This was probably the most technical video I’ve seen from you, but I loved it. Of course a lot of the chemistry and quantum physics is over my head, but it’s nice to see you not shy away from the technical stuff to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
This video contains SO MUCH MORE valuable information on thermonuclear weapons than the title implies that I very nearly skipped past it. This video is, however, one of the most ACCURATE and COMPREHENSIVE treatises on thermonuclear weapons in general that I have seen. BRAVO!!!
10:46 DEFINITELY the clearest, easiest to follow explanation of the thermonuclear weapon detonation I have EVER heard. I've heard it explained before, but never so eloquently. My compliments.
I do not know who did the research and script-writing describing how thermonuclear bombs work, but congratulations, it was concise and very accurate, especially the part about what tritium and deuterium are used and also why thermonuclear bombs are as much enhance fission as fusion bombs. Many leave off these details. As for Teller, he always struck me as somebody that could appear as a Bond villain, and he seems to have been a disruptive influence in the Manhattan project.
Yes and no on Teller. Teller was a very interesting and complex individual. He had a very horrific childhood in Hungary and this greatly influenced him the rest of his life. Particularly his feelings on and fear of the USSR. I very highly recommend Peter Goodchilds biography of Edward Teller.
Crazy Ed. That's how we referred to Teller when he was director of Lawrence Livermore Lab. I grew up about a mile from the lab, where my father worked. So we all knew who Teller was. He really was obsessed with the hydrogen bomb.
In a standard thermonuclear design, a small fission bomb is placed close to a larger mass of thermonuclear fuel. The two components are then placed within a thick radiation case, usually made from uranium, lead or steel. The case traps the energy from the fission bomb for a brief period, allowing it to heat and compress the main thermonuclear fuel. The case is normally made of depleted uranium or natural uranium metal, because the thermonuclear reactions give off extraordinarily large numbers of high-energy neutrons that can cause fission reactions in the casing material. These can add considerable energy to the reaction; in a typical design as much as 50% of the total energy comes from fission events in the casing. For this reason, these weapons are technically known as fission-fusion-fission designs. In a neutron bomb, the casing material is selected either to be transparent to neutrons or to actively enhance their production. The burst of neutrons created in the thermonuclear reaction is then free to escape the bomb, outpacing the physical explosion. By designing the thermonuclear stage of the weapon carefully, the neutron burst can be maximized while minimizing the blast itself. This makes the lethal radius of the neutron burst greater than that of the explosion itself. Since the neutrons are absorbed or decay rapidly, such a burst over an enemy column would kill the crews but leave the area able to be quickly reoccupied. Compared to a pure fission bomb with an identical explosive yield, a neutron bomb would emit about ten times the amount of neutron radiation. In a fission bomb, at sea level, the total radiation pulse energy which is composed of both gamma rays and neutrons is approximately 5% of the entire energy released; in neutron bombs it would be closer to 40%, with the percentage increase coming from the higher production of neutrons. Furthermore, the neutrons emitted by a neutron bomb have a much higher average energy level (close to 14 MeV) than those released during a fission reaction (1-2 MeV). Technically speaking, every low yield nuclear weapon is a radiation weapon, including non-enhanced variants. All nuclear weapons up to about 10 kilotons in yield have prompt neutron radiation as their furthest-reaching lethal component. For standard weapons above about 10 kilotons of yield, the lethal blast and thermal effects radius begins to exceed the lethal ionizing radiation radius. Enhanced radiation weapons also fall into this same yield range and simply enhance the intensity and range of the neutron dose for a given yield. With considerable overlap between the two devices, the prompt radiation effects of a pure fusion weapon would similarly be much higher than that of a pure-fission device: approximately twice the initial radiation output of current standard fission-fusion-based weapons. In common with all neutron bombs that must presently derive a small percentage of trigger energy from fission, in any given yield a 100% pure fusion bomb would likewise generate a smaller atmospheric blast wave than a pure-fission bomb. The latter fission device has a higher kinetic energy-ratio per unit of reaction energy released, which is most notable in the comparison with the D-T fusion reaction. A larger percentage of the energy from a D-T fusion reaction, is inherently put into uncharged neutron generation as opposed to charged particles, such as the alpha particle of the D-T reaction, the primary species, that is most responsible for the coulomb explosion/fireball.
Yes fast neutrons can fission U-238. Also the compression of the secondary fusion fuel is done with radiation pressure (radiation implosion) which is cool to think of.
These early fusion bombs generated a significant amount of their yield from the fission of the U 238 pusher shell, which normally would not fission but did so under the intense neutron bombardment from the fusion reaction. So it was really a fission-fusion-fission reaction. Also made them incredibly dirty from a fall out perspective.
While in the navy, my father's ship was one of the target ships. I you've seen the footage of enlisted men on the deck of an aircraft carrier there's my dad he passed at 54yrs from multiple cancers, I was 16. We were never compensated like promised, it would of helped finally paying off med bills after 10yrs (VA said he didn't qualify for medical)
Took my neighbor almost 50 years to get compensation for agent orange exposure from Nam. Sorry for your struggles, it’s a shame we use our boys the way we do
It’s almost certain that anyone downwind of Ivy Mike would be contaminated. The Big C is inevitable. The contaminated islands will be habitable in around 300,000 years.
Yes, the Hindu text was the Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God, which is one set of books, 700 verses or so, in the middle of a sprawling epic of nearly 1.9 million words called the Mahabharata. Oppy taught himself Sanskrit in order to read it in the original. My take is that it is one of the oldest books in man’s history, and depicts events from paleoancient times, from an ancient high civilization.
-Jimmy Carter, Farewell Address, 1981 "It's now been 35 years since the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The great majority of the world's people cannot remember a time when the nuclear shadow did not hang over the Earth. Our minds have adjusted to it, as after a time our eyes adjust to the dark. Yet the risk of a nuclear conflagration has not lessened. It has not happened yet, thank God, but that can give us little comfort, for it only has to happen once. The danger is becoming greater. As the arsenals of the superpowers grow in size and sophistication and as other governments, perhaps even in the future dozens of governments, acquire these weapons, it may only be a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed, or miscalculation lets loose this terrible force. In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second-more people killed in the first few hours than in all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide."
Anyone who claims to have a serious issue with President Carter is not a serious person. No one is ever perfect, but he is far better than the clowns he survived. I'm including you Kissinger and Cheney. Thankfully you guys were never president.
Almost all the Silent Generation, Boomers, and Gen X believed the world would never make it to the year 2000 without destroying itself. That's why they don't care about climate change or the kind of world they're leaving behind. They were raised to believe the future would self-destruct. By the time the Cold War ended, it was too late for many, if not most, of them to change.
@@Alltime2050stop pretending corporations read anything but profit and liability. It's not about that anyway, dear. But if you wanna pull humans out of the falicy of money and turn value to human and growth rather then use and consumption: by all means. Mankind needs a savior.
My mother, in the mid-60's, warned us kids about 'eating' snow, as it could be irradiated, I always thought she was over reacting, now, I'm thinking she was on to something.
Richard Rhodes book - Dark Sun is the definitive telling of the race to make the H-Bomb. It's the follow up to his Pulitzer Prize winning book - The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
An engineer from the RAF told that it may be possible to build an atomic hand grenade. Unfortunately nobody can throw it far enough to survive using it.
There was a man portable weapon called the Davey Crockett which resembled a bazooka/panzerfaust or stinger missle that had a small nuclear warhead about the size of a pumpernickel loaf. It was tested and deemed to have too low of a survival rate by the soldier firing it to be practical on the battlefield. The army does gave conventional remote weapons that are programmed to identify enemy tanks and autonomously fire a missile at them. It probably wouldn't take much to field an autonomous nuclear armed one. As an alternative, numerous hydrogen bombs were placed underground all over West Germany at critical highway overpasses, railheads, key bridges and The Fulda Gap which is the traditional place for armies to pass through Germany. (I wonder if they have been removed post Cold War? Given the current state of European politics it might be a good idea to have them. These were tactical nukes with a small yield and would be set off by a remote detonation signal. We couldn't match Soviet tank numbers, infantry numbers nor their incredible mobilization of masses of troops over long distances so this was the solution. Nothing like a 10 kt nuke to break up a tank or infantry advance!
Many years ago, I spent time with a man who had been a guard at Maralinga - England's testing ground in Australia. He said that England had, and tested, atomic bombs the size of hand grenades. He said that even the smallest ones still made a cloud in miniature, like we see on the larger fission bombs.
There was no mention of how the H-bomb was made very compact... all the ones shown here were huge. Quite early on, the US knew that the H-bomb would be quite small, and built its missiles accordingly (Atlas, Thor, Titan , Minuteman, Polaris), whereas Sakharov over-estimated the size and caused Korolev to build a very big first ICBM (the R-7, now morphed into the Soyuz orbital booster). This gave the USSR several years of head start over the US in the "space race", while the US was forced to develop miniature electronics (integrated circuits a.k.a. "chips"), which ultimately gave the US its massive technological/industrial lead over the rest of the world for the rest of the 20th century.
@@judyfps5059ha, yes it depends on which show he is doing. He has to be acting here or the show he comes across as clueless. It’s a mystery I guess. Ha
Yeah, when he lets the kayfabe drop in stuff like Brain Blaze he admits he has faint memories about things from reading them but most time is just words on a teleprompter for money for him. I admire him for it.
@@judyfps5059 He thinks being a good talker means talking just fast enough that most people don't follow or catch on that he doesn't know what he's saying. However speaking that rapidly and editing out the space between breaths and sounding like the grim reaper is bearing down on his every word is very amateurish. Sounds like crap and doesn't give the viewer time to think about what is said. Compare him to David Attenborough.
There's a video of soldiers running towards a nuclear explosion from a bomb shot out of a cannon. The goal was to prove that a nuclear bomb was "safe" enough to be used on the battle field. My sister-in-law's grandfather was one of the soldiers in that test; he died of cancer in his 50s along with some of his buddies around that age.
@icosthop9998 no. In the later 50s or early 60s. We fired an atomic cannon. And troops marched into the fallout. It was a test on radiation but the troops were not told that
I had the privilege of attending a guest lecture given by Dr Teller in the mid to late eighties. He talked more about the politics of nuclear weapons than the science. His viewpoints were... interesting. And deeply flawed, like his views on many other areas.
Nyarlathotep, he taught men new methods of destruction; destruction with atomic bombs in which the 'ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled down on the quaking citadels of man.' Lovecraft knew what he was writing.
Ivy Mike is also a footnote in chemistry since the elements einsteinium and fermium were discovered in its fallout. The names were already proposed before their deaths but not revealed until after they died.
Also there is an upper limit to fission weapons since you can only have so much fissile material in any one place before you have a critical mass thus making the weapon unsafe and/or prone to pre-detonation.
Yup. Which then implies an upper limit to fusion bombs that can be triggered by a fission bomb. But as I understand it, a fission-fusion-fission design like the Tsar Bomba has no such limit. Tsar Bomba would have worked fine (and still been air-deployable) at 100 MT, and offhand I don't know of any theoretical reason why the design couldn't be scaled to eg. 1000 MT and beyond. Just expensive to do, unwieldy to handle and deploy, and frankly way too dangerous for anyone to even consider actually detonating.
@@patheddles4004 Yeah, the only difference between the 50 MT and 100 MT versions was the exclusion of the uranium tamper, which they replaced with lead. Including the uranium tamper would have caused a shit ton more fission from all the fast neutrons from the fusion reaction. They were looking into gigaton bombs which is just crazy, even the 15 KT little boy killed 80 thousand people, like, even a single megaton is beyond comprehension. As you said, such a weapons is hugely impractical and also more small bombs do more damage because the damage doesn't scale linearly. 10 100 KT bombs would do more damage than one 1 MT bomb. Also I'm pretty sure they did some calculations and realised the most of the energy would have been lost into space.
Two points. The actual engineering design on the US side was done by someone almost never mentioned named Richard Garwin. Basically a grad student who worked at the weapons lab one summer. Second point I find interesting. Its always said that a nuke couldn't do much to destroy or deflect ELE sized asteroid. But if fusion weapons can scale up almost indefinitely then could a hypothetical 1000 MT device make a dent on an incoming threat? I could easily envision a crash multinational effort to build and deliver hyper weapons to avoid a killer asteroid.
Id like to hear more about what Oppenheimer thought about the hydrogen bomb all around. Also would be interested to see all the alternative ideas/designs for it besides one that was ultimately developed
Oppenheimer initially thought work to make the hydrogen bomb was pointless. No one was anywhere close to figuring out how to make it work after significant effort. And how much more yield did you need? They had already figured out how to make boosted fission weapons of much greater power. But when the Teller-Ulam configuration was invented, Oppenheimer thought the solution very innovative and withdrew his objection. The earlier designs sought to use the heat and pressure of the fission primary to ignite the fusion fuel. They never found a design solution that worked. The heat and pressure scrambled the fuel too rapidly. But then they stumbled on the idea to separate the fusion fuel from the fission primary, and then use the massive x-ray flux from the fission primary to heat and compress the fusion fuel and a plastic plasma. This happens with astonishing speed, and starts the thermonuclear reactions. They are fully involved before the shock wave from the fission primary can arrive. It never does arrive, as the fusion burning releases a greater shock wave. There are more elements to the design (spark plug and U238 tamper).
One missing detail on the Castle Bravo shot concerns the natural uranium (^238U) tamper. It had been expected to remain inert, as ^238U does not normally sustain a chain reaction and was intended to serve the 'pusher' function. However, it was subsequently discovered that ^238U can undergo vigorous and explosive fission when exposed to an extremely energetic flux of fast neutrons. Because the fusion stage of the Teller-Ulam device produces such neutrons in abundance, a significant portion of the ^238U tamper underwent fast fission, thereby adding about 5 to 6 megatons of extremely 'dirty' yield. Today, as a result of this discovery, most thermonuclear weapons have a more significant fission component than would be suggested simply by the yield of the primary., This reflects a complex interplay between fission and fusion processes during the entire detonation cycle of a thermonuclear weapon.
In 1964, I had a summer job at the Lawrence Livermore Lab which was called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at that time. One day, I found a note at my desk that said "Rich - Call Ed" with his phone number. So I called and when the secretary answered "Dr. Teller's office" I realized that I was the subject of a practical joke.
Good video. Those scientists were right. They just aren't all that terribly hard to make really, and someone was going to do it. You hit on a lot of the best points, even about how fallout scales better with more fusion unless the tampers are uranium. Almost all fallout is from the primary and the tampers fission. One 'good' side effect from the testing was that fake wine can be verified easier because of all those 50/60s isotopes they released.
There was one explosion that dwarfed the tsar bomba, and it happened without any radioactive fallout or radioactive propagation. Its shockwave circled the earth 7 times and continued to be detectable for 5 days after. This explosion occurred 30 years before nuclear warfare was remotely conceived. It occurred on August 27, 1883.
As it has been said before and shall be said again. There is nothing humans can do or build that will rival the destructiveness of mother nature. And God help our species the day we do. (If we even last long enough)
Teller's vigorous advocacy for strength through nuclear weapons, especially when so many of his wartime colleagues later expressed regret about the arms race, made him an easy target for the "mad scientist" stereotype.
I often wonder if he was mildly autistic and the bombs became his "special interest". All he could see is the connections and possibilities for improving them without the consideration of what that meant. It would be what differentiated him from Sahkarov, who designed Tsar Bomba but later became a proponent of disarmament.
@@3rdworldgarage450 I interviewed him in University. He was in his nineties and terrifyingly intelligent. I poured the tea and dished the cookies. He dribbled a bit on his tie, but the mind was unreal sharp. I let the geeks in the room ask most of the questions, and get answered on the vast majority that that was covert material. It was a good interview though. Easy for me. "More tea Mr. Teller?" I would not think autistic. A bit too much the classic gentleman as I recall, just a flipping GENIUS. Scary scary smart and I do not consider myself completely stupid. He however was a very very rare breed.. He also I am not entirely certain was a 'mad scientist'. He really wanted to see his technology also used for constructive purposes. And it now finally seems that someone may be figuring out how to do so. One can certainly hope.
@@3rdworldgarage450 I believe most people of extraordinary talent if studied by a psychologist would be found to be on the spectrum. Where they Excell at one thing they are often found lacking in another.
Teller was a bit of a mad scientist. He opposed the above ground nuclear test ban of 1962 because he believed the Russians would continue above ground tests on the far side of the moon, a technology they still don’t possess. He, more than anyone else, deserves the title of “Dr. Strangelove”. His hard right combativeness has tarnished the reputations of particle physicists the world over.
"My name is not Strangelove," he snapped. "I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say?… Look, say it three times more and I throw you out of this office." - Teller during a 1999 interview
It's interesting to have lived through this without knowing a lot of the details. My late husband's step grandfather was on the aircraft that delivered the bomb to the Enola Gay. In his words, the bomb was sullen and evil. And he was not a man to exaggerate. Bomb drills were a real thing when I was in elementary school in New Orleans, although not so much in the smaller towns in Louisiana. I knew where the bomb shelter was in town, even after we stopped worrying about being incinerated. My parents were worried about the Bay of Pigs, my Mom was a reporter for the local NBC affiliate and we were glued to the coverage. And then it hits me, when my generation is gone, no one will understand that we lived with that constant nagging fear that someone who hated us would flip that switch and make a completely un-retractable decision that would make the most dystopian fiction of today look functional. As kids, none of us knew who invented this thing. None of us questioned when they told us about cobalt bombs and neutron bombs, the ones that would kill everyone in a city but leave the buildings for the invaders standing, and somehow not leave radiation that would make the place uninhabitable while it was at it. It sounds so crazy today, but the Boomers lived with this. No wonder we're weird. Our childhoods, that people talk about how easy it was, no social media, no crazy pressure to get into the right schools (well, not at my social level), and yet we spent the 1960s with this fear at our shoulders, with death never far from us because someone in a position of power might lose it and give the order. It's a wonder any of us are sane. And I am thankful my kids and my grandkids do not have that fear ... with everything else they have to worry about, that's not the big one any more.
I appreciate your commentary here, and respect what you've seen in your life. Both of my Grandfathers were a part of that whole development. My parents lived through the air-raid drills. What I find truly terrifying and sad, understandably with a bit of prejudice, is that from the day I was born in 1985, this has still been a fear for them... and eventually me. Certainly we don't talk about it as much now, and it's less newsworthy... but the same fears and risks that you lived through, they never went away. We just got used to them. I was born and raised into a world that could blink out in an instant if the wrong people pushed the wrong buttons. My first vivid memory of something on television was the Berlin Wall coming down. I was far too little to know why it was important. But it was. I try to be optimistic, but I am a realist and value history. Those two weapons used... the testing that followed... the arms race... it's all Pandora's Box. Can't really put all that evil back in can we?
Those who lived through the Cold War definitely have stories to tell but a child born in the 80's we have our own nightmares. I was in 8th grade when the Columbine massacre happened and in 11th when 9/11 happened. It was me and the generations after me that live with the real threat of school shootings and lock down drills. Every generation lives through their own honors. My daughter may not remember it but her life was changed by the Covid 19 pandemic and the global and political upheavals of our current time period.
Part of the problem IS rhat no one is afraid of it anymore, not even in government and decisions are made daily that inch us closer to provocations that may indeed launch these weapons. These fools war game how to SURVIVE a nuclear war instead of understanding the only way to win that game is not to play at all.
Very well said! Start to research Baha'u'llah and the Baha'i Faith about where this is all now going to go and how humanity can best survive WWIII or actually possibly stop it. We are in big, big trouble. I have been a Baha'i for 53 years since searching for an answer after my time in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. I became a friend of Hugh Thompson Jr. later in life. Google him. I saw no way the U.S. was going to make it after my military service. Good luck to you and yours in investigating the claims of this new rapidly growing Faith.
I remember as a small boy watching terminator 2 for the first time ( would have been mid 90s ) with my old man and when i saw the scenes of the bomb going off and the destruction it caused i turned to my old man and first asked was this weapn real? And then asked why would human beings create such an evil weapon? I remember the feeling of fear, dredd and sadness that swept across me! All this just fron scenes from a movie! Can not imagine the feelings of kids and peoplw like urself went through during this age.
From what my fellow physicist friends told me when they worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab, Teller was one of the biggest warpigs of all time. He was literally giddy when discussing a proposal for space-based x-ray lasers pumped by a hydrogen bomb.
Both Teller and Ulam agreed that it should be called the Teller design - Teller for the reasons mentioned in the video, Ulam because he, like much of the physics community, didn't think the Super was a good idea for humanity and didn't want to be associated with it at all. So it's called the Teller-Ulam design over both of their objections.
@@stevejester5658??? What a strange way to twist this issue. Republicans were "created" around 1860 with their first candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Your narrow minded view detracts from the story.
@@mikeottersole- Ronald Reagan, on Aug 3, 1980, betrayed the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Jefferson Davis and the future Donald Trump when he declared in the racist hellhole of Neshoba County MS, “I believe in states rights. “ Reagan tapped out the racist code by declaring to the white audience that he was on their side. In the audience of Reagan’s evil speech, were the mayor, state and local police and local KKK who murdered three voting rights workers and buried them in an earthen dam. Reagan knew what he was doing. Reagan was an expert in communicating his anti black message.
Dr. Strangelove was an "... amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun ..., and Edward Teller ..." "It is frequently claimed the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this; Sellers said: "Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger-that's a popular misconception." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove Although Kissinger could be included for his cold war-like logic.
Some say Strangelove was based on Teller while others think he's a composite of Wernher von Braun, Edward Teller and Herman Kahn. I do know Teller hated any comparisons to Dr. Strangelove.
@@GlenCooper-sj4lh I think even before his passing, Teller kept getting asked if he knew anything about any similarity between him and Strangelove, and he said something like, 'Strangelove? I don't know any Strangelove!"
@@padawanmage71 From Wikipedia: "My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say? ... Look. Say it three times more, and I throw you out of this office." 😅
Cheers!🍻New SUBSCRIBER here because of the absolutely very well done and very descriptive video. Has Discovery Channel level production and information, actually gives information and Discovery Channel does on some of their small documentaries. Very well done video sir❤❤
Because of delivery system accuracy, yield of deployed weapons has actually decreased markedly. Most deployed weapons max out between 800kt and 1.2MT. I think the largest still deployed by anyone is 5MT and probably there are very few of those.
About the only conceivable use for 100 megaton devices would be to move asteroids around by detonating them in a standoff configuration and using the asteroid's ablation to provide thrust.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but Teller was among the scientists that calculated the possibility, prior to the detonation of Trinity, of atmospheric combustion, was he not? I find that somewhat ironic. But following WW2 Teller was always a great advocate for the use of atomic bombs, still glad it never came to that again. On a different note it's always fascinating to me how Teller, Ulam and Sakharov developed similar ideas for an H-Bomb, maybe it's just the number of varieties to build such a device, maybe it's their genius or maybe Sakharov had some "help", allegedly, still fascinating.
I don’t think secondary neutrons contribute significantly to the primary, but they can fission the outer jacket if made of natural uranium, which fast neutrons from fusion can do. Neutron initiation in the primary was initially via a small fusion reaction but later a neutron gun was used. Potentially A LOT of nuclear reactions going on: 1) fusion for neutron initiation 2) primary fission 3) gas boosting 4) tamper fission 5) spark plug fission 6) spark plug fusion gas boosting 7) secondary fusion 8) secondary tamper fission 9) fission of outer jacket by fusion neutrons if made of natural uranium.
It's mentioned in the video so maybe pay more attention before commenting lol, and it wasn't a bomb it was more of a facility to prove the concept viable.
Fun fact, in wepon like tsar bomba fusion only produces circa 10% of evergy, 90% comes from uranium being far more efficiently fisioned by super fast neutrons produced by fusion reaction ...
I have a friend who lived through that being several hundred miles South East of it. And I know where one of the battleships are sunk on stacks and sticks out a bit.
Castle-Bravo was NOT the first test of the hydrogen bomb. That honor goes to Ivy-Mike, detonated at Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952.
Ivy Mike had a bulky cryogenic fuel system that made it impractical. It was more of a proof of concept than it was an actual deliverable weapon. Operation Castle was the testing of weapons that could be actually used.
For one it's literally mentioned in the video so you obviously didn't pay much attention, secondly it wasn't a bomb it was more of a facility to prove the concept viable.
The architect gets credited for the building, regardless the the volume of labourers. There are millions of good ideas, but very few conductors who can direct the musicians to achieve a required end.
'Castle Bravo' biggest and world record'WHOOPSIE!' Unforseen almost doubled yield. I would have loved to be in the room for that post boo boo conversation.
The difference is, that was planned. The Tsar Bomba was stupid on purpose. In English slang the word Whoopsie, infers a surprise error. Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons. 2.5 times the predicted 6 megatons. This was due to the unforeseen cascade reaction of the lithium-7@@pashapasovski5860
In the USA and the USSR they also tried to develop civilian "clean" H-bombs, for example, for laying canals. As I know, in the USSR they conducted experiments with second stages without any fission reactions. For example, they used spheres filled with high-pressure D-gas as the second stage. It is important that they did not use a plutonium-made "spark plug", but achieved self-ignition of the thermonuclear fuel. At least one test produced 140 kilotons of "clean" thermonuclear energy. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about the first stage. Perhaps 3-5 kilotons of "dirty" fission energy. If 3kt was enough, they could achieve 98% purity. But one of the unresolved problems is neutron-induced radioactivity.
I worked with a Navy sailor ( Wally W.) who witnessed the "Shrimp" detonation. He told me a crew had been sent to a remote horseshoe shaped atoll in a landing craft. The only thing on the atoll was a radio tower and a small building. When the bomb went off the water inside the horseshoe went away, flowing out to sea, taking the landing craft with it. When the water came back it covered the island and the crew were forced to climb the tower to keep from drowning. Eventually they were rescued. He said the bomb 'pulsed'; I don't know exactly what he meant by this I am just repeating what he said in the interest of history.
“Climb down into your bunker and put on your fallout suit” Literally two things you don’t need to do with a hydrogen bomb which doesn’t leave radiation behind.
They absolutely leave radiation behind, they just won’t leave as much as a fission bomb, but even fission bombs don’t leave much radiation during an air burst.
One kilometer = 1000 meters. One meter = 1000 millimeters. Therefore 1000 meters x 1000 millimeters = 1 million millimeters. There is 25.4 millimeters in one inch, therefore 1 million divided by 25.4 = 39,370 inches or 3,281 feet. So one kilometer = 3,281 feet. FYI, one mile = 5280 feet. One mile = 1.61 kilometers (approx).
@@grantkopka9090 I typically do 2km = 1 mile, 3 feet = 1m and 1yard = 1m. It's not precise but when I want an instant ball park estimate instantly it's close enough
Oppenheimer was quoted after witnessing the Trinity test in New Mexico, that he saw the power of the fission bomb and said "I thought back onto the Hindu Scriptures, the Bagava Gita... ... and Vishnu revealed his multi-armed form and said 'Now, I am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.' " It was for an interview that we have the video footage online and for which they actually recreated the scene, shot for shot, for the movie.
They underestimated the size of the blast because of a "negligible" effect of lithium 7 producing extra fusionable material. The lithium 7 was in the lithium 6 used to generate hydrogen and helium for fusion fuel. And castle bravo wasn't even all that efficient of a fusion bomb. The tsar bomba the russians made however was pretty much as efficient as a fusion bomb could get. Why do humans do these things?
Your further explanation explained at the time I thought it looked like a sun to me and with a wave. I remember talking about it a school to a little girl I liked named Rita.
I finally got some insight into what my childhood friend in Los Alamos told me. He said his father was working on how to release thin metal spheres from the mold without them tearing. About the only mention I ever heard of someone's work at LASL. My father did mention that he saw Teller from time to time. There seem to be no half-measures for humanity. Even something as simple as the proliferation of single-use plastic water bottles took over the world like a runaway nuclear reaction.
@bujfvjg7222 Listening to this the thought came to me: trust a bunch of intelligent great apes to come up with ways to potentially extinct their species.
Everyone knows it was Edward Teller who sat there as early as 1943 whining about how he should be building the Super and refusing to do much to build the first fission device. The big baby wanted a bomb large enough to vaporise the known universe if he thought he could build it
Strictly speaking 'Mike' was not usable as a weapon. It was proof of concept and heavily instrumented and used a lot of refrigeration industrial equipment. It was a 'device'.
This was probably the most technical video I’ve seen from you, but I loved it. Of course a lot of the chemistry and quantum physics is over my head, but it’s nice to see you not shy away from the technical stuff to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Everything he said is quite superficial so if you rewatch a couple times, you might understand everything eventually.
Compression of uranium by focused explosives > compression and heating of hydrogen and tritium by smashing lithium with that prior uranium explosion
@@johnny_ethIn fact there are some errors (the role of plasma etc.) so the explanation cannot be comprehensive even for a physicist.
Teller confused everyone when he put a sign on his door that said: "gone fission".
Lmao 😂😂 u suck 😂
Dad! You said you’d stay off of UA-cam!
Your joke caused con fusion
You saw an opportunity, and you took it. Wow!
That was bad and you should feel bad
This video contains SO MUCH MORE valuable information on thermonuclear weapons than the title implies that I very nearly skipped past it. This video is, however, one of the most ACCURATE and COMPREHENSIVE treatises on thermonuclear weapons in general that I have seen. BRAVO!!!
Yes, CASTLE BRAVO!
@@onlylettersatozornum GOT ME!!!
Go watch Trinity the Atomic Bomb Movie. Shows how bad this crap is.
@@dr_cynix I bought Trinity when it first came out. This video gets the technical information spot on while Trinity is far more entertaining.
@@Indrid__Cold Shatner narrated? It was an excellent documentary, but you are correct, no technical stuff. Shatner did an excellent job.
10:46 DEFINITELY the clearest, easiest to follow explanation of the thermonuclear weapon detonation I have EVER heard. I've heard it explained before, but never so eloquently. My compliments.
I do not know who did the research and script-writing describing how thermonuclear bombs work, but congratulations, it was concise and very accurate, especially the part about what tritium and deuterium are used and also why thermonuclear bombs are as much enhance fission as fusion bombs. Many leave off these details.
As for Teller, he always struck me as somebody that could appear as a Bond villain, and he seems to have been a disruptive influence in the Manhattan project.
Edward Teller advocated transitioning away from fossil fuels due to climate change--starting in 1957.
The Teller-Oppenheimer Beef could be its own movie.
"Teller-Ulam Design. Disrupting the Manhattan Start-Up market "
Gilles messier, mentioned in the credits. He has his own channel "our own devices" which is worth checking out
Yes and no on Teller. Teller was a very interesting and complex individual. He had a very horrific childhood in Hungary and this greatly influenced him the rest of his life. Particularly his feelings on and fear of the USSR. I very highly recommend Peter Goodchilds biography of Edward Teller.
Crazy Ed. That's how we referred to Teller when he was director of Lawrence Livermore Lab. I grew up about a mile from the lab, where my father worked. So we all knew who Teller was. He really was obsessed with the hydrogen bomb.
In a standard thermonuclear design, a small fission bomb is placed close to a larger mass of thermonuclear fuel. The two components are then placed within a thick radiation case, usually made from uranium, lead or steel. The case traps the energy from the fission bomb for a brief period, allowing it to heat and compress the main thermonuclear fuel. The case is normally made of depleted uranium or natural uranium metal, because the thermonuclear reactions give off extraordinarily large numbers of high-energy neutrons that can cause fission reactions in the casing material. These can add considerable energy to the reaction; in a typical design as much as 50% of the total energy comes from fission events in the casing. For this reason, these weapons are technically known as fission-fusion-fission designs.
In a neutron bomb, the casing material is selected either to be transparent to neutrons or to actively enhance their production. The burst of neutrons created in the thermonuclear reaction is then free to escape the bomb, outpacing the physical explosion. By designing the thermonuclear stage of the weapon carefully, the neutron burst can be maximized while minimizing the blast itself. This makes the lethal radius of the neutron burst greater than that of the explosion itself. Since the neutrons are absorbed or decay rapidly, such a burst over an enemy column would kill the crews but leave the area able to be quickly reoccupied.
Compared to a pure fission bomb with an identical explosive yield, a neutron bomb would emit about ten times the amount of neutron radiation. In a fission bomb, at sea level, the total radiation pulse energy which is composed of both gamma rays and neutrons is approximately 5% of the entire energy released; in neutron bombs it would be closer to 40%, with the percentage increase coming from the higher production of neutrons. Furthermore, the neutrons emitted by a neutron bomb have a much higher average energy level (close to 14 MeV) than those released during a fission reaction (1-2 MeV).
Technically speaking, every low yield nuclear weapon is a radiation weapon, including non-enhanced variants. All nuclear weapons up to about 10 kilotons in yield have prompt neutron radiation as their furthest-reaching lethal component. For standard weapons above about 10 kilotons of yield, the lethal blast and thermal effects radius begins to exceed the lethal ionizing radiation radius. Enhanced radiation weapons also fall into this same yield range and simply enhance the intensity and range of the neutron dose for a given yield.
With considerable overlap between the two devices, the prompt radiation effects of a pure fusion weapon would similarly be much higher than that of a pure-fission device: approximately twice the initial radiation output of current standard fission-fusion-based weapons. In common with all neutron bombs that must presently derive a small percentage of trigger energy from fission, in any given yield a 100% pure fusion bomb would likewise generate a smaller atmospheric blast wave than a pure-fission bomb. The latter fission device has a higher kinetic energy-ratio per unit of reaction energy released, which is most notable in the comparison with the D-T fusion reaction. A larger percentage of the energy from a D-T fusion reaction, is inherently put into uncharged neutron generation as opposed to charged particles, such as the alpha particle of the D-T reaction, the primary species, that is most responsible for the coulomb explosion/fireball.
Yes fast neutrons can fission U-238.
Also the compression of the secondary fusion fuel is done with radiation pressure (radiation implosion) which is cool to think of.
...tamper...
Damn cuz, UA-cam paying you by the word for your comments?
@@stewartyates4510 😆
So, you or your dad didn't vote for Carter, and think a clean-kill, minimal destruction weapon is very useful?? Maybe, it depends on your objectives.
These early fusion bombs generated a significant amount of their yield from the fission of the U 238 pusher shell, which normally would not fission but did so under the intense neutron bombardment from the fusion reaction. So it was really a fission-fusion-fission reaction. Also made them incredibly dirty from a fall out perspective.
They could also be fusion-fission-fusion-fission if they used u-238 reflector along with a D-T initiator and booster, and a 2nd fusion stage
While in the navy, my father's ship was one of the target ships. I you've seen the footage of enlisted men on the deck of an aircraft carrier there's my dad he passed at 54yrs from multiple cancers, I was 16. We were never compensated like promised, it would of helped finally paying off med bills after 10yrs (VA said he didn't qualify for medical)
That's just so wrong. I'm so sorry to hear this.
Took my neighbor almost 50 years to get compensation for agent orange exposure from Nam. Sorry for your struggles, it’s a shame we use our boys the way we do
Condolences to you. BTW, it's would've or would have, not would of.
It’s almost certain that anyone downwind of Ivy Mike would be contaminated. The Big C is inevitable.
The contaminated islands will be habitable in around 300,000 years.
you should definitely take the va to court, get doctors and scientists to refute their reasons
J. Robert Oppenheimer: “And now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
*Edward Teller has entered the chat*
Oppenheimer didn't actually say those words at the TRINITY test; he thought them. What he said was, "Well, the Gadget works."
Tella in da house!!!
They weren't even his words, he got them from a Jewish document I believe
@@malcolmrowe5031
No, it was a quote from a Hindu religious text.
Yes, the Hindu text was the Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God, which is one set of books, 700 verses or so, in the middle of a sprawling epic of nearly 1.9 million words called the Mahabharata. Oppy taught himself Sanskrit in order to read it in the original. My take is that it is one of the oldest books in man’s history, and depicts events from paleoancient times, from an ancient high civilization.
-Jimmy Carter, Farewell Address, 1981
"It's now been 35 years since the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The great majority of the world's people cannot remember a time when the nuclear shadow did not hang over the Earth. Our minds have adjusted to it, as after a time our eyes adjust to the dark. Yet the risk of a nuclear conflagration has not lessened. It has not happened yet, thank God, but that can give us little comfort, for it only has to happen once. The danger is becoming greater. As the arsenals of the superpowers grow in size and sophistication and as other governments, perhaps even in the future dozens of governments, acquire these weapons, it may only be a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed, or miscalculation lets loose this terrible force. In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second-more people killed in the first few hours than in all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide."
Anyone who claims to have a serious issue with President Carter is not a serious person.
No one is ever perfect, but he is far better than the clowns he survived. I'm including you Kissinger and Cheney. Thankfully you guys were never president.
Well said.
Almost all the Silent Generation, Boomers, and Gen X believed the world would never make it to the year 2000 without destroying itself. That's why they don't care about climate change or the kind of world they're leaving behind. They were raised to believe the future would self-destruct. By the time the Cold War ended, it was too late for many, if not most, of them to change.
There's almost no point in replying to comments on any corporate-owned channel.
@@Alltime2050stop pretending corporations read anything but profit and liability. It's not about that anyway, dear. But if you wanna pull humans out of the falicy of money and turn value to human and growth rather then use and consumption: by all means. Mankind needs a savior.
My mother, in the mid-60's, warned us kids about 'eating' snow, as it could be irradiated, I always thought she was over reacting, now, I'm thinking she was on to something.
Richard Rhodes book - Dark Sun is the definitive telling of the race to make the H-Bomb. It's the follow up to his Pulitzer Prize winning book - The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
Kenneth W. Ford wrote the definitive book (2015) - it contains information recently declassified by the Department of Energy.
An engineer from the RAF told that it may be possible to build an atomic hand grenade. Unfortunately nobody can throw it far enough to survive using it.
well if you feel like you're dying from your injuries and you're surrounded by the enemy
@taelorwatson9822 like in the end of the first Predator movie
There was a man portable weapon called the Davey Crockett which resembled a bazooka/panzerfaust or stinger missle that had a small nuclear warhead about the size of a pumpernickel loaf. It was tested and deemed to have too low of a survival rate by the soldier firing it to be practical on the battlefield. The army does gave conventional remote weapons that are programmed to identify enemy tanks and autonomously fire a missile at them. It probably wouldn't take much to field an autonomous nuclear armed one. As an alternative, numerous hydrogen bombs were placed underground all over West Germany at critical highway overpasses, railheads, key bridges and The Fulda Gap which is the traditional place for armies to pass through Germany. (I wonder if they have been removed post Cold War? Given the current state of European politics it might be a good idea to have them. These were tactical nukes with a small yield and would be set off by a remote detonation signal. We couldn't match Soviet tank numbers, infantry numbers nor their incredible mobilization of masses of troops over long distances so this was the solution. Nothing like a 10 kt nuke to break up a tank or infantry advance!
Nobody read your comment to long u should write a book
Many years ago, I spent time with a man who had been a guard at Maralinga - England's testing ground in Australia. He said that England had, and tested, atomic bombs the size of hand grenades. He said that even the smallest ones still made a cloud in miniature, like we see on the larger fission bombs.
Great video.
Now, I am become sleepy, the goer to bed.
There was no mention of how the H-bomb was made very compact... all the ones shown here were huge. Quite early on, the US knew that the H-bomb would be quite small, and built its missiles accordingly (Atlas, Thor, Titan , Minuteman, Polaris), whereas Sakharov over-estimated the size and caused Korolev to build a very big first ICBM (the R-7, now morphed into the Soyuz orbital booster). This gave the USSR several years of head start over the US in the "space race", while the US was forced to develop miniature electronics (integrated circuits a.k.a. "chips"), which ultimately gave the US its massive technological/industrial lead over the rest of the world for the rest of the 20th century.
This is one of your better explanations. well done
Simon either has an amazing ability to talk about this like he understands it, or he really is "BIG BRAINED"! Either way 👏👏👏
he's a good talker, but he has NO clue what he's talking about. he's been pretty forward about that in the past
@@judyfps5059ha, yes it depends on which show he is doing. He has to be acting here or the show he comes across as clueless. It’s a mystery I guess. Ha
Yeah, when he lets the kayfabe drop in stuff like Brain Blaze he admits he has faint memories about things from reading them but most time is just words on a teleprompter for money for him. I admire him for it.
@@judyfps5059 He thinks being a good talker means talking just fast enough that most people don't follow or catch on that he doesn't know what he's saying. However speaking that rapidly and editing out the space between breaths and sounding like the grim reaper is bearing down on his every word is very amateurish. Sounds like crap and doesn't give the viewer time to think about what is said. Compare him to David Attenborough.
He reads material written by others. He obviously does it well.
There's a video of soldiers running towards a nuclear explosion from a bomb shot out of a cannon. The goal was to prove that a nuclear bomb was "safe" enough to be used on the battle field. My sister-in-law's grandfather was one of the soldiers in that test; he died of cancer in his 50s along with some of his buddies around that age.
No. Atomic Annie only fired once. The video your thinking of was a small tactical nuke that was dropped
What you speak of , was that done by the Chinese ?
@icosthop9998 no. In the later 50s or early 60s. We fired an atomic cannon. And troops marched into the fallout. It was a test on radiation but the troops were not told that
What more concise words can I search for more info on this please mate? @@TheFastshelby
@@sadmermaid atomic annie
I had the privilege of attending a guest lecture given by Dr Teller in the mid to late eighties. He talked more about the politics of nuclear weapons than the science. His viewpoints were... interesting. And deeply flawed, like his views on many other areas.
Nyarlathotep, he taught men new methods of destruction; destruction with atomic bombs in which the 'ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled down on the quaking citadels of man.' Lovecraft knew what he was writing.
Ivy Mike is also a footnote in chemistry since the elements einsteinium and fermium were discovered in its fallout. The names were already proposed before their deaths but not revealed until after they died.
Hans B at the beginning really is BIG brain with that head
Also there is an upper limit to fission weapons since you can only have so much fissile material in any one place before you have a critical mass thus making the weapon unsafe and/or prone to pre-detonation.
Have to use higher octane fissile material.
Yup. Which then implies an upper limit to fusion bombs that can be triggered by a fission bomb. But as I understand it, a fission-fusion-fission design like the Tsar Bomba has no such limit. Tsar Bomba would have worked fine (and still been air-deployable) at 100 MT, and offhand I don't know of any theoretical reason why the design couldn't be scaled to eg. 1000 MT and beyond. Just expensive to do, unwieldy to handle and deploy, and frankly way too dangerous for anyone to even consider actually detonating.
@@patheddles4004 Yeah, the only difference between the 50 MT and 100 MT versions was the exclusion of the uranium tamper, which they replaced with lead. Including the uranium tamper would have caused a shit ton more fission from all the fast neutrons from the fusion reaction. They were looking into gigaton bombs which is just crazy, even the 15 KT little boy killed 80 thousand people, like, even a single megaton is beyond comprehension. As you said, such a weapons is hugely impractical and also more small bombs do more damage because the damage doesn't scale linearly. 10 100 KT bombs would do more damage than one 1 MT bomb. Also I'm pretty sure they did some calculations and realised the most of the energy would have been lost into space.
Two points. The actual engineering design on the US side was done by someone almost never mentioned named Richard Garwin. Basically a grad student who worked at the weapons lab one summer. Second point I find interesting. Its always said that a nuke couldn't do much to destroy or deflect ELE sized asteroid. But if fusion weapons can scale up almost indefinitely then could a hypothetical 1000 MT device make a dent on an incoming threat? I could easily envision a crash multinational effort to build and deliver hyper weapons to avoid a killer asteroid.
Id like to hear more about what Oppenheimer thought about the hydrogen bomb all around. Also would be interested to see all the alternative ideas/designs for it besides one that was ultimately developed
Oppenheimer initially thought work to make the hydrogen bomb was pointless. No one was anywhere close to figuring out how to make it work after significant effort. And how much more yield did you need? They had already figured out how to make boosted fission weapons of much greater power.
But when the Teller-Ulam configuration was invented, Oppenheimer thought the solution very innovative and withdrew his objection.
The earlier designs sought to use the heat and pressure of the fission primary to ignite the fusion fuel. They never found a design solution that worked. The heat and pressure scrambled the fuel too rapidly. But then they stumbled on the idea to separate the fusion fuel from the fission primary, and then use the massive x-ray flux from the fission primary to heat and compress the fusion fuel and a plastic plasma. This happens with astonishing speed, and starts the thermonuclear reactions. They are fully involved before the shock wave from the fission primary can arrive. It never does arrive, as the fusion burning releases a greater shock wave. There are more elements to the design (spark plug and U238 tamper).
SpongeBob and Patrick Star did it! Sandy Squirrel dropped it! Squidward resented it.
Some v good books by Richard Rhodes: "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and "Dark Sun". Cover history people events and technology.
The Rhodes book only covers the fission bomb, not the fusion bomb.
'Dark Sun' covers the fusion bomb.
One missing detail on the Castle Bravo shot concerns the natural uranium (^238U) tamper. It had been expected to remain inert, as ^238U does not normally sustain a chain reaction and was intended to serve the 'pusher' function. However, it was subsequently discovered that ^238U can undergo vigorous and explosive fission when exposed to an extremely energetic flux of fast neutrons. Because the fusion stage of the Teller-Ulam device produces such neutrons in abundance, a significant portion of the ^238U tamper underwent fast fission, thereby adding about 5 to 6 megatons of extremely 'dirty' yield. Today, as a result of this discovery, most thermonuclear weapons have a more significant fission component than would be suggested simply by the yield of the primary., This reflects a complex interplay between fission and fusion processes during the entire detonation cycle of a thermonuclear weapon.
May the future children of earth forgive us for our ignorance. Thank you greatly for all your content
There is no future for you all
It was me. Sorry guys
I love your clean & clear Narration 🤳
Thank you Sir 👍🙏👏💪💯
In 1964, I had a summer job at the Lawrence Livermore Lab which was called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at that time. One day, I found a note at my desk that said "Rich - Call Ed" with his phone number. So I called and when the secretary answered "Dr. Teller's office" I realized that I was the subject of a practical joke.
The emphasis on the science and the results of radioactive fallout made this more interesting. Very good, as usual.
Teller was also among first to warn about global warming, in 1955.
1959 actually.
Videos are amazing but I have to put in 0.75 speed! Insane amount of information fast like that is hard to digest.
Dude how many channels do you have?
I saw online a document which stated that Los Alamos thought that Li7 would be inert; but that Livermore thought it was a 50% chance it would react.
Think about that.
Good video. Those scientists were right. They just aren't all that terribly hard to make really, and someone was going to do it. You hit on a lot of the best points, even about how fallout scales better with more fusion unless the tampers are uranium. Almost all fallout is from the primary and the tampers fission. One 'good' side effect from the testing was that fake wine can be verified easier because of all those 50/60s isotopes they released.
Edward Teller was a nut. Dr. Strangelove.
There was one explosion that dwarfed the tsar bomba, and it happened without any radioactive fallout or radioactive propagation. Its shockwave circled the earth 7 times and continued to be detectable for 5 days after. This explosion occurred 30 years before nuclear warfare was remotely conceived. It occurred on August 27, 1883.
Krakatoa Eruption...measured at 200 megatons
..4x more poweful than the Tsar bomb...yes
..we know.
As it has been said before and shall be said again. There is nothing humans can do or build that will rival the destructiveness of mother nature.
And God help our species the day we do. (If we even last long enough)
Teller's vigorous advocacy for strength through nuclear weapons, especially when so many of his wartime colleagues later expressed regret about the arms race, made him an easy target for the "mad scientist" stereotype.
I often wonder if he was mildly autistic and the bombs became his "special interest". All he could see is the connections and possibilities for improving them without the consideration of what that meant. It would be what differentiated him from Sahkarov, who designed Tsar Bomba but later became a proponent of disarmament.
@@3rdworldgarage450 I interviewed him in University. He was in his nineties and terrifyingly intelligent. I poured the tea and dished the cookies. He dribbled a bit on his tie, but the mind was unreal sharp. I let the geeks in the room ask most of the questions, and get answered on the vast majority that that was covert material. It was a good interview though. Easy for me. "More tea Mr. Teller?" I would not think autistic. A bit too much the classic gentleman as I recall, just a flipping GENIUS. Scary scary smart and I do not consider myself completely stupid. He however was a very very rare breed.. He also I am not entirely certain was a 'mad scientist'. He really wanted to see his technology also used for constructive purposes. And it now finally seems that someone may be figuring out how to do so. One can certainly hope.
@@3rdworldgarage450 I believe most people of extraordinary talent if studied by a psychologist would be found to be on the spectrum. Where they Excell at one thing they are often found lacking in another.
Teller was a bit of a mad scientist. He opposed the above ground nuclear test ban of 1962 because he believed the Russians would continue above ground tests on the far side of the moon, a technology they still don’t possess. He, more than anyone else, deserves the title of “Dr. Strangelove”. His hard right combativeness has tarnished the reputations of particle physicists the world over.
"My name is not Strangelove," he snapped. "I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say?… Look, say it three times more and I throw you out of this office." - Teller during a 1999 interview
So nice to have Wikipedia read to me, Thanks
Bravo to the scientific consultant of this video.
It's interesting to have lived through this without knowing a lot of the details. My late husband's step grandfather was on the aircraft that delivered the bomb to the Enola Gay. In his words, the bomb was sullen and evil. And he was not a man to exaggerate. Bomb drills were a real thing when I was in elementary school in New Orleans, although not so much in the smaller towns in Louisiana. I knew where the bomb shelter was in town, even after we stopped worrying about being incinerated. My parents were worried about the Bay of Pigs, my Mom was a reporter for the local NBC affiliate and we were glued to the coverage.
And then it hits me, when my generation is gone, no one will understand that we lived with that constant nagging fear that someone who hated us would flip that switch and make a completely un-retractable decision that would make the most dystopian fiction of today look functional. As kids, none of us knew who invented this thing. None of us questioned when they told us about cobalt bombs and neutron bombs, the ones that would kill everyone in a city but leave the buildings for the invaders standing, and somehow not leave radiation that would make the place uninhabitable while it was at it.
It sounds so crazy today, but the Boomers lived with this. No wonder we're weird. Our childhoods, that people talk about how easy it was, no social media, no crazy pressure to get into the right schools (well, not at my social level), and yet we spent the 1960s with this fear at our shoulders, with death never far from us because someone in a position of power might lose it and give the order. It's a wonder any of us are sane.
And I am thankful my kids and my grandkids do not have that fear ... with everything else they have to worry about, that's not the big one any more.
I appreciate your commentary here, and respect what you've seen in your life. Both of my Grandfathers were a part of that whole development. My parents lived through the air-raid drills. What I find truly terrifying and sad, understandably with a bit of prejudice, is that from the day I was born in 1985, this has still been a fear for them... and eventually me. Certainly we don't talk about it as much now, and it's less newsworthy... but the same fears and risks that you lived through, they never went away. We just got used to them. I was born and raised into a world that could blink out in an instant if the wrong people pushed the wrong buttons. My first vivid memory of something on television was the Berlin Wall coming down. I was far too little to know why it was important. But it was. I try to be optimistic, but I am a realist and value history. Those two weapons used... the testing that followed... the arms race... it's all Pandora's Box. Can't really put all that evil back in can we?
Those who lived through the Cold War definitely have stories to tell but a child born in the 80's we have our own nightmares. I was in 8th grade when the Columbine massacre happened and in 11th when 9/11 happened. It was me and the generations after me that live with the real threat of school shootings and lock down drills. Every generation lives through their own honors. My daughter may not remember it but her life was changed by the Covid 19 pandemic and the global and political upheavals of our current time period.
Part of the problem IS rhat no one is afraid of it anymore, not even in government and decisions are made daily that inch us closer to provocations that may indeed launch these weapons. These fools war game how to SURVIVE a nuclear war instead of understanding the only way to win that game is not to play at all.
Very well said! Start to research Baha'u'llah and the Baha'i Faith about where this is all now going to go and how humanity can best survive WWIII or actually possibly stop it. We are in big, big trouble. I have been a Baha'i for 53 years since searching for an answer after my time in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. I became a friend of Hugh Thompson Jr. later in life. Google him. I saw no way the U.S. was going to make it after my military service. Good luck to you and yours in investigating the claims of this new rapidly growing Faith.
I remember as a small boy watching terminator 2 for the first time ( would have been mid 90s ) with my old man and when i saw the scenes of the bomb going off and the destruction it caused i turned to my old man and first asked was this weapn real? And then asked why would human beings create such an evil weapon? I remember the feeling of fear, dredd and sadness that swept across me! All this just fron scenes from a movie! Can not imagine the feelings of kids and peoplw like urself went through during this age.
From what my fellow physicist friends told me when they worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab, Teller was one of the biggest warpigs of all time. He was literally giddy when discussing a proposal for space-based x-ray lasers pumped by a hydrogen bomb.
That's an extremely well done video. Thanks.
Both Teller and Ulam agreed that it should be called the Teller design - Teller for the reasons mentioned in the video, Ulam because he, like much of the physics community, didn't think the Super was a good idea for humanity and didn't want to be associated with it at all. So it's called the Teller-Ulam design over both of their objections.
I love how many super smart people was necessery to build the dumbest idea mankind ever had.
well, we wouldn’t want a dumb idea being executed in a stupid way, would we?
...so how many smart ppl DID it take to create Republicans then, exactly? 😂💯😊
@@stevejester5658you mean dirty ruling class politicians in general not just republicans
@@stevejester5658??? What a strange way to twist this issue. Republicans were "created" around 1860 with their first candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Your narrow minded view detracts from the story.
@@mikeottersole- Ronald Reagan, on Aug 3, 1980, betrayed the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Jefferson Davis and the future Donald Trump when he declared in the racist hellhole of Neshoba County MS, “I believe in states rights. “ Reagan tapped out the racist code by declaring to the white audience that he was on their side. In the audience of Reagan’s evil speech, were the mayor, state and local police and local KKK who murdered three voting rights workers and buried them in an earthen dam. Reagan knew what he was doing. Reagan was an expert in communicating his anti black message.
"There were monsters on that planet.....and truly we were them"
I’d read that Stanley Kubrick based his character of Dr Strangelove on Edward Teller.
Dr. Strangelove was an "... amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun ..., and Edward Teller ..."
"It is frequently claimed the character was based on Henry Kissinger, but Kubrick and Sellers denied this; Sellers said: "Strangelove was never modeled after Kissinger-that's a popular misconception." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove
Although Kissinger could be included for his cold war-like logic.
Some say Strangelove was based on Teller while others think he's a composite of Wernher von Braun, Edward Teller and Herman Kahn.
I do know Teller hated any comparisons to Dr. Strangelove.
@@GlenCooper-sj4lh I think even before his passing, Teller kept getting asked if he knew anything about any similarity between him and Strangelove, and he said something like, 'Strangelove? I don't know any Strangelove!"
@@padawanmage71 From Wikipedia: "My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say? ... Look. Say it three times more, and I throw you out of this office." 😅
I've never been able to listen to videos fully without falling asleep half way through, I use to for to go to sleep these days.
This video showed so many videos of nuclear tests, and it made me realize just how Eldritch nuclear bombs are. They look so unreal.
Those are films, whippersnapper.
I met Edward Teller in 1988 and spent more than 90 minutes with him one on one. He was absolutely brilliant. I would not doubt his version of history.
Brilliant doesn't mean sane
I do after beans.
Some might call that taco Tuesday.
Methane, hydrogen, same thing 🤷♂️
That's a methane bomb aka brown bomb. Arguably more dangerous especially if you're married.
Your pants smell after a week
And the question is how far will counties take the Brinkmanship before it's too late.
How can something so deadly be so beautiful?
bit like my wife
@@kimoe188😂
He talks fast because he is precise and Brit. And he makes one million videos per week. Hard working man! Hard working team. Thank you!
Cheers!🍻New SUBSCRIBER here because of the absolutely very well done and very descriptive video. Has Discovery Channel level production and information, actually gives information and Discovery Channel does on some of their small documentaries. Very well done video sir❤❤
So, for more than seven decades bomb size has reached and exceeded the limits of practicality. Wow...
Because of delivery system accuracy, yield of deployed weapons has actually decreased markedly. Most deployed weapons max out between 800kt and 1.2MT. I think the largest still deployed by anyone is 5MT and probably there are very few of those.
Teller's comment that Ulam didn't contribute much to a design that worked was uttered after Ulam's death, which is very convenient.
Teller was a disgrace and deserves no respect or appreciation whatsoever.
About the only conceivable use for 100 megaton devices would be to move asteroids around by detonating them in a standoff configuration and using the asteroid's ablation to provide thrust.
I meet Edward Teller and talked to him at a lecture at Gainesville. Interesting conversation.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but Teller was among the scientists that calculated the possibility, prior to the detonation of Trinity, of atmospheric combustion, was he not? I find that somewhat ironic. But following WW2 Teller was always a great advocate for the use of atomic bombs, still glad it never came to that again. On a different note it's always fascinating to me how Teller, Ulam and Sakharov developed similar ideas for an H-Bomb, maybe it's just the number of varieties to build such a device, maybe it's their genius or maybe Sakharov had some "help", allegedly, still fascinating.
I don’t think secondary neutrons contribute significantly to the primary, but they can fission the outer jacket if made of natural uranium, which fast neutrons from fusion can do. Neutron initiation in the primary was initially via a small fusion reaction but later a neutron gun was used. Potentially A LOT of nuclear reactions going on:
1) fusion for neutron initiation
2) primary fission
3) gas boosting
4) tamper fission
5) spark plug fission
6) spark plug fusion gas boosting
7) secondary fusion
8) secondary tamper fission
9) fission of outer jacket by fusion neutrons if made of natural uranium.
The fission/fusion loop and resulting explosion happens in 600 billionth of a second.
I thought the first viable thermonuclear test was Ivy Mike, not Castle Bravo.
It was, they got this one wrong
It's literally mentioned in the video ya tards.
It's mentioned in the video so maybe pay more attention before commenting lol, and it wasn't a bomb it was more of a facility to prove the concept viable.
@@meh7348 Ivy Mike's 10.4 megatons would like to have a word with you.
Thanks for tutorial going to grab the ingredients now.
Well done, SW! Very well written, Mr. Messier; any relation to Charles?
24:50 - in Raymond Burr's voice; "Yes, I see..."
Great video.
En-ee-wee-tok Atoll
Teller was a physicist and Ulam was a geometer. Ulam figured out the shape/geometry necessary to carry out Teller's calculations.
Thanx for the content
I love how simon has an expression like this is all extremely simple and obvious while he reads it off the teleprompter :P
Somehow we still exist. Amazing
Fun fact, in wepon like tsar bomba fusion only produces circa 10% of evergy, 90% comes from uranium being far more efficiently fisioned by super fast neutrons produced by fusion reaction ...
I have a friend who lived through that being several hundred miles South East of it. And I know where one of the battleships are sunk on stacks and sticks out a bit.
Castle-Bravo was NOT the first test of the hydrogen bomb. That honor goes to Ivy-Mike, detonated at Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952.
Mentioned in the video.
Ivy Mike had a bulky cryogenic fuel system that made it impractical. It was more of a proof of concept than it was an actual deliverable weapon. Operation Castle was the testing of weapons that could be actually used.
For one it's literally mentioned in the video so you obviously didn't pay much attention, secondly it wasn't a bomb it was more of a facility to prove the concept viable.
First practical pne
Castle Bravo was NOT the first Hydrogen Bomb, Ivy Mike was.
True, Castle Bravo was only the first utilising the designs propesed by Teller and Ulam, closer to what we use today than the Ivy Mike design.
Ivy Mike wasn't a "bomb" it was a facility for the testing of the concept.
@@outerrealmYes but it was what USHERED in the thermo nuclear age, not castle bravo
The first hydrogen bomb was Soviet RDS-6s. Ivy Mike wasn't a bomb, it was a nuclear device with the size of a house not suitable for practical use.
Actually the first thermometer fusion bomb was Greenhouse George, a boosted nuke
Ivy Mike was the first Hydrogen Bomb, Castle Bravo was the biggest test by US.
IM 1952 CB 1954
The architect gets credited for the building, regardless the the volume of labourers. There are millions of good ideas, but very few conductors who can direct the musicians to achieve a required end.
'Castle Bravo' biggest and world record'WHOOPSIE!' Unforseen almost doubled yield. I would have loved to be in the room for that post boo boo conversation.
Tsar Bomba was the biggest at 56 MgT,cut in half from 100MgT out of concern for destroying the sky!
The difference is, that was planned. The Tsar Bomba was stupid on purpose. In English slang the word Whoopsie, infers a surprise error.
Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons. 2.5 times the predicted 6 megatons. This was due to the unforeseen cascade reaction of the lithium-7@@pashapasovski5860
I just found this channel. Isn’t this the same guy that talks about war stuff?
Very well done!
Thanks a lot TELLER you maniac!
In the USA and the USSR they also tried to develop civilian "clean" H-bombs, for example, for laying canals. As I know, in the USSR they conducted experiments with second stages without any fission reactions. For example, they used spheres filled with high-pressure D-gas as the second stage. It is important that they did not use a plutonium-made "spark plug", but achieved self-ignition of the thermonuclear fuel. At least one test produced 140 kilotons of "clean" thermonuclear energy. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about the first stage. Perhaps 3-5 kilotons of "dirty" fission energy. If 3kt was enough, they could achieve 98% purity. But one of the unresolved problems is neutron-induced radioactivity.
Fantastic work, on this one.
Not that you folks do not work so well on all others.
I worked with a Navy sailor ( Wally W.) who witnessed the "Shrimp" detonation. He told me a crew had been sent to a remote horseshoe shaped atoll in a landing craft. The only thing on the atoll was a radio tower and a small building. When the bomb went off the water inside the horseshoe went away, flowing out to sea, taking the landing craft with it. When the water came back it covered the island and the crew were forced to climb the tower to keep from drowning. Eventually they were rescued. He said the bomb 'pulsed'; I don't know exactly what he meant by this I am just repeating what he said in the interest of history.
“Climb down into your bunker and put on your fallout suit”
Literally two things you don’t need to do with a hydrogen bomb which doesn’t leave radiation behind.
They absolutely leave radiation behind, they just won’t leave as much as a fission bomb, but even fission bombs don’t leave much radiation during an air burst.
I still trying to find out how big a kilometer is. 🤯
Roughly 6/10ths of a mile.
About 11 football fields
One kilometer = 1000 meters. One meter = 1000 millimeters. Therefore 1000 meters x 1000 millimeters = 1 million millimeters. There is 25.4 millimeters in one inch, therefore 1 million divided by 25.4 = 39,370 inches or 3,281 feet. So one kilometer = 3,281 feet. FYI, one mile = 5280 feet. One mile = 1.61 kilometers (approx).
@@keepingitreal6793 that seems pretty complicated 😉 I’ll stick with 5280 for a mile I can picture it
@@grantkopka9090 I typically do 2km = 1 mile, 3 feet = 1m and 1yard = 1m. It's not precise but when I want an instant ball park estimate instantly it's close enough
im pretty sure Castle Bravo wasnt the first Hydrogen bomb, it was a Lithium bomb
Fine work
You can get a good feel for why eating from the tree of knowledge was such a grave and terrible thing
300 million kelvin, now that's hot.
Oppenheimer was quoted after witnessing the Trinity test in New Mexico, that he saw the power of the fission bomb and said "I thought back onto the Hindu Scriptures, the Bagava Gita...
... and Vishnu revealed his multi-armed form and said 'Now, I am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.' "
It was for an interview that we have the video footage online and for which they actually recreated the scene, shot for shot, for the movie.
They underestimated the size of the blast because of a "negligible" effect of lithium 7 producing extra fusionable material.
The lithium 7 was in the lithium 6 used to generate hydrogen and helium for fusion fuel.
And castle bravo wasn't even all that efficient of a fusion bomb. The tsar bomba the russians made however was pretty much as efficient as a fusion bomb could get.
Why do humans do these things?
Your further explanation explained at the time I thought it looked like a sun to me and with a wave. I remember talking about it a school to a little girl I liked named Rita.
I finally got some insight into what my childhood friend in Los Alamos told me. He said his father was working on how to release thin metal spheres from the mold without them tearing. About the only mention I ever heard of someone's work at LASL. My father did mention that he saw Teller from time to time.
There seem to be no half-measures for humanity. Even something as simple as the proliferation of single-use plastic water bottles took over the world like a runaway nuclear reaction.
@bujfvjg7222 Listening to this the thought came to me: trust a bunch of intelligent great apes to come up with ways to potentially extinct their species.
Everyone knows it was Edward Teller who sat there as early as 1943 whining about how he should be building the Super and refusing to do much to build the first fission device. The big baby wanted a bomb large enough to vaporise the known universe if he thought he could build it
Strictly speaking 'Mike' was not usable as a weapon. It was proof of concept and heavily instrumented and used a lot of refrigeration industrial equipment. It was a 'device'.