The Craziest Things You Can Do With Nuclear Weapons
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2024
- Do you have a giant stockpile of world ending nuclear warheads and want some good PR to suggest they're not only useful for destroying cities? Here's crazy 10 things you can do with nuclear weapons that you might not have heard of.
For education purposes only, do not try this at home.
Thanks to 'Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer (⧖) 🏳️🌈 / @NuclearAnthro' for reminding me of a bunch of these.
/ nuclearanthro - Наука та технологія
Thanks to 'Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer (⧖) 🏳️🌈
' who reminded me of a few of these @NuclearAnthro twitter.com/NuclearAnthro
Don't try this at home kids.... or parents.
Друг
Scott Manley Still waiting for your into having a great white shark swimming across...
You could try it at home, the fine, if I recall correctly, for detonating a nuclear explosive inside the US, is 50 USD + damages.
I also consider every problem solvable via personal jetpack.
(Also Disney did this with the IronMan suit, and StartTrek does it with phasers/shields/deflectors)
Just out of curiosity how strong of a magnetic field would it take to contain a h bomb explosion in space or a vacuum. Is it only heat from fusion that we can use to generate electricity?
Concrete vapour is not a term one hears very often.
unless you live in arizona
I prefer communist vapor. Can that stuff up and sell it. :-)
"You mean concrete dust?" "Not exactly."
Neither is "nuclear-propelled manhole"
foxpup what about capitalist vapor?
I did some tests (in a video now removed due to use of explosives) that proved that the metal plate would have been deformed into a cone or even rod shape during launch thus greatly increasing its chances of making it through the atmosphere. Also I figured that the time, direction of launch and a 6x earth escape velocity would result in a highly elliptical orbit about the sun with the perihelion well below the orbit of mercury. This means that not only was it the fastest moving object created by man it very well still could be.
Six times Earth escape is more than solar escape velocity from Earth’s orbit - if it made it into space and retained enough velocity, it might not even be in the solar system anymore.
Even in the shape of an APFSDS projectile, the shear forces on the surface layer could have ground the thing to dust, since it was not made out of high strength material. Maybe we should do some experiments on construction steel projectiles in the lower atmosphere at hypersonic speeds ;-)
@@badbeardbill9956 I doubt it was going quite that fast when it left the atmosphere.
It left the tunnel at that speed, but it would have had to share its energy with a lot of air on the way out.
@@st4rlightr4v3n4 Remember, this is a lower bound on its speed - it could have left the tunnel even faster.
The thing is, at that speed it would go so fast that it may escape before losing most of its velocity. Of course if it was going fast enough even air would be approximately solid.
R
Ever heard about the crazy idea to use small low-yield nuclear bombs to make the tritium necessary to make the high yield hydrogen bombs? This was before anyone figured out how to make tritium in research reactors, and before the Canadians had made their heavy water "CANDU" reactor, which creates some tritium as a by-product of its normal operation. In the 1950s and 1960s, getting hold of enough tritium to make the really big warheads was a big problem, exacerbated by the fact that it has a half life of about 12 years, so every few years you need to replace some of it.
It was however known that if you subject lithium-6 to a short but intense neutron flux, it splits into equal quantities of helium-3 and tritium. So they came up with an idea with an appropriate acronym: BATS, aka Bomb Assisted Tritium Supply. Basically, make a shallow depression out in the desert somewhere and line it with a thick layer of asphalt, with loads of lithium-6 mixed into the asphalt. Then bang off a few low-yield (a few kilotons each) nuclear bombs next to it. The neutron flux from the nuclear detonations converts some of the lithium into tritium. So you then wait for the fallout to disperse and the short half-life isotopes to decay away (a few months, maybe a year maximum), then go in and rip up the asphalt and process it to get the tritium out. All perfectly feasible, and was a serious consideration until the partial test-ban treaty put a stop to it.
This has given me an idea for my next video - thanks!
@@scottmanley I've always wanted to use a hydrogen bomb as a camera flash to see underneath the clouds of Jupiter. Bomb and probe both under the clouds - what would we see?
the same was proposed to make americium and californium for super small nukes, fors x rays lacers and small emp / neutro devices
And now here we are in the present day, where tritium from research reactors is plentiful enough to be powering the night sights of civilians' firearms.
@@ChemEDan Likely an extremely large explosion as all the hydrogen atmosphere nearby fuses along with it. Don't nuke gas giants.
Play connect 4 on the moon's surface with the other nuclear powers. Luna(tic) World Series
LOL
This deserves a lot more likes
I'd play tic tac toe, it uses fewer nukes
Connect Four would be uninteresting (first player wins with perfect play). Chess or Go would be more fun for a battle of the AIs.
@@Kumquat_Lord Nah - the player who goes first can't lose.
“If you have nuclear weapons please don’t try any of these”. Nice public service announcement from Scott. 😎
sad.
“If you own nuclear weapons, don’t try this at home. Or at least ask for parental supervision.”
Don’t give kim jong-un any bright ideas please!
Cody: Hold my beer....
Trump (a guy who has nuclear weapons), just a few days later: "How about nuking a hurricane?"
Scott Manley: "You could use nukes to propel a spacecraft!"
Also Scott Manley: "Fly Safe!"
Could, not should
Ironically that would be the safest spacecraft by far. Because of the insane power you don't have to make it from tinfoil like every other one. They actually planned to build it in a shipyard.
Also, when your engine works with explosions, failure means a lack of explosion.
*Flai sehf
The people flying are safe. It's the people on the ground who are in danger.
@@andrasbiro3007 Tell that to the connecting rod that punched a whole through my engine block. :P
I am so glad that Scott spoke about the extinguishing of oil wells in Russia! My grandfather took part in this, and this is my favorite story of his!
Do they still do it? If not, what method has supplanted it?
This reminded me of one of my favorite John Wayne movies, "Hell Fighters". Hard living, hard drinking, oil well fire fighters. Pretty intense for an old movie.
I love XKCD's euphemism about certain events energetic enough: You don't "burn" or "explode" or anything like that. You just stop being biology and start being physics.
wait you have that book behind you in frame.
...and chemistry, though I suppose physics covers that.
@@troys9222 Yes, chemistry is a branch of physics
2:00 I don't usually smoke, but when I do, I light it with nuclear bombs.
This is a new solution to the Fermi paradox. The aliens heard we have thermonuclear cigarette lighters.
you guys are funny-amusing-YES
Probably not a good idea to smoke at all anywhere near an area with potential fallout. There is some chance you could inhale radioactive particles. Wear a gas mask instead.
Shouldn't this be a legendary object in FallOut?
Stu Bur Ted Taylor died at 80
11:30 "They now have a reservoir which is only slightly radioactive" - only slight radioactive, the gold standard of Soviet engineering.
3.6 Rontgen - not great, not terrible.
Specifically stated that only animals would drink from it. More rump steak to go around if every cow has multiple legs and assholes. 🤌
"I'm Scott Manley. Fry safe!"
Did you mean, "I'm Scott Manrey. Fry safe!" ?
Fred
"Nook the myun." I love this guy's accent.
"if you have any nuclear weapons, please don't use them at all"
But I blew my budget on making them. All this effort and I can't even use them?
Too pricey for 4th of july?
Mythbusters with a nuclear device...imagine the possibilities!
We'll get that pesky cement mixer this time!!
The Cool Guy imagine the military actually doing this as a joke? Back in the day, they might have.
Could be worse, imagine "Jackass" with nuclear weapons!
They'd just single social justice they'd be pretty lame
Will this jacket made of duct tape protect Buster from a nuclear explosion if we put him at ground zero? [[ P l a u s i b l e ]]
Use nukes to power a flashlight, so i can finally realize my dream of a flashlight with noticeable recoil.
Thank God you wrote flashlight not "fleshlight"
So an Imperial Las gun?
Nuclear-pumped lasers are a thing. Granted, not exactly a flashlight, but... Y'know... Kinda close enough.
@@matchesburn yes but does it have noticeable recoil?
@@AuburnTigers111 Q: "What do you call a lasgun with a laser sight?"
A: "Twin-linked"
I'm sorry, did I hear:
_"The_ *Most Fun Things* _you can do with Nuclear Weapons?"_
They're probably a lot more fun than what we use them for now (sitting in silos so that nobody nukes us), and *definitely* a lot more fun than using them on *people.*
yes you did hear that
Everyone needs a hobby.
@@davidkueny2444 Oh definitely more fun than using them on people!
Edit: Can you Imagine giving the Mythbusters nukes?
@@thecoolguy7403 _American national anthem intensifies._
"If you have nuclear weapons then don't try any of these ideas" He prbably means Jeff
Which Jeff?
Jeff Who?
“Let’s nuke the moon!”
“... just... why?”
“idk, sounds fun... wait, no I mean... morale! America! O-oh say can you - hey where are you going?”
Actually we should nuke the moon, like an underground test.
With the correct yield, in ten years we could build an underground lunar city in spherical void...
@@davidhollenshead4892 and then the earth gets overwhelmed by morlocks...
Isnt the sun already nuking the moon.. and has been for quite a while
@@davidhollenshead4892 Considering the moon is already an irradiated dead rock. Another irradiated deeper crater wouldn't do harm.
@@davidhollenshead4892 Or you could just use the lava tunnels that are already there.
LOL using nuclear explosions to extinguish fires. If that ain't "burning the village in order to save it", I dunno what is.
After Gulf War 1, lots of nations contributed to the effort to extinguish all the oil wells Saddam Hussein set on fire. IMO, the Hungarians had the best, most practical and effective idea -- they put a jet-fighter engine on a flatbed truck, pointed the exhaust nozzle at the fire, revved-up the engine to full blast, and blew-out a raging oil-well inferno as if it were a birthday candle. No nukes required!
Bombing a fire is actually a decent way of putting our a fires, especually oil fires historically and even today the shockwave tends to extinguish most fires granted a nuke is overkill,
The problem with the big fan solution is that you need to get water (otherwise youre just fanning the flame) and you need a lot of water for big flames. Dynamite is often easier in some cases
Radish hat yeah I’m pretty sure that’s how they fixed the BP oil spill/fire too.
Next time someone puts candles on your birthday cake,
clap your hands just above the candle flames
to put the candles out. It works and it is probably better hygiene.
We use fires to extinguish fires too. The world is strange.
@@richardgreen7225 You'd be blowing the candle wax into the cake from that angle.
Today: NOOO WE CANT USE NUCLEAR POWER ITS TOO DANGEROUS
1950's: Atomic bomb powerplant!
its not dangerous, dont spread these lies.
Nuclear power plants are wayyyyyyyyy less dangerous than fossil fuell plants.
edit: lol I wrote thermal plants XD
@@Maxgamer-fd7hv nuclear power plants are essentially thermal power plants, do you mean fossile fuel plants?
Almost of our power is thermal, just different sources of heat
@@TS-jm7jm Ya fossil fuel basically
@@TS-jm7jm ye I mean fossil fuel, ty for reminding me that nuclear powerplants generate electricity by producing steam.
Orion is used to great effect in the fictional "Footfall" by Niven and Pournelle. Great SF, well worth a read.
Best thing we could do with nuclear energy: to *send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri*
then everyone gets pissed with each other and follow 7 distinct ideologies
They see us coming with nuclear bombs and declare war!
Honestly, I would love if we took some of the stockpiled nukes we had and built a massive Orion drive, flew it out to Mars, and set up a colony. Or better yet, send one to the Saturnian system / Callisto and Ganymede to explore the moons. The sad thing is that its completely within our reach (half the design work and hardware is done already!) yet so politically unfeasible that it'll remain a dream forever. Unless some deadly rogue asteroid pushes everyone to collaborate that is... (Evil scheming ensues)
Yes that would be cool
That would be amazing, but people are dumb.
I mean, morons are still trying to stop the construction of the TMT in Hawaii, they would probably go ape shit as soon as they hear "nukes in space".
Lets not forget my favorite. Project Excalibur.
Nuclear. Explosion. Lasers.
EDIT: anyone knows any games to utilize this concept? Besides SoTS 2
Not just your ordinary laser either, these were X ray lasers! With no mirrors!
@@44R0Ndin Now that sounds like fun
Weapon of choice for David Weber's Honorverse.
@@simonoconnor7759 Ahh, laserheads. Perfect for getting around that pesky sidewall.
Dang, I was going to say that. Beat me to it.
Good job on your selection of supporting graphics, you really did a good job hunting down those animations of nuclear blasts (Plow shares, propulsion, etc)
Brand new subscriber...fantastic content, love physics and you've absolutely made it accessible and easy to understand so thank you!!
"If your only tool is a nuclear weapon then every problem looks like it needs a giant hole in the ground"
- Scott Manley, the Shakespeare of our time
Fun fact, I used to work a few km's from that reservoir crater in Kazakhstan.
Doing what?
@@deusexaethera exploring for minerals and later mining them. We had an underground test hole approximately 1km from the edge of the mine.
You can look up all the test locations on google earth and it gives the kt rating. The crater is easy to find and from there it is easy to see the mine sites. Karazhira Coal is still active for that region of Kazakhstan.
There are several gold, coal and molybdenum mines in the former testing polygon.
The stream coming from that crater we used to drive through going to and from work and several farmers live and graze their livestock on the banks of that stream.
The area we were in was the site of underground testing, so didn't have surface contamination and we used to monitor heavily water, air and soil's - more to put workers minds at ease rather than due to risk.
Given the timing of this video, I thought for sure you were going to mention nuking a hurricane.
Its a good idea
1% of 1 bar? Those are rookie numbers. Gotta pump the numbers up, Musk.
Well, you gotta look at those numbers in perspective:
Raising Mars atmosphere everage pressure by 1% of a bar means increasing it by more than 100%.
I'm pretty sure that more than doubling Mars atmosphere would have perceptible effects on everage tempertures.
In turn, higher temperatures (even by just a fraction of degree) would mean more CO2-ice trapped underground will begin to sublimate.
I think part of the reasoning for melting the polar ice caps on Mars isn't just to release the carbon dioxide there, but to increase the surface temperature of Mars enough to start outgassing some of the CO2 locked in the soil across the whole planet. At some point this should create a feedback loop that continues to feed itself and grow. I remember reading about this in Robert Zubrin's book.
But Mars will just lose it all to space again..Need to find some way to start up Mars's magnetic field up again. Guess you could try that with BIG nukes too?
@@hexadecimal7300 NASA has a proposal for an artificial magnetosphere on their website. Regardless, even without the protection of a magnetosphere loss of atmosphere takes far longer than most people assume.
@@hexadecimal7300 to be clear, when you say lose it to space again, that's on the order of millions of years. Between that time Mars will be an interesting place to live, and no one's stopping us from topping off the atmosphere with a stray comet now and then.
@@dsdy1205 Uh, might not be that easy when people start living there.
@@slickrickulous Imagine receiving that note from the government in the mail. "Sorry for the inconvenience..."
"Don't do any of these"
But i really really wanna see them nuke the moon!
I wonder if Carl Sagan chuckled knowingly at the opening episode of "Space: 1999," since the study he had worked on involved the very same thing, just on a smaller scale... :-)
nother gem in the series! Old (by internet spacetime), but Gold!
You nail so many subtle side effects, and in some cases benefits, and the research and economics that comes out of these is fascinating...
Where is a good place to go looking for this data and dig around material that's just been declassified or is about to...? This would be an interesting area of research essentially meta-analysing data that was previously inaccessible but can have important implications for future civil and commercial applications.
I watched the footage of the space tests, and it's one of the most beautiful nuclear explosions I have seen, plus the aftereffects were very beautiful.
You forget the most important thing of all.
To make sure that the Spider is really gone.
It's the only way to be sure.
To be honest i still wouldn't be sure.
If it’s an Australian one, that might only make it angry.
Super sweet corn was developed in the 60's by agricultural specialists in Illinois. We lived across the street from one of the guys working on it. He gave us some of the corn from one of the first developed breeds. It's was amazing an revolutionary. Oh, and NO nukes invoked. Just a lot of hard work crossbreeding .
Idea: use thermonuclear warheads in fusion reactors to form ridiculously large pressure waves which would kick the hydrogen into a super-compressed state, which will be hot so you can start a fusion reaction. One method of fusion they are looking into is a method to do something like this but with huge pistons - a high pressure and temperature is generated, before the pistons are shoved in increasing the pressure by a LOT and setting off the fusion reaction.
This sounds like the "Classic Super" H-bomb concept which was ultimately abandoned in favour of the Teller-Ulam staged radiation implosion design. The short answer is that it doesn't work because the region within the hydrogen which has been compressed and heated to extreme temperatures ends up radiating energy away too quickly to be able to sustain a fusion reaction.
5:55
You can see this effect yourself in games like Kerbal Space Program if you have ridiculous propulsion bugs like the stack separator launcher or Danny's "RCS Sling" (which you happened to cameo in when the physics_significance=1 on the RCS thrusters was discovered) where the Kerbonaut, or any other payload, would instantly incinerate, provided you don't go *so* fast that Unity doesn't even calculate atmospheric drag and heating.
Does it involve removing a hurricane? Asking for a friend....
Yeah he forgot that one
@doodr What could go wrong?
BTW, a nuke would not make a dent in a fully formed hurricane. The nuke would be far too small to disturb it enough. This would be true even if you used the Tzar Bomba.
@doodr Only because your incredibly ignorant and value your own entertainment over everything else. No wonder things are going to hell on this planet. The population is getting dumber by the day.
Joe Dufour Quite true. Can you imagine someone so stupid that they don’t recognise an obvious joke?
@@joedufour8188 They did want to nuke the moon for "american morale"...
Codydon Reeder (Cody's Lab) did some tests with high explosives, and found the manhole cover just may have become an explosively formed projectile, and could have survived into space.
Wouldn't that have required some means of concentrating the steel plate to form the projectile?
@@bamascubaman its a piece of cast iron (assuming it was a "manhole cover"), whatever happened, with those forces, it probably didn't hold its shape for very long. the parts that were thinner probably allowed it to fracture pretty quickly. it could have been a malfunction of the film-based high speed cameras, in older film camera videos there are plenty of points where the footage skips. if the shockwave traveling through the ground at around 6km/s reached the camera at about the time the cover was lifted off it could have caused the film camera to skip leading to a much higher velocity estimation when going frame by frame.
obviously conjecture, but unless there was another camera with a wider view that happens to be declassified at some point, it will always be claimed to have made it to space in one piece. i did not read the report.
@@Baigle1 It wasn't based on footage but on mathematical operation from one of the physicists, not exactly accurate
@@Baigle1 Was it actually cast iron? If it was literally armor plate, then it's not.
@@AnimeSunglasses I keep hearing manhole cover in the stories, those are usually made out of cast iron which is a high carbon steel that is very strong but not flexible and it tends to shatter or fracture like the ar500 level 3+ plates when stressed.
I've got number 11. Package Thieves. Call me Captain Overkill .
13:43
"yeah its possible but we would need enough nukes to turn the enirity of the soviet union into a radioactive wasteland"
"agreed, we might aswell just use the nukes on the soviets
Next time on KSP: terraforming Duna by crashing asteroids into it!
Erpoggio that’s going to be ksp3
Scott Manley for nuking asteroids to hit mars!
Let's deorbit Phobos and Deimos !
Aren't comets mostly water? Surely they would be a better option
@@kirkc9643 Depends on the comet. Frozen CO2 should be relatively available too.
@@kirkc9643 Also comets have way more orbital energy so they are harder to meet and deflect than "normal" asteroids.
@@dexter9313 Though if you have time you just need to nudge them towards planet. So I would look at both asteroids and comets for the plan. Far better then just throwing nukes are the problem and hope for the best. Lets use a scalpel and not a sledgehammer to solve this problem. ;)
So... if nuking the polar ice caps of Mars would release CO2, albeit a small amount, couldn't you theoretically start dropping asteroids & comets that are made up of ice onto Mars?
@temporarysanity Lighten up Francis.
Entire "Nuclear" Playlist excellent. You've covered a lot of the hard parts ... but the only powerplants are more incidentally described. Thorium options, breeders, etc - discussing 'from the power side' would really complete this! In other "Crazy things to do with nuclear ... waste" was "send it to space" and yet ... Elon's getting to reliability and scale levels that sort of take this out of "Bogglingly silly" to ... "Well, we've done crazier things actually."
Carl Sagan had "billions and billions" of problems with that plan. Lol.
From what I read about that incident, Sagan didn't accidentally reveal the existence of that "nuke the Moon" study program. He did it quite deliberately, because at the time his Curriculum Vitae was thin and he was seeking a researcher position (he was very young and just starting out in his scientific career), and his work on that study was one of the few things he could list as having done. It turned out that even the name of the study was classified, and his DOD boss took him into a room and told him that if he ever pulled something like that again, a prison cell would be his home for a long time afterward.
yeah, he totally ruined the pronunciation
Sagan had an imagination as wide as the cosmos but 99% of his lifetime opinions on nuclear explosions were later proven worthless. He hyped Nuclear Winter so hard and so long that he was still alive when it was disproven by his fellow scientists; he didn't care. He wanted no nuclear power (so more coal), no nukes in space (so no trip to Mars). The Anti-Nuke movement had already glommed onto it and he wasn't going to pass up that kind of fame. I like Sagan just fine for what he did do, but the man was about the least objective commentator on the subject anybody could ask for. Now, when we DO go to Mars with a nuclear engine, I hope his fans realize it had absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Cosmos.
@@Rutherford_Inchworm_III i am 99.9% (with a repeating bar over the last 9) sure there are no serious plans currently to go to mars using nuclear engines
@@mining1574 well you'd be wrong. Because that is something being looked into, as it would cut the transit time down a lot
One demonstration of the power of a blast, was the Cannikin test in Alaska. A 4.7MT warhead for a Sprint ABM was tested underground, at the bottom of a 1 MILE deep shaft in solid rock. The blast lifted the site 25 FEET up, and permanently raised the shoreline 2 miles away by 5 feet.
The W71 warhead used in that test was also notable for having a solid gold tamper as this made it far more efficient at producing x-rays for its intended use to destroy incoming nuclear warheads in space.
Damn, now i want to disassemble my smoke detector and make supercharged cannabis seeds.
(Not actually, and you shouldn't either lol)
Wow so Karl Pilkington wasn't talking absolute bollocks about a manhole cover placed on a nuclear bomb 😅
An urgent question
Was it a chocolate covered manhole?
Maybe use nukes to steer comets into mars... Water, CO2, CO, CH4, a little more mass from dust etc.
@temporarysanity Chill out.
Glad he gave that warning at the end, I was about to try that moon one.
When you mentioned Edward Teller I thought for sure you would have mentioned the x-ray laser from the Reagan Star Wars era. If you could focus the x rays of a nuke explosion they could take out the enemy warhead. If you had it's exact track and could focus the x-rays from a nuke.
They did experiments. Turns out you can't. Or, that this was a very, very, very silly expensive folly.
And there's the annoying thing that Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere so the gases would just get blown off by solar winds.
Artificial magnetosphere can be created with and array of magnetic artificial satellites. Thou few solar farms are required to power the array.
on a timescale of millions of years. So not an issue for human timescales.
Even without a magnetosphere it would take hundreds of thousands to millions of years for the planet to lose the artificially created atmosphere. By the time it even starts to thin out slightly, humans will be moved on from mars, by far.
Even little Luna would retain a breathable atmosphere for something like a thousand years, if memory serves - and Mars is much larger and experiences less solar wind due to being further away. Mars would EVENTUALLY lose any liberated or generated atmosphere, yes, but by then we would have plenty of time to replenish it provided we survive that long.
Wait is that the reason why? I always thought it was just that Mars had too low gravity to hold an earth-like atmosphere.
Quote of the Day: "If you have nuclear warheads, please don't use them." - Scott Manley
One or more nuclear weapons might save our lives one day, if an asteroid is discovered to be on an Earth impact trajectory (say, a few solar orbits--for the asteroid--prior to the asteroid/Earth "meeting"), and we find it *after* the time window in which other, slower deflection methods (such as a gravity tractor ion drive spacecraft, or a solar sail "tug") would be effective. Unlike the popular mental picture of blowing up such an asteroid, it's more likely that a nuclear weapon would be detonated an appropriate distance above a selected place on the asteroid, vaporizing some of the surface material, which would recoil from the asteroid, imparting a thrust to the body. Nuclear weapons, like guns and knives, are neither evil nor good; like any weapon, they have applications that can save lives as well as take them. It all depends on what they are used for.
@@j.jasonwentworth723 Huh? they did save our lives, they prevented the "cold war" from being a hot one.
To Light a cigarret with a nuclear bomb is the most badass thing ever
Freeman Dyson is a genius. I love his mind!
I don't have any nuclear weapons but IF I did I'd probably be taken a lot more seriously.
I'm taking you more seriously already just in case ( o.o)
Or you'd be invaded by the US, which could be a little painful... :P
14 people took you seriously after that comment
"I suppose I could part with one and still be feared." - Prof Hubert Farnsworth
Are you North Korean?
God: Thou shall not refine deuterium and tritium.
Moses: Uh, what are those?
God: Okay, this is going to be a problem then...
God: Thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me.
14 The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.
15 Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains.
@@ErnestGWilsonII sounds like an ancient description of a mushroom cloud
@@Grimpy970 as a person of science I cannot say for sure if there is a heaven but I can tell you if nuclear weapons are used there will definitely be a hell.
and a very wise man once said those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it
i forgot their name but not their words.
@@slycooper1001 - George Santayana "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Hilarious video ! What's the smallest useable Nuclear reaction ?
Lighting a cigar or cigarette with a nuclear explosion. I feel like this is something Clint Eastwood would do on a daily basis.
good thing you told me not to use nuclear weapons...I was already one foot out the door with mine in tow when you said that. disaster averted.
Hi Scott. The ‘Nuke Mars’ idea has been around since the 70’s, maybe earlier. I recall watching the British Interplanetary Society propose this on the BBC, most likely on the Sky at Night, when I was a kid.
launch a space ship into space with a nuclear bomb is that possible?
Great stuff! Loved the Carl Sagan "billions & billions" reference!
Sagan claimed he never said "billions and billions".
Hello Scott.
You spoke of the behringer crater in this episode. Kind of off topic but what do you think would be the viability of turning the crater into a United States version of arecibo. It already has the shape and would be easy to support under? Just a thought. Love your videos!
I do not think we need Arecibo type facilities any longer. Also...such a project would be far too expensive to construct in the good old USA. Interesting idea though.
This kind of subject seems the perfect compliment to your technical humor way of explaining things, thanks for another fun video!
you can probs heat your home w/ one
for about 0.3 seconds, to a few thousand °C
Warm and toasty.
You’d be warm for the rest of your life
Averaged out across the year the temperature would be just right!
*million °C
Nuclear weapons get much hotter than even a few million K.
Up to 2 billion K, or up to 500 times hotter than the sun. This is achieved in a fraction of a second, but the energy is rediculous.
I love how this video has the xkcd "What If?" book in the background. I'm not sure that a more appropriate book could exist for the topic of this video.
In the wildfires we had last year here in Sweden, the airforce did an experiment to put out a wildfire in one of the armed forces training and testing grounds. In short, they bombed it with help of a jet fighter. As far as I understand, the inital fire was more or less put out - but the blast started more fires around. And no fire fighters could be anywhere near, wich meant time to evacuate and reenter the site. All in all, they concluded it was intersting but nothing they would do again anytime soon.
Sadly not digging due to the leftover isotopes. The idea of easily making lakes and channels was too beautiful to be true:(
Yeah, someone didn't think this through. Or maybe they thought fallout affects only the enemy?
Our understanding of radiation and radiation fallout was pretty shaky for the first half of the 20th century. People used to think it was a great thing and that everyone could use more of it in their lives as it had been shown to take care of cancer, help power green glow in the dark paint (thus why everyone thinks uranium glows green when it’s actually a normal silvery metal that most people couldn’t identify as being different from most other metals except for its unusually high density which is higher than tungsten, the densest metal we use for most non-weapon things). It was probably the sixties and seventies that we started to really understand the dangers radiation can pose to human health and how much radiation is left and how long it takes to fully dissipate after a blast (and it varies. Hiroshima is below normal background radiation levels today, while without human intervention, Chernobyl will be radioactive for millions of years).
@@Treviisolion not 70's even. 1986. That was a wake up call that rings to this day. And without it and experience payed in blood we have gotten then, we might have faced something even worse by today.
@@Treviisolion Wasn't uranium glass the initial source of the radioactive green glow trope?
Pyro Nicampt I had not heard of these, but I would not be surprised if it contributed, especially as most watches used radium, though I believe the public at that time never learned much distinction between radium and uranium, or thought they behaved the same way as they were both radioactive.
If you want to melt the ice cap on Mars, divert a 3 km asteroid... with an Orion drive.
a 3km wide asteroid would do a heck of a lot more than just melt the ice caps, 400m wide would be more than enough for that purpose
@@a4h426 But if you pick an asteroid that's mostly ice, you're actually adding gasses to the atmosphere at the same time.
Korenn Halley’s comet? Good old 5.5km of ice. *RUBS HANDS READY FOR 2061*
@Ordinary Sessel The amount of energy required to send our excess co2 to mars would generate more co2 than you're getting rid of.
Greatest real estate sales pitch “come see our lake, it’s only slightly radioactive!”
I would be willing to bet the core geometry was a floating hollow pit. Probably the last of this series of core. A lot of times Teller made fizzles or in this case with the core not effected by surrounding detonation to reach critical mass no matter how roughly it was handled in transit. You can just picture how this detonation occured on a single ignition source. As the wave front of the detonation reached the suspended hollow pit the wave front timing though the seeming vacuum around the pit was large enough distance to blend the arrival time on one side of the cavity around the pit so that while it never reached the pit exactly as a wave front perfectly spherical it pushed in the side of the hollow pit a nanosecond before the compression reached the far side of the pit. A nanosecond is quite a bit of time in this detonation front so the calculation was it would smear out the compression wave. But the calculation hadn't been carried through to the inside of the hollow pit which almost reached the center simultaneously. Almost. Sort of like Ivy Mike, what do you mean tritium is generated during the detonation, ya'll kinna make that much in the time available.
8:00 YET!
There is a lot to say here. I am switching from telecommunications engineering to plasma confinement device controls engineering. This is a fun rabbit hole to fall down. Omega Tau has good podcasts on it, and there is a freely available 2012 IAEA textbook called "fusion physics". Those two sources cover most relevant questions to fusion as it exists today.
you will never get stable plasma field in your research you are missing the main ingredient and going down the wrong path.
The STARS ARE NOT FUSION BASED , FUSION IS A BYE PRODUCT OF STARS .
That`s why every fusion reactor on the planet has never even had a stable field for more then seconds , costs more power to keep running than have produced altogether.
The fusion research is failing is because of what i call the hawking effect , scientists in this field continue down hawking`s path that the universe must work as you believe , yet the universe continues to give the bird to hawking based non scientific research of which FUSION without matter state changes will always fail.
3 experimental fusion reactors not one has produced even enough power to pay for one firing.
Have wasting resources and power on your blind journey to failure.Don`t feel alone though cause china, russia , and great britian are wasting their time.
Ossie Dunstan I’m sorry but you should at least spell check before making a convincing argument. You should also at least try to make a convincing argument while you’re at it. If you’re unable to understand the problem and the physics enough to do that, then the only thing you’re doing is spinning your wheels in front of an audience that isn’t interested.
Furthermore you seem unhinged. Come back to reality and put the effort in if you want to have an actual conversation.
@@ossiedunstan4419 Nuclear reactions and bombs had plenty of failed attempts before we got it right... Failure is the best teacher. If we gave up after a couple failed attempts, there would be much less in the world for us to marvel at.
One of the best summaries of the problems of magnetic confinement fusion reactors is this: it's like trying to squeeze jello with your fingers.
@@willis936 This is one of those times I want to reply to the original reply but bloody hell, where do you even start deconstructing that drivel.
Considering the resident in the White House, I'm not sure posting this video is such a good idea...
Star Trek: Enterprise actually featured a concept in one of its episodes that used a planetary beam fired from the surface of Mars that can reach out to any comet or asteroid in the entire solar system (hell, it can reach Earth as the episode demonstrated) and use it to deorbit the target and crash a comet filled with ice into the atmosphere of Mars and use it to add pressure to the atmosphere. This was their first step towards terraforming a whole planet.
I got a real bang out of that, thanks.
Orion brought back some fond memories, but sadly not practical ones....
"Hands on experimenters"
"tail", but it was quite a story...
I have no idea why this came across as "tale". I must have had a baud rate mismatch between my brain and my thumbs. Good catch.
One of my high school teachers in Winnipeg suggested using airburst nukes for snow removal after a big winter storm ... the two biggest problems would have been fall out and flooding
There was an early Macintosh space flight sim (appropriately named Orion) that used the Orion drive concept to explain the propulsion. This was on the early monochrome macs, though, so you basically got a planetarium program where you could reposition the observation point. The planets were marked with their astrological symbols as well, instead of being able to get a view of them up close.
I always thought about setting some bombs off along fault zones to maybe trigger earthquakes manually and prevent bigger ones from occurring without notice
Great video Scott. Although I think it would be crazy not to consider nuclear powered rockets for use in interplanetary space. Science progresses when people think outside the box and even though these schemes to harness nuclear energy were impractical they were interesting to contemplate.
The biggest issue with nuking mars which isn't touched on often is that mars lacks a magnetic field so even if you did make the Martian atmosphere thicker the sun would slowly blast it of.
I hear that a lot. It's a very slow process and at some point we could use a massive magnet at the L1 Lagrange point to deflect solar wind.
@@kukuc96 just borrow some magnetite ore from Kursk Magnetic Anomaly
@@stallfighter You could get it to space with a hydrogen bomb
There was a purported project to have a bare reactor core, pass helium through it and get massive thrust from the heat available. Massive thrust did seem possible but not as massive as the concrete shielding that would be needed.
I'm old enough to get the joke and laugh out loud about Sagan having billions and billions of problems with that idea. Manley, you're endlessly fun!
The most crazy thing you can use nuclear weapons for is destroying a city.
Right in the feels :-(
atleast we got anime
@@breastmilkgaming Still working on if that's a good or bad development.
@@MouseGoat unfortunately at the time they were used, the alternative options tended towards "much MUCH worse", with death counts projected into the millions if a land-based street-by-street battle was to go ahead. Remember the Tokyo firestorm killed 100,000 people overnight without a nuke in sight and Japanese High Command didn't flinch (they didn't flinch about Hiroshima either until they realised a day later that it was ONE bomb that did the damage)
War is a terrible thing and trying to second-guess events afterwards isn't overly helpful. Dropping a nuke on an uninhabited spot where the Japanese could see it is highly unlikely to have convinced the High Command that they should "stop, now" and as it was it still took some decisive action with the Japanese power structure to get a surrender after Nagasaki - there were _still_ crazies at the controls who wanted to "keep on fighting, never surrender, go down in glory" and take everyone around them along for the ride.
@G Guest From what I hear, the reasons for surrender actually involved the possibility of the soviets invading, and Japan would rather surrender to the US. Nukes apparently had no weight in the decision.
I believe Edwin Teller also proposed digging a canal with nuclear weapons from the Mediterranean Sea to the Qattara Depression Project to create an artificial inland sea in Egypt. Naturally the Egyptians at that time weren't too keen on the idea of using nukes, but the canal and project itself is very interesting. Making the canal big enough to become tidal would solve most of the 'lake' salting up over time. There's a Wikipedia page on it.
Lighting a cig from nuclear blast is like a cancer speedrun
I always thought that the craziest thing to do with a nuke would be to kill millions of civilians by launching it at a city.
The second craziest thing would be to let it sit in a silo, submarine, or bomber, and proceed to intimidate potential enemies by brandishing said silo/sub/bomber menacingly.
These ten ideas seem positively tame by comparison.
Ukraine shows what happens to countries that don't have nukes, if a nuclear armed one wants what the unarmed one has. There are a few other examples I would give but people would get triggered, being brainwashed.
Yeah and then try and claim they actually saved lives by ending the war against a country whose navy they had already practically decimated.
Am I crazy for I looked for this comment?
"If you have nuclear weapons, please don't try any of these."
And also please turn yourself in to the authorities.
I don't think that the US government wants to admit any wrong doing with these things, so no they wont turn themselves in to themselves.
I forget which city it is, but there's some city in the US that issues a $500 fine for detonating a nuclear device in city limits.
I'll post an update when I find it.
UPDATE: Chico, California has a $500 fine for detonating nukes within city limits.
@@MarioMonte13 that actually makes me want to figure out how to get that fine (and *only* that fine)
Simon Buchan False confession with convincing details?
@@SimonBuchanNz make a device with an explosive yield of 1 stick of dynamite.
Exploding one on your own planet sounds like the craziest thing you can ever do.
I saw what u did there Manley. Nice Carl Sagan Easter egg. "Billions and billions" of problems 😁
Just checking on "old" videos.... wow so minimal the desk is....🤣 no Lego SaturnV with 39A tower...no shuttle Discovery/Hubble (which happens to be my favorite series of yours) I built my Apollo lander while watching live....Thanks @Scott Manley , fly safe, even in ZeroG !
The craziest thang you can do with a nuclear weapon is BUILD ONE. At one time there are about 60,000. We are truly an insane species.
why? nukes are awesome. as shown in this video we have lots of great uses, how else are we going to dig our enormus kilometer wide canals through the sahara? in all seriousness nukes are like fire, applied to a problem correctly it can be safe and uniquely capable.
@@ravener96 You so unsane.
@@larrybeckham6652 not sure which part you are referring to, the joke or the nuanced stance
@@larrybeckham6652 REEEEEEEEEEEE someone has a nuanced opinion!
There no nance at Ground Zero.
I mentioned about the cigarette guy, Ted Taylor, a ways back on one of your videos, also it should be noted, Taylor ran Project Orion with Dyson.
Thoroughly enjoy your channel your banter your accents your bald head and your idea about moving a comet to crash into Mars pretty ingenious if you ask me and sounds plausible. 🙏🤘🏼❤️
Congratz for the 1.000.000 👌
Scott Manley: "If you have nuclear weapons please don't try any of these."
Kim Jong-un sighs and puts down nuclear detonator.
I am more concerned with what Israel could do with theirs than with North Korea tbh.
... he was about to light up his cigarette with.
Charles Wagener Putin too
*TheFLOW1978,* it's the only way to -be sure- get the whole tip instantly and evenly to a good temperature without muddying the taste
@@jonharson , why? Israel's use of their nuclear arsenal is and would be entirely predictable. They will do what they've always done, and respond with extreme effect, If ever one of their belligerent neighbors uses a WMD against them. N Korea is much less predictable. They are just as likely to sail one into a harbour, as launch it on a ICBM.
Love your videos! So very well researched, and even as an old-fart guy, I've learned so much from them.
Very informative. I really learned something here.
Dude! Where do you get your awesome t shirts?