Well.. when all they had to deliver it was that plane and ... I rather like to believe they did not .. ofcourse they did not want to kill .. humans.. pilots.. theyre pilots.. theyre publi... anyways... it would also over a drunken stoober be decided and accurately so that claiming truthfully it could have been twice as big but they didnt bother cause htey had common sense... would be much cooler. THAT WAS AN AWESOME BOOM AND IT KILLED NO,... human... directly at least. Cool explosion though.. horrifying enough to put an end to that madness. Thank the BOOM.. or as he so eloquently put it.. Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. For science sake I recommend we build a series of them blowing up stuff on jupiter´s moon Io .. we could stress test bunkers in all kinds of scenarios. in case aliens invade ;))) .. ending up with the iggest detonated in our solar system to blow up a man made replica of the death star in 1/1 scale :)
I'm not sure this is an absolute standard. I think the method of delivery is a big factor in the equation. Remember the "Davy Crockett" nuclear recoil-less rifle had the optimistic words along the lines of "users are probably safe, but should still take cover after firing" within its operating manual. Sure it's a big bomb, but is it really the size that's the issue or the fact that ordinance and delivery tech did not actually match up like they ought to have? I am also definitely not condoning that everyone should create better delivery methods for nuclear ordinance, I'm just pointing out sometimes it's the boom, sometimes it's the moron pulling the trigger.
@@steeljawX I am sure that a cool hoopy frood that is pulling the trigger on a 1000 times faster and larger device in a preannounced public science experiment is a much much much better thing --- than a non hoopy frood pulling the trigger on anything bigger than firecracker.
Well at least the Soviets were able to accurately predict the yield and plan accordingly. The biggest US detonation, the Castle Bravo test was a huge fuckup that nearly got scientists killed and irradiated inhabitants of nearby islands as well as the crew of the ironically named "Lucky Dragon," a Japanese fishing vessel. You see somebody didn't properly do his homework, or fubared up the math, or both, and anyway hugely miscalculated the fusion potential of lithium deuteride, the primary fusion fuel of modern thermonuclear bombs. These brainiac scientists calculated the yield of Castle Bravo to be around 5 MT. Which is still a huge, apocalyptic explosion and even at that size would have been the most powerful man-made explosion the world had ever seen. Imagine the surprise and professional embarrassment when Castle Bravo detonated with FIFTEEN FUCKING MEGATONS instead of five. Observers on ships dozens of miles away talked about expecting to see an impressive explosion far away, when instead they felt like they were standing in the open door of a blast furnace and instead of having the mushroom cloud on the horizon, they had one so huge and so close it looked like, as they said "it had gone off in our laps." Instead of a far away vantage, they were so close that they actually fell under the umbrella of the mushroom cloud. A group of scientists who were monitoring the explosion in a "bombproof bunker" on the other end of the atoll, some 23 miles away, had to be emergency evacuated because the radioactivity falling on their shelter was skyrocketing to the point that it would have roasted every one of them alive, even in their so-called bombproof bunker if they'd remained much longer. I think you could call Castle Bravo the Biggest Fuckup in Human History. That's not to say it wasn't scientifically useful. Once the scientists learned just how little lithium deuteride you had to put in your secondary to create an apocalyptic explosion, US warheads began to get much smaller and far, far more powerful. In the days of bomber-borne gravity bombs and huge but dumb rockets, a megaton-plus warhead was on practically every weapon the US deployed in the 50s and early 60s. Without doubt Tsar Bomba was a smashing success in its assigned role, that of propaganda tool rather than a useful weapon. Which it was not. But it was never designed to be. Khrushchev was nothing if not brilliant and Tsar Bomba had the exact effect on the USA that it was planned to have. Honestly though, even a fleet of planes carrying a couple dozen Tsar Bombas wouldn't have even made it to Canada before every one of them was a smoking wreck on the ground. Too big and too slow and no match at all for NORAD interceptors and surface-to-air missiles. I doubt that more than a handful would have even made it much past the north pole. So now nobody but the Chinese are mounting megaton-range warheads on their missiles or in their strategic bombers (which is, save only stealth aircraft, an obsolete concept.) The only reason the Chinese use them is because their missiles are big and dumb and are only considered a deterrent. As in China has no capacity for a first strike to, say, destroy an enemy's missiles in the ground. What they do have is enough big dumb missiles to drop a megaton-plus warhead on every major city of any country in the world. When it comes to nuclear deterrence the Chinese are probably the smartest of us all. Their arsenal is all about punishment. Swift, unavoidable punishment on a huge scale. They don't need to be able to destroy an enemy's missiles in the ground so long as the enemy knows that ANY launch on China will result in smoking holes in the ground where enemy cities used to be. Nowadays between the US and Russia most strategic warheads run from about 100-800 KT in yield, just a pinch of the power of both Castle Bravo and Tsar Bomba. Does that make you feel safer? It shouldn't. Ten or fifteen 150 KT detonations in the right pattern over a city or other target is going to cause far, far more destruction than any single Tsar Bomba ever could. And that's EXACTLY how war plans on both the Russian and US side would work. Massive swarms of small warheads. According to the now-declassified SIOP plan of the USA for attacking the Soviet Union in the late 60s, the area of central Moscow where the Kremlin and other government agencies were located was slated to get 65 (!) goddamn warheads. That's not for all of Moscow. That was just for downtown. With plenty of others to flatten everything else. We have to assume that the USSR had similar plans for Washington DC and other important areas. Hell you could probably skateboard from North Carolina all the way to Philadelphia on the radioactive glass that would be all you'd see for hundreds of square miles after a Soviet or Russian attack. You'd drop dead from radiation in just a few hours, but it wouldn't be the skateboard's fault you couldn't skate the entire distance. Everything you need to know about how a nuclear attack would come about, and why. ua-cam.com/video/u4Wb2p28tlY/v-deo.html. The most dread-inducing documentary you'll ever watch. And as a bonus, in that video you find out why the Moscow Metro would have been a mass grave in WW3 , instead of the sheltered underground world of the magnificent Metro series of PC games. As explained by a cold-war Soviet medical official, so you can't doubt the source. Hey Simon, how's that for a Megaproject? Do one on the declassified 1960s SIOP US war plans for attacking the USSR. Any plan that calls for detonating dozens or hundreds of thermonuclear warheads over a single city is as fucking MEGA as it gets. If he does it you know who to thank, folks.
@@patrickscalia5088 Wrong there. Castle Bravo went haywire because of an unknown property of the Lithium isotope used for most of the fusion fuel. It wasn't known until after the results of that test were analysed that the isotope making up the bulk of the Lithium in the Lithium-Deuteride fuel could initiate fusion, so that component was not taken into consideration when calculating the projected yield. The Soviets no doubts got their hands on that data (it may even have been in the open by the time) so they knew better what to expect.
@@carso1500 Yeah, combined with the fact that they discovered the full-up 100 megaton yield would have been impossible to make *clean*, since it would've been impossible to keep the fireball from irradiating countless tons of debris, turning it into fallout, and thanks to the sheer yield and construction of the full yield's tamper, put a LOT of people in danger from high altitude, highly radioactive fallout. They also found out that 50 megatons was the "sweet spot" for high-yield detonations as anything more tended to lose more blast energy out into space, rather than where they wanted it.
@@redram5150 thats actually a myth, the scientists did discuss the posibility initially but after doing some mathematics they discovered they would need a REALLY Big bomb to do something like that
@@carso1500 Even then, initial calculations suggest not even a large antimatter explosion could do this. You'd sooner create a crack in the mantle that'd arguably do just as much damage on a global scale. There was honestly more paranoia about the underwater shots than anything detonated intra-atmospherically - there's a video by the guy in charge of the first Bikini atoll tests where he deadpans into the camera that the tests won't vaporize the oceans and that he is "NOT an 'Atomic Playboy.'"
@@Stale_Mahoney no they reached the point of usefullness of the weaon, most of the blast of 100megaton one would escape to space, also it would create so much of radioactive debris it would bassically do more harm than use.
@@Stale_Mahoney no the designer cut the yield because in order to attain another 50 megatons they would have to employ a uranium tamper of U238 to fast fission from the fusion. As such it was too much contamination. He also assumed over 500 hundred thousand people worldwide would die from the amount of fission used to ignite the weapon which was already over a megaton. There have been much bigger explosions than Tsar Bomba. Krakatoa was 200 megatons.
The next question is.... Just how many of them pushing for a full power test.... SHAT then selves, and suddenly decided that 50% is a DAMN good number after all?
The US: blowing up the atmosphere? Sounds like a good idea right? Ps: they actually tried to do something like this, I don’t know if it was beffore or after the Tsar Bomba but it was wnvuentually pulled off because someone so ewhere figueres out this was a dumb idea.
Am I the only one who sang that to "I like big butts but I cannot lie"....?? "I like big bombs but that's too much".... yeah.... the beats match perfectly.
@@vonfaustien3957 sure, that's what we did... Which is why there are only like four or so planes that are large enough to transport/deliver/service targets with our "standard" tactical nuke... You almost got it right, nice try though, thinking you're thinking of our intercontinental ballistics that have multiple reentry vehicles for target servicing. You've never heard of Texas huh, everything is bigger in Texas.
Agreed! He did an episode on the B-52 a year ago, but it boggles my mind that he hasn't done an episode on it's rival, Da Bear! Between the B-52 and the TU-95, my favorite has to be the TU-95. I'm an American Aviation nerd and I'm proud to say that.
It's said that the Russian Scientists watching the Tsar Bomba explosion were frightened that it would not stop . That fear also helped to end above ground Nuclear Testing .
They bungled this. They should have gone into detail about how long it took the Soviets to pool those resources together necessary to make the bomb. We know this part of the story. And they did Castle Bravo to death. lol
@@stefanschleps8758 Tsar Bomba has been done to death but here we are watching another, besides I feel the CB one is more interesting in that it was a major goof and not just the testing of a big bomb.
You know it’s bad when even the Russians put the brakes on it. “We could make it bigger.” “We SHOULD make it bigger!” *some math and a weapons test later “We should make it even bigger!” *lead scientist steps back “... we need to stop.”
Even russians. Too bad americans was not russians when they start atomic war with Japan and kill thousands of children with atomic bombs. Should put a break on it
Actually, unless hyperspace or some other method that we (currently) don't think is scientifically possible exists to travel the vast interstellar distances, any ship going anywhere near the speed of light has to worry about shielding from even dust particles? Why? Because at speeds greater than roughly 50 percent of C dust particles act like gamma rays and even larger things (like a pebble) are basically nukes. So any interstellar ship will have to have SHIELDING of some kind and such shielding would largely make it immune to our puny nukes, as they would have traveled 100s of trillions or even quadrillions or more of miles to get here and had to be prepared to take a near constant bombardment of gamma rays and small nukes, esp when they were near or entered a solar system, ours or others.
@@remo27 yeah but that's just like...your opinion, bro ;) No, you're right, if they got interstellar travel down, they're not shocked by a nuke. Their toddler's probably play with scarier stuff in our perception, they're totally different beings. More likely they'll rate us a "Stage 2 Civilization" with Ants at Stage 1 and we're probably not even able to grasp Stages 7 and above
@@YeeSoest the tsar bomba liberated roughly the same amount of energy that hits the earth from the sun in a second, so for roughly one second suddenly energy spiked on earth and we reached kardashev 1 civ status to then fall down again to kardashev 0.7 or around that, the tsar bomba was a fucking monster
Simon you should convince the UA-cam CEO to make you the international Chief Marketing Officer. Your channels keep me busy most days, the back catalogue has kept me going through UK lockdown. I’ve got your viewing numbers up 👌
You missed the reason for the change from 100mt... they figured anything beyond 50 mt. was a waste because the blast would be so big that it would just go into space...
The yield of a explosion is proportional to the bast radius cubed. That means that you have to provide 8 times as much boom to get a blast twice as wide. Splitting up a payload into smaller warheads produces _waaay_ more damage. Big Bomb: 1000kt --> 7.7km radius blast; 186.3 km^2 wrecked Smaller bombs 5x100kt --> 5x 3.6km radius blasts; 203.575 km^2 wrecked The second option provides 10% more damage for half the yield. The real reason that the Tsar Bomba was so big was because the Soviets couldn't increase the yield per kilogram efficiency of their warheads as high as the Americans and decided to try and awe the public with scale instead. To the experts tracking the the arms race it mostly revealed how behind their technology was.
I was shocked and impressed when you mentioned the height of the mushroom cloud...and then you compared it to Everest. Holy fuck! My eyes nearly popped out of my head, that's insane!
I believe it happened before that... in Germany during WWII. It also explains where we got all the "material" for the 2 "B"'s used on Japan. The Germans had it before we did. No one, including us, knew about it.
@@alankrebs856 I believe the German explosion you mentioned was a chemical one with the release of radioactive materials. The Trinity test was the first ever nuclear fission explosion.
Im glad we live in the timeline where after this test the Americans and the Soviets were like...."ok yeah we should prob just stop there...that seemed a bit much" because you know the timeline where America responded with their own apocalypse bomb everybody's dead
What makes you think anything stopped except the testing? You don't really believe research in how to make ever more powerful bombs that weighed a tenth as much, do you? America and Russia both tightened their security until neither side knew what the other was doing, and research is still ongoing after all these decades. Research split into two directions, higher yield bombs in smaller packages, and low yield bombs that could be used with artillery. One could even be fired from a mortar. No one who's talking knows how well the research went, but there is no doubt that the Czar bomd is the largest ever exploded, but nowhere near the most powerful ever built. The Czar bomb is ancient history. Modern science has made it little more than a toy.
Looking at the history of nuclear weapons development I disagree. After the colossal miscalculation with Castle Bravo and the Tsar Bomba I don't think anyone wanted something more powerful to be manufactured and stored inside their territory unless war was declared and they found it absolutely necessary to use as a last line of defense. Also, by the time these bombs were being developed it became apparent that such a massively huge and heavy bomb would be much harder to deploy successfully against an enemy far away than to build a multitude of ICBMs with smaller, less powerful, but much more effectively deployed nuclear warheads than trying to fly a slow, loud airplane over a vast distance to deliver on target.
"The nuclear weapon's age began on the 6th of august 1945." Actually, it began on 16th july of the same year with the Trinity nuclear test of a plutonium bomb.
1:20 - Chapter 1 - The nuclear age emerges 3:40 - Chapter 2 - The soviet nuclear program 5:30 - Chapter 3 - A bomb to rule them all 6:10 - Chapter 4 - The tsar bomba 9:25 - Chapter 5 - The test 12:05 - Chapter 6 - Fallout
@HVAC Quality Assurance "Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dimitri? Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I like to speak to you. Of course I like to say hello. Not now, but any time, Dimitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It's a friendly call."
Imagine for some reason Soviet Union couldn’t develop nuclear weapons. Cold war would be a much different picture. Even with the power to wipe out humanity, nuclear deterrent did play a massively important role in avoiding wars in the scale of WWI & WWII.
Few things 1 - this was actually one of the "cleanest" nukes as far as fallout is concerned. 2 - at 3:05 you are dead wrong. Soviets lost half a tank army trying to quickly take Warsaw(Battle of Radzymin). The tank army was decimated and was not in any shape to continue fighting. When you lose something like a tank army, you tend to take things slow for a while.
1 Tsar bomba cleanest bomb omfg.2 No more lies about real history of WW2 You know that's the Soviets propaganda right? Soviets have still lots of man ( and tank power) they simply use this as excuse to not help the Armia Krajowa in Warsaw uprising.They waited for them to bleed out fighting the Nazis.
Hey fact boy, have you heard of the Belgorod class of Russian subs? Commissioned in 2019 to do one thing only: Launch the bus-sized Poseidon class Intercontinental Nuclear Torpedo, these can be launched clear across the ocean at 70 knots to hit coastal targets. Original design was for a 100MT warhead with the goal of inundating the coastal city with a radioactive tsunami and render it uninhabitable for decades. The sub itself is big enough to carry 6 of these things, and also a whole other submarine docked to the underside. Sounds perfect for Megaprojects. Giant absurd russian vehicle + giant absurd russian doomsday device.
Is it my imagination, or is Simon's beard growing longer, darker and more luxurious? Surely there is some sort of beard product that could be a sponsor of Simon's videos. 😲
Interesting fact I heard, the Tsar at twice the yield wouldn't have been that much more effective. At 50ish megatons a lot of the blast blew out more of Earth's atmosphere into space. So a bigger blast wouldn't necessarily be that much more effective because it would simply be blowing out more air into space rather than having the air carry the blast wave onward. ... still scary as heck though!
Honestly they probably don't. The simple matter is that the larger a blast the less efficient it is. It's better to use cluster munitions that can target multiple targets simultaneously. The bombs used in the 40's could wipe out cities, bigger than that was already seeing diminishing returns.
The mushroom cloud reached well beyond the troposphere, the lower atmosphere where most of our weather events take place (probably had a height of around 15km or so) and trough the stratosphere which goes to aroung 50km and into the Mesosphere. The region where small meteorites burn up. It's height was 67km as he said in the video and for comparison space is defined as anything above 100km and the ISS orbits at around 400km. It reached 16% the height of the ISS!!
Errors - When Hiroshima is mentioned, it shows footage from the bombing of Nagasaki. When the bomb dropped upon Nagasaki was mentioned, it showed footage from Hiroshima. Also I believe that he called the latter bomb "big man" or something. It was called "fat man". I've pointed out inaccuracies before on one of his videos, and I received a rather passive aggressive response that said "well thanks for pointing that out" What happened to humility?? Dont get it twisted, I absolutely ADORE his content. But if I see something that's inaccurate or misleading, of course I'm going to stay something.
I thank God that we have mostly pulled away from the nuclear war mindset. Being a realist, I know that nuclear is always a threat, but nothing near like it was when I served in the Army.
Why so wasteful of a big bomb? It wastes most of its yield to look big instead of performing architectural renovation. Because it is better to aim a bunch of smaller ones more accurately and they can fit on a SLBM.
Russia has recently redeveloped their 100 megaton warheads. They’re installed on the newer Poseidon supermassive autonomous torpedoes. The intent is to have self-guided torpedos attack an enemy’s coast and with the detonation causing a massive artificial tsunami. It’s a confusing and scary second-strike weapon. They’re installed on the Belgorod and Khabarovsk submarines.
Yes. More posturing. They could do something like that but as you said it would a second strike doomsday weapon. The U.S. has a second strike doomsday weapon that is set to go off 2 weeks after the smoke clears. lol I guess that is to make sure all the people that have shelters, don't get too cocky and think they are ok.
Now they made its military into joke last year. I doubt they have more then 1 or even worse, they didn't even build it (money most likely went into someone's pocket).
If you see the video that the Russians made on it, you can see the innards of this device. It had 6 roughly 9Mt thermonuclear subassemblies in it. There was supposed to be a tertiary stage in the center that was gonna make it even more powerful. Had they added that piece, the yield would have been between 120 and 250Mt of blast. In practice though, once they yield is roughly 22Mt, the excess power is wasted because the crater more or less reflects the energy straight up.
@@alankrebs856 Then we would have to establish what the phrase nuclear age means. Radioactivity was discovered several decades earlier, the word being coined by Maria and Pierre Curie back in 1898. British scientists made first artificial nuclear transmutations in 1920's and early '30s. Germans discovered nuclear fission in 1938. But in this video, I suppose the phrase was meant to be - detonation of the first nuclear bomb.
Someone should create a video recreating this bombs detonation. To better show what it really was, these short glimpses of actual footage from outdated cameras jus doesn't do it justice. CGI or something to that effect of course lol
When you have to reduce the power of your weapon because you realize that the test site, hundreds of miles from anywhere, is STILL too close to home, you probably should rethink what you're doing in the first place.
Wrong. The people who created the first ATOMIC (not thermonuclear aka hydrogen) bombs worried about that, there was some very small chance based on their calculation that the Trinity Test (first nuclear test ever) might do that due to some chain reaction in the air, but it never happened. By the time this bomb rolled around 10 to 15 years later, it was known that nukes, no matter how large, don't 'set the atmosphere on fire'. This was due not just to all the hundreds of tests that both superpowers had done by that time, but also the fact that digital computers h ad not only been invented but their were far more of them and they could handle all the theoretical calculations faster and better and more accurate than humans could. What the Soviets didn't want was trouble with their neighbors. This island was a test island (where they exploded the Tsar Bomba) but even so the shockwave was felt (and shattered windows) in places like Norway and Sweden. A twice as powerful bomb might have caused considerably more damage plus they didn't want to risk fallout all over Europe which might lead to war or , at best, embarrassment.
Oh poo! What's a little atmospheric FIRE!!!! It's all in the name of "fun"!!! :))) I don't know what I like more.... Tesla Resonance Oscillators.... or cracking Hydrogen from ordinary tap water! Da bigga da boom da betta!
@@remo27 that, and they didn't really need to do the full scale blast to test if the thing worked. The effects of using a Uranium tamper instead of a steel tamper were not that hard to calculate, and didn't affect the overall design, so using a steel tamper was both more safe, cheaper, and enough for the purpose of the test.
Given how volatile the minds of heads of state are, the fact that a 100MT bomb idea hasn't been explored yet is quite a testament to common sense and the power of the atoms themselves.
Also very interesting: The full 3stage designed would likely have been had way higher than its intended yield as the material used as foam initially used for keeping the 3rd layer at a distance was later theorised and shown to be able to increase the yield of the inner stages by slowing down the expansion as well as acting as a moderatot increasing the yield of the 3rd stage. As most information about the exact construction and workings of nuclear weapons are still secrets heavily guarded by the respective governments there are only rough estimates about just how large the effect would be. Some sources say it would be just as low as a 20% increase, others go as high as suggesting 3x increase.
"We've never seen anything like the Tsar Bomba since, and always remember - it was supposed to be twice as big!" Is that a challenge meant towards some crazy billionaire to make Atomic Bombs Great again?
nah, the Russian military has already done that. They're fielding 2 weapons systems with 100MT warheads, nuclear propulsion, and fully autonomous navigation systems. Set a target, a desired date to hit it up to several months in the future, press the button, and it will fly around for a while before looking for the best way to get there undetected and blow up a city. The Americans with their SLAM project in the 1950s weren't anywhere near that crazy, and they canceled theirs because it was too crazy.
One thing Simon forgot to mention. When the Tsar Bomba was dropped, it was in the middle of a mutually agreed upon moratorium on nuclear testing so both the Soviets and the US could negotiate arms limitations. The Soviets gleefully ignored the moratorium inside a year and thus proved the worth of their word. This escalated the Cold War by proving the Soviets, at best, were not negotiating in good faith as they used Castle Bravo to browbeat the West into agreeing to stop testing while they were cheerfully developing a beast like this.
The US was still developing super bombs, in the 1960s they added the B41 to their arsenal, the most efficient bomb ever. 25Megatons and much smaller than the Tsar Bomba.
Possible Cold War annihilation always seems more interesting and humorous when Simon gives you his take on it. Continue doing what you do and I'll keep watching it.
You know the bomb is big, when the human lives of the operators are taken into consideration when calculating the cost of operation.
Well.. when all they had to deliver it was that plane and ... I rather like to believe they did not .. ofcourse they did not want to kill .. humans.. pilots.. theyre pilots.. theyre publi... anyways... it would also over a drunken stoober be decided and accurately so that claiming truthfully it could have been twice as big but they didnt bother cause htey had common sense... would be much cooler. THAT WAS AN AWESOME BOOM AND IT KILLED NO,... human... directly at least. Cool explosion though.. horrifying enough to put an end to that madness. Thank the BOOM.. or as he so eloquently put it.. Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
For science sake I recommend we build a series of them blowing up stuff on jupiter´s moon Io .. we could stress test bunkers in all kinds of scenarios. in case aliens invade ;))) .. ending up with the iggest detonated in our solar system to blow up a man made replica of the death star in 1/1 scale :)
I'm not sure this is an absolute standard. I think the method of delivery is a big factor in the equation. Remember the "Davy Crockett" nuclear recoil-less rifle had the optimistic words along the lines of "users are probably safe, but should still take cover after firing" within its operating manual. Sure it's a big bomb, but is it really the size that's the issue or the fact that ordinance and delivery tech did not actually match up like they ought to have? I am also definitely not condoning that everyone should create better delivery methods for nuclear ordinance, I'm just pointing out sometimes it's the boom, sometimes it's the moron pulling the trigger.
@@steeljawX I am sure that a cool hoopy frood that is pulling the trigger on a 1000 times faster and larger device in a preannounced public science experiment is a much much much better thing --- than a non hoopy frood pulling the trigger on anything bigger than firecracker.
Well at least the Soviets were able to accurately predict the yield and plan accordingly. The biggest US detonation, the Castle Bravo test was a huge fuckup that nearly got scientists killed and irradiated inhabitants of nearby islands as well as the crew of the ironically named "Lucky Dragon," a Japanese fishing vessel.
You see somebody didn't properly do his homework, or fubared up the math, or both, and anyway hugely miscalculated the fusion potential of lithium deuteride, the primary fusion fuel of modern thermonuclear bombs. These brainiac scientists calculated the yield of Castle Bravo to be around 5 MT. Which is still a huge, apocalyptic explosion and even at that size would have been the most powerful man-made explosion the world had ever seen.
Imagine the surprise and professional embarrassment when Castle Bravo detonated with FIFTEEN FUCKING MEGATONS instead of five. Observers on ships dozens of miles away talked about expecting to see an impressive explosion far away, when instead they felt like they were standing in the open door of a blast furnace and instead of having the mushroom cloud on the horizon, they had one so huge and so close it looked like, as they said "it had gone off in our laps." Instead of a far away vantage, they were so close that they actually fell under the umbrella of the mushroom cloud. A group of scientists who were monitoring the explosion in a "bombproof bunker" on the other end of the atoll, some 23 miles away, had to be emergency evacuated because the radioactivity falling on their shelter was skyrocketing to the point that it would have roasted every one of them alive, even in their so-called bombproof bunker if they'd remained much longer.
I think you could call Castle Bravo the Biggest Fuckup in Human History. That's not to say it wasn't scientifically useful. Once the scientists learned just how little lithium deuteride you had to put in your secondary to create an apocalyptic explosion, US warheads began to get much smaller and far, far more powerful. In the days of bomber-borne gravity bombs and huge but dumb rockets, a megaton-plus warhead was on practically every weapon the US deployed in the 50s and early 60s.
Without doubt Tsar Bomba was a smashing success in its assigned role, that of propaganda tool rather than a useful weapon. Which it was not. But it was never designed to be. Khrushchev was nothing if not brilliant and Tsar Bomba had the exact effect on the USA that it was planned to have.
Honestly though, even a fleet of planes carrying a couple dozen Tsar Bombas wouldn't have even made it to Canada before every one of them was a smoking wreck on the ground. Too big and too slow and no match at all for NORAD interceptors and surface-to-air missiles. I doubt that more than a handful would have even made it much past the north pole.
So now nobody but the Chinese are mounting megaton-range warheads on their missiles or in their strategic bombers (which is, save only stealth aircraft, an obsolete concept.) The only reason the Chinese use them is because their missiles are big and dumb and are only considered a deterrent. As in China has no capacity for a first strike to, say, destroy an enemy's missiles in the ground. What they do have is enough big dumb missiles to drop a megaton-plus warhead on every major city of any country in the world. When it comes to nuclear deterrence the Chinese are probably the smartest of us all. Their arsenal is all about punishment. Swift, unavoidable punishment on a huge scale. They don't need to be able to destroy an enemy's missiles in the ground so long as the enemy knows that ANY launch on China will result in smoking holes in the ground where enemy cities used to be.
Nowadays between the US and Russia most strategic warheads run from about 100-800 KT in yield, just a pinch of the power of both Castle Bravo and Tsar Bomba. Does that make you feel safer? It shouldn't. Ten or fifteen 150 KT detonations in the right pattern over a city or other target is going to cause far, far more destruction than any single Tsar Bomba ever could. And that's EXACTLY how war plans on both the Russian and US side would work. Massive swarms of small warheads. According to the now-declassified SIOP plan of the USA for attacking the Soviet Union in the late 60s, the area of central Moscow where the Kremlin and other government agencies were located was slated to get 65 (!) goddamn warheads. That's not for all of Moscow. That was just for downtown. With plenty of others to flatten everything else. We have to assume that the USSR had similar plans for Washington DC and other important areas. Hell you could probably skateboard from North Carolina all the way to Philadelphia on the radioactive glass that would be all you'd see for hundreds of square miles after a Soviet or Russian attack. You'd drop dead from radiation in just a few hours, but it wouldn't be the skateboard's fault you couldn't skate the entire distance.
Everything you need to know about how a nuclear attack would come about, and why. ua-cam.com/video/u4Wb2p28tlY/v-deo.html. The most dread-inducing documentary you'll ever watch.
And as a bonus, in that video you find out why the Moscow Metro would have been a mass grave in WW3 , instead of the sheltered underground world of the magnificent Metro series of PC games. As explained by a cold-war Soviet medical official, so you can't doubt the source.
Hey Simon, how's that for a Megaproject? Do one on the declassified 1960s SIOP US war plans for attacking the USSR. Any plan that calls for detonating dozens or hundreds of thermonuclear warheads over a single city is as fucking MEGA as it gets.
If he does it you know who to thank, folks.
@@patrickscalia5088 Wrong there. Castle Bravo went haywire because of an unknown property of the Lithium isotope used for most of the fusion fuel.
It wasn't known until after the results of that test were analysed that the isotope making up the bulk of the Lithium in the Lithium-Deuteride fuel could initiate fusion, so that component was not taken into consideration when calculating the projected yield.
The Soviets no doubts got their hands on that data (it may even have been in the open by the time) so they knew better what to expect.
"yeah we gotta cut the blast power in half because if we don't, pretty sure we're gonna blow up the atmosphere"- Russian scientists
It was more like "we gotta cut the blast power in half or the pilot is not going to return"
@@carso1500 Yeah, combined with the fact that they discovered the full-up 100 megaton yield would have been impossible to make *clean*, since it would've been impossible to keep the fireball from irradiating countless tons of debris, turning it into fallout, and thanks to the sheer yield and construction of the full yield's tamper, put a LOT of people in danger from high altitude, highly radioactive fallout. They also found out that 50 megatons was the "sweet spot" for high-yield detonations as anything more tended to lose more blast energy out into space, rather than where they wanted it.
When the Trinity test was going on, they were worried they’d ignite the ionosphere and burn the planet to a crisp.
@@redram5150 thats actually a myth, the scientists did discuss the posibility initially but after doing some mathematics they discovered they would need a REALLY Big bomb to do something like that
@@carso1500 Even then, initial calculations suggest not even a large antimatter explosion could do this. You'd sooner create a crack in the mantle that'd arguably do just as much damage on a global scale. There was honestly more paranoia about the underwater shots than anything detonated intra-atmospherically - there's a video by the guy in charge of the first Bikini atoll tests where he deadpans into the camera that the tests won't vaporize the oceans and that he is "NOT an 'Atomic Playboy.'"
The fact the scientists decided to lower the payload because they thought it was too powerful is insane.
well when the fear of blowing the atmosphere of the planet, comes from someone it kind of defeats the purpose of protecting a country xD
@@Stale_Mahoney no they reached the point of usefullness of the weaon, most of the blast of 100megaton one would escape to space, also it would create so much of radioactive debris it would bassically do more harm than use.
@@MrVacicak guess you have not heard that they did actually fear for the atmosphere itself if it was to be the original chosen size?
@@Stale_Mahoney no the designer cut the yield because in order to attain another 50 megatons they would have to employ a uranium tamper of U238 to fast fission from the fusion. As such it was too much contamination. He also assumed over 500 hundred thousand people worldwide would die from the amount of fission used to ignite the weapon which was already over a megaton. There have been much bigger explosions than Tsar Bomba. Krakatoa was 200 megatons.
The next question is.... Just how many of them pushing for a full power test.... SHAT then selves, and suddenly decided that 50% is a DAMN good number after all?
Imagine signing up as a photographer for the Russian Air Force because it was the safest assignment possible and then you pull this short straw
Go big or go to the Gulag
That like being a politician and you have to be the security at your place
Big or bust.
What do you think american airforce was safeset job?
The US: blowing up the atmosphere? Sounds like a good idea right?
Ps: they actually tried to do something like this, I don’t know if it was beffore or after the Tsar Bomba but it was wnvuentually pulled off because someone so ewhere figueres out this was a dumb idea.
"More power than all the munitions in WWII" , as a vet that puts this things power into perspective for me and it's kinda scary
10x more power than all the munitions in a 6 year war...and this was the bomb at half it's designed power. It's absolutely fucking terrifying haha
10 times more powerful mate...while still (thankfully) half reduced of it's potential yield lmao. Those russkies were totally insane allrite
Imagine counting every bullet, missle, torpedo, artillery shell, and bomb. Fired during those 6 long years? Truly a terrifying scale of destruction.
And that includes the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
@@nicwilson89 And WWII was no average war, it was the pinnacle of madness involving human-on-human violence.
It finally happened... ALL of the UA-cam recommendations on my screen are for Simon Whistler channels.
Simp
you have collected all 10 channels, now shave your head to claim the prize of becoming the head of the Simon cult
You have a choice of videos to watch - Simon, Simon, Simon and Simon
He favors you, the chosen one.
Someone's a Simonoholic here.
Or maybe a Whistkie x)
You know the bomb was humongous when even the US said "I like big bombs that's too much"
Am I the only one who sang that to "I like big butts but I cannot lie"....??
"I like big bombs but that's too much".... yeah.... the beats match perfectly.
You ain't never been to Texas...
They should bomb USA with 1000 like this ;)
The USA focused more on targeting and minturiazation. Why drop one bomb when a MIRV can carpet bomb several targets at once
@@vonfaustien3957 sure, that's what we did... Which is why there are only like four or so planes that are large enough to transport/deliver/service targets with our "standard" tactical nuke... You almost got it right, nice try though, thinking you're thinking of our intercontinental ballistics that have multiple reentry vehicles for target servicing. You've never heard of Texas huh, everything is bigger in Texas.
Tu 95 deserves its own episode.
Agreed.
Agreed! He did an episode on the B-52 a year ago, but it boggles my mind that he hasn't done an episode on it's rival, Da Bear! Between the B-52 and the TU-95, my favorite has to be the TU-95. I'm an American Aviation nerd and I'm proud to say that.
He do the B29 yet?
I thought I read it's the loudest aircraft in the world.
@@patdohrety2940
It certainly is when it drops a 57 MT bomb...
It's said that the Russian Scientists watching the Tsar Bomba explosion were frightened that it would not stop . That fear also helped to end above ground Nuclear Testing .
Castle Bravo would make a good follow up to this considering the literal fallout from that spectacularly awesome screwup!
ua-cam.com/video/WzAe7t_o0Mw/v-deo.html
I have been pestering him for ages to do Castle Bravo alas still no though.
They bungled this. They should have gone into detail about how long it took the Soviets to pool those resources together necessary to make the bomb. We know this part of the story. And they did Castle Bravo to death. lol
@@stefanschleps8758 Tsar Bomba has been done to death but here we are watching another, besides I feel the CB one is more interesting in that it was a major goof and not just the testing of a big bomb.
@E Van they know now, they didn't know at the time. We know now because of Castle Bravo
You know it’s bad when even the Russians put the brakes on it.
“We could make it bigger.”
“We SHOULD make it bigger!”
*some math and a weapons test later
“We should make it even bigger!”
*lead scientist steps back
“... we need to stop.”
Even russians. Too bad americans was not russians when they start atomic war with Japan and kill thousands of children with atomic bombs. Should put a break on it
To quote skulker, "We attacked a few boats, they dropped the sun on us twice"
Andrei Sakharov is one of the greatest Soviets to ever live. He is like the 20th century equivalent of Alfred Nobel. Incredible person.
He was one of the inventors of the Tokamak, the fusion reactor with the biggest potential.
At this point, Simon might as well make a channel and call it Cold War Projects. These cold war vids are sick
Imagine an alien starship approaching Earth to visit humanity and seeing that
Alien: "I can't wait to clap some human chee- HOLY SHIT"
To quote George Carlin. "And then we wonder why. A UFO doesn't just land and say hello."
Actually, unless hyperspace or some other method that we (currently) don't think is scientifically possible exists to travel the vast interstellar distances, any ship going anywhere near the speed of light has to worry about shielding from even dust particles? Why? Because at speeds greater than roughly 50 percent of C dust particles act like gamma rays and even larger things (like a pebble) are basically nukes. So any interstellar ship will have to have SHIELDING of some kind and such shielding would largely make it immune to our puny nukes, as they would have traveled 100s of trillions or even quadrillions or more of miles to get here and had to be prepared to take a near constant bombardment of gamma rays and small nukes, esp when they were near or entered a solar system, ours or others.
@@remo27 yeah but that's just like...your opinion, bro ;)
No, you're right, if they got interstellar travel down, they're not shocked by a nuke. Their toddler's probably play with scarier stuff in our perception, they're totally different beings. More likely they'll rate us a "Stage 2 Civilization" with Ants at Stage 1 and we're probably not even able to grasp Stages 7 and above
@@YeeSoest the tsar bomba liberated roughly the same amount of energy that hits the earth from the sun in a second, so for roughly one second suddenly energy spiked on earth and we reached kardashev 1 civ status to then fall down again to kardashev 0.7 or around that, the tsar bomba was a fucking monster
"nope nope nope nope nope "
*puts spaceship in reverse*
One day Simon is going to have a mega projects video about how many UA-cam accounts he has
How the fuck does he find the time to do this
Hmmm.. maybe they’re robots and androids… ever seen Simon and Simon at the same place at the same time…. Hmmmm…. 🤔
Simon you should convince the UA-cam CEO to make you the international Chief Marketing Officer. Your channels keep me busy most days, the back catalogue has kept me going through UK lockdown. I’ve got your viewing numbers up 👌
What about a Geographics video on Krakatoa? That'd be neat!
You missed the reason for the change from 100mt... they figured anything beyond 50 mt. was a waste because the blast would be so big that it would just go into space...
The yield of a explosion is proportional to the bast radius cubed. That means that you have to provide 8 times as much boom to get a blast twice as wide. Splitting up a payload into smaller warheads produces _waaay_ more damage.
Big Bomb: 1000kt --> 7.7km radius blast; 186.3 km^2 wrecked
Smaller bombs 5x100kt --> 5x 3.6km radius blasts; 203.575 km^2 wrecked
The second option provides 10% more damage for half the yield.
The real reason that the Tsar Bomba was so big was because the Soviets couldn't increase the yield per kilogram efficiency of their warheads as high as the Americans and decided to try and awe the public with scale instead. To the experts tracking the the arms race it mostly revealed how behind their technology was.
I was shocked and impressed when you mentioned the height of the mushroom cloud...and then you compared it to Everest. Holy fuck! My eyes nearly popped out of my head, that's insane!
The first nuclear bomb detonation was not at Hiroshima, it was the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexico desert.
@@TheInfidel_SlavaUA Technically, that's a Fuel-Air Explosive weapon, not a nuke. The More You Know...
Its not really a nuke
@@alimohammad1934 Little Boy and Fat Man weren't nuclear either. They were considered atomic.
I believe it happened before that... in Germany during WWII. It also explains where we got all the "material" for the 2 "B"'s used on Japan. The Germans had it before we did. No one, including us, knew about it.
@@alankrebs856 I believe the German explosion you mentioned was a chemical one with the release of radioactive materials. The Trinity test was the first ever nuclear fission explosion.
Im glad we live in the timeline where after this test the Americans and the Soviets were like...."ok yeah we should prob just stop there...that seemed a bit much" because you know the timeline where America responded with their own apocalypse bomb everybody's dead
What makes you think anything stopped except the testing? You don't really believe research in how to make ever more powerful bombs that weighed a tenth as much, do you? America and Russia both tightened their security until neither side knew what the other was doing, and research is still ongoing after all these decades.
Research split into two directions, higher yield bombs in smaller packages, and low yield bombs that could be used with artillery. One could even be fired from a mortar.
No one who's talking knows how well the research went, but there is no doubt that the Czar bomd is the largest ever exploded, but nowhere near the most powerful ever built. The Czar bomb is ancient history. Modern science has made it little more than a toy.
Looking at the history of nuclear weapons development I disagree. After the colossal miscalculation with Castle Bravo and the Tsar Bomba I don't think anyone wanted something more powerful to be manufactured and stored inside their territory unless war was declared and they found it absolutely necessary to use as a last line of defense. Also, by the time these bombs were being developed it became apparent that such a massively huge and heavy bomb would be much harder to deploy successfully against an enemy far away than to build a multitude of ICBMs with smaller, less powerful, but much more effectively deployed nuclear warheads than trying to fly a slow, loud airplane over a vast distance to deliver on target.
USA: We make nuke.
USSR: Hold my vodka.
"The nuclear weapon's age began on the 6th of august 1945." Actually, it began on 16th july of the same year with the Trinity nuclear test of a plutonium bomb.
Quite.
It didn't become a weapon until it was used.
Do one on the BelAZ-75710 the largest dump truck ever
"Has yet seen" Good phrase when we are 100 seconds to midnight
Let us pray.
@@stefanschleps8758 I'm sure that'll be effective...
Simon has a crush on "Big Bombs", cause he knows we like that
We like blowing things up :3
I like big bombs and I can not lie.
FonicsSuck damn you! Lol took my line 👍
He likes big bombs and he cannot lie.
1:20 - Chapter 1 - The nuclear age emerges
3:40 - Chapter 2 - The soviet nuclear program
5:30 - Chapter 3 - A bomb to rule them all
6:10 - Chapter 4 - The tsar bomba
9:25 - Chapter 5 - The test
12:05 - Chapter 6 - Fallout
I'm a simple man: i see tsar bomba and I click.
Well-played👍
I see nuke and i click
I know nuclear weapons have been lost in the USA but if this bomb was ever lost, you couldn't pay me all the money in the world to look for it
I think Simon mentioned the Tsar Bomba so many times in other videos I thought he already made a video about it.
Hello Dimitri. Well it seems one of our base commanders well he went a little funny in the head. He launched a bomber strike!
@HVAC Quality Assurance great sene
I thought I told you to take it easy, THERE'S NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO NOW.
Gentlemen. You can't fight in here. This is the War Room
@HVAC Quality Assurance "Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dimitri? Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I like to speak to you. Of course I like to say hello. Not now, but any time, Dimitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It's a friendly call."
@@johnconnor2572 How you know his name is Dimitri?
Perhaps a video on the U.S. electrical grid, which I believe started with the Pearl street station, would be a worthwhile venture.
Comrade Strangelove; How we learned to love our bomb
You called!
I remember feeling the shockwave from this and I was born 12 years after it was tested.
Imagine for some reason Soviet Union couldn’t develop nuclear weapons. Cold war would be a much different picture. Even with the power to wipe out humanity, nuclear deterrent did play a massively important role in avoiding wars in the scale of WWI & WWII.
0:56 the parachute magically appears out of thin air.
I also "Like Big Bombs and Cannot Lie!!!" Simon is amazing.
That’s why you should get yourself some BeardBlaze! What s glorious beard he has (his own beard articals)
@@KendlickLama hahaha
Few things
1 - this was actually one of the "cleanest" nukes as far as fallout is concerned.
2 - at 3:05 you are dead wrong. Soviets lost half a tank army trying to quickly take Warsaw(Battle of Radzymin). The tank army was decimated and was not in any shape to continue fighting. When you lose something like a tank army, you tend to take things slow for a while.
1 Tsar bomba cleanest bomb omfg.2 No more lies about real history of WW2 You know that's the Soviets propaganda right? Soviets have still lots of man ( and tank power) they simply use this as excuse to not help the Armia Krajowa in Warsaw uprising.They waited for them to bleed out fighting the Nazis.
Hey fact boy, have you heard of the Belgorod class of Russian subs? Commissioned in 2019 to do one thing only: Launch the bus-sized Poseidon class Intercontinental Nuclear Torpedo, these can be launched clear across the ocean at 70 knots to hit coastal targets. Original design was for a 100MT warhead with the goal of inundating the coastal city with a radioactive tsunami and render it uninhabitable for decades.
The sub itself is big enough to carry 6 of these things, and also a whole other submarine docked to the underside.
Sounds perfect for Megaprojects. Giant absurd russian vehicle + giant absurd russian doomsday device.
Is it my imagination, or is Simon's beard growing longer, darker and more luxurious? Surely there is some sort of beard product that could be a sponsor of Simon's videos. 😲
He has his own brand of beard products. Called Beard Blaze if I remember correct.
The ultimate ‘hold my beer’...
*vodka
@@ervinm.5065 Good point ;-)
It was more like:
“Hold my b...DAAAAAAAAMN! OK, let’s back up for a second...”😳😳😳
Interesting fact I heard, the Tsar at twice the yield wouldn't have been that much more effective. At 50ish megatons a lot of the blast blew out more of Earth's atmosphere into space. So a bigger blast wouldn't necessarily be that much more effective because it would simply be blowing out more air into space rather than having the air carry the blast wave onward. ... still scary as heck though!
Good god, I knew the Tsar Bomba was big, but I didn't know it was THAT big. O_O
O.o
I have a Tsar Bomb replica in my backyard. It’s a great conversation starter
I wouldn't at all be surprised if the US and Russia have the full powered version of this bomb, just sitting somewhere, waiting to be used.
The modern bombs America have are far more destructive than that old Russian bomb
Honestly they probably don't. The simple matter is that the larger a blast the less efficient it is. It's better to use cluster munitions that can target multiple targets simultaneously. The bombs used in the 40's could wipe out cities, bigger than that was already seeing diminishing returns.
Thanks be to God that the reaction in Washington was "Yeah, maybe we should, like, ease up a bit" instead of "We need something bigger."
I wasn't scared when I saw this 9 months ago, but youbet your ass i am now.
The bombs blast was so catastrophically powerful it blew out windows as far as Sweden when it went off.
I caught YOU SIMON! You referenced this video in the past but it DID NOT EXIST UNTIL NOW!! Ya suspect Whistler!
The mushroom cloud reached well beyond the troposphere, the lower atmosphere where most of our weather events take place (probably had a height of around 15km or so) and trough the stratosphere which goes to aroung 50km and into the Mesosphere. The region where small meteorites burn up. It's height was 67km as he said in the video and for comparison space is defined as anything above 100km and the ISS orbits at around 400km. It reached 16% the height of the ISS!!
The algorithm knows to push Cold War content after Oppenheimer’s release
Because people are searching for it
Errors -
When Hiroshima is mentioned, it shows footage from the bombing of Nagasaki.
When the bomb dropped upon Nagasaki was mentioned, it showed footage from Hiroshima.
Also I believe that he called the latter bomb "big man" or something. It was called "fat man".
I've pointed out inaccuracies before on one of his videos, and I received a rather passive aggressive response that said "well thanks for pointing that out"
What happened to humility??
Dont get it twisted, I absolutely ADORE his content. But if I see something that's inaccurate or misleading, of course I'm going to stay something.
Simon, do a video on the Warsaw Uprising. It's somewhat a megaproject itself
Nuclear weapons are good for one thing: Maintaining PEACE through deterrence (and Mutual Assured Destruction, aka "MAD").
Until the day a crazy man comes to power and decides to use one!
That is only western thought. Every citizen of Moscow knows exactly what to do in a limited strike situation !
I thank God that we have mostly pulled away from the nuclear war mindset. Being a realist, I know that nuclear is always a threat, but nothing near like it was when I served in the Army.
Hold that thought
This is the best Tsar Bomba video. Not biased at all.....allegedly. 🤞
Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Hola, what was the reason u summoned me oh master ?
At 114Mt. predicted yield how much atmosphere would be blasted into space? Tectonic shifts? These are somethings we never need to verify.
Americans: Our biggest bomb was designed to have half that yield.
Russians: Our biggest bomb was designed to have TWICE that yield!
yeah, and be three times the size of yours too even at half its design yield
Why so wasteful of a big bomb? It wastes most of its yield to look big instead of performing architectural renovation. Because it is better to aim a bunch of smaller ones more accurately and they can fit on a SLBM.
Harry Truman: “There’s no way the Soviets have the ability to make nuclear weapons”
The Soviets: *Makes Tsar Bomba*
Russia has recently redeveloped their 100 megaton warheads. They’re installed on the newer Poseidon supermassive autonomous torpedoes. The intent is to have self-guided torpedos attack an enemy’s coast and with the detonation causing a massive artificial tsunami. It’s a confusing and scary second-strike weapon. They’re installed on the Belgorod and Khabarovsk submarines.
Yes. More posturing. They could do something like that but as you said it would a second strike doomsday weapon. The U.S. has a second strike doomsday weapon that is set to go off 2 weeks after the smoke clears. lol I guess that is to make sure all the people that have shelters, don't get too cocky and think they are ok.
Now they made its military into joke last year. I doubt they have more then 1 or even worse, they didn't even build it (money most likely went into someone's pocket).
If you see the video that the Russians made on it, you can see the innards of this device. It had 6 roughly 9Mt thermonuclear subassemblies in it. There was supposed to be a tertiary stage in the center that was gonna make it even more powerful. Had they added that piece, the yield would have been between 120 and 250Mt of blast. In practice though, once they yield is roughly 22Mt, the excess power is wasted because the crater more or less reflects the energy straight up.
The nuc age startled in July 1945, in New Mexico,
I'd just wanted to write that, and started to browse comments to see if someone had already noticed the error.
On July 16, to be precise...
Way before that if you look in German history.... we just didn't know it.
@@alankrebs856 Then we would have to establish what the phrase nuclear age means. Radioactivity was discovered several decades earlier, the word being coined by Maria and Pierre Curie back in 1898. British scientists made first artificial nuclear transmutations in 1920's and early '30s. Germans discovered nuclear fission in 1938.
But in this video, I suppose the phrase was meant to be - detonation of the first nuclear bomb.
Maybe you should do a complete video on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg! Would be very interesting!
Someone should create a video recreating this bombs detonation. To better show what it really was, these short glimpses of actual footage from outdated cameras jus doesn't do it justice. CGI or something to that effect of course lol
Lethal fallout from this bomb would have spread all the way to Bangor, Maine. Let that thought sink in.
"The Tsar Bomba: Building the World's Biggest Nuke"- Can you get the kit on Ebay, asking for a friend
Yes and no; I bought my kit last week but it was a cheap chinese knockoff; only blew up half the town. Useless. I would save your money
Welcome guys to the NSA watch list.
@@TFCBarreto nsa watch list I love it 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
@@webserververse5749 Pity BBC kids programme Blue Peter wasn't a round. They would show you how to make one from sticky-backed-plastic and loo rolls
A total complete nightmare for anyone's country that this monster lands on.
The nuclear age didn't begin with Hiroshima, it began in the New Mexico desert with the first nuclear explosion.
True but I think he meant nuclear war.
Such a stunning demonstration of military technology at its finest!
I see Cold War video about Tsar Bomba, I click.
Each photon torpedo of Star Trek The Next Generation had a yield of 64 megatons, besting the Czar Bomba.
Research Molecular Dissociation. Now there is a VERY scary topic.
Poseidon torpedo 100 megaton.
Oh how this is so relevant
This is a classic case of whip it out and play "who is bigger" between two world super powers. Thankfully things did not escalate further.
Putin is working on silly, dangerous 'bluffing' once again.
3:25 Yet he never ordered to drop a nuclear bomb on a city.
Great opening: "Some bombs are simply too big." 🤣
"No mouse would ever create the mousetrap"
When you have to reduce the power of your weapon because you realize that the test site, hundreds of miles from anywhere, is STILL too close to home, you probably should rethink what you're doing in the first place.
I heard that the reason the bomb was scaled down was because they didn't want to accidentally set the atmosphere a blaze
Wrong. The people who created the first ATOMIC (not thermonuclear aka hydrogen) bombs worried about that, there was some very small chance based on their calculation that the Trinity Test (first nuclear test ever) might do that due to some chain reaction in the air, but it never happened. By the time this bomb rolled around 10 to 15 years later, it was known that nukes, no matter how large, don't 'set the atmosphere on fire'. This was due not just to all the hundreds of tests that both superpowers had done by that time, but also the fact that digital computers h ad not only been invented but their were far more of them and they could handle all the theoretical calculations faster and better and more accurate than humans could. What the Soviets didn't want was trouble with their neighbors. This island was a test island (where they exploded the Tsar Bomba) but even so the shockwave was felt (and shattered windows) in places like Norway and Sweden. A twice as powerful bomb might have caused considerably more damage plus they didn't want to risk fallout all over Europe which might lead to war or , at best, embarrassment.
Oh poo! What's a little atmospheric FIRE!!!! It's all in the name of "fun"!!! :))) I don't know what I like more.... Tesla Resonance Oscillators.... or cracking Hydrogen from ordinary tap water! Da bigga da boom da betta!
@@remo27 that, and they didn't really need to do the full scale blast to test if the thing worked.
The effects of using a Uranium tamper instead of a steel tamper were not that hard to calculate, and didn't affect the overall design, so using a steel tamper was both more safe, cheaper, and enough for the purpose of the test.
Given how volatile the minds of heads of state are, the fact that a 100MT bomb idea hasn't been explored yet is quite a testament to common sense and the power of the atoms themselves.
Woah this is the earliest i’ve been on a video
Well done
for me I've been 6 seconds early
7 minutes
You’re grounded go to your room.
Also very interesting:
The full 3stage designed would likely have been had way higher than its intended yield as the material used as foam initially used for keeping the 3rd layer at a distance was later theorised and shown to be able to increase the yield of the inner stages by slowing down the expansion as well as acting as a moderatot increasing the yield of the 3rd stage. As most information about the exact construction and workings of nuclear weapons are still secrets heavily guarded by the respective governments there are only rough estimates about just how large the effect would be. Some sources say it would be just as low as a 20% increase, others go as high as suggesting 3x increase.
Tzar Bomb: Basically my wife but in the USSR
So you had 50/50 to survive eh?
When I was a kid, the magazines showed maps of the destruction which such a bomb could cause to NYC, or other cities. Terrifying!
The bomb just dropped. Lets gooooo!!!
6:06 pretty sure this is half the back sound from the original Quake game.
This is a reminder of what humans can do but shouldn't.
It just blows my mind how exponentially more powerful a thermonuclear weapon is to the atomic bomb.
"We've never seen anything like the Tsar Bomba since, and always remember - it was supposed to be twice as big!"
Is that a challenge meant towards some crazy billionaire to make Atomic Bombs Great again?
nah, the Russian military has already done that. They're fielding 2 weapons systems with 100MT warheads, nuclear propulsion, and fully autonomous navigation systems.
Set a target, a desired date to hit it up to several months in the future, press the button, and it will fly around for a while before looking for the best way to get there undetected and blow up a city.
The Americans with their SLAM project in the 1950s weren't anywhere near that crazy, and they canceled theirs because it was too crazy.
@@jwenting posidon torpedoes
Seriously ? T.D.S much
The RS-28 Sarmat will reportedly carry a nuclear payload large enough to wipe out an area the size of Texas or France.
One thing Simon forgot to mention. When the Tsar Bomba was dropped, it was in the middle of a mutually agreed upon moratorium on nuclear testing so both the Soviets and the US could negotiate arms limitations. The Soviets gleefully ignored the moratorium inside a year and thus proved the worth of their word. This escalated the Cold War by proving the Soviets, at best, were not negotiating in good faith as they used Castle Bravo to browbeat the West into agreeing to stop testing while they were cheerfully developing a beast like this.
The US was still developing super bombs, in the 1960s they added the B41 to their arsenal, the most efficient bomb ever. 25Megatons and much smaller than the Tsar Bomba.
Possible Cold War annihilation always seems more interesting and humorous when Simon gives you his take on it. Continue doing what you do and I'll keep watching it.
This is actually the first time I've heard anything about this particular bomb. I'm amazed we didn't destroy the planet during that time period!
you know the bomb is big when the soviet union cares about the pilots
Yo have you done a video on the a10 warthog?
If so, I’ll try find it.
If not, you should definitely do one because it would do pretty well
Real Engineering have an excellent video on the A10. Check it out!
Have you guys done an episode on poseidon bombs yet?
Hey Vsauce here
America's response to the tsar bomb was simple: "Duck and cover...remember what to do folks,when you see the light".
Well unfortunately current events have me viewing this video...
Wow! I knew of this bomb test but never knew how big it actually was. That's insane