they are high and mighty enough to think they have the right to end the world. That they alone have the right to end all life of even the innocent. All of nature. The arrogance of anyone who thinks this is there call to make. Just incomprehensible to me. I can only imagine the hate and superiority they must feel. No one like this should ever be in a position to make such judgments.
So after everything is taken from us and we lose half the population due to radiation poisoning, we won't be making much more noise about that after all. And Millenia later, something else will see it's own day, just like we did before we dropped the ball.
Isn’t it weird. Imagine if sharks spent all their time and energy designing and building something that would kill all sharks. That’s basically what human beings have done with nuclear weapons. It’s just the universe is most expensive suicide packed
It’s arguably more a factor in that how wars are fought has changed. trench warfare is truly dead for the mainstay. And with modern communication/social ideas the general populace is more likely to put up a fuss with any war that effects them in their country instead of just someone else’s country.
@@robertmccully2792 True, and how long do you think that will last? And now we have thousands of weapons that can kill a couple of billion people.. We have been extremely lucky. Whether it’s in 10 years or 50 years or 100 years or more, one of these bombs is going to go off either by mistake or on purpose and the worlds nuclear powers aren’t going to spend time trying to calmly and rationally figure out what has happened, some of them almost certainly will launch at whoever they are currently pissed off with assuming the worst. And then it’s on. Mutually asured destruction is still on the table, all it takes is to come up against somebody who doesn’t care. Imagine if a Hitler type or a bin laden got their hands on a nuclear weapon? Do you think they care about self-destruction? Nope. The bill always comes at the end.
@@nathnathn populations always had a problem with the impact of wars on their own country. That’s the whole point of propaganda to keep morale up when a war is being waged on your territory or otherwise. But yes, obviously the way wars are waged are different. Now it’s just mostly done from a distance, much easier to kill people you never see burst into pieces or scream. Especially if you can sit in some office on the other side of the world while you do it.
@@conors4430 >the worlds nuclear powers aren’t going to spend time trying to calmly and rationally figure out what has happened I disagree, they're not all idiots you know, at least not in the way you might think. First off countries around the world have put a LOT of effort into figuring out how to tell when nuclear weapons are being launched, by who, and why, specifically to stop a single spark from lighting everything up. Nuclear weapons are primarily a means of global grandstanding, I can guarantee you that in most future conflicts nuclear weapons will not even be an option to be considered, because we don't fight that way anymore, they didn't deploy nukes in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria because there was no point. This whole assumption that one spark can set everything off is a gross misunderstanding of how the major global powerhouses operate and what they actually want, but I can tell you what they don't want is a problem that will affect everyone. While the possiblity that nuclear weapons may be used against actual targets in the future is fairly likely considering they aren't going away, the chances of a nuclear armageddon are INCREDIBLY low, any rogue player can easily be eliminated by the big powers before they get a chance to end the world, and you can bet your ass that in a world practically ruled by wealthy businessmen, bankers and billionaire parasites who are currently trying their best to figure out how they can keep living and being rich forever that it's in no one's intrest to end the world just yet, once they get the space stations and offworld colonies then maybe, but I wouldn't hold my breath, it's going to be a while. In the mean time you can look forward to a limited nuclear exchange, might come sooner than you think with China being ready for war in about 4 years or so, the Russian Status 6 nuclear powered torpedo armed with a high yield nuclear warhead most likely is a thing too, it's still up for speculation whether they're planning on using it to wreck NATO carrier strike groups in the event of a war or if they've just created a weapon capable of causing massive and entirely unexpected radioactive tsunamis, but the torpedos and the subs meant to carry them are well on their way. The Cold War never really ended, however we can still hope that it doesn't turn hot.
My Dad was in the USAF in the 1960s. He once told me that they had a cobalt bomb, but were afraid to test it because "they are afraid it will blow up the world".
Here's the reason cobalt weapons have never been produced. They're lower yield and radiologically less potent than conventional thermonukes. Let's take a secondary with a 1MT fusion yield and a neutron flux of 5e23 neutrons/cm^2, and compare the effects using a 25g/cm^2 tamper made of U-238 vs Co59. Co-59's radiative capture cross section to 14.07 MeV neutrons is 0.00116869Bn. This means only 0.0255 of the neutrons are attenuated. This means only 0.0127g/cm^2 of your cobalt would be transmuted, or about 0.1% of the total cobalt in your bomb. This would produce a total Co-60 yield of 0.092kg of Co-60. In total this would produce around 200Gj of delayed gammas. U-238's fission capture cross section to 14.07 MeV neutrons is 0.632414Bn. This means 4% of neutrons are attenuated. This means 7.9g/cm^2 of your uranium would be fissioned, or about 31.6% of the total uranium in the tamper. This would add another 2 MT to the yield, and produce a total of 115kg of fission products, which will release 270 Tj of delayed gammas. A conventional thermonuke of the same mass produces on the order of thousand times more energy as delayed gamma radiation, as well as producing a blast 3 times as powerful.
This is precisely why the Soviets used a lead tamper for the Tsar bomba. A U238 tamper would have lead to a 300 MT yield (as opposed to "only" 50 MT), and insane levels of fallout, much of which would've landed in Russia itself.
Plot twist, why not both? A tripple stage thermonuclear device with a regular uranium casing delivered on a barge full of lithium cobalt oxide loaded graphite. (The stuff in lithium batteries) Conversion would be extremely efficient plus you get your bang as well. Lets hope it never happens but it is a very plausible way to deliver a device of this nature. 😲😵💩😢
@@christopherleubner6633 Although those elements would moderate the neutron flux, they'd also absorb neutrons, particularly lithium, so the conversion wouldn't be that efficient. You'd still get more yield and more fallout using uranium tampers.
What worries me most is that some nuclear power could _accidentally_ do this by dropping a regular nuclear bomb on a city that happens have a cobalt storage warehouse.
Well, on that side I can say you should worry less since most nukes are used as an airburst meaning there should be some distance between the explosion and the cobalt - enough distance that the neutrons would be too dispersed to effectively enrich the cobalt. It would need to be a literally direct hit with a warhead able to punch through the ceiling of the warehouse to be close enough to be effective but that would sacrifice a fair amount of the bomb's potential blast radius.
@@Neion8 Or smuggle the bomb inside of said warehouse and detonate it. If you're a nuclear-capable nation, you probably have the resources to pull that off if you really wanted.
@@Stoney3K I mean it wouldn't be accidental then and just *not* airbursting an ICBM that you already have and know works seems far more practical than staging a complicated and risky espionage mission and hoping human error doesn't bite you in the ass.
It has to be within a very close radius to the high neutron flux at moment of nuclear activation or it won't absorb much neutrons and transmutate. So no.
"Salting the earth" was not a curse. It was spread over the fertile areas around cities and settlements to make growing crops nearly impossible. It was a way to completely destroy an area and no longer leave it able to produce food and thus leaving the area unlivable.
@@grantkruse1812 No, in the sense he said it, it was not scorched earth, only a perceived one as he said it was a curse. Salting was done to destroy the land in a very real way.
You need a lot of salt to make just one field infertile. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot - several tons of it! Furthermore, salt was precious at the time, so it is a myth!
@@meckifoerthmann9790 well, do you think they had slaves dig it up merely to put on their table? What motivates conquerors more, fine cuisine, or more real estate ( which includes denial of those one doesn’t care for of their real estate)
510 tons of cobalt would be the same weight as almost 3 boeing 747's, and that's excluding all the other stuff needed to build a bomb that big, and I doubt a single bomb of that size could sustain a nuclear reaction.
Simon realized he has an hour free on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and every other Sunday. Stressed with all this free time, he created another channel.
Honestly, how many more channels will he start, talk about money hungry
@@Rock-Bottem1982 lol why do you say money hungry? He puts out a lot of content, so any money obtained is deserved lol
@@jonnypope1537 did I say he doesn't deserve it? No I didn't, so don't accuse me of things I didn't say
@@Rock-Bottem1982 you're implying it and just being stupid in general. that's like saying people who work hard shouldn't be payed. it's ok, once you move out of your moms basement and start living life youll understand.
Perfect if you hit a hurricane
I always liked the scenario description of two people up to their necks in gasoline arguing over who was more powerful by the amount of matches they have.
Lol!
except in the gasoline are 7 billion other people without matches and not wanting anything to do with the argumentation
yes, that sums up russia's nuclear weapons bluff over NATO, stopping NATO forces from physically deploying in Ukraine itself. Though it's very silly and overly cautious a decision. even Putin has said nuclear weapons would only be used if there was an existential threat to the continued existence of the Russian federation. Also adding that if Russia were to not continue existing, the putin would make sure the rest of the world was wiped out. no russia, no point in a world, to paraphrase Putin. surprisingly this is a conservative stance compared to ex president and prime minister or russia, medvedev, who stated that if ukraine tried to retake crimea, then the kremlin would respond with all its weapons (including nuclear)| the real threat is localised small nuclear weapons that would cause horrific casualties to civilians, but the radioactive fallout would not leave ukraine. even china of all states, has warned putin not to go nuclear. but it's the nuclear weapons of mass destruction that NATO is afraid of. and for no reason. because sending ground troops into ukraine , say 20,000 special forces soldiers, does not threaten russia' federation's continued existence as a nation, since the special forces would be confined to supporting ukrainian troops with expert soldiers, whilst training up the section of inexperienced civilian ukrainian soldiers , with no military action breaching russian itself. (the pre annexed ukranian territory russian land). which is why i've argued that this is a serbian-kosova war situation-where NATO carpet bombed serbia into surrender. but in this case, there isn't even need to bomb russia, only specialist troop deployment into ukraine, which would quickly end the invasion by means of a peace treaty of heavy russian concessions.
As somebody who had gasoline accidentally spilled all over his lap (and crotch) that would be INCREDIBLY painful lmao any sensitive skin literally starts chemical burning away. And I'm sure you can imagine what "sensitive skin" means in relation to my lap lmao
Likened*
Way back in 1994 I was writing my high-school graduation dissertation on the topic of "Nuclear Energy". It was divided in 2 parts, one about nuclear plants and another about nuclear weapons. The final weapon I covered was the so-called "K-bomb". According to source material, this would ideally be a combination of a high-yield fusion device mostly consisting of Deuterium and Tritium used in "neutron bombs" and a large envelope of stable Cobalt (approx. 1 ton). According to the source material, detonating 10 to 100 such devices would be enough to produce and distribute enough Cobalt-60 to kill all life on land within its half-life. It wouldn't make any difference where on Earth you set it off, as long as it was detonated at high enough altitude where it would be carried around the globe by atmospheric winds.
Thanks for a trip down memory lane.
your high school graduation required a dissertation?
@@speakerz74 Seems like a good high school to me.
America's nukes are becoming obsolete, they're 60+ years old, and with several countries working on hypersonic missiles that can intercept a nuke in space, adventually it will come to a point where a nuke can be taken out before it leaves its country of origin.
@@Skelath for all we know the us has updated its nuclear arsenal to include such weapons but have been better at keeping it under wraps seeing as it wouldnt give any good PR, like it does in russia (even there it isnt super popular)
K-Hole > K-Bomb
I’m 99% sure that “salting the earth” wasn’t about “cursing” the city so much as it was about preventing food being grown there in the future thus preventing any larger settlements forming from the displaced survivors
Correct. Carthage was also never literally salted, as it was brought into the Roman empire.
Salt was VERY expensive and valuable and is water soluble so to literally prevent crops growing over the tens of thousands of acres needed to sustain a large city would be ludicrously impractical given the quantities involved. We're talking millions of tonnes of salt. It was a symbolic thing.
@@isbestlizard Thank you for saying it. “ it was a symbolic thing” a saying sort of. We beat them and salted the earth so they can never rise against us again!! No one was gonna waste that much valuable salt.
A small area where plants wouldn't grow would frighten people. They used a lot of salt in this small area, and it would spread when watered. A cursed city with a growing blight. But really you'd do it around the government building, city center, or statues of their Gods.
Then the Gods had forsaken the city, a sign to leave.
It was more of a saying though as salt was expensive, even for that.
It was often sufficient to simply collapse narrow mountain passes crucial for reliable trade, destruction of irrigation systems, the enslavement of anyone fertile or about to be fertile, the slaughter of the children boys, burning down ports, plundering of treasuries and anything else which would make economic and population growth back to what was impossible within enough number of generations.
Cobalt 60 is the radioactive deadly form of Cobalt. It is formed when Cobalt 59 (non radioactive form, the salt) absorbs a neutron from a fission of fusion . It has the following decays: Beta .317 MeV decay, Gamma 1.1732 MeV decay, Gamma 1.3325 MeV. These gammas are extremely high energy. I worked at Crystal River Nuclear Plant for 25 years. Our FSAR did not allow the use of alloys containing Cobalt 59 or Nickel 60 in the reactor building. It was explained to me by our health physics department that cobalt 60 is the 1,000,000 volt power line of gammas.
Yup; Colbalt and nickel were used in valve seats. As they wore out that stuff would up in the resin beds. You did not want to be near those filters, unless you were over 50.
Did you say a fission of fusion?
@@bryanergau6682presumably they meant fission or fusion
The plus side of the high energy is that it interacts with matter less frequently, so it more likely will pass right through you compared to lower energy
Eventually Simon will create a channel that covers his other channels.
Good one!
"The Linkhikers Guide to Simons Galaxy", has a nice ring to it.
“The history of the Biographics channel”
Accomplished Whistler: "Was he bored or was some form of evolution inevitable?"
@@sandhilltucker There is a known clinical term for his lifes story: Downward spiral
Here's a terrifying fact about Cobalt-60: If you ever see a rod of the stuff, it will likely have a warning printed on it. That warning will literally tell you to drop the rod, run away, and notify authorities.
I mean tbf if you have no idea what it is it will kill you. Same as any other poison
Probably the same for uranium-235, right?
@@nicklasveva Probably not as U-235 is nowhere near as dangerous. It has a half life of 700 million years, meaning its radioactive activity is minimal compared to Co-60 with a half life of 5.3ish years. On google you can even see images of people holding plates of U-235
@@theeelectronneutrino so you shouldn't drop the rod of U-235 and contact authorities if you happen to stumble upon one?
@@nicklasveva You should of course - I was referencing the feature of a warning being printed on it as I thought you were.
Besides I doubt anyone would find a lump of shiny metal and immediately assume it's radioactive - and it is extremely unlikely that it'd ever get out of the right people's hands anyways.
Minor correction at 3:50: you wouldn't use Gold-198, Tantalum-182, Zinc-65 or Cobalt-60 in the bomb, but rather it's what you're aiming to create in the explosion.
You would use Gold-197, Tantalum-181, Zinc-64 or Cobalt-59 in the bomb.
Though, you do self-correct later in the video in the case of cobalt.
I mean he’s just reading a script, but it’s a good correction for whomever writes them
@@Lohanujuanand yet it is his channel and the script is written by his employee, if your mcdonalds order was wrong and you told the manager, would he just say “well tell my employee.” Or would they address and or correct the issue?
Couldn't you use any ionic change then not just cobalt...
That is correct, the lower are the stable variants whereas the latter are the unstable ones that take radiation to a whole new level.
Gold would only have a half life of 2.7 days, so would decay pretty quick ... with a double whammy of decaying into Mercury
I think it was Oppenheimer who listed size and type of weapons with their delivery systems. For a very large salted bomb he just put “backyard”… he realised that it didn’t matter where on the planet it was detonated. The end result would be the same.
Thank you. I was wondering if this was what the Backyard Bomb referred to. I knew it was named as such since it didn't matter the location but didn't know if it was tied to a specific type of bomb
@@Poodleballin Interesting
This is a paraphrased quote from the Sci-Fi novel “Neverness” by David Zindell: “We walk the brink of racial destruction because we are smart enough to build Nuclear weapons and stupid enough to use them”. A very good book if anyone fancies reading it!!
Was once told that God gives us the ability to destroy the world and Satan gives us the inclination.
"Say to them:
Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.”
from: The Orchestra by William Carlos Williams (used in the Desert Music by Steve Reich).
Always a pleasure to hear about the possibilities of our doom.
Random question, would you rather survive through a nuclear wasteland, a zombie apocalypse, or an earth affected by major temperature shifts (all deserts, flooded areas, or frozen lands)
@@WhuDhat nuclear wasteland would only let me live a short time because of radiation poisoning, zombie-bois don't do a real, so I suppose climate change is the most likely to be able to survive the longest.
@@yacker7226 Zombies are possible...they just wouldn't be much of a threat. It'll never be a virus (because viruses don't operate that way, at all), or a bacteria (unless it were somehow a communal lifeform and lived in "hives"). Most likely it would be a parasitic fungus like a relative or mutation of cordyceps. It's spores would invade the body and begin growing tendrils through your own nerves, consuming and replacing them as it does, killing your body and animating the remains once it reaches your brain.
.
As a fungus, it would continue to feed on your decaying corpse (likely decaying somewhat faster as a result) as it shambled around blindly and randomly in search of more victims. It's not that it wouldn't be able to perceive what your senses could relay to the fungal "nerves", it's that as your body decayed, those senses would just cease to operate. Your eyes would cloud over and go blind, your ear drums would fall apart and you'd go deaf, the cilia in your nose would be gone almost immediately, making you unable to smell (probably a good thing, as a rotting corpse). The only thing you'd kind of have would be touch.
.
Odds are, the spores would be transmitted by inflicting any kind of open would with any part of its infected flesh. Splintered bone from a compound fracture, a bite, a scratch from exposed finger bones or broken fingernails. Or any of their gunk landing on an open wound or getting in your eyes or mouth or other opening. The real horror would be if the spores became airborne.
.
But, even then, infection would take a damned long time, and would probably be relatively easy to treat, unless it was somehow drug-resistant for really no reason. And still then, the zombies themselves would be so trivially simple to dispatch relatively safely, and they couldn't coordinate or even actually hunt anyone at all, that some decent protective gear would really be sufficient to survive. Zombies would be unable to hunt anyone down, would only be marginally mobile for a week or two at most, and within a matter of weeks would be completely decomposed.
.
The real problem then would be dormant spores constantly causing new outbreaks of zombies. There'd never be a way to get rid of them on a global scale. Either a cure would have to be found, or everyone would have to mask-up...forever. Especially if it got airborne. Then it could actually turn into a zombie apocalypse. It would never result in the end of humanity of civilization, but it would be an endless Hell of minor zombie infestations.
@@DoremiFasolatido1979 so, like I said, they don't do a real.
Nobody boil an egg and we will be fine
I used to weld Tantalum. There’s no forgiveness like in other non-ferrous metals (titanium, zirconium, inconel, etc.). You mess up the bead, you throw the piece out. This was often used in heat exchangers that would be in an extremely corrosive environment. If the environment was too corrosive, we would apply platinum dots as a sacrificial; meaning the product would attack the platinum first, before eventually attacking the Tantalum.
I have worked with Tantalum capacitors and those things are amazing but darn expensive. Tant is quite the metal. I love it.
"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity" An author I've sadly forgotten....
IT was, I'm pretty sure, Robert A Heinlein.
George Carlin?
Didn't Einstein say that?
"I know not with what weapons World War 3 will be fought but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones" - Albert Einstein
Also, we can produce anti-matter. All we need is better containment to trump any nuclear bomb ever created. We could literally "delete" things from existence forever in an annihilation.
The problem with trying to make things idiot proof is that the universe keeps producing better idiots.
The time Simon dedicates to the content across all of these channels is near unfathomable. It seems as if he must always be filming. I have absolutely 0 idea how he has that sort of energy (particularly social energy), it's incredibly impressive. Thanks to everyone behind this content, I've learned so many (horrible) things.
You forget the cocaine ...........
@@russellfitzpatrick503 Allegedly.
Thanks :)
He gets the energy from peanut butter flavor Magic Spoon cereal and cocaine. Allegedly
He is propably CGI only now. He does not exist :-)
"This has never come even remotely close to happening"
2022: "Sounds like you're being a lil' cheeky..."
Putin was caught watching this vid with a notebook and pencil.
@@jonny5714 making Musk and mars looking better
lol there wont be a nuclear war calm the f down and stop spreading fear...
@@layton3503 I'd gladly die in nuclear fire if the alternative is to go to Mars and be a slave for King Elon I.
@@djcsdy2 Good, they are looking brighter people to colonize mars anyway.
"On The Beach" was such a good book that when I joined the U.S. Navy I sited it as one of the things that influenced me to volunteer to become a NUC submariner.
*cited
God I made the mistake of blinking and Simon has a new channel.
i just block em at this point.. its way too much
@@sa.8208 Yet here you are
Gotta make that money reading Wikipedia pages
@@blink182bfsftw wait that's all he does?
ANOTHER Channel?!? Simon's takeover of UA-cam continues and I'm totally here for it.
You just noticed? It's already the 3rd video. It's been announced over a month or two ago. Another one will come later this year
@L S gotta search than. He read audiobooks before he became a UA-camr. Even wrote one himself. 8 don't remember what about I just found out about it when I searched Simon Whistler and found a really old interview from the before TIFO times. You know the dark ages when Simon had hair
@L S sorry to hear that. Simon is very lucky. His wife is probably one of the few women who was excited when Simon got rid of his hair.
@L S it's okay, if it helps, I never paid attention to appearances when seeking a mate. Personality is where it's at, since that's generally a mainstay of the relationship while appearance is not.
We need more please. Feed us!
Great video as usual, thanks. I feel I want to just add this little detail. At 2:06 Simon states: "Although hydrogen bombs, which fall into the fusion category, typically include multi stages, which can include a fission stage..." Actually H-bombs are not typically multi stage weapons, they are always multi stage weapons (two stages usually). Also, it's not that they "can include a fission stage", it's that they must include a fission stage (as the primary). It is only mechanism powerful enough to start the fusion reaction (in the secondary stage) en-masse.
@jon medle Ah OK, thanks for the update.
I might be wrong but theoretically you can put a particle accelerator like a fusor inside the bomb to set off the hydrogen core.
I was a advanced reader for my age when I read on the beach for the first time when I was nine. I'm a cold war child and still remember duck and cover drills. I just couldn't fathom mutual assured destruction and nobody wants t discuss a topic like this with a child. Even now I could go home and I remember where every fallout shelter is.
"The white seasoning that we're all so fond of"....as a business blaze viewer this hit different
OGBB Legend Matt
As a comedian in my prime in the 80's, I feel as though we're very much on the same mirror... Page, I meant page.
I'm well seasoned
@@Kremithefrog1 Daddy chill jk, stay seasoned you legend
Ry show !!!!!! You knocked it out the field with that come back !!!. Lol I'm no joke going to see what this ry show is all about right now. Ill give you shot !! Lol ! But seriously this is sum scary stuff (LoL) to think about and could honestly happen 1 day in are life time !!! One thing I have learned is nothing last forever; and Man builds many tall beautiful objects, buildings,statuses,brigades, society,law and order!!! But man is also destroyers. Nothing that man has ever built from beginning of human time has lasted longer than a couple of years. This is because of human nature. Man is still a animal . No matter how much you dress up a pig ! A pig is still a pig. A human is a human. The way we live are life's and the way we interact with each other is unnatural. The are life's are scheduled and organized is unnatural. We are not ment to be in buildings (which are nothing but large cages) working and living. We are ment to live in packs and tight nit villages, and live in a way we everyone actions effects everyone and everyone action and jobs are just as important as anyone's else. Were everyone's work is praised. This is why I believe there is so much mental health and illness !!!! I believe are diets and just daily routine are not in line with are mind and body. And we live in a unnatural ways which cause stresses that are bodys are not ment to deal with. That is why we need to get back to the way we were living. Like even just a 100 years ago. Small towns and even big towns. Everyone knew everyone and everyone respected everyone. People would talk to each other. Neighbors talked to each other and ate together ( even if they didn't like each other) there were Neighborhoods watches (which in most cases they didn't even need, but for small things like dogs who ate chickens) and family functions. Poeple wanted to be together and live together. But know a days. Its every man for there self. Poeple don't make real friends these days. They just talk to you because they can use you or want something and once they get it they are gone forever. Kids don't know how to make lasting friendships and this is from media and the way of life. Which is a shame because they are going to miss out on life. And see there real joy in life is the small things and simple times where you watch a little kid lean to catch his first football or watch a wild animal just graze through the grass.we are doing a poor job raising are chilling and preparing them for life. We are doing a poorer job showing the world how to live in peace and how to raise your family and how to live a modern-day life. We are not being good leaders. Things must change for the better or things will just keep getting worst. War is really a option and nothing is forever
1:15 - Chapter 1 - Nuclear weapons
2:25 - Chapter 2 - Salted bombs
4:45 - Chapter 3 - Cobalt bombs
6:25 - Chapter 4 - Tests
7:35 - Chapter 5 - The fallout
10:25 - Chapter 6 - Status 6
11:45 - Chapter 7 - The doomsday device
13:05 - Chapter 8 - The dirtiest of dirty bombs
One of my favorite parts of all of Simon's channels is that even though he films all the videos in the same office space, he does them all at a camera angle and posture thats specific to each channel so you know which channel you're on even between the channels he uses his professional announcer voice on like this one
Glad I'm not the only one to have noticed! 😄
I read "On the Beach" and "Fail Safe" when I was in high school in the early '70's, and had nightmares about WWIII for many years after. A Co-60 bomb was also a plot element in one of the "Planet of the Apes" movies, as I recall. I wonder, how many people have died prematurely of cancer because of atmospheric testing of nukes before such tests were banned? Got to be tens of thousands by now. And at least that many more will be the eventual cost of the (totally preventable) Chernobyl accident.
Ah, so this is how the Fallout Video Game scenario starts to make sense with 200 years passing since the bomb.
In early 1960s a friend who i loved like a Dad before passing from cancer told of the cobslt bomb. That it could destroy the world. It was beyond my comprehension RIP MR BROWNING.
Well yes and no. Dead Hand is a fail-deadly system. Basically, a second-strike guarantee to protect against a decapitation strike. Around Moscow are various sensors. One being a luminosity sensor, one a simple radio receiver, and most likely a seismic, since nuclear weapons create a wave unlike anything else. If a warhead hit Moscow, the Dead Hand would go hot. It would listen for the radio signal, which is nothing more than Radio Moscow. If it found no signal, and the luminosity sensor detected a flash, it would wait a certain amount of time to make sure it wasn't a bad sensor or something, and if all the parameters were met it would then send the go code to the launch facilities. The US has the same, sort of. It's not a fail-deadly system though. It's called the ERCS. If, in the event of all leadership being taken out, which is highly unlikely, and the destruction of all other comms being unable to transmit the order, a missile with a comms package would launch from Vandenburg, fly over the US, transmitting the order. It still takes humans to input the codes, but it's more of a fail-safe than an automatic response, unlike Dead Hand.
The Emergency Rocket Communication System (ERCS) was deactivated in 1991. ERCS was to put a communication package into low earth orbit to broadcast a message to Strategic Air Command (SAC) units for a response. SAC was decommissioned in 1992 so there is no ERCS or SAC so your claim that the U.S. has some automatic system for launching an attack called ERCS is not true.
@@buckhorncortez Well I guess that'll be your little secret then. Don't get hung up on names. SAC never went anywhere. Only the name has changed. As did the ERCS. It's now the ALCS. As I said in my comment, it's not an auto-launch system in any sense of the word. The NCA would still need a human to initiate the system, and still need humans sitting in LCFs to punch it in. It's simply a means of sending the go code if every other asset, like TACAMO, Nightwatch, Looking Glass, and our sats were knocked out in a first strike. In no way was it or is it, an automatic response.
UVb76 goes on to this day....
I am of corse biased but I like the letter system we have on uk subs
I'm afraid none of these systems mentioned can hold a candle to the " W.O.P.R. " 😁
Simon does a great job, i grew up in a scientific community, my father and my neighbors were research scientists/professors, i can relate two stories about Cobalt60, first i was a 16 year old living in Bedford in the spring of 1966 my Father and i drove over to Cambridge where they had a cobalt 60 source where i would help my father ZAP bacteria spores with sub lethal doses of gamma radiation, i actually did the irradiating of the samples the other story was a year and half later back in Illinois as a junior in high school i walked to a neighbor two houses away and asked him "What is a dirty bomb?" my neighbor worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project developing the first atomic bomb he was a Harvard Phd in physics---- he answered "Tom you take a fission bomb and sheath it with 22 feet if cobalt 60" and he went back to reading his physics publications that was back in 1967 i still remember that conversation.
“Fortunately, neither side wants to end the world”
I don’t share your optimism.
I wouldn't be surprise the CCP choose to end the world rather than loosing face.
@@Kiev-in-3-days I would. They have never had a large stockpile and they are doing fine.
what about the eugenesist side?
Yeah, you're right. It's probably not Russia that wants to reduce the worlds population, though...
@@julianshepherd2038 I don't understand.
I have used Cobalt 60 to X-ray big thick metal things, usually I just x-ray normal pipe welds with Iridium 192, but for things very thick up to a few feet thick we use Cobalt because it's Rays penetrate deeper and thru denser materials
Its not x ray
Its gamma ray tjat co60 makes
@@the_retag people always say that but we use it to radiograph. We just call it x-ray cause we call ourselves x-ray hands
In what field do you work as?
@@afnanali1503 weld inspection. We take radiograph of where they weld pipelines together to make sure the weld is good all the way through
I did the same testing welds on oil pipelines in the Middle East. Getting the cobalt camera through customs and into a safe storage was not easy!
Well, I can sleep better tonight, knowing there is absolutely no way I could possibly do anything worse than this.
Actually they dont even need to salt their bombs. Staged nuclear warheads can do the same. Three or four staged thermonuclear warheads can cause long term radiation like a saltes bomb. That why this concept is outdated now.
I found an original copy of On The Beach for $35.00 on ebay. Had not read it in 30 years. A brilliant read.
Back in the '80's, I remember scientists commenting on the absurdity of nuclear war.
They said "MAD" (Mutual Assured Destruction) was the WRONG assessment of full scale nuclear war.
Instead, the correct moniker was "SAD" (Self Assured Destruction)
This implied that even if one side did not retaliate, the nuclear fallout would be so extensive as to destroy the world, including the country launching the nukes.
That's been largely debunked. Although society would be in a very bad spot, with a good chunk of humanity dying out, there really isn't a world ending threat. We're talking about major cities being blown out, with large swaths of land becoming uninhabitable, and a very ugly struggle for food and water for population numbers that can't support itself anymore. All industries severely disrupted.
@@greenl7661 No, it would be MAD and SAD, with hundreds of 1000MT devices aimed at major cities, it basically covers the entire planet. So no point being fearful of nukes, the only thing to fear would be suffering in the fallout zones, rather than taken out by the initial blast.
@@tensevo ..no, it wouldn't. Unless you're in a big city you'd die due to infighting for last remaining bits of food. If you local population isn't super dense, you have supply of food and water, you'd likely survive the 'apocalypse'.
@@tensevo It depends; were it a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, other parts of the world like Europe, West Africa and the Eastern Americas could survive due to distance from Asia (albiet life would be changed forever for everyone) - were it between the United States and all its allies vs the neo-Soviet union+China then yeah game over.
Simon... You make an erroneous assumption at the end by assuming it is ONLY the USA and Russia that might use them. I suspect it is the small and even non-nation state actors that are the real problem.
Yeah. This is the "Mad Scientist Postulate". One of the central aspects of all technology from livestock to the atomic age is it puts an increased amount of energy in the hands of the individual. The Mad Scientist Postulate argues that human technology will rise until it reaches the point where a sufficiently small number insane or irrational actors can destroy all the productive capacity of the rest of the world. Once designer viruses or home built fusion bombs are in the range of technology a person has available in their basement, you can no longer assume that rational self-interest will prevent that person from doing more harm than all the rational self-interested people can prevent or repair.
Sort of True. It was Britain and Australia playing with Cobalt bombs. A less developed country or terrorists would need a supply of uranium or plutonium and enrichment capability.
It's only a matter of time before an attempt is made. It could be centuries, but all you need is the combination of the technology and the willingness either due to religious or meglomaniacal reasons. EG religious: because the world has gone to the devil, and that rather than to go down to defeat, "cleanse the world of the opponent's devil cult". EG meglomania- Rather than go down to defeat the meglomaniac presses the button on the cobalt weapon saying- If I can't have the world, then no one else can either. (I am still all powerful because regardless what my opponents do- they lose either way.) Concievably, an international regimen of rigorous inspections could be put in place to stall this scenario, but it would require strong cooperation between all nuclear powers.
Some Israelis have spoken of "The Samson Option", which is a theoretical plan to bring down the rest of the world in the case where the home country is facing extinction; basically holding the world hostage to ensure your own survival. Such a plan would be a good candidate to keep an eye on for cobalt bombs or other doomsday devices. Rational actors need not continue to be rational once they feel they have nothing to lose.
@@RCAvhstape Who knows? It may already be underway behind the scenes?
"...and it would probably only ever be used as a last resort"
Comforting.
Comrade's Putin's interior monologue: either I win or everybody loses 😈
@@IRosamelia I don't doubt it.
The best apocalyptic post nuclear war book I have read is "Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald. The hero of the book is known only by his number. You never get any character's names or even know what country they are from. All you know is that tensions have grown, they go underground, a push-button nuclear war is fought, and ... well, then the rest. The book is stunning for me because of how much pathos you come to feel for the main character without ever knowing his name or what country he fights for.
Man, im always surprised the algo shows me MORE of simons chanells. At this rate, simon will create a youtube singularity in approx. 3 years.
You should subscribe…. OooOoOoOoOooo
It's one of the least surprising things ever if you think about it for another... second. Tops. And go
youtube needs more simon XD
All Simon, all the time.
@@rukeyazu8669 No need to subscribe since all his videos show up in everyone's recco's all the time lol
You would use Co-59 as the salting material. The fast neutrons would convert nearly all of it into Co-60.
Yes...
NOT HELPING.
yes, thank you. I needed this info for reasons....
Shush. Don't give them ideas.
I'm not sure about this. There needs to be a practical experiment to prove this hypothesis.
I think at this point the Beard has entered Simon's brain and is refusing to let him stop. All hail the Beard!!!
Maybe it's actually the Beard that's talking... :-)
There is no more Simon, only beard
Bloody great big bushy beard
Hail
I, for one, welcome our follicular overlord
Minor correction here: It's incorrect to say that fusion weapons "can include a fission stage", but rather they absolutely ALWAYS do. The fusion stage is triggered by a fission primary, it doesn't work any other way.
I love that book and its adaptations. The endings are arguably happier than in "Threads." And the book was better than similar books like "Alas, Babylon." Somehow it had a happy ending.
ANYTHING is happier than the ending of "Threads".
There's is still time, brothers
Threads was a fucking rollercoaster.
Threads could ruin your life for years. A great movie but I cannot recommend it to anyone because I don't want to be responsible for its impact. I used to watch the Day After for entertainment again and again, wow look at those explosions, zap people getting vapourised, yay! Threads? My god no!
Jeeze, Simon, thanks for reigniting my fears from the 60's. I grew up an hour away from a first strike by target. Over the years I've learned to never underestimate the hatred or stupidity or greed of the human species. We're a pitiable bunch.
I'm currently about a 3-hour drive more or less downwind of Oak Ridge... On the bright side, if a nuke was to land in my back yard, I wouldn't have to worry much about regretting the politicians that led to it coming... ;o)
It's for this reason I've spent my entire adult life within striking distance of one, or most often several, primary targets. That way, my brain will be vaporized before any pain of the heat hitting my skin can reach the brain. No pain. I won't know much in advance that it's coming (probably).
Be surprised what a ground zero target is because it is not always military targets or cities. Sometimes it is small towns that sit on top of transportation junctions for multiple roads, highways, freeways, and rail, plus all of the power/telecom grip that typically follows transportation links.
I've spent my entire life living next primary targets, and at this point I've accepted and am glad that I'll most likely die in the flash, should it ever kick off.
@@vampiro4236 Just take some 7-Hydroxymitragynine and low temp dab some Delta-9-THC before it happens. You'll feel great.
"On the Beach" was in our living room bookshelf throughout my childhood in Los Alamos. In high school I finally took the time to read it. Though I lived in the birthplace of the A-bomb, I had never heard of cobalt bombs until I read the novel.
They made a movie and I saw it as a kid in the 60's. Gave me nightmares for years.
I read a book "Level 7", they were the last surviving humans at the bottom of the shelter of some kind. Yes, they died too. It's maybe fourty years later, and I still remember.
@@markhodge7 location film in melbourne 1959
@@markhodge7 They even made a remake of the movie in the 80s. Saw both to reinvigorate the nightmares.
I'm curious , any super powers from exposure ? 😀
I remember reading On the Beach and other books like it in the 70s where scenarios were discussed using salted bombs. It scared the crap out of me tbh and the details and possible permutations were spelled out most gruesomely. And it seemed inevitable. Dare to hope. Dare to act.
So Salty Nukes are like the bomb equivalent of nunchucks? You’re just as likely to injure yourself as your opponent!
If you're feeling overly cheerful and need more existential horror in your life, I recommend "The Day After" and "Threads".
With human nature, It's inevitable.
Another Simon Whistler channel? I’m surprised this channel wasn’t recommended to me in the last week
Simon Media Empire expands!
yes...but doesnt it seem his voice has changed?? hope all is well with his throat
Holy crap it is too, I didn't even realize, I just assumed it was one of the other channels.
12:38 "The russians are kind enough to keep it switched off"
Shows monument in Kyiv, Ukraine 🙄
Possible target
Eh it all seems like the same places to midwestern Americans like myself. Good enough, I say.
Well, during cold war Ukraine WAS part of Soviet union, so when talking about cold war era stuff, it's not entirely wrong... If he simply googled "soviet monument" for picture, this could be easily made mistake. (honestly, even I, living in postcomunist country, couldn't tell it's not something in Russia... I actually thought it's just some cgi to give it proper feeling)
I'm kind of disturbed by the fact that cobalt bombs are so overwhelmingly powerful and horrifying that nobody has even _made_ one yet. Not even as just a threatening bluff.
There is a bomb. It’s called the Poseidon and Russia has it.
Are you joking? What kind of bomb do you think is being used as the failsafe in your site.
They haven't been made because they're ridiculously overblown. Pure fiction. Everyday nuclear weapons used in a ground burst produce such lethal fallout it would be a waste of money and effort to put cobalt in any of them. That's what the experts say. Not just my opinion. No need to find yet more to be scared of when the current mundane reality should be terrifying to anyone with any sense. You don't need cobalt bombs to exterminate the human species. The same old bombs we've had since the 60s are more than up to the job.
If something scares Dr. Bright of all people, then we should all be terrified.
A emp strike over the tesla car factory would turn each battery into c60
Honestly, thanks for bringing back memories from my adolescence around 1970, when I first heard about Cobalt Bombs---and haven't heard mention of since.
On a far cheerier note (that you briefly covered) cobalt is used in (at least) three different blue pigments: 1. Cobalt Aluminate (standard cobalt blue), 2. Cobalt Phosphate (what Windsor/Newton uses in cobalt blue dark, and 3. Cobalt Stannate (cerulean blue). All of them are lovely.
It’s an interesting...and terrifying concept. Nevil Shute’s: “On the Beach” was a fantastic book btw.
Ill have to read the book. The movie ending for "On The Beach" is pretty unforgettable as well. I won't ruin it here.
The more recent Australian TV version is really good.
@@Iamthelolrus I’ve yet to see the movie. I’ll have to find it and check it out.
F* the Patriots, I’ll see you on December 8th in Orchard Park
Great book, read it in high school.
3:50 .. those isotopes are the active products already. The blanket would be made of the natural occuring Au-197, Ta-181, Zn-64 or Co-59.
Correct. I noticed that too!
Also, the conversion to the radioactive form happens after bombardment by neutrons, not neutrium. I thought he might be using neutrium as a neologism for a gas of neutrons, but a Google search reveals that neutrium (or more frequently neutronium) is sometimes used to describe the extremely dense material inside of neutron stars, not the sort of hot stream of neutrons that you would get from a nuclear bomb.
Probably not the au...
This guy's work ethic is insane. Aren't you on like 10 different active channels at this point?
Ah yes, nothing like a dirty bomb video to end my paranoia induced nightmare episodes I had after watching Oppenheimer 🤣
Uncomfortably watching this in early 2022.
I really liked this. I reminded me of another Science Fiction story. In the story scientists had managed to create a form of anti-matter fueled bomb. The bomb was not stable enough to place into a missle and lob at others, but instead the military had decided to create a series of bombs as a sort of deadman's switch, the ultimate MAD. So if the US was attacked the devices would go off. And the yield on the bombs and placement underground were so great the resulting cloud of radioactive dust thrown into the air would ensure a cold, radioactive death to the planet. And the bombs were built to essentially be armed and no one could in theory disarm them. You've all read that type of doomsday story.
So in the story one scientist was drinking heavily in a bar unloading this ultimate secret of this existence of 50 such bombs on one of his friends, has was numb at the revelation and being told as he friend was obviously crossing the line saying anything. But then the kicker came in. Due to the interactions of magnectic fields keeping the anti-matter safe and aspects of quantum mechanics, there was a small chance every year that an atom of antimatter would get by the fields strike material and effectively self-detonate the bomb. But initially they calculated the odds of that being so low as any bomb would likely last a thousand years before it randomly went off (good enough for politicians). But they went and built 50 of these devices. And since each had a random chance each year of detonating the odds were 50-50 that in the next 20 years one would trigger the end of the world, randomly. And all they could do was sit, and wait, and hope....
for probability is a b.... at the black jack table
An antimatter bomb, if you could create the antimatter, would be far more dangerous to the user than to the intended recipient. Antimatter in quantities visible to the human eye is the most dangerous stuff in the universe, which is why no one will ever atempt to make it. If a quantity the size of a pin head came into contact with matter, it would explode with the force of a blockbuster bomb, and keeping matter and antimatter apart is almost impossible.
I think you have to prime a fusion warhead with a fission explosion. They used to use a separate bomb to trigger the splitting of atoms, and then the fusion warhead facilitated the process of the atoms fusing into tritium and deuterium.
0:15 Dogmeat found something
I remember commenting about the Belgarod sub and it's intercontinental nuclear tsunami torpedo on one of your mega-projects videos. Glad to see you ran into that weapons system when researching this video.
Haha, my high school chemistry teacher told us how to theoretically make these back in 1998 or so. He even drew us pictures. I wrote it all down. Ahh, memories.
That teacher also liked to tell crazy stories about wrestling alligators while skydiving, or how he had all his fingers burned off with acid one time even though he actually had all his fingers as far as I could tell. But the cobalt bomb thing I knew was theoretically plausible because I looked it up myself afterward.
I just realised Mr. Hughes is probably dead by now. That sucks. He was cool.
Sounds like a great teacher
In theory there's no limit to how big a nuclear can be.
High school chemistry teachers are the best at comedy!
It's going to happen to all of us😪
I wonder how many teachers will die not knowing the effect they had on us.
I’m going to go to my old high school and thank some of my old ones, while I still can
I’m surprised that there was no mention of there ‘Alpha and Omega’ bomb in the original Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Which had a cobalt casing, according to one of the characters.
"Glory be to the bomb and the holy fallout."
Also Auric Goldfinger tried to use a cobalt bomb to irradiate Ft. Knox. Really didn't need to as the gold is Au 196, and the 197 isotope is radioactive. Au 196 is the only stable isotope of gold. Longest half life for gold is 12 days, with the shortest in nanoseconds.
Great content. Your programs are jolly interesting and well done and presented. Please keep going. Cheers
Now I live in a world that when I wake up the first thing I do is I check the news on my phone to see if a nuke has been dropped. Great times to live in
Don't my friend. We all have a personal clock ticking towards death anyways. Find peace and enjoy you're freaking life bro ✝️🙂 (I know that last bit might feel impossible but if I can, after witnessing devastating traumatic events, you can too- take steps toward peace... steps.)
It's still a great time to live in compared to previous generation.
We humans are exceptionally good at destroying our fellow humans very quickly... but to connect with each other we have smart phones.
Ironic
@@22Epic Depends on where you live don't you think?
Hi Marko..wow, similar thing with me except I turn on non-cable tv to a news channel first thing in the morning. I live a couple of miles from a primary target large military base, so, if the world goes stupid all I will see is a bright flash and then turn into a cloud of disassociated atoms. I have heart felt worry for the survivors who will not live long anyways. smh...😥
I love watching videos about nukes when they're more likely to be used now than ever in my life 😊
This is why a good missile defense system could be considered a god send!
@@brandonhoffman4712 Im not sure there are adequate defenses against some of the new missile technologies. Especially for example SWARM missiles that can fractionalize
Why would you put a smile emoji after saying that? If nuclear weapons are used during this Russian war things will change so much that the shutdowns during Covid will look like nothing
@@terranhealer sarcastically
@@brandonhoffman4712 bros been watching too much WatchMojo
Watching this in February 2022....hits a little different.
A standard-issue hydrogen bomb has four explosive stages: The first stage is the chemical explosive that compresses the fissile material to start stage two, the fission trigger. Radiation and explosive vaporization of a shell compresses and heats a deuterium-tritium mixture to the the fusion point, starting stage three. Some neutrons from the fusion hit lithium and produce more tritium. Some neutrons from the fusion hit a depleted uranium wrapper causing U-238 to fission, the fourth stage. H-bombs the omit the fourth stage are called neutron bombs. They have a much higher radiation/blast ratio.
Simon : It never came close to be a reality
Putin : Hold my vodka.
Read this in a Russian accent
Biden : hold my geritol
Biden hold my brain
I read a short fiction story this week about Russian's automated system getting triggered by the US using 18 older missiles (clearing out their stockpile to get funding for new ones) as counter-missile weapons against a North Korean missile (launched for pride) that the Russian system didn't pick up. It's just the kind of posturing, bureaucratic nonsense that I could see happening, which made it painful to read.
Can you tell ne the name and author of the Story?
Fusion is only possible in multiple stage devices, it requires a certain amount of heat. Basically a bomb will start out as fission to produce the heat required for fusion. If I remember right the Tsar Bomba was one such device. After testing it Russia never tried to make one bigger or repeat the process. I'm sure they manufactured more devices on the down low but they never tested more.
Great video and interesting. Cobalt bombs have appeared in popular media a few times.
One of the best examples, being in Metro Exodus after was used on Novosibirsk by the USA.
"It would be crazy, it would be insane, it would be like blowing up your house to cook an egg"
And six months later we have Putin acting veeeery insane.
Living far away from major population centers, I've always expected to probably live if nuclear war happens.
But Russia being led by a declining madman who also happens to be the one person in the world most likely to possess a cobalt bomb is not encouraging.
If there's ever an all out nuclear war it will be a total extinction event for the entire planet. All life will die. It is technically impossible for us to build any shelter from the fallout where we could survive long enough for the radiation level to decrease to safe levels. The experiments conducted to do that sort of thing have all failed. Staying alive be hard.
@@rosequartz2290 who's leading America now?
@@1pcfred If everyone were using dirty bombs like cobalt bombs, then *maybe* you could make the argument that nearly all humans would die, or nearly all terrestrial vertebrates maybe.
But with normal nuclear/thermonuclear arms, generally airbursted, there would be nowhere near enough fallout to kill everyone. Global weather patterns will not spread it equally, either. So it's almost certain that not even all humans would die. Probably not even *most* humans.
And there's *no way*, even with widespread cobalt bombs specifically placed to distribute fallout everywhere by some crazy supervillain, that all life on Earth would die. If nothing else, plenty of microbial life would survive, and there would remain many refuges for multicellular life too. Underground, inside of glaciers, portions of the ocean floor, microbial life in the atmosphere, etc...
@@delphicdescant it is possible that you simply do not fully appreciate the threat nuclear war poses. That would be down to a lack of knowledge or understanding. It is a topic that we don't really deal with in our day to day existence. Yet there are still facts out there if one seeks them out. Suffice to say in a total nuclear exchange this planet will be lifeless. You need to accept that as a fact. One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. 14,000 nuclear bombs and it's game over. But things are better today than they were. We used to have 70,000 nukes.
@@1pcfred I appreciate the conversation, but I do not have to "simply accept" what some youtube commenter insists. Nuclear fallout, and the risks of elevated radiation in general, is massively sensationalized in popular culture and on the internet, as I'm sure you can tell. However, I *can* rely on my physics degree and a calculator.
No matter how many warheads exist, there aren't enough launching facilities to deploy them all before launching equipment is destroyed by counterattack. Launching facilities would, of course, be among the first targets. So only a small fraction of all existing warheads would actually get used in a MAD scenario.
BUT, even if it were somehow possible to put all of existing warheads into the air at once, assuming that they're conventional thermonuclear devices meant for air bursting and not intentionally dirty ones, that would *still* not produce enough fallout to end all life on the planet. I'm not sure what calculations you're relying on, though, or what kind of radiation density you're considering "fatal to all life."
If nothing else, surely you'd agree that the extremophile life living in the Chernobyl plant itself, literally subsisting off of the elevated radiation levels, is a counterexample to what you're saying, right?
Well after that I'm going to listen to some Joy Division to cheer myself up.
Or some Leonard Cohen…
…that might be a step too far though…
And just for a moment I remember a song
An impression of sound
And then everything is gone forever....
@@oliverlaw02 Oh well doooooone, you've caught up with everyone else on the planet who've know where they got their name from for the last four decades.......
What a great video! You translated very technical terms into minutes and days and so on that makes it easy to understand just how deadly these bombs are.
Let's hope that diverse groups of people work and discover ways of getting along with each other. Humans helping humans is the basic concept.
Some kids in Brazil found some cool looking stuff in a garbage dump. They opened it up and found some really neat looking blue stuff and played with it. Turns out it was some X-ray equipment with Cobalt-60 and they died.
Adults after a quick buck actually.
The Goiania incident right?
@@Boe-Temeraire pretty sure that was radioactive cesium.
@@chfire2004 you are right, it was cesium-137.
That was just awful. It was a couple of adults looking for things they could sell. Unfortunately for all concerned, the contents of the container they chose were highly radioactive.
As a former nuclear warrior, this piece stirs up a nasty brew of memories. That we are all still around is a constant amazement and ongoing reaffirmation of Frank Zappa's maxim " There will never be a nuclear war because there is too much real estate involved ". Or as I like to put it, a war that kills or impoverishes even the most wealthy will never be allowed to happen.
But then there is the universal tendency of human systems to malfunction, often at the worst possible time. Like I said, I'm constantly amazed we are still around, and would not be the least bit surprised to see a blinding flash in the sky at any moment. Nuclear PTSD anyone?
A friend's dad worked on the tests at Maralinga. While driving through the desert one day, his geiger counter went beserk. He stopped and found some metal balls, put them in a tobacco tin, then headed back to camp. When he got there everyone was running about in a panic, as all the counters were registering the approach of his find. The balls were Cobalt 60. He said it was so radioactive they had to put it in a lead box and stand a few yards away with their counters to get any sort of meaningful measurement.
Why in the world would be put an object setting off his Geiger counter into a tin and take it with him?
@Darkwolf young and reckless, I guess. I'm not sure the dangers of radiation were that well known at the time.
Better containment for particles that shed off due to hydrogen embrittlement. It at least kept them from spreading until opened anyway.
The real question isn't what prompted his less than genius level response to finding them. It's where the h#ll did they come from - who made them - why? - and how the f@ck did they end up lying loose in the desert, unsecured, for your father to just pick up and take off with ??
Did someone decide that just pitching them out in the desert was an adequate way to dispose of them ??
@@jackreisewitz6632 handling that is more expensive and difficult due to being radioactive with a long half life so some places that use/used colbat 60 like hospitals for certain machines sometimes irresponsibly and illegally deal with it by leaving it in far away spots. theres been cases where the machines are sold for scrap without the radioactive stuff being removed after years in storage.
as for this specific case its most likely knowingly dumped so some group didnt have to be responsible for it and figured some forgotten patch of desert was a solid place to do it.
@8:00 Is it just me or did anyone else get worried that Simon was putting out a blueprint for how a super villain could destroy the Earth?!? We've got too many Lex Luthor's on this planet & no Superman to rescue us
Considering current events, I probably shouldn’t have watched this one.
Don't worry after the fallout the world can start over as our planet slowly drifts into nothingness that is somethingness at 500,000 miles per hour.
Lmao yeah not ideal
0:38 Simon of 2021: It is a tale of impending doom and heartbreak.. and thankfully it has never come close to even remotely happening..."
2022: Hold my beer...
Even saying it hasn't come close to happening is wrong because it very much has. There are a scary amount of stories where people almost fired their nukes from false alarms. All it takes is one dumbass and one false alarm and everyone dies.
A macabre and terrifying video. Thanks for scaring us all "to death!"
Sweet dreams, it may be your last
@@Richard-zc1cj 😂😂😂!
The US did produce salted bombs. Here is the list: Mk-21 Mod.0/1/1; Mk-36Y1 Mod.0/1; Mk-41Y1; B53Y1 Mod.0/1/2/3.
Less than a year later and the answer might be, "maybe this is how the world ends." Fingers crossed.
Humans don't currently possess the power or mental fortitude to end the world, only life as we know it.
The world was here 4.2 billion years before we crawled upon its surface and will most likely exist at least 4.2 billion years after humans evolved into whatever comes next.
Our world was struck by an exo-planet which ripped the planet in two, giving us our moon. Yet the world just reformed into a ball and kept on trucking! I highly doubt we could do worse in the next 1,000 years if we tried our best.
I've always wondered what percentage of "our" nuclear arsenal was fission bombs, what % were hydrogen bombs, how many neutron bombs, etc.
Most developed nation will use fusion bombs, due to need to limiting the size of the weapon and assuring a decent yield. For neutron bomb this is more complicated to know. One interest of neutron bomb would be to stop (Russian) armored divisions, indeed a strong neutron flux could pass the armor of the tank and kill the crew.
The French had developed the Pluton and Hades theater missiles to use from the French border on Russian advancing tanks (on German soil...). There is an interview of Mitterrand at the time from where one could hint those warheads could be neutron bombs... but nothing more, was the shrewd man playing one of his games or hinting a secret? It is possible to switch mode in nuclear weapons from different yield to "neutron bomb?" do countries with huge arsenals field neutron warheads? All this obviously classified information.
They are all fission weapons. They are boosted with fusion. There is no fusion bomb, or clean bomb. Even if they say it is " clean" they still have to use fission for the several million degrees to create fusion. They are all "boosted" fission weapons. A neutron bomb is a small yield thermonuclear weapon with a tamper that is transparent to neutrons with a very sharp cutoff of about 1000 yards. The weapon still destroys property it is just smaller and relies on radiation to kill. Most of the weapons use a mix of fission fusion fission. They go for like half and half. They made a few that were 90 percent clean but all of the weapons in the arsenal are "dirty".
920x W-78 warheads, 367x W-80 warheads, 1400x W-80/1 warheds, 650x B-83 bombs, 525x W-87 warheads, 400x W-88 warheads... give or take a few
@@pietristephane3537 The US does not have any neutron bombs. It never has. Before the planned neutron bombs could be fielded it was discovered that ordinary humidity in the atmosphere limited the neutron radiation to the same distance as the fireball. Thus the neutron enhancement was cancelled out, and they would have no more effect than the regular warheads. End of program.
@@KB4QAA read the other day that a large part of the non existent Israeli nuclear inventory has a large percentage of ERW warheads; non existent of course.
This guy looks just like the guy who did that old channel that doesn't exist anymore, Business Blaze
Ah the good old times 😂. Allegedly another mad blazy channel will come later this year
Yep. He does a narration on a gazillion different channels. And he annoys the shit out of me on every one of them.
@@blindlemon9 so let me get this straight… his voice annoys you yet you come here to do what exactly? Hate comment? Hate view? If you hate him that much the fuck are you doing here?
JFI: The CSIRO, the Australian government’s biggest scientific research organisation, announced about 20years ago. They said that owing to nuclear testing in Maralinga, Australia, during the 1950s to 1963, I believe, about 20,000 extra still born deaths were attributed to the nuclear testing. The incidence of childhood leukaemia also increased substantially at this time. Now you say a cobalt salted device was tested in the country I live in with about 27 million others. The original inhabitants suffered more than any other group in our country. This is a blot on our land left by our ‘allies’ and colonial overlords.
Yes!
Every time I find a new Simon channel I start watching in fear wondering if it’s “normal” Simon demeanor or “douchebag” Simon demeanor
This is great!
So glad you made a channel for the darker side of humanity. Can't wait to see what you and your team produce.
You might enjoy the casual criminalist
@@gidelix have since day one of the channel lol.
Salting aside, there is a misconception about fusion or 'H' bombs. The fusion part is still really part of the 'trigger'. The main destructive force is still provided by fission - the heavy outer casings are uranium ('depleted, or un-enriched). The fusion reaction in the core (caused by an intermediate fission reaction of plutonium) releases an immense cloud of neutrons that hit the containment vessel and cause it to undergo the massive fission reaction that yields the bulk of the energy. See Teller-Ulam configuration.
Current tech is boosted fission (so conventional - fission - added fusion from d and t gas - more fission THEN thermonuclear since all that stuff was a trigger to create heat and pressure inside the shell. Also inside the shell is a fusion bomb that is the "real" thermonuclear part. Otherwise you still have pretty limited yields.
No limit on how many iterations you can use for boosting. Packaging is the constraint. Huge bombs are physically huge due to multi stage boosting. Small-ish warheads are boosted fission, encased. Medium (ICBM) are two components in shell with first being more complicated.
Depends on the design of the bomb. Castle Bravo ran away to 15 megatons instead of the expected 4 or 5 because some morons miscalculated the fusion potential of lithium deuteride. It was the fusion fuel that made it the hugest bomb ever detonated by the USA, not boosted fission.
The Teller-Ulam configuration merely calls for using the x-ray "pressure" of the fission primary to initiate the fusion secondary. Meaning it uses the high-energy photons of x-rays to get fusion started before anything else can happen. It does not concern fission casings or anything of the sort. Simply a way of initiating fusion in the fuel before the blast of the primary dissipates the fuel too much for sustained fusion to occur.
Neville Shute's novel "On the Beach", the nuclear bombs used to kill everyone were cobalt bombs
What i can't comprehend is the thought of anyone thinking they are high and mighty enough to think they have the right to end the world. That they alone have the right to end all life of even the innocent. All of nature. The arrogance of anyone who thinks this is there call to make. Just incomprehensible to me. I can only imagine the hate and superiority they must feel. No one like this should ever be in a position to make such judgments.
So after everything is taken from us and we lose half the population due to radiation poisoning, we won't be making much more noise about that after all. And Millenia later, something else will see it's own day, just like we did before we dropped the ball.
Isn’t it weird. Imagine if sharks spent all their time and energy designing and building something that would kill all sharks. That’s basically what human beings have done with nuclear weapons. It’s just the universe is most expensive suicide packed
No world Wars since 1945, that's 75 years.
It’s arguably more a factor in that how wars are fought has changed. trench warfare is truly dead for the mainstay.
And with modern communication/social ideas the general populace is more likely to put up a fuss with any war that effects them in their country instead of just someone else’s country.
@@robertmccully2792 True, and how long do you think that will last? And now we have thousands of weapons that can kill a couple of billion people.. We have been extremely lucky. Whether it’s in 10 years or 50 years or 100 years or more, one of these bombs is going to go off either by mistake or on purpose and the worlds nuclear powers aren’t going to spend time trying to calmly and rationally figure out what has happened, some of them almost certainly will launch at whoever they are currently pissed off with assuming the worst. And then it’s on. Mutually asured destruction is still on the table, all it takes is to come up against somebody who doesn’t care. Imagine if a Hitler type or a bin laden got their hands on a nuclear weapon? Do you think they care about self-destruction? Nope. The bill always comes at the end.
@@nathnathn populations always had a problem with the impact of wars on their own country. That’s the whole point of propaganda to keep morale up when a war is being waged on your territory or otherwise. But yes, obviously the way wars are waged are different. Now it’s just mostly done from a distance, much easier to kill people you never see burst into pieces or scream. Especially if you can sit in some office on the other side of the world while you do it.
@@conors4430 >the worlds nuclear powers aren’t going to spend time trying to calmly and rationally figure out what has happened
I disagree, they're not all idiots you know, at least not in the way you might think. First off countries around the world have put a LOT of effort into figuring out how to tell when nuclear weapons are being launched, by who, and why, specifically to stop a single spark from lighting everything up.
Nuclear weapons are primarily a means of global grandstanding, I can guarantee you that in most future conflicts nuclear weapons will not even be an option to be considered, because we don't fight that way anymore, they didn't deploy nukes in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria because there was no point. This whole assumption that one spark can set everything off is a gross misunderstanding of how the major global powerhouses operate and what they actually want, but I can tell you what they don't want is a problem that will affect everyone. While the possiblity that nuclear weapons may be used against actual targets in the future is fairly likely considering they aren't going away, the chances of a nuclear armageddon are INCREDIBLY low, any rogue player can easily be eliminated by the big powers before they get a chance to end the world, and you can bet your ass that in a world practically ruled by wealthy businessmen, bankers and billionaire parasites who are currently trying their best to figure out how they can keep living and being rich forever that it's in no one's intrest to end the world just yet, once they get the space stations and offworld colonies then maybe, but I wouldn't hold my breath, it's going to be a while.
In the mean time you can look forward to a limited nuclear exchange, might come sooner than you think with China being ready for war in about 4 years or so, the Russian Status 6 nuclear powered torpedo armed with a high yield nuclear warhead most likely is a thing too, it's still up for speculation whether they're planning on using it to wreck NATO carrier strike groups in the event of a war or if they've just created a weapon capable of causing massive and entirely unexpected radioactive tsunamis, but the torpedos and the subs meant to carry them are well on their way. The Cold War never really ended, however we can still hope that it doesn't turn hot.
My Dad was in the USAF in the 1960s. He once told me that they had a cobalt bomb, but were afraid to test it because "they are afraid it will blow up the world".
Don't forget the cobalt Alpha-Omega bomb in Beneath the Planet of the Apes!
Here's the reason cobalt weapons have never been produced. They're lower yield and radiologically less potent than conventional thermonukes.
Let's take a secondary with a 1MT fusion yield and a neutron flux of 5e23 neutrons/cm^2, and compare the effects using a 25g/cm^2 tamper made of U-238 vs Co59.
Co-59's radiative capture cross section to 14.07 MeV neutrons is 0.00116869Bn.
This means only 0.0255 of the neutrons are attenuated. This means only 0.0127g/cm^2 of your cobalt would be transmuted, or about 0.1% of the total cobalt in your bomb.
This would produce a total Co-60 yield of 0.092kg of Co-60. In total this would produce around 200Gj of delayed gammas.
U-238's fission capture cross section to 14.07 MeV neutrons is 0.632414Bn.
This means 4% of neutrons are attenuated.
This means 7.9g/cm^2 of your uranium would be fissioned, or about 31.6% of the total uranium in the tamper. This would add another 2 MT to the yield, and produce a total of 115kg of fission products, which will release 270 Tj of delayed gammas.
A conventional thermonuke of the same mass produces on the order of thousand times more energy as delayed gamma radiation, as well as producing a blast 3 times as powerful.
Underrated comment
@@goodroach9984 Thanks.
This is precisely why the Soviets used a lead tamper for the Tsar bomba. A U238 tamper would have lead to a 300 MT yield (as opposed to "only" 50 MT), and insane levels of fallout, much of which would've landed in Russia itself.
Plot twist, why not both? A tripple stage thermonuclear device with a regular uranium casing delivered on a barge full of lithium cobalt oxide loaded graphite. (The stuff in lithium batteries) Conversion would be extremely efficient plus you get your bang as well. Lets hope it never happens but it is a very plausible way to deliver a device of this nature. 😲😵💩😢
@@christopherleubner6633 Although those elements would moderate the neutron flux, they'd also absorb neutrons, particularly lithium, so the conversion wouldn't be that efficient.
You'd still get more yield and more fallout using uranium tampers.
What worries me most is that some nuclear power could _accidentally_ do this by dropping a regular nuclear bomb on a city that happens have a cobalt storage warehouse.
Well, on that side I can say you should worry less since most nukes are used as an airburst meaning there should be some distance between the explosion and the cobalt - enough distance that the neutrons would be too dispersed to effectively enrich the cobalt. It would need to be a literally direct hit with a warhead able to punch through the ceiling of the warehouse to be close enough to be effective but that would sacrifice a fair amount of the bomb's potential blast radius.
@@Neion8 Or smuggle the bomb inside of said warehouse and detonate it. If you're a nuclear-capable nation, you probably have the resources to pull that off if you really wanted.
@@Stoney3K I mean it wouldn't be accidental then and just *not* airbursting an ICBM that you already have and know works seems far more practical than staging a complicated and risky espionage mission and hoping human error doesn't bite you in the ass.
Total neutron flux matters, and the metal needs to be wrapped around the device.
It has to be within a very close radius to the high neutron flux at moment of nuclear activation or it won't absorb much neutrons and transmutate. So no.
"Salting the earth" was not a curse. It was spread over the fertile areas around cities and settlements to make growing crops nearly impossible. It was a way to completely destroy an area and no longer leave it able to produce food and thus leaving the area unlivable.
Scorched Earth Policy....Same thing
@@grantkruse1812 No, in the sense he said it, it was not scorched earth, only a perceived one as he said it was a curse. Salting was done to destroy the land in a very real way.
Yeah, we’ll, it is a curse for those who were previously and obliviously living there. But they were not preferred.
You need a lot of salt to make just one field infertile. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot - several tons of it!
Furthermore, salt was precious at the time, so it is a myth!
@@meckifoerthmann9790 well, do you think they had slaves dig it up merely to put on their table? What motivates conquerors more, fine cuisine, or more real estate ( which includes denial of those one doesn’t care for of their real estate)
I just LOVE On The Beach. Have read the book and watched the black and white movie multiple times. Great story!
Thermobaric bombs (especially those fired from hand-held launchers) would make a pretty cool vid
There are some vids of Russian solidiers training with them in urban combat scenarios. It's like a scifi weapon. Awesome. Oh wait, they are real.
Who else immediately subscribes to Simon's new channels as they come out?
510 tons of cobalt would be the same weight as almost 3 boeing 747's, and that's excluding all the other stuff needed to build a bomb that big, and I doubt a single bomb of that size could sustain a nuclear reaction.
The UA-cam algorithm has a sick sense of humor sometimes ...
It's so destructive in theory, it's still theoretical, because testing it may be regrettably irreversible
It’s so simple, it doesn’t need to be tested.
Has been in reactors, and it is nasty stuff.