A 25,000-Tonne Bomb That Has Never Been Detonated Is Set Off | The Ultimates: Explosions | Spark
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- Опубліковано 15 січ 2021
- An exploration of extreme speed and power, focusing on the scientific research behind notorious war-time explosions, the worst collisions in sports car history, supersonic trains, thrill rides, strike planes, and attack helicopters.
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How happy does that Farmer feel when he tries to sleep at night during a Thunder storm ?..the Liberty Ship blast was truly horrifying..great Vid.
Me at 3am just one video before I go asleep
Same.. i can't stop watching 😐
Me in science class 🧓🏼
Me too, I started watching at 3am. Mistake!
Yep. Lol
Hahaha literally same
I remember seeing a video about the mines. A British Officer commented saying, Gentlemen, I don’t know whether we are going to make history tomorrow, but at any rate we shall change geography."
shout out to Graham Maddox ,, my maths teacher ,historian, book writer on the manchester and liverpool regiments. Will never forget the some trips in france u did for the school for over 20 years was privelaged to attend my era on them . Rest in peace Mr Maddox. gone but not forgotten! Lest we forget.
Every time i see the tsar bomba explosion, there's this sense of awe and beautiful elegance but simultaneously absolute terror to the core. ("Wow" vs "oh shit...")
Narrator: "Maybe you get used living in the shadow of history" ? I find living on a 25 ton bomb not quite the same! 😂😂😂
There is more than one Atomic bomb still buried in the ground.
If that was 25 tons of ammonium nitrate buried that field would be producing some magnificent crops.
Poppys lol
Not 70 feet down...even horseradish doesn't have roots that deep ! (Hopefully.🙄)
another awesome episode thx
Correction : TNT was NOT designed to be insensitive, it was just a welcome coincidence that the compound happened to have. It was actually first used as a yellow dye, before the nature of nitrated organic compounds became known. Many other nitrated compounds are FAR FAR more sensitive, Picric acid, nitrated phenol, also a yellow dye, is easily set off especially by friction. Nitrated glycerol, nitroglycerine can also be easily detonated simply by dropping it, banging it against another object, static electricity, strong acids, U.V light, freezing it makes it even more sensitive, soaking it up in a dry powder like diatomaceous earth makes it more stable, then it is called DYNAMITE, and because of this greater stability, it was used everywhere to build nations.
Nitrogen Triiodide; now *that's* a sensitive explosive, people have jokingly said that just someone's gaze falling on it will set it off 😄
To think they use phenol in chemical face peels
What is not said in this documentary is that since the Redwing H bombs tests operation in 1956, the US had mastered the technology of multistage H bombs ( Shots Tewa and Zuni over Enewetak atoll, bombs based on the Bassoon device, with yields around 4 MT ) thus enabling USA to build the famous Mk-41 H bomb ( nominal yield 25 MT ) - 500 of those were built - and that, had they built a bomb based on the Mk-41 design but using the same amount of Lithium Deuteride ( the thermonuclear fuel ) as found in the Tsar Bomba, it's yield would have been 140 MT, far more than the Russian Tsar. As a matter of fact, US designs were much more advanced than the Russian ones and for a given yield, a US H bomb was three times lighter than its Russian counterpart. A US built Tsar would have weighed around 14 tons against the 27 T of the Russian test weapon while still being far more destructive... The blast from the Tsar destroyed an awful lot of windows in Finland, a thousand kilometers from Novaya Zemlya. A US built Tsar would have destroyed windows in most of Europe with probably even more damage including to houses, buildings and other structures. Thus, the most advanced and powerful H bomb ever is the American Mk-41, not the AN-602 or RDS-220 ( other names of the Tsar ) though it was never tested on such a scale, the damage would have been cataclysmic. So the Tsar remains indeed the most powerful H bomb ever tested ( Actual yield 57.3 MT according to Nikita Krutschev in his memoirs for a target yield of 50 MT ) and thanks God, the US never tried to test a Mk-41 with the same amount of 6Li2H as the Tsar.
The Texas City explosion was a big one too... a whole ship loaded with ammonium nitrate. Blew a 2 ton anchor a mile away. Later! OL J R :)
During WW2 the Norwegian resistance blew up a German supply ship loaded with ammo. That explosion was heard over 250 miles away on the Swedish East coast.
My mom was standing in the front yard of her house and was knocked down and the concrete driveway cracked when Texas City explosion occurred and she lived 90 miles away.
It is hard to believe that much explosives, unexploded, could have just been forgotten about
Embarrassing events tend to be covered up.
POLITICS
@@general5104 It is obviously Joe Biden's fault.
@@general5104 Not always. Sometimes it's for a far more mundane reason. Things move on, people move on, records get filed away, lost or destroyed. Things gradually disappear from living memory. You see it happen throughout history, all over the world, not just in military history, but everyday life.
@ 8:01 Even though he knew quite well what was about to happen, he flinched.
Can't say I wouldn't do the same. That was a really sweet firecracker.
It was a true feat to have that plan ongoing for an entire year and it not be leaked or somehow exposed. That itself is truly amazing!
As a small boy was hard to believe it, but later I knew it was real. Gosh!
'but..but surely someone would have talked.. ' what the 911 deniers always say
Lol now days you can't even make a movie or video game without it getting leaked.
My father was in Italy WW11 with the British Royal Engineers a US munitions supply vessel just arrived exploded in the docks and lifted half the ship three stories high landing on a seamen’s mission killing everyone in it. My father was two bocks from the dock in a workshop. They felt a depression and dropped to the floor as the windows all blew in. He survived with no injuries. The only survivor on the dock was an MP who had stepped into a vertical RSJ holding up a building to have a quite cigarette, the blast swept past him and the girded protected him. One time that smoking prolonged someone’s life! My father was reported as killed to his family, they received a letter a while later from him very much alive. The only one I can see on the web at the moment was at Bari. There was mustard gas on one of the two munitions ships hit by bombing it was there just in case the Germans carried out a threat to use it in Italy.
I read that as WW eleven..... And thought did i miss 9 world wars?
2 or Roman numerals please
@@rickstorm4198 nurd
I think that explosion was the one that lead to a cure after the war
The real reason the explosive hasn't been removed is simple Cost, who's going to foot the bill.
Cost and the risk, similar to neutralizing land mines and naval mines. I recall a mine that washed ashore near my home on the Monterey Bay (California) back in the early nineteen fifties. It looked pretty rusty but . . . I lay down at the top of the cliff a good distance away. Navy bomb disposal experts (could have been Army experts from nearby Fort Ord?) were working around it. They vacated and I got behind a tree although I was still pretty far away. There was a loud CRACK! and the mine was split open. The pieces were hauled away and we could play on the beach again.
Plus early WW1 era explosive were, are relatively unstable compared to modern recipes or explosive mixtures as they degrade with age, becoming more unstable and possibly more likely to go off for a reason of some/any kind, in an unpredictable manner or reason.
Tring to remove it, let alone the cost of doing so, could well lead to it going off.
Unlike the explosives stored in Beirut, on the docks in a warehouse which had more variations in temperature from the warehouse buildings construction and the local regions climate, the Messines 'mine' is kept fairly constant in an average ground temperature & groundwater content...
So, in some ways, leaving it is a safer option, albeit the area above & around should be declared a high risk danger zone with restriction on what sorts of construction & industrial machinery and operations can be used anywhere near it, and ideally, no new homes or new homeowners allowed within that area.
The government that put them there has a moral responsibility.
I don't know when this documentary was made. We have seen the Halifax disaster repeated in Beirut, 4th August 2020.
25,000 tonne bomb? Even in American tons that's a 50,000,000 pound bomb you're talking about...I think we used the wrong unit of measure in the video's description 🤦♂️
Yeah, what a bullshit title description when so soon into the vid 25,000 tonnes is changed to 25 tonnes. Typical clickbait bullshit.
This has just popped up for me, given lack of comments when released wonder if someone has edited video title? To be less sciencey. And more clicky?
There again i can see old comments talking about atomic bombs.
The 2020 Beirut explosion even gave us a more realistic insight of what AN in huge doses can do.
Tiff needs to do more documentary's like this. He has a great voice for narration.
As an American "petrol head" I heard him speak the opening line and was filled with a warm happy feeling like when you hear from a old friend
Can you imagine being in a plane and seeing chunks of metal the size of a garage or entire house flying by?
Mum, is that Superman? Don't be silly son, Superman is not real. That's a Tesla Model S.
Frightening!
U said that so, Why does snoopy sitting on his dog house with scarf come to my mind???
Shades of "The Wizard of Oz" and its tornado!
How low? If you could see it, you would be joining it shortly.
So awesome to know! Thank you for the knowledge 🙂
Induced charge... always good to know..🙄
Now that was bangin'.
I'm going straight to the comments section, to see what the experts have to say about this video.
I miss looking at the mothball fleet on my trips to and from the bay area as a kid. Was the highlight of every single trip.
The Tsar Bomba would have been visible to a human on Mars, had there been anyone there looking.
@ Craig Robertson:
It WAS visible to the little green men on Mars.
Gianni Russo was there. He saw it.
So we could detonate a hydrogen bomb on Mars and see it from here
@@klaasdeboer8106 if it was big enough.
@@sheldoniusRex and of course when mars is close.
It is impressive how distinct Tiff Needell's voice is. And the video is pretty good too!
I am amazed that there wasn’t actual filming of the explosion that you could have used for this.
there was look up Y sap.
The main reason they stopped making bigger bombs is simply that they are such a huge waste. You can do a lot more damage with a small percentage of power using multiple warheads.
Carl Sagan debated evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr about the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life in the late '90s. While Sagan was quite sure it existed, Mayr argued the only example of intelligent life we know anything about are Homo sapiens. Although humans have existed only a few 100 thousand years, compared to thousands of other unintelligent species that have existed for millions of yrs., yet it's humans who are well on their way to destroying themselves and their planet with them. Mayr maintained intelligence is a lethal mutation. Thus, we ought to question the existence of intelligent ETs.
Even at the time it was built and detonated, "Czar Bomba" was too large to be practical in actual warfare. It was designed more for the psychological effect.
If that were completely true b52 would have been dropping cherry bombs in nam.
@@kierenalvarez - I believe CB's original comment was referring not to conventional bombs, or even first generation (uranium or plutonium fission) nuclear bombs, but to thermonuclear (hydrogen fusion) bombs....Once you get to hydrogen bombs of a certain magnitude, making them even bigger ceases to be useful.
@@Bike_Lion Unless of course we're talking about energy generation. In which case, the bigger the fusion bomb the better.
*Hydrogen bombs dont get their power from fusion alone, The fusion bomb sets off a larger fission bomb because its capable of releasing more neutrons and xrays into it before it blows it self apart. The fusion part of a H bomb or Teller Ulam design is known as the fusion spark plug. The actual firing order goes: Conventional explosives to compress a fission bomb, then fusion, then fission. Plan old polystyrene foam is used to channel the xrays that are so bright that they crush, and a beryllium shell is used to reflect the fast neutrons back onto the main fission bomb. If the czar bomb used U238 instead of lead as a tamper it would have been 100 M tons creating huge fall out and killing the drop bomber. As it was the shock wave knocked the bomber down thousands of feet and was painted white and shielded with lead. They put the odds of survival at 50% for the bomber crew.
Yeah Mr. White, Science 👍
Dope theory... u gotta go-pro
Normal high explosive, fission, leading to thermal fusion reaction of fuel
so Dave B. the final fission blast is more powerful than the fusion? I thought more energy is released when atoms are forced together forming a new element than fission when an atom is split...
@8:02 he flinched 🤣😭🤦🏼♀️
This is a fantastic video.
CORRECTION:
10,000 soldiers were not killed at once, BUT, on more than one occasion during the American Civil War, soldiers (former miners) dug subterranean tunnels under enemy positions, filled them with kegs of gunpowder, and detonated the "mines", producing huge numbers of dead and injured, while creating enormous craters.
yeah most famously in the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, which was holding up the Yankee attack on the Confederate capitol at nearby Richmond. I had a relative that fought at "the Crater" and lived. OL J R :)
Iu
When I grow up I want to be this man in his red suite!
Very informative documentary, thanks.
While stationed in Germany in the 60s, there was a commotion below my 2nd floor office window. While excavating for some reason, an unexploded 250 pounder was uncovered. Naturally, the building and those around it were evacuated. I stayed behind, carefully peeking out the window, lest I be seen. Watched the explosive ordinance disposal people disarm and remove it. Nobody noticed that I was not present in the evac headcount, as they assumed I helping count.
I'm sure they would have approved of your decision 😁
Dumb.
I'm a bit late, but these things still happen all the time in germany...
basically every place that had some sort of railway during ww2 digs up bombs every time an excavator is on site. lots of fun in larger cities...
Amazing how we split the atom before we even broke the speed of sound in level flight.
Amazing that ten years before the first a bomb the neutron had only been a theory. Thats like Going from a main frame computer in the 60's to a Cray super computer with 1000's of cores in the 70's.
I think splitting the atom was more important to us at the time😉
im actually surprised we didnt start smashing atoms shortly after recreating fire. hot spots occur in nature. it's possible that such endeavors resulted in self deletion and perhaps the creation of religion. you dont need a critical mass of highly enriched material to get things hot. i hope thats not "the quiet part out loud" (as though life's a script)
Nuclear physics is one of the subjects we know the most about.
@@tedmoss and the least about
Bro sweet vid
Brilliant documentary, thank you
A Dynamite factory near my home had a bunker that caught fire. Pretty impressive mushroom cloud when it exploded. They never figured out why it exploded since it should have just burned!
As it burns it becomes more sensitive , so a falling beam or collapsing disheveling could be the reason .
If you use a small piece of C4 to heat food with you let it burn out , never stomp on it to put it out .
@@richardsolberg4047io
Popcorn explosion way bigger
Sabotage
At the port we see all the wood waste but yet it did not burn. In the 1990s it was a lot easier to find info on the web but most of that is gone now.
Wait a hot damned physics question!
A bomb weighing 50-thousand POUNDS?! Man THATS JUST RIDICKULOUS!
A tonne is 1,000 kg which is 2,200 pounds.
25,000 tonnes is 55-MILLION pounds!
Its not a bomb. Its a pile of material that can detonate. In a wide sense you could call it a bomb, but its not a bomb as in a thing that is encased and meant to go boom.
@@jafstraycat Title is wrong. Someone confused kg with tons.
The stuff in the tunnel is 25.000 kg. Not 25.000 tons.
25.000 tons = 25 kt, which is about the size of the first nuke on Japan.
also consider that hydrogenbombs the US uses are about 25 mt. So a factor 1000 bigger ( a million times bigger than the pile in the tunnel). Russia detonated the biggest one; the Tsar bomba, with a yield of 100mt (although limited at the time to 50).
Russia now has Poseidon, with a 200 mt load. Thats 8 million times bigger than the pile in the tunnel from ww1.
"Why did the quest for ever bigger bombs cease?"
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
-- Joshua
WOPR
-1983
Anyone for a game of chess?
if you are going to research a bit about the tzar bomba you will find information, that the ppl behind the bomb actually reduced the amount of explosive strength as they feared the consequences of such a high explosive bomb (that they might damage earth beyond repair, when i remember this correctly)
@@megadeath4834 yes, they used an inert lead tamper instead of a uranium one
Who says they've stopped. maybe they just stopped telling everyone
I guess that farmer feels it's not worth moving for something that might never happen, and if it does he won't know anything about it.
As hard as it may be, the UK should have to fund tunnel excavation to remove them. I don't know what the battlefield leaders were thinking when they simply abandoned them because the line had moved. We have the means to go in under the house and remove the TNT. Farmer Brown should be in the House of Commons demanding funding for the removal.
Except that the farmer is in Belgium and Britain's not even in the EU now. I know what the battlefield leaders were thinking when they abandoned them - "how far back did the enemy move? Let's keep on the attack!". They could have had "controlled" explosions once that section had cooled down a bit - probably the safest way to remove the danger.
And making people go clean up the wars they fought in is a dangerous suggestion given the adventurism over in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 20 years. Given that the British Army would never have been in Belgium or France if it hadn't been for Kaiser Willy, generally the responsibility for clean up would be on the Germans. But the Treaty of Versailles was already punitive enough to cause a war 20 years later, I wouldn't push that barrow now.
A not dissimilar situation to the Messines mines exists at Fauld in Staffordshire UK where Britains largest non nuclear explosion took place in November 1944 where it is said 3500 - 4000 tons exploded at an RAF munitions dump in an old gypsum mine (1/2 a mile from there is a similar mine still working today), the crater it left was 250 yards across and 100 feet deep and is still "off limits" today as it is still uncertain how much unexploded ordnance is still down there, I have spoken to people who've been inside the mine and they say that beyond the crater it is still pretty much intact but that anything metal is pretty corroded by now so probably not a good place to go poking around inside.
If you want to look it up it might be known as either the Fauld or Hanbury (nearest village) crater.
There is also a sunken munitions ship in the Thames near London. It is too dangerous to try to slavage or remove the explosives. So it is heavily carefully guarded, and not talked about.
@@frosty3693 Are you writing about th SS Richard Montgomery near Sheerness?, There is a contract out to tender for the masts that sit out above the waterline to be removed as there's a fear at present that with deterioration of the wreck they're likely to collapse onto the hull and possibly set the munitions off.
@@stevehill4615 Quite possibly. I heard it mentioned on a British based naval history podcast.
In the 1980s I was working at the Fauld site on a tree felling gang , and there was tight security there , we had to sign in , and one day there was an official looking visit by military top brass .It was at the time of the Cruise missile saga and I have wondered ever since whether they were checking the site out as a hiding place fore the missiles . Any thoughts ?
I would like to point out that the nitrates used in explosives tend to attract moisture and degrade once wet. I think that is the reason why we solve these types of problems by leaving them alone and letting moisture and time do their thing.
Tiff’s voice makes everything better!!!
The saddest aspect of the Halifax explosion is the fact that it could have been so easily averted.
Yeah I don't understand why the crew didn't do to the opposite bank and tell ppl to run like hell!!
This might be the last of these loads. I know that a few years back one of them went off due to a lightning strike. You try to get near this thing it may set it off. Old explosives are VERY touchy.
old dynamite is touchy. old tnt not so much. the biggest worry is groundwater contamination.
"A few years back" was 1955, as it says in the video. By now the explosives have been down there in the waterlogged clay for another 66 years and you'd have to say, detonation is less likely as the days go by.
The only problem I have with this sort of video is that it's never "revealed for the first time" - none of this is new, they've always known about the abandoned mines, their sizes, and where they are. The British mining and mapping efforts of the day were amazing. Now you don't even need to go for the specialist books, it's all in wikipedia these days. If they'd just been a bit more circumspect with those sorts of claims, they'd deserve a lot more respect for the content.
Yes they do have a rather nasty disposition. Don't you think so? Of course you really think so.
Wow, the man who pushed that button that blew those mines, must of felt so fucking powerful.
And sad upon reflection
You don't know what power really is until you run an electric system.
To save his countrymen lives, yes. To see your fellow soldiers and friends get destroyed and then not feel like somewhat happy after killing the enemy with many of those same non-enemy lives saved is understandable. I am sure it was bittersweet though! Unless you experience war in person on the front lines, the normal feelings of someone isn't normal in a war of kill or be killed! It is almost impossible to revert back to normal citizen after experiencing life or death decisions on the front lines for days, weeks and years! Not saying it is right, I'm just saying that unless that individual have experienced war, that individual will not know how they would feel or act. War is the worst humanity has ever committed against itself!
@@tedmoss you've never fired a shot in a large mine i see...
@@AmericaVoice all wars should be led by those who declared them... Imagine modern politicians wanting to be first into battle??
No more wars would ever be fought.
A well produced program! I'm a bit surprised that the use of the mining technique at Petersburg, Virginia during the American Civil War was not mentioned. Though that mine was only 8,000 pounds of black powder the crater can still be seen today.
That completely backfired on them!
@@1966monkeyboy Yes it did!
thanks for the vacation idea
I grew up within walking distance of Fort Darling with it's cannon watching over the mighty James.
@@tobycatVA , growing up in Richmond we often went relic hunting on Sunday afternoons. Union Army lost a lot of equipment in that area.
11:27 "Full-Scale Model" Not quite. I have a 1:1 scale map of Texas at home too. It's hard to fold.
Surprisingly well-made documentary. Not too much hyperpole.
Agreed ... hyperbole not needed! These bombs speak for themselves.
Amazing how powerful and destructive a bomb is and how much more massive they have become.
they need to drop this on Chicago
@@clemclemson9259 UK politicians 1st please 👍
@@mattydare yes and then the Biden administration😂
How about how insidiously destructive they've ɓecome, like the neutron bomb...ĵetting out radiation but leaving less of an outright explosion? Dirty tidal waves, ẅow
@@mattydare There's an easier way to get rid of politicians. Vote for someone else. All you need to do is find someone who can magically please all the people, all of the time, and vote for them.
On the 7th June 1917 my grandfather Lt E A WINCHESTER was C company commander of the 4th Battalion NZ Rifle. His task that morning was to attack and take the southern half of the town of Messines.l was going on 14 when he showed me his diary and the letter he wrote to his father in NZ detailing what he went through that day . He also told me he was the first man into the town as he lead his men into it. He describes the explosions as so great the men had to get out of the jump off trenches because they feared they would cave in due to the shock wave.
There is a story that the reason that the two mines under Petite Douve farm were not blown was that the Germans had blown the main tunnel leading to the two galleries with a camoflet making it unusable on the 7th of June.The story goes that the that tunnel was then deliberately flooded with water by the British which in turn flooded the German tunnel with water from the Steenebeek ,the stream running between the two sides.The German tried to pump out their tunnel to no avail because they were effectively recycling the water back to stream which just happened to be the source of the flooding
they just flood it again
11:20 "They don't like it up them" quite uncanny.
Thank you!
Great use of safety gear at 6:40 - while mixing the components of the explosive, having the face-shield in the 'up' position.
Safety 3rd!!!
The German soldiers should have realised what was happening when they heard the sound of Welsh miners singing from far below the ground.
Sorry to burst that bubble, but they would have been singing music hall - it was the cockney clay-kickers who were digging the deep tunnels. Welsh miners were rock/slate miners. I dare say that they all learned the same techniques but when Norton Griffiths set up the mining companies they sought out those who'd dug the tunnels under the Thames and up around Manchester, which I think is actually the same clay bed as under Flanders.
Incredible! 💣
Crazy , I went to high school in Antioch , Ca. Near the Mothball fleet. And now live near Texas City ,Tx.
This video never answer what happened to all the rest of that left over explosive from WW1. It seems impossible that something so important, so deadly, would just be forgotten about for so many years. One would think that they would still be monitoring the area to this day, just to make sure none was left over.
Unexploded munitions are found across Europe to this day luckily the ones that are left are in rural areas as it doesn’t cause many problems
I ate it.
As noted unexploded ordnance is common across Europe. French farmers still routinely have unexploded munitions show up when plowing every year. Cleaning that up isn't possibble now and was even less plausible in the aftermath. Even if there had been the will and money after the war to completely clean up the battlefields, they simply didn't have the technology to find it all. So it was left and the leftovers became just another danger of that part of the world.
Welcome to the aftermath of war.
Only similar explosion I have ever heard of was in the straight outside Campbell River, British Columbia. There was a small island that caused a vortex when the tidal rift came through. They tunneled under it and destroyed the island. I have been a student of History since I was in grade school in the 60’s and never heard or read about these.
RAF Fauld was a 4400 ton explosion, England 1944
There's still places we can't go here due to it being full of UX
And there's 1400 tons of explosives in a liberty ship that sank in the Thames.
If it goes off its going to kill 1000s and cost billions
The article aI read about destroying this island claimed it was the largest non nuclear explosion but I forget the details.
@@MostlyPennyCat
Oh it seems so lovely to have such great BIG EXPLOSIONS in the UNITED KINGDOM.
@@MostlyPennyCat just for reference. When I was in Iraq we found a weapon cache that had an estimated 350 tons of Artillery shells. The crater was 35meters deep by 90 meters across. The mushroom cloud was seen 45 kilometers away. It knocked guys over who were 1,500 meters away you could see the shock wave ripple across the desert. The Thames ammo ship is pretty scary as it would very much be like that explosion in Lebanon a couple years back.
@@MostlyPennyCat Yeah and its rusting fast.
Plan is that soon the engineers cut off the masts before they collapse onto the cargo holds.
I bet the guy with the cutting torch is well paid. Lol
The Mont Blanc explosion was about 1/5 of the Hiroshima explosion, assuming the Mont Blanc was almost 3 Kt and Hiroshima was almost 15 Kt. Nagasagi, (Fat Man) which was an implosion bomb with Plutonium, and Little Boy, which was a U-235 gun barrel type device was less efficient. I believe the first test device known as "Trinity" was a "Fat Man" type device. When asked if Little Boy would even work, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer said: "It will work" confidently without having even testing it.
2 war crimes right there.
Could you guys keep it down over there please! I work nights and it's difficult to sleep with all this banging during the day!
It might be worth looking at removing the wire to the detonators from the mine.... or even just cutting it close to the explosive pile. The main danger appears to be an induced charge in the wire triggering the detonation.
Unfortunately, the shaft was collapsed when the others detonated, which is why they never recovered it. Trying to dig them out would be an option, but if the shovel or pick generated a spark at the wrong time would be bad.
@@leechowning2712 Flood the chambers with water.
@@roysheaks1261 in the video he says that the chambers are underwater, and that the explosives experts believe this preserves the munitions, since they are an oil based explosive. The water prevents oxidization, and since this is fresh water it doesn't include the bacteria which break down oils such as we see in the ocean. The reason the devices were not detonated in the war was due to the Germans flooding the tunnels.
@@leechowning2712 no ... no flooding .. the Germans had repositioned since they started digging .. remember it took more than 12 month to finish
Given that lightning can be shown to set them off all these years later (at least, in 1955, at 15:00 ) finding and removing the detonators is probably a bad idea.
If they wanted it gone, when / if the property ever becomes vacant or is to be redeveloped, they could just set up a large metal pole and wait for lightning, or make a big shock.
... would be a fun thing to have as a livestream...
A bit hard to work out just what value we humans have added to this planet.
without us there would be no one to ponder this dilemma you find yourself in.
Rather easy, actually. Zero. the harder calculations is the amount of damage.
@@nate2838 Yep. I suppose we can take all our achievement and mutiply them by zero
21:40 - Read the first hand reports of the Halifax town harbour Nova Scotia explosion many years ago - it flattened the whole town, unbelievable amount of deaths. It was alike amageddon had arrived. Lady I know from Nova Scotia, her mother as a child was blown over a mile through the air but somehow survived. She landed in a grassy field well outside the town.
Really interesting cheers
Pretty much figured the TNT wouldn't detonate when burned when he rolled out about a hundred feet of cable...
Yo
And one mind blowing fact about the Tsar bomba that I didn’t hear them say anything about, I could have missed it and be wrong tho, but it’s the fact that the Tsar bomba was only tested at 50% of it actual yield! It’s full yield was 100 megatons but they only detonated a 50 megaton bomb for the test. I want to say they did not test it at it’s full potential out of safety concerns for the pilots. Among other reasons I’m sure but I don’t know the full history on it enough to go Quoting any of that as fact. The only fact i can say without a doubt is the Tsar bomba was a 100 megaton weapon tested at half its potential,50 megatons, and is to me, for some reason, is almost as fascinating as it is terrifying!
Too bad that we didn't have a GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR to see the effects of THE TZAR BOMB. It would have been very lovely to see such a massive explosion that would have killed a massive amount of the population in Europe.
Russia has it in Poseidon now. Although initial reports said it was 200mt. Thats about 10 times bigger than the US ever tested.
nice!!!
There's only really two options. 1) continue as normal and hope. 2) Evacuate the area, set it off the restore the area as much as possible. One more thing it's not 25,000 tons. Historical records show that around 20 mines containing a total of 1million pounds of explosive were used, so that is around 50,000 lbs per mine which is roughly 25 (English) tons. Meanwhile any threat of a thunderstorm should put the area off limits.
Thank you Danni for doing the math! 25,000 tons (aka 25 kiloton) would be significantly more powerful than Hiroshima (16 kiloton) but SPARK never lets the facts get in the way of their lies as they shamelessly harvest eyeballs with clickbait headlines and it's sad but true. I wish I could say they made a simple mistake but their deception is by design and for a few pieces of silver. It makes me sick
There's a movie: Beneath Hill 60 that covers most of this (with some artistic license here and there). They set off the charges in a predetermined sequence. Imagine being in the center (or one end) of the Imperial German trench and seeing explosion, a pause for a few seconds, then another explosion, another pause, coming toward you!!! Yet, if you abandon your position you would be shot! Moral was shot even before half of the charges were set off, and any survivor was probably more into thanking God that he was still alive and instead of getting ready to fight, probably a lot of them were mentally preparing to surrender!!!!!!!!
You put a parachute on a bomb. Crazy ain't it. So simple but I would have never thought of that.
It gives the aircrew time to get away same with bombs that flaps open at back
One of the best videos I've ever seen, well done and I'm subscribed
I know I'm older than this; but my mind couldn't help laughing at 9:14. Hey, that looks like a real life Creeper (MineCraft) hole! 😄
The history guy must never have heard of the battle of Petersburg in 1864...
Granted this was on a larger scale, but it wasn't the first time it was used in trench warfare.
It used to be used for blowing up besieged castle walls in medieval times.
The point of this video was to blame the West for atomic power.
@@nomdeplume2117 ,. No it wasn't.
@@thatguyinelnorte,. No it wasn't.
@@thatguyinelnorte *BREAKING NEWS: Man invents fictional scenario, gets angry about it*
I bet that farmer shit when they told him he had been driving over a 25 ton bomb!
holy shit the anchor was 2 miles from the site?!?! That is insane.
Interesting history
Smokeless powder and modern explosives, when confined have a "positive feedback": starts burning, which causes heat and expanding gasses. However, since it is confined, the pressure quickly rises, which increases the heat, which increases the rate of burn, which causes the pressure to quickly increase even more, which increases the heat, which increases the rate of burn.... etc., etc., etc. until either the bullet leaves the muzzle, or BOOM!
This film is more about the manufacturing and engineering of explosives and not much about the explosives under the farmers field.
And the understatement of the day goes to - "the leaders finally realized they were playing with fire.." 😅🤦♀️
incredible channel
Is that the voice of the great Tiff Needell I hear? Always suiting on a rainy night :D
It's him alright.
That’s insane how it’s all just left out there and especially since it’s uncontrolled like that!! I’m shocked that nobody has been removing it for their own purposes like blowing up tree stumps and clearing ground or even something far worse such as financial gain honestly!! 😬🤦🏻♂️
The fuck you going to do with a 25 ton bomb buried 70 feet underground. More to the point how do you suppose you get it out? Even most Augurs don't reach 70 feet.
If it was in some other countries, it would have been long gone by now! China, N. Korea, some Arab countries, some African countries...
welcome the the uk.. the mod kill more brits than anybody else,,ask the vets !
@@wazaagbreak-head6039 tell a bunch of hill billies where it is and give them a weekend.
It's called the Iron Harvest and even now, in 2022, there's still places in Europe that have to be kept off limits because there's still tons of ordinance from both World Wars left out there. And after all this time trying to remove it would be suicide, it's unknown where it all is and it's bound to be super unstable at this point
The Halifax explosion must have been very mind blowing!
Everyone there had blue eyes...one blew left and one blew right...
@@JohnSmith-yv6eq
😂👍
The drive for ever-bigger nuclear devices was the result of the poor CEP (Circular Error Probability) of the weapons -- if you can only expect your weapon to land somewhere within a mile of your target, then you need a weapon with a full-destruction radius in excess of a mile. As the delivery systems improved, the need for large warheads diminished, with large warheads being reserved for particularly resistant targets.
One of the other considerations about larger detonations is that blast effects go up as the cube root of the size of the warhead -- a detonation with twice the explosives produces the same destruction only out to 1.25x as far away. The bomb dropped at Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons of explosive; a bomb of 15 megatons -- 1,000 times larger -- would produce the same damage out to only 10x the distance. So larger weapons become proportionately more inefficient, making it more cost-effective to use multiple smaller bombs than one large one.
Close Counts...
The U.S. Army's Pershing II IRBM missiles had a guidance system that in its final sequence compared a digital map of the target and surrounding physical terrain with the radar return of the actual target. Small steering vanes effected course corrections. The Pershing II had a CEP of 30 meters at a range of up to 1,056 miles. This, in conjunction with its variable yield warhead of 5 KT to 80 KT, indisputably put the Pershing in the exclusive company of hand grenades and horseshoes.
In 1961, a B-52 broke apart at 9,000ft (Broken Arrow) near it's home base, Seymour Johnson AFB in Goldsboro, North Carolina. My exes daddy was Wing Commander of a Fighter Squadron at the time. The B-52 was carrying two Mark 39 nuclear bombs. One floated safely down into a farmers field, but the other is still buried approx 150 ft. below ground. It's still radioactive, and they know 3 of its 4 fail safe switches had failed before impact. Yep, there's STILL a nuke buried in Goldsboro, NC, but hey...after 60 years the government says it's highly unlikely to detonate.
What a wonderful GUESS that is! But what if guessing the opposite ??? Accidents, right? Who is to. blame??? Worst part, if it happens any time now???
"Unlikely" Uh-huh.
There is also a nuclear bomb without a fuse in the Salton Sea in California. It was dropped accidentally, but no fuse, so they just figured they would leave it there.
Thanks Tiff. Further proof he IS not just a hot shoe.
Tiff goes alright. There is something familiar about is journalism/narrating. Very enjoyable and relaxing. If may make a judgement. I think there a some similarities between him and Jeremy Clarkson. (JC has taken it to the next level)
I thought that voice was familiar! I love tiff hes just great!
I am honestly so lost & also dont even catch the "hot shoe" reference. 😆
Im guessing it has something to do w/ me being American?? LoL
@@KennyMcCormick99 The narrator (Tiff Nadell) used to be a race car driver, hence "hot shoe".
@@JonsTunes AAAAHHHH!! Its all clear to me now! LoL THANX!
Admiral bird's diary explains why the nuke race stopped
On May 4, 1988, a fire followed by several explosions occurred at the Pacific Engineering and Production Company of Nevada (PEPCON) chemical plant in Henderson, Nevada. 4,500 tons of ammonium perchlorate were detonated. I felt the blast 10 miles away in downtown Las Vegas. I was sitting in my car at the time, I thought someone had rear ended me.
They should either remove the explosives or buy the farm for double the appraised value and set it off if it’s too dangerous to remove.
Its easily made safe and removed. They talk it up. Its costs vs danger. Vacuum the explosive out as its not sensitive. Loop the trigger wires that are in the entry tunnel. Its simple, they made a story out of something that is really no issue, as anything like this once known of can be safely, managed.
Thank You SO Much for this well researched documentary. I previously knew about the Halifax and Port Chicago explosions, but I never heard of their relevance regarding the Los Alamos Project. Since the Port Chicago explosion yielded such critical data for the soon to be dropped atom bombs, my cynical side makes me wonder how "accidental" the Port Chicago explosion really was. Were those poor Black sailors at Port Chicago just "collateral damage" in a Los Alamos field experiment ???
What you on about?😅 this is ww1. I think you have mistaken yourself
The Port Chicago explosion was hardly deliberate except in that it was the inevitable result of the following process...
Take a large group of African-American recruits, and train them in various millitary skills but dont train any of them in ship loading or explosive storage. Pick out the best and brightest and deploy them elsewhere. Take the remaining manpower and supervise them with white officers who also are also not properly trained in ship stowage of explosives, but are infused with racisim. Give the officers a crash course in explosive loading but provide the workers themselves with little in the way of manuals and procedures. Then let them divide into teams and have a competition with betting to see which team can load the highest tonnage fastest. Now load a ship at night with very badly maintained cranes. Have them loading many different types of munitions, including incendiaries, some some of which are fully fused with detinators. When someone in authority reports that this is unsafe, pressure them into withdrawing their report.
Its only a matter of time before somebody looses controll of a craneload. Bang.
9:04 Now I know how to get shot of my underground hornets nest 🤣
My word. I realize it's a hundred years ago so it's hardly "too soon" but the cheerful glee in the narrator's voice while discussing industrialized murder hits different 😂
One of the sailors aboard the French munitions ship swam to shore and then ran through Halifax trying to warn people of the coming explosion. He was a mile outside of town when the ship blew up and still running. A piece of the anchor chain from the ship struck him the head and killed him. True story.
That's bizarre enough to be true.
So, 25000 kilos, not 25000 tonnes. Just off by an order of magnitude !
Yea, i noticed that too. First thought was that it couldnt be right, bc 25 kt is bout the size of the nukes on Japan.
So i did the math. They said 40.000 bags of 25 pounds. Thats about 500.000 kg, total. So its spread over a number of tunnels. They said somewhere something about 25 tons, which seems reasonable. So maybe some 20 tunnels, each with 25 tons = 500 tons. 25 tons is in one tunnel.
Which means the title is off by a factor 1000. Someone confused kg with tons.
25kt wouldnt be dangerous for the few houses there, it would blow the entire village off the map.
Im also thinking btw; wasnt the blast in beirut 2 years ago, which was a huge load of ammoniumnitrate (even without burn material) a bigger one? Seems so if you check the videos of it and the devastation.
Maybe not bigger than the ship in Halifax. Its too late i need to go sleep, so not going to do the math on it.
46:57 Imagine being a real-estate agent trying to sell the property, with full disclosure.
"Well, the reason it's so cheap is because it's sitting on top of 50kton explosives that may go up
any second which makes it really hard to get insurance of any kind."
Fantastic documentary thank you guy from 5th Gear and co.
Tiff needell mate couldn’t figure out the voice until I saw your comment