I'm joining two meetups next week. Come say hi! Feb 12th at UC Berkeley: www.eventbrite.com/e/asianometry-meet-up-berkeley-haas-tickets-826506512227?aff=oddtdtcreator Feb 15th in NYC: partiful.com/e/b3Tpey9enoNpGJT8SLAB
You live in Taiwan though, right? I live in the States, but nowhere near either NYC or Berkeley. There's a better chance I'll visit Taiwan one day. That's a priority destination for me. All the same, take care and have fun with your celebrity tour!
Fusion is even harder to kindle than this video suggests. In addition to requiring "a massive amount of energy", the energy must be applied in a very precise way in order to compress the deuterium without excessively heating it, as that would increase the pressure, resisting further compression. To reach and sustain thermonuclear temperatures of billions of degrees, the plasma must be dense enough to be "opaque" to the xrays that are emitted at such temperatures (same mechanism as a space heater, or a lightbulb, but much hotter), meaning that instead of escaping, the xray photons produced by the heat bounce around inside the plasma, keeping it hot. Otherwise the plasma cools off faster than fusion generates heat, which is why Teller's original "super" proposal was non-viable -- simply exploding an atomic bomb next to a container of deuterium is insufficient. Ulam's contribution of radiation-driven implosion was the key innovation, and it took quite a bit of creativity to develop a physical configuration capable of harnessing the energy of an atomic bomb to compress the fusion stage in just the right way. For example, to protect the fusion fuel from premature heating, the design includes a thick uranium shield in front of the secondary that blocks both neutrons and xrays coming from the fission stage. This buys time for fission xrays to travel around the secondary, where their effect on the secondary's tamper creates tremendous implosive pressures of several million atmospheres, an order-of-magnitude more powerful, and thus faster, than an implosion driven by conventional explosives. Around the time the fusion fuel approaches maximum density, a "sparkplug" in the center start to fission, generating heat, and like a match striking dynamite, this triggers a catastrophic rise in temperature and a rapid fusion burning from a configuration dense enough that this process runs to completion within a few nanoseconds, which is quite fast even in the context of an exploding nuclear bomb. The fusion stage compresses and burns to completion before the shockwave from the fission stage can travel the several inches between the two stages. Or really, at such short distances, the fission shockwave is still dominated by radiation energy transport, rather than by the physical motion of the atoms, so in a sense, one can think of the compression of the fusion secondary as being driven by the fission shockwave's interaction with a very specific physical configuration of matter.
You are right of course. The video presents many true historical facts, but because it misses the role of compression, it greatly exaggerates the significance of Fuchs' patent. Neither Fuchs, nor anybody else understood the possibility of compressing the fuel to the point of opacity until Teller-Ulam's epiphany in 1951. Even the British had to rediscover this on their own, to say nothing about the Soviets.
@@stellviahohenheim It's difficult to find good quantitative intuitions about thermonuclear compression from Googling alone, as some of the best descriptions are still found in books. The book that got me into this subject is Richard Rhodes, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", which is probably my favorite history book on any subject. He gives a good overview of the physics that's at once accessible and relatively precise, although still quite high level. For a more technical take on this subject, see "A Technical History Of America's Nuclear Weapons", which includes several invaluable quantitative intuitions -- I would recommend the $9 Kindle version, which is searchable; it's an 1800 page book, but the sections on nuclear physics are only a small fraction of the book and are located at the beginnings of several chapters. There's no reason to read the book in order, and while I've read the best parts several times, I've at best skimmed the exhaustive weapon enumerations that dominates much of the book's content.
Very informative and well made - and a good choice of topic. One flub: Fermi was the physics Nobel prize winner in 1938. It's a stretch to say that Teller was as "equally famed" as Fermi in Sept 1941.
Richard Rhodes' book, 'Dark Sun,' is a good read on the subject of Soviet bomb/super development, and much more - including Oppenheimer's post war difficulties as depicted in the movie.
A very good video as always, and nearly everything in it is true. But some key parts need to be added or explained more to make the story complete. First, the reason why thermonuclear bomb is so difficult to make and why it took so much research to create it. This reason is not just the high temperature required to ignite the thermonuclear reaction, but a rather more subtle problem. It is mentioned in passing in the video at 16:25 ...*before the heat is dissipated away*. This in fact is the most important thing in the whole story. The intensity of thermal radiation from hot objects increases so rapidly with temperature, that the energy in the "classical super" dissipates from the reaction zone faster than the new energy is added by the fusion. Therefore a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction is not possible at all. There is no "trigger point", the ignition of a classical super is not possible. It took years of research to establish this fact. So how does the bomb function then? The absolutely key element is the compression of thermonuclear fuel. When the fuel is enormously compressed, to hundreds of times of its normal density, it becomes opaque to its own thermal radiation. This traps the heat and enables the self-sustaining reaction. This was the key discovery which became the basis of 1951 Ulam-Teller radiation implosion patent, which is when the real thermonuclear bomb was born. None of this was understood in 1946 when von Neumann and Fuchs submitted their patent application, so their patent is not considered to be very important. In fact, when British were working on their own thermonuclear weapon after the war, they really struggled to rediscover the idea of compression. And those were the scientists who themselves participated in the Manhattan project in the US! So this idea was very far from obvious even to the extremely knowledgeable people.
@@davidcarr2216 Some things were published, other things are still classified. For example, there is an official history of the USSR nuclear project in something like 17 volumes. It reproduces the orders and reports, and what was built when, but the technical details are largely absent and the information becomes heavily censored once it gets to the time of the real breakthroughs. In the USA, the history of the nuclear bomb project is very well documented. But the history of the hydrogen bomb is not. Even the contents of the original Teller-Ulam paper are still classified. But Teller did outline the key milestones in his interviews. I recommend "Web of Stories" interview with Teller here on UA-cam. It's not the whole story of course, but it is worth listening to.
more like compression of the neutrons released by the thermonuclear fuel, containment of those neutrons so that they trigger actual fission in the plutonium and uranium... the heat is the thing that destroys the plutonium and uranium -- its not the thing that increases the yield but actually the thing that prevents the yield from being increased. thats why the hydrogen is added- it releases neutrons and induces fast fission reactions BEFORE the heat reaches and destroys the material - while regular atomic bombs simply evaporate long before most of the uranium atoms have undergone any fission. Hydrogen bombs increase the neutrons to heat ratio, more neutrons and less heat comparatively in the early time window needed - in order to create more heat and radiation later...
@@fast_harmonic_psychedelic Apart from radiation release enhanced charges (like say w66) neutron flux density is hardly an issue. And what you are describing later actually happens in a conventional spark plug/primer charge cores. Li6/D is used as a booster along with a z-pinch or a similar principal device as an initiator by practically every nuclear power out there. And i never heard about a "regular atomic bomb". What those are? What makes them regular? Thermal radiation comes later (microseconds-milliseconds) as a result of all kind of particles scattering out and thus "cooling down" (or heating up everything around). Staged H-bomb (Teller-Ulam/Sakharovs 3rd) is about how to direct as much of the primer energy as possible to initiate sustainable fusion reactions. Ideal primer only ignites fusion and adds 0 kt to the final yield. From there it is possible to add arbitrary number stages. A 50+Mt Tsar bomba, for example, was a 3 stage device: 1) fission primer < 10kt 2) fusion
@@bakagaijin7452 All true. Just one caveat. A "shock" has a specific meaning in hydrodynamics. Shocks are out of equilibrium, irreversible jumps in pressure and temperature. In a shock, the temperature rises much more than in a reversible adiabatic compression. If you slam the fuel with a sudden pressure jump, you generate a shock. The excessive temperature rise makes fuel less compressible. With a shock it takes much more pressure to achieve the same density compared to a more gentle, reversible, shockess adiabatic compression. Advanced thermonuclear weapon designs and inertial confinement fusion experiments go into a great length in tailoring the shape of the radiation pulse to achieve a *gradual* increase in pressure, in order to achieve shockless compression, or at least to break one large shock into a series of smaller ones which would closer approximate shockless compression. The goal is to first make the fuel as dense as possible, which happens the best when the fuel is heated the least, and only then to spark the reaction from the middle of the mass. This achieves the most efficient reaction. Of course, even without a shock the compression is still very, very rapid. The main difference is not in the speed per se, but in how the pressure pulse is shaped. A gradual rather than a sudden increase in pressure is what prevents shocking the fuel up.
@@FartGas-xe4ykcomplicated in relation to the sparkplug design we use which requires a nuke to go off in the correct way as to compress fusion fuel and refract around the casing correctly
The difficulty is that it needs about 120kg of highly enriched U-235 to make a sloika (layer cake) or alarm clock type design. The maximum yield is around 720kt, tested by the British as an interim step (quick hitter) in developing a radiation implosion bomb.
Reminds me of Carl Sagan's recipe for apple pie: "To make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe" and then explained how elements are created in stars.
Ironic that the Soviet scientists realized early on the viability of combining lithium with deuterium and tritium possibly before the Americans. If American scientists had this awareness it might have prevented the surprise runaway reaction of the Mike Bravo shot
That's a powerful point,, you point out exactly the Yanks arrogance in thinking that they're the only people that can figure out these equations and the engineering, then they f*** up so catastrophically because of a simple miscalculation that the Russians were smart enough to avoid... TAKE THAT American stroke-offs lol...
"Lithium" was understood "by the Americans" at the time. The difference was that Lithium-7 was not thought to be a player due to the missing cross section calculation. Soviets figured it out after the fact, just as America did.
@@calvinhobbes7504 I don't think anyone's questioning the intelligence of Western scientists,, they're some brilliant mofos but the Soviets were no johnny-come-latelys either...
@@micnorton9487- Oh, I don't disagree at all, sir (or ma'am) .... when it came down to "who got it first" on a lot of the physics, the comparisons were so close, it was more like who had their ink dry the fastest! :) I was just pointing out the miscalculation about lithium-6 and lithium-7 ..... and it seems both sides missed that boat. - and from what I read, that was an easy boat to miss.
@@calvinhobbes7504 I agree,, and to the physicists who do calculations it seems easy but to the people doing the chemistry on these materials it's a lot more personal,, and handling the finished product - not something I'd volunteer to do under any circumstances....
@@nicholasmaude6906Maybe they gave the "Sausage" nickname to the device after the big cylindrical- shaped criogenic Dewar flask (fusion fuel container)? Ironic...
In 1945, when General Groves said it would take the Soviets 20 years to build an atomic bomb, physicist Isidore Rabi replied, "I don't know, General. Physics is physics, and they've got some pretty smart guys over there."
In his defence this was still new stuff at the time. So new people genuinely had no idea how easy or hard it would be for someone else to do it. As it turns out its not that hard. Just about any industrial society can do it.
@@djpalindromeThose people saved the world from assured destruction by allowing a balance of power. Otherwise LeMay would of nuked 10’s of million innocent Slavs.
That is not correct. It took years of very intense research both in the USA and in the USSR to establish the fact that the "Classical Super" thermonuclear bomb cannot function in principle. And then it took more applied physics research to discover new ideas and to make something else that did work. The "high energy density" physics which is required for understanding the bomb is not common knowledge even today.
You do not even understand the word "science" and nothing was a secret considering the ammount of spies in USA on every stage of the development. They got spies that were acting as the most trusted advisors to the president of the USA and multiple spies in Los Alamos. The Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos was recognized from the air by Americans thanks to the fact that the Soviets even copied the layout of the buildings... I love how this video is made under the assumption that Klaus Fushs, was sitting in prison for 8 years and only counted the number of spiders on the walls... heh
@@cogoid yeah. Nowadays most of the ulam-teller design is common knowledge (and in theory it isnt a very complicated idea), and even more of just the normal fission one is. To the point where some recent (non-nuclear) physics grads could get rather close to a design that would work within 2 years or so for a implosion style nuke, even less for a gun style, back in 1964. Of course the hardest part is actually refining the uranium/creating and purifying the plutonium, but it really isnt hard. I just recently got a youtube video recommended explaining the formula to compute the critical mass of a given chunk of fissionable material, and the derivation of the formula; pretty interesting watch for the physically/mathematically inclined Much of the ulam-teller design still isnt common knowledge, and it does require even more fancy engineering than the fission only weapons, given the rather high complexity of getting the radiation pressure high enough, and focused just right, but nothing a moderately well funded nuclear program couldnt do, especially nowadays (but it definitely wouldnt be easy). The actual refinement of fissionable and fusable fuel probably still is one of, if not the, major hurdle, especially if you dont have a nuclear power backing you and have to do the thing in secret/semi-secret. The lengths that the nuclear powers will go to to stop the refinement part is insane, just look at the cyber attack by the USA on Iranian centrifuges under Bush and Obama. Edit: Just realized i fipped the Ulam and Teller bits of the names, ill leave it because Ulam-Teller sounds a lot better in my head that Teller-Ulam
@@hayleyxyz It is more a matter of how one defines engineering v. basic science. The Ulam/Teller H-Bomb was not obvious, but neither was an implosion fission bomb
22:09 - sorry, that's not a picture of the two different stages detonating. That's a picture of the complete detonation at two times well after the burn was complete.
21:54 I don't thinks the caption is correct. It is misleading in a sense that it shows two stages, first being fission primary and second being fusion secondary. I was under the impression that bot primary and secondary finish their process before bomb is disassembled and any visible fireball is formed. What we might see are either two consecutive moments in fireball development or two different tests. First test with only fission primary and second test with both primary and secondary. Am I wrong?
10:47 - correction: in 1948 Beria did not have any formal ministerial appointments. He was relieved of his duties at the NKVD in December 1945, and the NKVD itself was renamed MVD in 1946.
Try again - nanoseconds! But I agree, and was going to post the same. From memory, the total event is over in 20 nanoseconds, of which the fusion part takes about 1 to 4 nanoseconds.
Radiation implosion was Stanislaw Ulam’s concept. Teller refined it, having finally realised that ‘classical super’ was a total dead end. Oppenheimer, despite his qualms, called it ‘technically sweet’. Hence all fusion weapons, Mike onwards, use Ulam-Teller radiation implosion. In the USSR, Sakharov independently came up with radiation implosion. As did the British, but they obsessed over the more difficult idea of spherical radiation implosion.
In one documentary I saw on the USSR program, it was said the information from Fuchs was not actually given to the Soviet physicists but it was instead used to double-check their work by their superiors.
@@sg5184 Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany in 1938. Both superpowers grabbed components of the German program to accelerate their respective weapons programs and Germany's program began 3 years and 4 months before the Manhattan Project began. It's the sort of thing that isn't hard to do once you understand that it CAN be done. There are many different ways to build nuclear weapons; it's not like there's a single secret beyond the one telling that it's possible to crush metal enough to make a fission chain reaction go. Once you know that, the rest is engineering details.
@@EmsThaBreaks441 No, I'm a nuclear historian and Sandia NL used to be one of my consulting clients. I used to design survey instruments like alpha scintillation spectrometers. Why would you say something so silly?
@Peter_S_ What are you smoking, it took a mile long building for uranium enrichment, the Manhattan project was a massive effort, and the German nuclear program was nowhere near making a viable bomb, and at best had a small research reactor. The Soviets did catch up but it took years. Literally nothing about it was easy, people died trying to make it happen; there's a difference between knowing a thing is theoretically possible and doing all the math and industrial effort to make it real.
Thanks as always for the amazing content! I really enjoy when the topic contains the USSR, its always interesting as when it was the Soviet Union they indeed invested a lot in R&D and always have some kind of espionage behind.
Thank you for telling stories like this. From a perspective of a historian and weapons enthusiast, these are some of my favorite videos of yours, I'm hoping you eventually make videos on Pakistan or North Korea's nuclear programs.
It would take another 71 years after Ivy Mike to accomplish, but 3 months ago the laser inertial confinement system at the National Ignition Facility repeated its initial 2022 one-off feat of igniting a fusion capsule in 4 out of 6 more recent attempts. We have now truly entered the era of repeatably achieving the burning plasma regime in the laboratory. This is a HIGHLY nonlinear parameter space, and though the highest yield fusion shots have now produced nearly 4 megajoules (Q factor of ~2), this represents a burnup fraction of only 2% of the hydrogen fuel in the capsule. That means there is further potential for reaching gain factors in excess of 10 or 20 times the laser energy if the ignition and burn wave propagation can be controlled more precisely. these are the brightest neutron sources humans have ever created aside from weapons tests themselves last century.
It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix. It is an eximer frozen in it's excited state. As soon as we apply a field, we couple to a state that is radiatively coupled to the ground state. We can extract at least ten to the twenty-first photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter.
I hate that,, I used to do the same thing... Of course I'm not a physicist or had any training in the field, I came to recognize it as just trying to make sense out of something that scares the s*** out of me...
"That is a problem Tolstoy dealt with in War and Peace. Here you have Napoleon ravaging Europe and now about to invade Russia, and Tolstoy raises this question: Is the leader really a leader, or is he simply the one out in front on a wave? In psychological terms, the leader might be analyzed as the one who perceived what could be achieved and did it." - Campbell, 1986
For an in-depth look into the development of Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear devices, read "Stalin & The Bomb" by David Holloway. An excellent companion to Richard Rhodes' books on American programs. Rhodes does cover some of the Soviet work in Dark Sun, but Holloway's work is more detailed.
There are no first stage then second stage explosions separated in time as your pics suggest at 22:05. The first stage (fission bomb) does go off first but the second stage lithium deuteride goes off within a few billions of a second. IOW it all goes off at once. The growing fireball takes a little longer to reach maximum size but even that is just a few seconds.
About what are the temperatures needed to ignite dueterium and tritium? I understand that very briefly temperatures in a fission blast reach 100 million degrees
What the Russian analogy to Oak Ridge (enriched uranium) and Hanford (plutonium) were for ingredients would be interesting material. They were SUPER EXPENSIVE endeavors.
Hans Bethe who was in charge of that portion of the Los Alamos research devoted to the “super” famously stated in response to a question regarding who was responsible for its ultimate fruition, “(Stan) Ulam was the father, (Edward) Teller was the mother and I was the midwife.”
Oppenheimer is most remembered for his remarks about the trinity test. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Very apt words considering the godlike devastation even the smallest nuclear weapons leave in their wake.
"Nah", Admiral Nimitz replied. "We all know it´s merely some science fiction Psy-Op propaganda nonsense intended to deny the Russians and the Chinese their occupation zones. Not a real military weapon.
@@pashapasovski5860 why was an american physicist interested in an ancient indian religious text so much as to remember it and project it on a moment like this?
i recommend, on a flight or road trip or something, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast episode 59, "The Destroyer of Worlds". it talks about an insane plan he americans had. they had 300-400 atom bombs at the time. and they were going to drop 200-300 of them on the soviet union....in one day. leaving the remainder to go clean up anything they missed. this was to prevent the soviets from getting the bomb, ensuring the united states would be the only power with the weapon. but the administration and brass were debating if it was like, way over the top or not....and before they implemented it, the soviets detonated their first weapon. absolute madness. so now the genie was out of the bottle. no point wasting all those nukes. they have the knowledge, and its probably duplicated and secure.
The United States never ever promised to "bury" the Soviet Union. Had the Soviets not made that promise, on the World's Stage, to the US, there would be no "nuclear threat" at all. History is a great teacher, but only if one chooses to enter the classroom.
The most important information that the Soviets got from America's successful H-bomb project was the same as the most important information their spies gave them about the A-bomb. The simple fact that it could be done. Technical details were not really required as the Soviets had plenty of good mathematicans and physicists who could take it from there.
For the brilliant work on the hydrogen bomb Sakharov was given a princely reward. A villa with servants, a nice car with a chauffeur, a bonus equivalent to roughly one million dollars, great respect. He continued to create new weapons. One of his ideas was the torpedoes of enormous explosive power, to wipe out the US seaboard. They were not implemented at the time, because the navy considered such weapons to be in bad taste. But now of course Russians seem to have changed their attitude. Much later, in late 1960s Sakharov became an activist for various causes which did not follow the party line, and was indeed exiled.
@@cogoidIt was really hard to become member of Academy of Sciences of USSR. Sakharov was elected as acting member at the age of 32. Without being correspondent member. When he started his human rights activism, Khrushchev ordered to exclude him from Academy. But Head of Academy, Mstislav Keldysh, was at Baikonur, and Sergey Korolev didn't give him a plane to attend meeting. Sakharov lost all benefits and was sent to Nizhny Novgorod, but he remained member of Academy of Sciences.
Chuckle. 4:42 Did some scientists actually say, “Why was there any need to build a bigger bomb?” You’d think that after spending so much time with the military, the answer would have been self evident…unless Groves and Oppenheimer really and truly kept the scientists in their naive and isolated bubble. Imagine asking LeMay if wanted bigger bombs and him replying with “nope, I’m good.”
If the Sloika design is considered 'boosted fission' then so was Ivy Mike. The latter also had nearly 80% of its yield from fission. In formal circles 'boosted fission' designs have less than 1% of their yield from fusion.
Most of that came from the tamper, which I dont think was there to enhance yield, and uranium was just a pretty dense material they had a lot of, and not with the (primary, it might be a secondary effect that was desired, im not 100% sure on that) of boosting yield. The US did have a boosted fission design (Alarm Clock), and the Soviet design was intended to be boosted fission. So in terms of intended effect, it wasnt really a boosted fission device, even if it the actual yield percentages say something different. Given that it was an early test of the idea you might forgive the different terminology
I think an earlier " proof of concept" test was the George shot in Operation Greenhouse. A small amount of deuterium and tritium was placed in a fission bomb. If a fusion reaction was possible it would eject nuetrons at about 14.5 MeV ahead of the blast. The test was instrumented to pick this up and confirmed a fusion reaction did occur.
@@markdombrovan8849 since the point of the design was to test the idea of achiving a fusion reaction using compression by a fission bomb id argue the design was successful
@@RepChris oh yeah, 100%. As an experiment, a proof of concept - it was a concept. It proved that a fusion bomb IS possible. But it didn't prove that a fusion bomb is attainable, not yet anyway
John, much obliged for your history research into the early days developing the H-bomb, it just grabs my attention. I’ve wondered why Teller was so hell-bent on building ever bigger bombs? What drove him to do it?
I learned a lot from this video. I guess I hadn't ever really thought much about the tech behind the leap from a-bombs to h-bombs. Thank you for this video! God be with you out there everybody! ✝️ :)
That picture of Stalin and Beria with the little girl on his lap is fucking chilling when you know what kind of predator he was. The movie Death Of Stalin protrays this in an equally chilling way. The movie is often hilarious and snaps to black-dark in a second, well worth a watch.
Stalin was well aware of Beria's 'tastes.' Either he didn't care that much about his daughter, or he was supremely confident that Lavrentiy would never dare...
You are so predictable. Is it now fashionable to mention "Death of Stalin" as the reference for bizarre anti-communism? I thought lying authors of Sovietology can give a facade of how intellectual anti-communism is, but it belonged to the past now. Now we have gutter minded people who thinks a garbage movie is enough to generate anti-communism, which mostly have no originality.
The British sent Ted Hall to the Manhatten Project and he took a train to New York walked into a Russian trade centre and proceeded to give them the workings of what was happening in Los Alamos. The Russians knew it was true because it cross referenced what others from Los Alamos had told them.
@@QuibizOwlthe tension was growing since 1938, then in 1939 the second ww started after Germany invaded Poland (split it with Soviet through Molotov Ribbentrop Pact).
Yes, and Fuchs in fact left Germany in 1933. I'm going to guess this was a transcription error on the part of Asianometry - that they read a 3 as an 8 (which can happen if you have messy handwriting).
@@QuibizOwl many starting dates have been given, but 1938 is not among them. In Europe the starting date was 1939, the Russians like to forget about their alliance with Hitler and thus put it at 1941. An argument could be made that it actually started in Asia with Japan invading China, in which case it started either in 1937 or 1931, depending on which parts you want to count as part of WWII. 1938 doesn't make sense as that was part of the appeasement attempts by the British and French. So while this lead up to eventually WWII, it definitely wasn't part of it and rather a half-assed attempt at preventing it from breaking out ...
The profession of science is a fickle thing. One spectrum of science can make life saving medicines and the other spectrum can create world ending device's
Yeah those Soviets, I wish they would have designed their own stuff. I spent my late teens & twenties shadow boxing with against these guys and only figured out they were idiots much later.
This video brings togerther nicely, information which isn't widely available. So, thanks very much for this. Like many other topics you cover, it's a fascinating one.
@@CraftyF0X yes but most people forget that only a tiny tiny amount of mass if actually converted to Enegery. most of the mass is in the fission/fusion products that rain down as fallout. (Plutinium is not "gone", its split in 2 and some tiny rest energy that gets released) converting a car-sized bomb fully to engery would be world ending
from what I remember the last nuclear test conducted by NK was supposed to be an H-type bomb but there was information that it was an ordinary A-type explosion. I am sure that they are working on thermonuclear weapons but without success - apparently a technological leap is not that simple and in fact requires mastering many issues of physics, materials and techniques which NK, despite many years of research, is unable to achieve even though they are capable of developing their own ICBMs which however proves that they have wide technical and scientific capabilities.
@@nneeerrrd You are deeply misled by propaganda. The myth that Beria was a pedophile was invented by the Khrushchev regime to justify his murder. Beria was a responsible man, devoted to Stalin.
Can't quite put my finger on the feeling, fascination with learning about an object, that, its very existence I find offensive. I'll bet the Germans have a word for it.
I sense a pinch of prejudice. Aside this: I cannot recall the German language having a special word for this specific concept. Athough, when evaluating the concept, a special word would be very funny, and perhsps even charatestic, and very much within the German language's typical creativity, and flexibility. Like there is e.g. "fremdeln" (which is a relatively new specimen, and originally had a tongue-in-cheek, btw). And there are even extremely nice, but ridiculously outdated/forgotten words like "Klupf" (the purely Germanic word for "Erde"/earth, which has a Greek lineage). But we can construct a legit, fitting word combination, like "interessant-abstoßend" or "spannend-widerwärtig", i.e. intestring/fascinating _and_ disgusting/repellent at the same time (that's the hyphen's purpose). And yes, both suggestions are "augenzwinkernd" (winking grounding - a nice English word in it's own right, btw). "Offending" is "beleidigend" btw. But "beleidigend" does not work too well with other adjectives "hyphenated" towards it, like "interessant-beleidigend", which sounds misfitting ambitious. But I am neither Goethe (who is believed to had the largest active German vocabulary), nor did I study the famous Grimm brothers' dictionary, nor am I even a Germanist. So, perhaps, there is a dedicated German word. If so, pls reply to this humble comment.
I caught the Science Asylum reference. (Hot hot) If it wasn't a direct reference then my brain is playing tricks on me, I almost instantly saw his iconic angelic pose holding inferno in his hands.
4:27 _"In August 1945 the US dropped two atomic weapons on Japan. WWII had ended and the US have been left with a nuclear monopoly. The world was now seemingly at peace. What was there any need to produce a bigger bomb."_ Peace is imposed by the victor. You have to know how to win and you have to know how to govern imperially in such a way that everyone feels integrated and part of the same project. The Anglo-Saxons, British and US, have always been disastrous in that department being mostly predatory in all their imperialist actions. This happens because they are racist supremacists and consider that there are first, second and third class nations, ethnicities and races. This contrasts radically with empires such as the Spanish or the Roman, in which there were mechanisms to achieve the same category of citizen in society (Roman) or they directly considered everyone as equals (Spanish). In such a way that all ethnic groups were able to integrate as one more within the civilization they built. This means also developing the territories they conquered so that they would not be left behind with respect to the metropolis. These empires were generative, that is, they mixed with all the peoples they conquered to fuse and syncretize genetically and culturally, and they were not afraid to share their advances to build a cohesive nation and civilization.
I'm joining two meetups next week. Come say hi!
Feb 12th at UC Berkeley: www.eventbrite.com/e/asianometry-meet-up-berkeley-haas-tickets-826506512227?aff=oddtdtcreator
Feb 15th in NYC: partiful.com/e/b3Tpey9enoNpGJT8SLAB
You live in Taiwan though, right? I live in the States, but nowhere near either NYC or Berkeley. There's a better chance I'll visit Taiwan one day. That's a priority destination for me. All the same, take care and have fun with your celebrity tour!
You cut the distance between us in half and I still can't make it. Hope you get a lot of fans.
сомміеs напds behind the evil. Like USSR, which has breastfeeding Nazi Germany until 1941. Then baby bit the mother hard.
сомміеs напds behind the evil. Like USSR, which has breastfeeding Nazi Germany until 1941. Then baby bit the mother hard.
сомміеs напds behind the evil. Like USSR, which has breastfeeding Nazi Germany until 1941. Then baby bit the mother hard.
Fusion is even harder to kindle than this video suggests. In addition to requiring "a massive amount of energy", the energy must be applied in a very precise way in order to compress the deuterium without excessively heating it, as that would increase the pressure, resisting further compression. To reach and sustain thermonuclear temperatures of billions of degrees, the plasma must be dense enough to be "opaque" to the xrays that are emitted at such temperatures (same mechanism as a space heater, or a lightbulb, but much hotter), meaning that instead of escaping, the xray photons produced by the heat bounce around inside the plasma, keeping it hot. Otherwise the plasma cools off faster than fusion generates heat, which is why Teller's original "super" proposal was non-viable -- simply exploding an atomic bomb next to a container of deuterium is insufficient. Ulam's contribution of radiation-driven implosion was the key innovation, and it took quite a bit of creativity to develop a physical configuration capable of harnessing the energy of an atomic bomb to compress the fusion stage in just the right way.
For example, to protect the fusion fuel from premature heating, the design includes a thick uranium shield in front of the secondary that blocks both neutrons and xrays coming from the fission stage. This buys time for fission xrays to travel around the secondary, where their effect on the secondary's tamper creates tremendous implosive pressures of several million atmospheres, an order-of-magnitude more powerful, and thus faster, than an implosion driven by conventional explosives. Around the time the fusion fuel approaches maximum density, a "sparkplug" in the center start to fission, generating heat, and like a match striking dynamite, this triggers a catastrophic rise in temperature and a rapid fusion burning from a configuration dense enough that this process runs to completion within a few nanoseconds, which is quite fast even in the context of an exploding nuclear bomb. The fusion stage compresses and burns to completion before the shockwave from the fission stage can travel the several inches between the two stages. Or really, at such short distances, the fission shockwave is still dominated by radiation energy transport, rather than by the physical motion of the atoms, so in a sense, one can think of the compression of the fusion secondary as being driven by the fission shockwave's interaction with a very specific physical configuration of matter.
You are right of course. The video presents many true historical facts, but because it misses the role of compression, it greatly exaggerates the significance of Fuchs' patent. Neither Fuchs, nor anybody else understood the possibility of compressing the fuel to the point of opacity until Teller-Ulam's epiphany in 1951. Even the British had to rediscover this on their own, to say nothing about the Soviets.
Thank you both for rendering such an opaque subject transparent
Nobody cares how good you are at googling stuff
@@stellviahohenheimI care
@@stellviahohenheim It's difficult to find good quantitative intuitions about thermonuclear compression from Googling alone, as some of the best descriptions are still found in books.
The book that got me into this subject is Richard Rhodes, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", which is probably my favorite history book on any subject. He gives a good overview of the physics that's at once accessible and relatively precise, although still quite high level.
For a more technical take on this subject, see "A Technical History Of America's Nuclear Weapons", which includes several invaluable quantitative intuitions -- I would recommend the $9 Kindle version, which is searchable; it's an 1800 page book, but the sections on nuclear physics are only a small fraction of the book and are located at the beginnings of several chapters. There's no reason to read the book in order, and while I've read the best parts several times, I've at best skimmed the exhaustive weapon enumerations that dominates much of the book's content.
Very informative and well made - and a good choice of topic. One flub: Fermi was the physics Nobel prize winner in 1938. It's a stretch to say that Teller was as "equally famed" as Fermi in Sept 1941.
Richard Rhodes' book, 'Dark Sun,' is a good read on the subject of Soviet bomb/super development, and much more - including Oppenheimer's post war difficulties as depicted in the movie.
A very good video as always, and nearly everything in it is true. But some key parts need to be added or explained more to make the story complete.
First, the reason why thermonuclear bomb is so difficult to make and why it took so much research to create it. This reason is not just the high temperature required to ignite the thermonuclear reaction, but a rather more subtle problem.
It is mentioned in passing in the video at 16:25 ...*before the heat is dissipated away*. This in fact is the most important thing in the whole story. The intensity of thermal radiation from hot objects increases so rapidly with temperature, that the energy in the "classical super" dissipates from the reaction zone faster than the new energy is added by the fusion. Therefore a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction is not possible at all. There is no "trigger point", the ignition of a classical super is not possible. It took years of research to establish this fact.
So how does the bomb function then? The absolutely key element is the compression of thermonuclear fuel. When the fuel is enormously compressed, to hundreds of times of its normal density, it becomes opaque to its own thermal radiation. This traps the heat and enables the self-sustaining reaction. This was the key discovery which became the basis of 1951 Ulam-Teller radiation implosion patent, which is when the real thermonuclear bomb was born.
None of this was understood in 1946 when von Neumann and Fuchs submitted their patent application, so their patent is not considered to be very important. In fact, when British were working on their own thermonuclear weapon after the war, they really struggled to rediscover the idea of compression. And those were the scientists who themselves participated in the Manhattan project in the US! So this idea was very far from obvious even to the extremely knowledgeable people.
Thank you for this. It's not easy to find out very much about the deelopment of H bombs - for obvious reasons.
@@davidcarr2216 Some things were published, other things are still classified. For example, there is an official history of the USSR nuclear project in something like 17 volumes. It reproduces the orders and reports, and what was built when, but the technical details are largely absent and the information becomes heavily censored once it gets to the time of the real breakthroughs.
In the USA, the history of the nuclear bomb project is very well documented. But the history of the hydrogen bomb is not. Even the contents of the original Teller-Ulam paper are still classified. But Teller did outline the key milestones in his interviews. I recommend "Web of Stories" interview with Teller here on UA-cam. It's not the whole story of course, but it is worth listening to.
more like compression of the neutrons released by the thermonuclear fuel, containment of those neutrons so that they trigger actual fission in the plutonium and uranium... the heat is the thing that destroys the plutonium and uranium -- its not the thing that increases the yield but actually the thing that prevents the yield from being increased. thats why the hydrogen is added- it releases neutrons and induces fast fission reactions BEFORE the heat reaches and destroys the material - while regular atomic bombs simply evaporate long before most of the uranium atoms have undergone any fission. Hydrogen bombs increase the neutrons to heat ratio, more neutrons and less heat comparatively in the early time window needed - in order to create more heat and radiation later...
@@fast_harmonic_psychedelic Apart from radiation release enhanced charges (like say w66) neutron flux density is hardly an issue. And what you are describing later actually happens in a conventional spark plug/primer charge cores. Li6/D is used as a booster along with a z-pinch or a similar principal device as an initiator by practically every nuclear power out there. And i never heard about a "regular atomic bomb". What those are? What makes them regular?
Thermal radiation comes later (microseconds-milliseconds) as a result of all kind of particles scattering out and thus "cooling down" (or heating up everything around).
Staged H-bomb (Teller-Ulam/Sakharovs 3rd) is about how to direct as much of the primer energy as possible to initiate sustainable fusion reactions. Ideal primer only ignites fusion and adds 0 kt to the final yield. From there it is possible to add arbitrary number stages. A 50+Mt Tsar bomba, for example, was a 3 stage device:
1) fission primer < 10kt
2) fusion
@@bakagaijin7452 All true. Just one caveat. A "shock" has a specific meaning in hydrodynamics. Shocks are out of equilibrium, irreversible jumps in pressure and temperature. In a shock, the temperature rises much more than in a reversible adiabatic compression. If you slam the fuel with a sudden pressure jump, you generate a shock. The excessive temperature rise makes fuel less compressible. With a shock it takes much more pressure to achieve the same density compared to a more gentle, reversible, shockess adiabatic compression.
Advanced thermonuclear weapon designs and inertial confinement fusion experiments go into a great length in tailoring the shape of the radiation pulse to achieve a *gradual* increase in pressure, in order to achieve shockless compression, or at least to break one large shock into a series of smaller ones which would closer approximate shockless compression. The goal is to first make the fuel as dense as possible, which happens the best when the fuel is heated the least, and only then to spark the reaction from the middle of the mass. This achieves the most efficient reaction.
Of course, even without a shock the compression is still very, very rapid. The main difference is not in the speed per se, but in how the pressure pulse is shaped. A gradual rather than a sudden increase in pressure is what prevents shocking the fuel up.
Excellent treatment of a wide range of physics and archival information. Great job - I wish I was around NYC for your meetup.
the H-Bomb layercake route isn't that complicated but it does require having a working nuclear bomb first
@@FartGas-xe4yk The equations are pretty clear that they lead to such a result. Yeah. A 5 year old could calculate if given the tools.
@@FartGas-xe4ykcomplicated in relation to the sparkplug design we use which requires a nuke to go off in the correct way as to compress fusion fuel and refract around the casing correctly
lit no rocketsurgery ;)
The difficulty is that it needs about 120kg of highly enriched U-235 to make a sloika (layer cake) or alarm clock type design. The maximum yield is around 720kt, tested by the British as an interim step (quick hitter) in developing a radiation implosion bomb.
Reminds me of Carl Sagan's recipe for apple pie: "To make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe" and then explained how elements are created in stars.
For the algorithm! Love the video mate, glad to have found your channel. Liked, shared, and subbed. God speed
Ironic that the Soviet scientists realized early on the viability of combining lithium with deuterium and tritium possibly before the Americans. If American scientists had this awareness it might have prevented the surprise runaway reaction of the Mike Bravo shot
That's a powerful point,, you point out exactly the Yanks arrogance in thinking that they're the only people that can figure out these equations and the engineering, then they f*** up so catastrophically because of a simple miscalculation that the Russians were smart enough to avoid... TAKE THAT American stroke-offs lol...
"Lithium" was understood "by the Americans" at the time. The difference was that Lithium-7 was not thought to be a player due to the missing cross section calculation. Soviets figured it out after the fact, just as America did.
@@calvinhobbes7504 I don't think anyone's questioning the intelligence of Western scientists,, they're some brilliant mofos but the Soviets were no johnny-come-latelys either...
@@micnorton9487- Oh, I don't disagree at all, sir (or ma'am) .... when it came down to "who got it first" on a lot of the physics, the comparisons were so close, it was more like who had their ink dry the fastest! :) I was just pointing out the miscalculation about lithium-6 and lithium-7 ..... and it seems both sides missed that boat. - and from what I read, that was an easy boat to miss.
@@calvinhobbes7504 I agree,, and to the physicists who do calculations it seems easy but to the people doing the chemistry on these materials it's a lot more personal,, and handling the finished product - not something I'd volunteer to do under any circumstances....
17:25 - The first US thermonuclear device was not called the Ivy Mike (That was the name of the test shot) it was called the Sausage device.
I thought it was called the shrimp?
@@stevenclarke5606 You are thinking of the TX-21S SHRIMP device tested in the Castle Bravo shot on March 1, 1954.
@@nicholasmaude6906 Ok thank you for the information, I appreciate your input.
I knew I had heard of the shrimp device from somewhere
@@nicholasmaude6906Maybe they gave the "Sausage" nickname to the device after the big cylindrical- shaped criogenic Dewar flask (fusion fuel container)? Ironic...
@@gaborbanay92 If you've ever seen a photograph of the "Sausage" device it, well, looks like a giant metal sausage.
In 1945, when General Groves said it would take the Soviets 20 years to build an atomic bomb, physicist Isidore Rabi replied, "I don't know, General. Physics is physics, and they've got some pretty smart guys over there."
In his defence this was still new stuff at the time. So new people genuinely had no idea how easy or hard it would be for someone else to do it. As it turns out its not that hard. Just about any industrial society can do it.
And they had some pretty slimy spies- Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs
I knew the Russians were ultra smart when it came to math. They heavily push that over there from what I've read.
@@djpalindromeThose people saved the world from assured destruction by allowing a balance of power. Otherwise LeMay would of nuked 10’s of million innocent Slavs.
@@djpalindrome
slimey is as slimey does.
Thanks!
very well done. thank you for all the work and then sharing.
The science was never a secret, the engineering was to some degree.
That is not correct. It took years of very intense research both in the USA and in the USSR to establish the fact that the "Classical Super" thermonuclear bomb cannot function in principle. And then it took more applied physics research to discover new ideas and to make something else that did work. The "high energy density" physics which is required for understanding the bomb is not common knowledge even today.
You do not even understand the word "science" and nothing was a secret considering the ammount of spies in USA on every stage of the development. They got spies that were acting as the most trusted advisors to the president of the USA and multiple spies in Los Alamos.
The Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos was recognized from the air by Americans thanks to the fact that the Soviets even copied the layout of the buildings...
I love how this video is made under the assumption that Klaus Fushs, was sitting in prison for 8 years and only counted the number of spiders on the walls... heh
@@cogoid yeah. Nowadays most of the ulam-teller design is common knowledge (and in theory it isnt a very complicated idea), and even more of just the normal fission one is. To the point where some recent (non-nuclear) physics grads could get rather close to a design that would work within 2 years or so for a implosion style nuke, even less for a gun style, back in 1964. Of course the hardest part is actually refining the uranium/creating and purifying the plutonium, but it really isnt hard. I just recently got a youtube video recommended explaining the formula to compute the critical mass of a given chunk of fissionable material, and the derivation of the formula; pretty interesting watch for the physically/mathematically inclined
Much of the ulam-teller design still isnt common knowledge, and it does require even more fancy engineering than the fission only weapons, given the rather high complexity of getting the radiation pressure high enough, and focused just right, but nothing a moderately well funded nuclear program couldnt do, especially nowadays (but it definitely wouldnt be easy). The actual refinement of fissionable and fusable fuel probably still is one of, if not the, major hurdle, especially if you dont have a nuclear power backing you and have to do the thing in secret/semi-secret. The lengths that the nuclear powers will go to to stop the refinement part is insane, just look at the cyber attack by the USA on Iranian centrifuges under Bush and Obama.
Edit: Just realized i fipped the Ulam and Teller bits of the names, ill leave it because Ulam-Teller sounds a lot better in my head that Teller-Ulam
I believe that's true for a pure fission bomb, but not for a fission-fusion bomb. But I am in no way qualified to speak on the subject so 🤷♀️
@@hayleyxyz It is more a matter of how one defines engineering v. basic science. The Ulam/Teller H-Bomb was not obvious, but neither was an implosion fission bomb
Wow, that picture of Beria and Stalin's daughter is something else.
At 10:59 ?
Or 11:04?
@@psychohist - I think yours is the one …
Another great video! Always a great day when you post one.
22:09 - sorry, that's not a picture of the two different stages detonating. That's a picture of the complete detonation at two times well after the burn was complete.
21:54 I don't thinks the caption is correct. It is misleading in a sense that it shows two stages, first being fission primary and second being fusion secondary. I was under the impression that bot primary and secondary finish their process before bomb is disassembled and any visible fireball is formed. What we might see are either two consecutive moments in fireball development or two different tests. First test with only fission primary and second test with both primary and secondary. Am I wrong?
You are correct.
10:47 - correction: in 1948 Beria did not have any formal ministerial appointments. He was relieved of his duties at the NKVD in December 1945, and the NKVD itself was renamed MVD in 1946.
Well someone must not have passed the memo to Beria because he was still the head of the Soviet secret police at the time of Stalin's death...
Don't think those photos show a first and second stage as the separation in time is in the order of milliseconds
Try again - nanoseconds! But I agree, and was going to post the same. From memory, the total event is over in 20 nanoseconds, of which the fusion part takes about 1 to 4 nanoseconds.
Exactly. The entire bomb is vaporized before a visible flash can be perceived.
Radiation implosion was Stanislaw Ulam’s concept. Teller refined it, having finally realised that ‘classical super’ was a total dead end.
Oppenheimer, despite his qualms, called it ‘technically sweet’.
Hence all fusion weapons, Mike onwards, use Ulam-Teller radiation implosion.
In the USSR, Sakharov independently came up with radiation implosion.
As did the British, but they obsessed over the more difficult idea of spherical radiation implosion.
What was the British test?
In one documentary I saw on the USSR program, it was said the information from Fuchs was not actually given to the Soviet physicists but it was instead used to double-check their work by their superiors.
I'd probably say that to if I felt like more of an imposter and not so much inventor
@@sg5184 Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany in 1938. Both superpowers grabbed components of the German program to accelerate their respective weapons programs and Germany's program began 3 years and 4 months before the Manhattan Project began. It's the sort of thing that isn't hard to do once you understand that it CAN be done. There are many different ways to build nuclear weapons; it's not like there's a single secret beyond the one telling that it's possible to crush metal enough to make a fission chain reaction go. Once you know that, the rest is engineering details.
@@Peter_S_You're the product of a German education?
@@EmsThaBreaks441 No, I'm a nuclear historian and Sandia NL used to be one of my consulting clients. I used to design survey instruments like alpha scintillation spectrometers. Why would you say something so silly?
@Peter_S_ What are you smoking, it took a mile long building for uranium enrichment, the Manhattan project was a massive effort, and the German nuclear program was nowhere near making a viable bomb, and at best had a small research reactor. The Soviets did catch up but it took years. Literally nothing about it was easy, people died trying to make it happen; there's a difference between knowing a thing is theoretically possible and doing all the math and industrial effort to make it real.
Thanks as always for the amazing content! I really enjoy when the topic contains the USSR, its always interesting as when it was the Soviet Union they indeed invested a lot in R&D and always have some kind of espionage behind.
just like there are aliens behind the pyramids.
14:01 Fission fusion fission Pum-pum :D
Thank you for telling stories like this. From a perspective of a historian and weapons enthusiast, these are some of my favorite videos of yours, I'm hoping you eventually make videos on Pakistan or North Korea's nuclear programs.
Book ATOMIC BAZAR ... Explains Pakistan nukes
South Africa’s nuclear weapons program is another fascinating tale along with the Republic of China’s nuclear weapons program.
It would take another 71 years after Ivy Mike to accomplish, but 3 months ago the laser inertial confinement system at the National Ignition Facility repeated its initial 2022 one-off feat of igniting a fusion capsule in 4 out of 6 more recent attempts. We have now truly entered the era of repeatably achieving the burning plasma regime in the laboratory. This is a HIGHLY nonlinear parameter space, and though the highest yield fusion shots have now produced nearly 4 megajoules (Q factor of ~2), this represents a burnup fraction of only 2% of the hydrogen fuel in the capsule. That means there is further potential for reaching gain factors in excess of 10 or 20 times the laser energy if the ignition and burn wave propagation can be controlled more precisely. these are the brightest neutron sources humans have ever created aside from weapons tests themselves last century.
What tf are you talking about? Talk in layman's language. This is not a science forum.
@@srijanme Go to bed, sir.
@@srijanme mf has a phd in yappinomics
@@srijanmenobody forced you to read it either 😂
Just wanted to say your channel is great. Thank you
This easily could have been an “end of civilizations” video.
It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix. It is an eximer frozen in it's excited state. As soon as we apply a field, we couple to a state that is radiatively coupled to the ground state.
We can extract at least ten to the twenty-first photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter.
This comment section is full of nuclear physicists.
I hate that,, I used to do the same thing... Of course I'm not a physicist or had any training in the field, I came to recognize it as just trying to make sense out of something that scares the s*** out of me...
Why be scared of something you have absolutely no control over? Pointless, just forget about it.
The crème de la crème of youtube 😅
I'm here for the explosions and comments
@@micnorton9487I'm a big gay nigga
Beginning: "oh, I hope we not gonna burn down atmosphere, we should be careful"
End: "make it double of what they have!"
No one really thought that, it's like the bs around breaking the sound barrier.
"That is a problem Tolstoy dealt with in War and Peace. Here you have Napoleon ravaging Europe and now about to invade Russia, and Tolstoy raises this question: Is the leader really a leader, or is he simply the one out in front on a wave? In psychological terms, the leader might be analyzed as the one who perceived what could be achieved and did it." - Campbell, 1986
Tolstoy asked few subtle questions.
For an in-depth look into the development of Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear devices, read "Stalin & The Bomb" by David Holloway. An excellent companion to Richard Rhodes' books on American programs. Rhodes does cover some of the Soviet work in Dark Sun, but Holloway's work is more detailed.
There are no first stage then second stage explosions separated in time as your pics suggest at 22:05. The first stage (fission bomb) does go off first but the second stage lithium deuteride goes off within a few billions of a second. IOW it all goes off at once. The growing fireball takes a little longer to reach maximum size but even that is just a few seconds.
About what are the temperatures needed to ignite dueterium and tritium? I understand that very briefly temperatures in a fission blast reach 100 million degrees
Jesus Christ...
What the Russian analogy to Oak Ridge (enriched uranium) and Hanford (plutonium) were for ingredients would be interesting material. They were SUPER EXPENSIVE endeavors.
Hans Bethe who was in charge of that portion of the Los Alamos research devoted to the “super” famously stated in response to a question regarding who was responsible for its ultimate fruition, “(Stan) Ulam was the father, (Edward) Teller was the mother and I was the midwife.”
Oppenheimer is most remembered for his remarks about the trinity test. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Very apt words considering the godlike devastation even the smallest nuclear weapons leave in their wake.
"Nah", Admiral Nimitz replied. "We all know it´s merely some science fiction Psy-Op propaganda nonsense intended to deny the Russians and the Chinese their occupation zones. Not a real military weapon.
No. He’s most remembered for developing the bomb.
Bahagavat Gita verse
God Vishnu putting his armor on and developing his warrior shape said
And now I have become death destroyer of Worlds!
@@pashapasovski5860 why was an american physicist interested in an ancient indian religious text so much as to remember it and project it on a moment like this?
@Cjephunneh relatable, before the Trinity explosion, it was possible for the entire atmosphere to burn and destroy the World!
Like they used to say in russia, "you're such a smart guy, yet still not in prison. What's wrong with you?"
bu|| shiт
Do they really say that in Russia or did you pull it out from your ass again? My money is on the latter.
.... we dont talk that
i recommend, on a flight or road trip or something, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast episode 59, "The Destroyer of Worlds". it talks about an insane plan he americans had. they had 300-400 atom bombs at the time. and they were going to drop 200-300 of them on the soviet union....in one day. leaving the remainder to go clean up anything they missed. this was to prevent the soviets from getting the bomb, ensuring the united states would be the only power with the weapon. but the administration and brass were debating if it was like, way over the top or not....and before they implemented it, the soviets detonated their first weapon. absolute madness. so now the genie was out of the bottle. no point wasting all those nukes. they have the knowledge, and its probably duplicated and secure.
It was a part of Curtis LeMay's war plans as commander of the newly formed Strategic Air Command
The United States never ever promised to "bury" the Soviet Union. Had the Soviets not made that promise, on the World's Stage, to the US, there would be no "nuclear threat" at all. History is a great teacher, but only if one chooses to enter the classroom.
Run time is 5 hours 49 minutes 😮
No
The most important information that the Soviets got from America's successful H-bomb project was the same as the most important information their spies gave them about the A-bomb. The simple fact that it could be done. Technical details were not really required as the Soviets had plenty of good mathematicans and physicists who could take it from there.
5:20 The Nazis won power in 1933, not 1938. Klaus Fuchs left Germany in August 1933 after living and studying in Berlin for 5 months undetected.
Great topic, love the choice of direction ❤
No mention of Tzar Bomba or did I miss it?
You can in principle make multi-megaton pure fission warheads if you make them a two or three-stage design.
12:17 and then Andrey Sakharov ended up being imprisoned for dissent.
For the brilliant work on the hydrogen bomb Sakharov was given a princely reward. A villa with servants, a nice car with a chauffeur, a bonus equivalent to roughly one million dollars, great respect. He continued to create new weapons. One of his ideas was the torpedoes of enormous explosive power, to wipe out the US seaboard. They were not implemented at the time, because the navy considered such weapons to be in bad taste. But now of course Russians seem to have changed their attitude.
Much later, in late 1960s Sakharov became an activist for various causes which did not follow the party line, and was indeed exiled.
@@cogoidIt was really hard to become member of Academy of Sciences of USSR. Sakharov was elected as acting member at the age of 32. Without being correspondent member.
When he started his human rights activism, Khrushchev ordered to exclude him from Academy. But Head of Academy, Mstislav Keldysh, was at Baikonur, and Sergey Korolev didn't give him a plane to attend meeting.
Sakharov lost all benefits and was sent to Nizhny Novgorod, but he remained member of Academy of Sciences.
How about the just built one? Do you think they can't make stuff?
5:00 is he related to fred fuchs from avgn?
Don't think so, it's his step brother who gives a fuchs😢
Great video! Subscribed
Funny thing is that the photo of the "Main Gate" is actually a toilet stall. :-)
Loving this series on how countries got to where they did with nukes 👍
Your image at the end does not really show two stages going off.
Chuckle. 4:42 Did some scientists actually say, “Why was there any need to build a bigger bomb?” You’d think that after spending so much time with the military, the answer would have been self evident…unless Groves and Oppenheimer really and truly kept the scientists in their naive and isolated bubble. Imagine asking LeMay if wanted bigger bombs and him replying with “nope, I’m good.”
Great vid, enjoyed it thoroughly
If the Sloika design is considered 'boosted fission' then so was Ivy Mike. The latter also had nearly 80% of its yield from fission.
In formal circles 'boosted fission' designs have less than 1% of their yield from fusion.
Most of that came from the tamper, which I dont think was there to enhance yield, and uranium was just a pretty dense material they had a lot of, and not with the (primary, it might be a secondary effect that was desired, im not 100% sure on that) of boosting yield. The US did have a boosted fission design (Alarm Clock), and the Soviet design was intended to be boosted fission.
So in terms of intended effect, it wasnt really a boosted fission device, even if it the actual yield percentages say something different. Given that it was an early test of the idea you might forgive the different terminology
I think an earlier " proof of concept" test was the George shot in Operation Greenhouse. A small amount of deuterium and tritium was placed in a fission bomb. If a fusion reaction was possible it would eject nuetrons at about 14.5 MeV ahead of the blast. The test was instrumented to pick this up and confirmed a fusion reaction did occur.
@@RepChrisif most of the yield doesn't even come from the fuel, but from the casing, then it's a failed design
@@markdombrovan8849 since the point of the design was to test the idea of achiving a fusion reaction using compression by a fission bomb id argue the design was successful
@@RepChris oh yeah, 100%. As an experiment, a proof of concept - it was a concept. It proved that a fusion bomb IS possible. But it didn't prove that a fusion bomb is attainable, not yet anyway
Thank you for another excellent & well researched clip.
John, much obliged for your history research into the early days developing the H-bomb, it just grabs my attention. I’ve wondered why Teller was so hell-bent on building ever bigger bombs? What drove him to do it?
Ken brannaugh last name is pronounced 'brannah' not brannow
Hi ad, it is good video, can you make a video about fusion power plant and history of fusion power plant ? Thanks.
Reading Richard Rhodes's book "Dark Sun," about the creation of the H-bomb. Thanks for this!
I learned a lot from this video. I guess I hadn't ever really thought much about the tech behind the leap from a-bombs to h-bombs. Thank you for this video!
God be with you out there everybody! ✝️ :)
That picture of Stalin and Beria with the little girl on his lap is fucking chilling when you know what kind of predator he was. The movie Death Of Stalin protrays this in an equally chilling way. The movie is often hilarious and snaps to black-dark in a second, well worth a watch.
I did a report and I told my teacher that I must change people because how horrible that creature was
The girl was Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, Beria knew better than doing anything to her.
Stalin was well aware of Beria's 'tastes.' Either he didn't care that much about his daughter, or he was supremely confident that Lavrentiy would never dare...
@@monkofdarktimes The only way you will ever change people for good is to effect a 'patch' to our genome. One that makes us less monstrous...
You are so predictable. Is it now fashionable to mention "Death of Stalin" as the reference for bizarre anti-communism? I thought lying authors of Sovietology can give a facade of how intellectual anti-communism is, but it belonged to the past now. Now we have gutter minded people who thinks a garbage movie is enough to generate anti-communism, which mostly have no originality.
Minor nitpick early on: the Nazis took power on 1933, not in 1938 as claimed in the video ...
Yeah, I noticed that also, we all make those kind of mistakes.
Germany's A-bomb project was deterred by Heisenberg's insistence on heavy water as a reactor moderator.
The graphite available to the Third Riech was contaminated with boron and unsuitable for a pile.
@@dbmail545that would cause a bit of an issue
The Nazis didn’t “win power” in 1938. Hitler came to power in 1933, and the Nazi party dominated Germany’s political landscape past that point.
They moved to Ukraine!
I was about to write that, too. Hitler became chancellor in 1938.
5:07 big citation needed (more like an emphatic no, especially in parliament)
5:17 they came to power in 1933, come on
also its Niels Bohr, not Neils.
Right after tucker😂
I read that Zeldovich had interests in such different areas of physics, that it was believed that it's a pseudonym for group of scientists.
The British sent Ted Hall to the Manhatten Project and he took a train to New York walked into a Russian trade centre and proceeded to give them the workings of what was happening in Los Alamos. The Russians knew it was true because it cross referenced what others from Los Alamos had told them.
Your videos captivate me so much I joined your patreon a few weeks ago. Keep up the awesome work buddy! Cheers ❤
Make a documentary on Tsar Bomba
Please correct your mistake of the Party gaining power in 1938! It was 1933. Please put a correction somewhere!
Edward Teller said that all nuclear power reactors should be build underground, but no one listened.
Didn't the Nazis gain power in 1933 not 1938?
Yes.
1938 was the start of ww2
@@QuibizOwlthe tension was growing since 1938, then in 1939 the second ww started after Germany invaded Poland (split it with Soviet through Molotov Ribbentrop Pact).
Yes, and Fuchs in fact left Germany in 1933. I'm going to guess this was a transcription error on the part of Asianometry - that they read a 3 as an 8 (which can happen if you have messy handwriting).
@@QuibizOwl many starting dates have been given, but 1938 is not among them. In Europe the starting date was 1939, the Russians like to forget about their alliance with Hitler and thus put it at 1941. An argument could be made that it actually started in Asia with Japan invading China, in which case it started either in 1937 or 1931, depending on which parts you want to count as part of WWII.
1938 doesn't make sense as that was part of the appeasement attempts by the British and French. So while this lead up to eventually WWII, it definitely wasn't part of it and rather a half-assed attempt at preventing it from breaking out ...
Excelente Documentary ! Congratulations ! And greetings from brazil.
The profession of science is a fickle thing. One spectrum of science can make life saving medicines and the other spectrum can create world ending device's
The keys of heaven also open the gates of hell
0:23 I didn't know Logic was a spy
Yeah those Soviets, I wish they would have designed their own stuff. I spent my late teens & twenties shadow boxing with against these guys and only figured out they were idiots much later.
They looked up at the sky and saw a million stars.
She moved forward only because she trusted that the ending she now was going through must be followed by a new beginning.
This video brings togerther nicely, information which isn't widely available. So, thanks very much for this. Like many other topics you cover, it's a fascinating one.
its just crazy how a small car sized thing can blow up giant cities
That is E=mc^2 for you.
@@CraftyF0X yes but most people forget that only a tiny tiny amount of mass if actually converted to Enegery. most of the mass is in the fission/fusion products that rain down as fallout. (Plutinium is not "gone", its split in 2 and some tiny rest energy that gets released)
converting a car-sized bomb fully to engery would be world ending
@@Nagria2112 only a dimes worth of mass was converted into energy from the Hiroshima bomb. the rest of it was scattered.
What's even crazier is a neutron star being the size of Manhattan and containing over two solar masses worth of matter.
No it’s not.
Interesting how they got it, but it should have been a direct air delivery right after WW2.
Based
I love your work!
Going from fission to fusion seems alot more obvious than going from nothing to fission
We should really try to get along.
Excellent as always.
The narrator states that deuterium has just 1 neutron in its nucleus, but most hydrogen atoms do not have any neutrons in their nuclei.
Yes, that’s why it’s called deuterium. It’s an isotope of hydrogen.
@@skunkwerx9674exactly. I know. You know, too.
@@richardbennett4365 sorry, I though you were wondering. 👍
That Sakharov statue is creepy as fuck.
Dudes eternally holding his head in his hands wondering ‘what the fuck he’s done.’
from what I remember the last nuclear test conducted by NK was supposed to be an H-type bomb but there was information that it was an ordinary A-type explosion. I am sure that they are working on thermonuclear weapons but without success - apparently a technological leap is not that simple and in fact requires mastering many issues of physics, materials and techniques which NK, despite many years of research, is unable to achieve even though they are capable of developing their own ICBMs which however proves that they have wide technical and scientific capabilities.
11:06 Beria was a known реdо
It's not her daughter in the picture
@@nneeerrrd You are deeply misled by propaganda. The myth that Beria was a pedophile was invented by the Khrushchev regime to justify his murder. Beria was a responsible man, devoted to Stalin.
Not only pedo.
@@nneeerrrdMaybe her daughter would be safe.
That's Stalin's daughter. Beria didn't have the balls to do anything too creepy, unless he wanted his teeth pulled out... Slowly.
Very well done and accurate -
Thank you! I want to know how did it get it's hands on the hydrogen bomb.
How do you think are Star Trek weapons compared to the H-Bomb? Star Wars vs Star Trek weapons?
Nukes were invented by a science fiction author. The US government then ran with the idea.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(science_fiction_story)
Can't quite put my finger on the feeling, fascination with learning about an object, that, its very existence I find offensive. I'll bet the Germans have a word for it.
I sense a pinch of prejudice.
Aside this: I cannot recall the German language having a special word for this specific concept.
Athough, when evaluating the concept, a special word would be very funny, and perhsps even charatestic, and very much within the German language's typical creativity, and flexibility.
Like there is e.g. "fremdeln" (which is a relatively new specimen, and originally had a tongue-in-cheek, btw). And there are even extremely nice, but ridiculously outdated/forgotten words like "Klupf" (the purely Germanic word for "Erde"/earth, which has a Greek lineage).
But we can construct a legit, fitting word combination, like "interessant-abstoßend" or "spannend-widerwärtig", i.e. intestring/fascinating _and_ disgusting/repellent at the same time (that's the hyphen's purpose). And yes, both suggestions are "augenzwinkernd" (winking grounding - a nice English word in it's own right, btw).
"Offending" is "beleidigend" btw.
But "beleidigend" does not work too well with other adjectives "hyphenated" towards it, like "interessant-beleidigend", which sounds misfitting ambitious.
But I am neither Goethe (who is believed to had the largest active German vocabulary), nor did I study the famous Grimm brothers' dictionary, nor am I even a Germanist.
So, perhaps, there is a dedicated German word.
If so, pls reply to this humble comment.
how about "morbid fascination", not one word but close enough.
I caught the Science Asylum reference. (Hot hot)
If it wasn't a direct reference then my brain is playing tricks on me, I almost instantly saw his iconic angelic pose holding inferno in his hands.
08:16 *Niels Bohr.
Not Neils Bohr.
But your pronunciation is correct
4:27 _"In August 1945 the US dropped two atomic weapons on Japan. WWII had ended and the US have been left with a nuclear monopoly. The world was now seemingly at peace. What was there any need to produce a bigger bomb."_ Peace is imposed by the victor. You have to know how to win and you have to know how to govern imperially in such a way that everyone feels integrated and part of the same project. The Anglo-Saxons, British and US, have always been disastrous in that department being mostly predatory in all their imperialist actions. This happens because they are racist supremacists and consider that there are first, second and third class nations, ethnicities and races.
This contrasts radically with empires such as the Spanish or the Roman, in which there were mechanisms to achieve the same category of citizen in society (Roman) or they directly considered everyone as equals (Spanish). In such a way that all ethnic groups were able to integrate as one more within the civilization they built. This means also developing the territories they conquered so that they would not be left behind with respect to the metropolis. These empires were generative, that is, they mixed with all the peoples they conquered to fuse and syncretize genetically and culturally, and they were not afraid to share their advances to build a cohesive nation and civilization.
A boom Boom eh? 😂
There are a lot of armchair physicists about, snapping and snarling somewhat. One or two sensible ones as well!
Don't you hate that?