The Smallest Nuclear Explosions in History
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 18 май 2024
- While everyone talks about big nuclear explosions, it turns out that there are plenty of small ones, either from small weapons, failed tests that fizzled, or 'safety tests' that went critical.
And yes, it caught my attention that the record for biggest explosion in a movie had an energy content equivalent to about 60 tons of TNT making it 3x bigger than the US W54 warhead on its lowest yield configuration.
Find many more historic films of nuclear tests at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - great footage, shame they had so many fizzles.
www.youtube.com/@LivermoreLab...
Follow me on Twitter for more updates:
/ djsnm
I have a discord server where I regularly turn up:
/ discord
If you really like what I do you can support me directly through Patreon
/ scottmanley 
Наука
Looking at tower surviving 200T, I now understand, why no one bothers with attacking the radar/ radio towers (like UK radar towers during WWII, Germans tried but quickly gave up).
Unless you can squarely hit the antenna or two of the legs near the base, most of the energy just goes right through the holes!
ye, maybe a Earthquake Bomb like the Tall Boy or Grand Slam might worked, but they themself had been quite rare and die only bomb loads that would not have been offloaded somewhere and if if would have been worth the afford since the Towers can be replaced with relative ease, compared to Bridges, Tunnels and Bunkers for what they had been used
the only viable way to hit radar towers is to crash into them. then your out one pilot and one plane.
A good example of having towers up and running in 24 hours or less) is Iraq post 2003, providing endless examples. Repeated strikes with GPS guided 500 lb HE would typically be repaired by Iraqi teams in less then a day. Their abilities were impressive given the big money spent to knock them out, and the minuscule amount to have them up again.
You don’t go after the easily repaired towers - you go after the hard to hit electronics…
Today I learned that the number of "oops, slight miscalculation" in nuclear weapons tests is "unsettling" times greater than I expected/would have liked.
Not necessarily "miscalculation", maths may very well have been correct but the outcome still not matching reality, mostly because many of the relevant physical effects were previously unknown, being discovered for the first time...
@@u1zhacastle bravo moment
@@billymcmedic4221Can you imagine being the guys in the control room for that one?
Having several kids, I am always amazed at how hearty the human body is. Then I think about the fact that a few joules of "light" of the wrong kind fo light will kill you.
a few jouls propelling a needle in the wrong direction will as well.
Meanwhile, technically if we find a way to stop our squishy bits from sloshing we could start using lithobraking and springs instead of parachutes for humans.
From Orbit.
Its not about the energy, its always about the delivery.
@@AnonymousAnarchist2
I bet you were dropped on your head
From orbit
Byatch
-Robert E Frost
@@AnonymousAnarchist2 Aye, about the delivery. I accidentally discharged a capacitor bank into my left arm recently, it held about 500 joules of electric energy. It hurt like hell, but was fine again half a day later. Somehow I think taking a 9mm bullet to my arm wich also has about 500 joules would have hurt more :D
I like how in the kinda medieval-like post-apocalyptic world of the manga/anime film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, people call radiation "poisonous light"
> _if we find a way to stop our squishy bits from sloshing we could start using lithobraking and springs_
Well, we're not alone with this problem:
*Rincewind:* "I'm not going to ride on a magic carpet! I'm afraid of grounds!"
*Conina:* "You mean heights. And stop being silly."
*Rincewind:* "I know what I mean! It's the grounds that kill you!"
The fact that a "safety test" with only one detonator activated still resulted in 500T explosions says quite alot about the supposed "safety" of those systems. 😬 And the idea that soldiers would be carrying around small devices for use in demolition or as mortars is just absolutely insane. Even a fizzle would create battlefields checkered with radiation. Insanity.
They're bombs. TF you think they're supposed to do when they *correctly* function? Play Kumbaya and lecture us on the climate, patriarchy and income inequality?
And PVT Joe Snuffy, PV2 Schmuckatelli, CPL Tentpeg and SGT Rock having a SADM or Davy Crockett? That'd mean there's a major war. They don't issue out the party favors until there's a party. Commanders were loathe to even have the damn things because the paperwork and security requirements were a nightmare, and the generals and politicians were always worried that a mere Sergeant would nuke the Russians and kick off WW III over a misunderstanding.
The point of them was to defend ground, and giving Mother-Earth-Gaia a new case of erupting radioactive acne was only if it was a no-shit emergency. Like if the WWII strength Soviet army came rolling through the Fulda Gap. Denying them the ability to resupply would blunt their ability to advance. In a way, not issuing them out in that situation would be insanity. The point of a war is to *_WIN._* By any and all means necessary.
On the point of generalized danger, I was a soldier. It wasn't a safe job. I've handled conventional explosives before. Some parts of handling those explosives bothered me. (Blasting caps and frag grenades, mainly: They're a bit tetchy someimes.) But I learned what I can and cannot safely do with them.
I carried around six 40mm HEDP rounds in pouches on a drop leg panel nearly every day for 13 months. One would be enough to make me and anyone within 5m of me chunky salsa.
I've taken lunch sitting on a porch with a 155mm artillery round converted to a pressure plate triggered IED. (Why? Because EOD wasn't going to make it out until after *they* had lunch, so I may as well catch a meal while I waited.)
I've been next to a 2,000 lb mk. 84 bomb on a bomb cart on a flight line.
In every case, I learned to take it phlegmatically: No need to worry about things because if something went wrong, someone else would have a shitty day and lots of paperwork. And it would definitely *be* someone else because getting turned into bologna vapor would happen so fast I would be dead before I knew what happened.
Scorched Earth policy that literally scorches the Earth.
Checkering the area with radiation was part of the plan; it would kill exposed infantry and force vehicles to operate under hazmat conditions, reducing their effectiveness. The Cold War plans for WW3 were brutal.
*a lot
Honestly, the potential use of chemical weapons early in the cold war is likely far worse
I knew the Infantry Colonel who's unit was the first to be assigned the Davy Crockett. They had one set up in display and it fell over on it's own with nobody touching it thanks to improper assembly by the crew. When I asked him about the system, Colonel Halsey said, "It was a million dollar warhead on a 37 cent launcher!"
"Soldiers, your task will be to use the Davy Crockett. You will learn how to properly set it up, select a target and fire it."
- "Will we also learn how to reload it?"
"Trust me, you won't need to know that."
whose*
@@h.a.9880 Another friend was a tank commander in West Germany who saw the battle plans a Lieutenant with special clearance would be exposed to and he noticed his tank unit didn't exist in any plans beyond the opening phase. I knew someone else who was talking with a Pershing crew member and he made some comment about East Germany being a smoking mess if Pershing was ever used. The Pershing guy replied that the targets of those missiles were all in West Germany because that's where the East German soldiers would be.
🎶 Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the artillery 🎶 🎵
@@Peter_S_I was confused, I thought you were talking about the M26 Pershing tank... but you're talking about the Pershing missile.
The smallest nuclear test that failed was a design by Ted Taylor who worked on miniaturizing nuclear weapons. He worked through a series of designs: Bee, Hornet, Viper, and finally the last one called “The Puny Plutonium Bomb or P.P. shot.” It was the first known complete failure in the history of nuclear testing. After the failed test, Enrico Fermi told him, “Now you’re making progress.” “You’ve fired a dud.” Ted Taylor also designed the largest fission weapon tested - Ivy King. Taylor and George Gamow co-authored the technical paper, “What The World Needs Is a Good Two-Kiloton Bomb." As a space buff, you might be interested in Taylor's designs for a nuclear bomb-powered rocket that could have lifted a mass equivalent to an entire city block. The limited test ban treaty of 1963 put an end to that pursuit as it banned atomic explosions in outer space. The information comes from the book, "The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor."
Taylor didn't design the spaceship (known as "Project Orion"), but he was part of the team and was responsible for the nuclear shaped charges that would power the vehicle. In George Dyson's book, Taylor states that in the end he was okay with the project being canceled because he was getting pretty good at building small bombs and was worried it would catch on.
LOTS of interesting stories by Ted in "GEORGE DYSON - Strange Love - Or, how they learned to start worrying and love to hate the bomb." I found that online somewhere. Example: "The smallest tactically deployed nuclear weapon was the Davy Crockett, with a warhead weighing less than 60 pounds. It was not designed by Taylor. 'I tried to find out what was the smallest bomb you could produce, and it was a lot smaller than Davy Crockett, but it was never built in those years,' he said. 'It certainly has been since then. It was a full implosion bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about 6 inches in diameter.'”
I suspect the "What The World Needs Is a Good Two-Kiloton Bomb" might be about what was said about defending Germany from a mass Soviet tank invasion without destroying the country: I paraphrase, "German villages are two kilotons apart."
@@winstonsmith478IIRC Taylor also became known for lighting his cigarette with a nuclear bomb. He put it at the focus of a parabolic mirror that was pointed at the bomb, and he ducked into a trench beneath it. When the bomb went off it lit it up. So not a healthy lifestyle in more ways than one, I guess, but he got cool points for it.
@@RCAvhstapeTo piggyback off your comment, to address the OP's suggestion to make videos about the book's contents... Scott _did_ make a video about _Project: Orion_ so it's possible he's already come across and/or read the book in question.
Wait, banning atomic explosions in space - doesn't that make Type Ia supernovas illegal?
The one point safety tests are scary. Fizzles are supposed to be easy, for safety reasons. If for example, a B-52 crashes with a megaton-range bomb on it and the bomb's chemical explosives cook off in a fire, you absolutely do not want any fission to occur, but those tests make it look very possible. And I use the B-52 because there were several accidents in the past where this sort of accident did happen, particularly in North Carolina, Spain, and Greenland. Fortunately none of those weapons went nuclear.
Fun story: The North Carolina one very nearly DID go nuclear. Both bombs had all but one safety fail... and it was a different safety in both. So it wasn't a case of one safety being better than all the rest, it was a case of blind luck if ANY safety would work.
Tybee bomb still missing, Savannah, Georgia
Wow i never knew the yields could be so low. The neutron weapons like davy crocket are terrifying.
and to think they were designed to help stop the advance of soviet tank crews xD they were that terrified of those measely T's ? :D
Davy Crocket is not technically considered a neutron bomb.
@@Evan_Bellthats fair, i guess it is the neutron effects that are scary to ponder, even if they werent the primary design goal.
@@ManBearPigCreative Yeah, it's just a natural effects of such low yield weapons.. A product of the scaling laws for effect magnitudes vs radius.
For small weapons, gamma and neutron dosages exceed the lethal radius for blast and thermal radiation.
@@maeton-gaming
Weren't terrified of the tanks themselves, but their numbers. The USSR made enough to roll over Europe easily (in theory at least). So the choice was to build and maintain equal number of tanks in Europe (very expensive), or just use a couple of small nukes to neutralize them (easy and cheap). Wasn't a hard choice.
Also at that time tanks were far more dangerous than today. With no drones, GPS, RPGs, guided missiles, smart ammunition, or even helicopters, tanks were extremely hard to kill, and they had formidable firepower.
Just when you think Scott's vids can't get any more interesting, niche or original.... he pulls this out the bag..👍🏻
bag‘o bombs
7:06
Doesn't it look like there is an open highway between the test site and this camera position?
If that was a fizzle ...
Alan B Carr the historian in residence at LANL recently uploaded test film of the Kiwi TNT explosion of an experimental nuclear rocket core, where the line between criticality excursion and nuclear detonation is entertainingly blurred. Yield was probably around a couple tons TNT, but because it was done in the mid 60s there's quality high speed color footage of the event and we can clearly see the blue glow of gamma-induced air ionization surrounding the device before it decides it's had enough of this world and converts itself into a firework of thousands of burning chunks of 235. The title of the video is "Kiwi TNT: An Explosive Nuclear Rocket Test" and is honestly one of the most fascinating pieces of video to emerge from the nuclear age.
ruclips.net/video/4zSCdYu2Ps8/видео.html, 19:50 for the blue
It's never going to end well if you're antagonising Kiwis. Take it from an Australian...
7:12 wow... cars traveling down road while nuclear test going on in the background.
Yes, imagine if it exploded at the expected yield...
I never fully realized how many fizzles there were (discounting the intentional ones), which makes it all the more impressive that they got it right the first time with Trinity.
This. I thought it was mostly flawless, guess there were way more than i thought!
Trinity wasn't trying to optimise to minimise radioactive materials or size. Later tests often were trying to do that sort of optimising, notably by increasing the compression level greatly. Or in some cases were trying to convert a non-spherical shape to spherical or close enough as it was being explosively compressed.
Trinity was over-engineered. Like all engineering, anyone can design a building to stand up. The impressive part is making a building that just barely stands up. Elegance in design isn't when there's nothing left to add; It's when there's nothing left to take away.
@@bobthecannibal1 well put
@@jamesday426 makes sense. I am really curious about the late atomic age stuff / probably still classified stuff. All sorts of interesting “pushing the envelope” size/shape wise, then also all the crazy shaped charge/laser pumper stuff.
That and maneuverable reentry vehicles, and tech in the Inertial Guidance / Celestial Navigation, i think that is less classified i just need to read up on it more.
The way nuclear weapons dump their energy is so interesting, it doesn't scale linearly, and I'm almost 110% certain 200 tons of regular TNT would never have left any_part_ that tower intact, measuring (or figuring out how to measure and compare explosives, even regular high order detonations, is tricky business).
Great video, wish they had filmed more with the sun in view, never saw that one before, really shows how bright they are.
The real question is, if you ignore fizzles, what was the smallest successful nuclear explosion? Was it that Davy Crockett demonstration at ~20 tons of TNT?
What about the Soviets, or for that matter, the other nuclear powers? The reported yields of most of the North Korean tests were tiny, too.
Still classified fun stuff too probably
"Do you mind if we use the tower after you?" was a little more sass than I was expecting from nuclear scientists...
An old boss of mine was an Army vet who'd been stationed in Germany on a Davy Crockett team. He said that as they were trained, they were to consider themselves expendable in action should the Cold War turn hot as practical implementation (allowing time for processing of orders, setup, the shorter real world range accuracy would require, the geography of the area, etc) would put them within the area of effect.
at one point it was expected we'd be fighting while nukes were going off left and right, and having a large civilian population was better, once ICBMs started hitting urban areas. It was a percentages game.
This brings a whole new meaning to the line "Say hello to my little friend"
I think the recent laser fusion experiment at Lawrence Livermore is technically the smallest nuclear explosion in history.
Lets call it the smallest intentional man-made nuclear explosion.
The smallest is propaply a single suitable atom undergoing spontaneous fission, or some kind of air- cosmic radiation interaction.
In the slightly bigger category, many particle accellerator experiments come to mind.
@@nos9784not really, by definition an explosion is the release of a wave of pressure where the rate of dispersal occurs above the speed of sound, forming a shock wave (see the difference between detonation and deflagration). Individual fission reactions do not cause this. As for the fusion reaction, I imagine there would be a small amount of pressure generated, but whether or not it was enough to cause a shockwave is another matter.
Regardless, inertial confinement fusion does act very similarly to a 1 stage thermonuclear device, no uranium fission bomb needed, just a high power chirp laser and an ablative polymer tamper
Actually…🤓 🤓 🤓 🙄🤣
@@BennyAscent interesting... sounds like we need a quantum dynamics equivalent to pressure for my stuff to count :D
I'm more interested in nerding out than a battle of definitions, though.
I think in nuclear reactions, the energy is released in form of kinetic energy of the products as well as radiation.
So, a few particles and an electromagnetic field... if those particals are faster than sound, they might count as a dispersing pressure wave when they disperse their energy via interaction with an environment.
My grandpa was part of a division that handled the howitzer fired nuclear warheads shown. He said we were scary close to using them. He became chemist and professor and i inherited his piece of the molten trinity tower.
It's great to see you apply your knowledge and skills to this subject ! Just to point out to anyone interested, those demon core incidents which released the equivalent energy of a few milligrams of TNT - a lot of that energy was released in the form of neutron radiation which is deadly as it damages the DNA structures inside cells, and also converts the atoms in a human body into radioactive elements.
My father was working on the Nevada Test Site in the 1960's. He observed a shoulder fired tactical nuclear weapon being shot. Everyone had to turn away from the detonation- sky lit up in an intense violet-purple, then they could immediately turn around and look at the detonation. He was never told what the yield was suppose to be.
Probably just saw the Davy Crocket demo and confused the details. People misremember things all the time.
@@Pho7on No. My father was a Caltech graduate, a scientist, and would not confuse what he witnessed. He was intimately involved in multiple nuclear test shots.
@@Pho7on "People misremember things all the time" along with "details change over the years" and "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance" among many others are some of the favourite crutches of the false skeptic and conman alike. If you don't believe something, ask questions until you either know it to be true, or can prove it as false. Never just make an unsubstantiated claim against someone with no evidence.
How dramatic. I made an appraisal of an anecdote and you act like I infringed on scientific law.
Rocket testing: Embarrassing if your test stand is'nt there afterwards.
Nuclear testing: Embarrassing if your test stand IS there afterwards.
Great as always. If looking for offbeat nuclear subjects wish you could do one on the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex (KUMSC) - more nuclear weapons there than anywhere else in the world. Probably a sensitive area - early satellite views showed what looked like an artillery position on top of the roof (since gone). I once got on the base with an AF friend - we were at the golf course parking lot and I pulled out my camera to get shots of Manzano mountain, not knowing that KUMSC was across the street. It only took a minute for a security car to pull up near us but they were nice about it.
Getting the yiey below Davy Crockett's lowest 10 ton option is actually very interesting theme in regards to precision weaponry like small cruise missiles, high caliber ATGMs, AGMs, loitering artillery shells and drones. Not to mention there are weapons nowadays that can fit several if not all of the categories I've mentioned and they have 150-155mm caliber and sometimes enough booster/fuel to get to 40, 60 or even 80+ km ranges. Imagine TOW crew being armed with extended range launcher for 12-20km that deliver sub 1 ton directed nuke to the target, maybe even in top attack fire and forget mode. And that's the low end capability for range.
Would be able to beat a LOT of fictional armies.
Thanks for the great information Scott, super well structured and interesting
Towards the end of the Cold War the US was looking at "micro nukes" for torpedoes. There was doubt that existing torpedoes would be able to one-shot things like Typhoons and Oscars, due to their double-hulls and size. They figured nukes of a yield in the tens of tons wouldn't be detectable detonated underwater at sea. Then the Cold War ended so the problem became moot. The smallest, physical size, contemplated would have been, "about the size of a grapefruit". That was when they were studying pulse units for Orion back in the day.
We're lucky to have Scott Manley because he is full of unique surprises. He delivers "The World's Smallest Nuclear Explosions" right out of left field. Highly gifted fellow, the Manley guy.
He should be the science officer on star trek or for UK space agency
Thanks for all the information and videos Scott.
There is a non-zero chance that the footage shown of Castle Bravo was filmed by a plane full of scientists and instruments piloted by my father. He was a career Navy aviator who participated in Castle Bravo flying an observer aircraft.
For what it's worth... he retired after 25 years of service in 1966, with the cancers already taking hold. Before his death at age 49, he had six different cancers diagnosed, including leukemia, melanoma, lung cancer, CRC, kidney cancer and liver cancer. I was quite young when he passed. And yes, the Veteran's Administration attempted to claim that it wasn't a service-related disability responsible for the cancers. They failed that claim in court.
Sometimes, footage is obtained at a high price.
sorry to hear that, mate. Never know if it was deliberate negligence in those days or they just plain didn't realise the danger to the serviceman.
Must have been one hell of a view though
OMG. Macabre but fascinating history combined with Scott's hilarious descriptive comments for each detonation. :D
With the demon core imagine that 3mg of tnt going off on a table, except instead of a small pop noise, all the energy just goes directly into ripping apart the DNA of everyone in the room.
Great video, love the fizzle test footage. Also in regards to literally everyone going "science Tuber" and doing videos on nukes etc.... so many get stuff so incredibly wrong
So I was actually looking for a video about small nuke tests a couple days before your upload. Thanks a lot, great video.
Great video Scott.
Thanks, Scott for the fascinating story, great footage, and "atomic" histroy.
The neutron bombs are truly terrifying.
The Mk-54 wasn't a true neutron bomb.
Actually they are not. An enhanced radiation, or neutron, bomb is actually just a very small thermonuclear weapon in the range of a few kilotons to perhaps 10 kt max. They are just optimized to generate a lethal pulse of neutrons instead of heat and pressure as their primary kill mechanism, but they are still just very small nuclear weapons with lethal ranges measured in perhaps 1 to 2 km compared to the city killing multi megaton weapons killing every thing withing many tens of km.
Why do you find them more scary than any other nuclear weapon?
@@schr75
I guess the scary part is dying through the innumerous horrible effects that radiation can cause to you
Because the detonation may cause no apparent true devastation until living things begin vomiting and turning red.@@neshirst-ashuach1881
It is interesting to note that a lot of the low yield tests at the NTS were primary (the fission part of the fission-fusion reaction) designs for thermonuclear weapons. Some of these tests would then have had a similar device tested out in the Pacific with the fusion stage resulting in the full weapon yield (and a single primary design might have been used in multiple different thermonuclear weapon designs).
I have no idea whether this comment is gibberish or I’m just sleep deprived so ima leave this reply here so some notif will drag me back here when my brain isn’t scrampled egg
@@oberonpanopticonmades sense to me
@@oberonpanopticonIt's not gibberish, it's accurate. Or at least mostly. Many full two stage devices were also tested at NTS.
I don't know (and I don't know if it is declassified or not) the yield of primaries in Thermonuclear bombs, but I always assumed they had to generate around 1% of the final yield (or more in early ones), unless their technology to redirect neutrons and photons for long enough was really ingenious very quickly. Idea of 1kT primary detonating 5MT secondary (approx. 0.02%) would be really scary. Also (reason why I thought it could be classified) it could give insight into how efficient warhead geometry and materials were. Which would be one more information about those that is given to others. Not saying I don't believe you, I do in fact. I just wonder if you have any info on ratios or even specific numbers on some warheads (yield of primary and secondary - I don't think there were many devices that had tertiary, since it would be big and maintenance would be difficult) that you could share.
The Soviets and British had layered secondaries. Does make you wonder if the latter’s notoriously porous security is how Stalin managed to build his Tsar Bomba.
Great video, Scott...👍
Many years ago, a friend asked me why there were no nuclear hand grenades. My reply was to ask him "How far can you throw a grenade?"
The best Olympic shot put athletes might be able to throw a nuclear hand grenade far enough that they wouldn't be caught in the fireball or the instant-death part of the pressure wave of some of the smaller fizzles. Of course they'd probably die of radiation poisoning a few weeks later, but they could throw a nuclear hand grenade and not die instantly, and that's really something.
Fascinating video! I've wondered about this for some time now!
I loved the caption on the 'Castle Bravo" test, " I never knew Lithium 7 would do that" 🤣🤣 . The info on the "Worlds fastest manhole cover" from Operation Plumb bob is fascinating as well. There is debate weather or not that the cover achieved escape velocity intact, or if it was traveling so fast it vaporized by the time it exited the atmosphere, but the statement that it was only captured in one frame on the high speed camera ( now you see it, now you don't) calculated it traveling instantly at some 6 digit MPH speed, approximated @ 130,000 MPH
"Ye canny break the laws of physics" -- Commander Scott, Engineering, NCC1701B.
The energy budget and physics doesn't add up - the Pascal B explosion was another squib shot, 300 tonnes yield. To get the "manhole cover" (actually a lump of concrete and steel weighing 800kg) to accelerate to anything like the speed extrapolated from the camera recording would have required accelerating the air in the vertical shaft (about 180kg in total) to the same speed and more, and the speed of sound in air is a hard physical limit to the velocity the air and the shaft cover could attain.
no, with shockwaves the speed of sound goes out the window
@@tommihommi1 Sadly they don't. It would be nice but... Nukes do cheat a little, direct radiative heating of the atmosphere around the fireball from X-rays cause a faster-than-speed-of-sound shockwave as measured by instruments at a distance, but that's a very special case that didn't apply in the Pascal-B test since there was no direct radiative coupling between the test device and the air in the shaft. It's a nice tale, the nuclear-powered manhole that flew so fast it left the Earth forever but unfortunately it's just a tale.
@@robertsneddon731 Speed of sound in air is limited to Mach 1, but the speed of air is not.
@@captsorghum If the air in front is being pushed from the back by more air then it travels at the "speed of sound", the speed a pressure pulse can move in a given medium such as air. Increasing the temperature increases the SoS for any gas but it's why guns driven by chemical propellant limit out at about 1700m/s (tank guns, typically), the very hot gas (mostly CO2) behind the shell can't move faster than its SoS to accelerate it more.
The SoS for hydrogen is much higher than air so that gas heated up is used for collision experiments up to 7000m/s. For higher speeds there are railguns and rockets.
Thank You for excellent content.
TBH I was expecting a Marine tossing one through a doorway like it was a thermonuclear flashbang.
You need to achieve critical mass to build a nuclear warhead, so there is a lower limit to how small warheeads can be.
@@zockertwinsnot if you increase the density of the material.
The critical mass of U235 is 52kg, but these 'backback' bombs will use less and rely on compression
I really enjoyed this video, thank you!!
Fascinating stuff indeed! Thanks, Scott! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
What a fantastically original idea for a video, and brilliantly presented. Bravo
So informative. and So funny. love you Scott!
Nice one Scott.
Thanks for thinking of this. It was very interesting
Interesting, as always, Scott
Great topic!
I remember back in the late 1980's, there was interest in very small nuclear weapons because Soviet submarines were becoming to tough and difficult to detect.
The thought was using a very small warhead to kill the submarine wouldn't increase worldwide tensions. While the jury is still out on that one, even after thirty years, the plans were ultimately scraped because the end of the Cold war.
Very interesting subject thanks for covering
2:22 - Anyone know why it says "do not turn above 27 hours" ? I guess no one was brave enough to try it out lol.
Perhaps because above 27 hours the counter will roll over to zero and trigger the detonation circuits instantly? 100.000 seconds is just over 27 and a half hours.
Very good point@@Stoney3K
Gotta love anytime Scott uploads. Gotta love anytime Scott uploads.
Regarding the competition between Los Alamos and Lawrence-Livermore, there used to be a saying at LANL, "The soviets may be our opponents, but Lawrence - Livermore is the ENEMY!"
JPL v Goddard
Ah yes, the good old "who hates us more than ourselves"
This is one of my favorite channels, thank you for explaining stuff in a way that simple country feller like me can understand! 🚀
Love the slow mo, you can see the rebound shockwave on the ground going back into the explosion
What would happen if You turn it above 27 hours?
You wrap around to zero and BOOM.
Great video Scott.
Felt a bit short tho, think I can watch an hour long video of you talking about nuclear weapons history.😊
You're in luck, he has a whole playlist on the subject made a few years ago
@@QuantumHistorian I know, already watched those twice now😂
@@samuraidriver4x4 taking notes, don't ya? ;)
@@ivoivanov7407 I find it hella interesting 😁
Have to love the commentary under the test names on screen!
Lithium-6 deuteride (aka heavy hydrogen) is the primary fusion fuel in thermonuclear weapons.
I love your videos !
Intriguing as always - thanks 👍 Any idea if the amount of fissile material in these tiddlers? Hard to gauge how much is being talked about when referencing to yields and the associated fizzles?
Love me some Scott Manley!
3:20 There's a typical scale of stuff around the bomb (maybe ~10m) and there's a typical scale of the fireball (the radius at which the energy density of the fireball would be the energy density of the surrounding air; i.e. mechanical equilibrium). If the latter is much larger than the former (as is usually the case for nukes), the huge expansion factor flattens out features on the fireball, and you get a smooth sphere. If the explosion is too weak, it reaches mechanical equilibrium before it can smooth out the features from whatever stuff was placed around the bomb, and so you get a non-spherical explosion.
Just a big thank you to my man Scott Manley.
The Orion project space vehicle was meant to utilize small, various yeild devices for propulsion.
Freeman Dyson mentions them in the Orion documentary and that the technology is still very hush hush.
Orion actually designed special "shaped charge" nuclear devices to preferentially release energy in one direction. These evolved into a space weapon concept known as the casaba howitzer.
Never seen that POV of Castle Bravo. Shame about the clouds 🤔 Also thanks for not slapping a watermark over the explosion.
They really should've gone with some CG for the test detonation in Oppenheimer. The effect we got was significantly underwhelming even compared to the grainy original test footage. I really enjoyed the movie, but all I can remember about the actual detonation was disappointment. The hype they built up around how shocking and awe-inspiring the scene was was just that, all hype no substance.
Yeah right, I know he is no CGI but they could of at least done some lense trickery to make it look bigger on the horizon
I read the thumbnail and was going to Skip till I read who's channel this was and Scott you bring the science 😊
The W54 had a yield of up to 1KT, Scott, this variant probably used DT-boosting and IIRC one XW-54 was tested at 6KT (Definitely hollow-boosted).
10:30 I love the Demon Core!
What's going on at the bottom of the Upshot Knothole: Ruth video? Is that light reflecting off something? Power lines? Roads?
The movement of the dust cloud makes it look like a sped up video of a nuke detonation next to a busy road.
Scott Manley: A man who had way too much fun making captions.
I’d be very interested to see a video on the subcritical tests that continue to this day
Gotta love anytime Scott uploads
love your atomic videos 👌✌
Nice burn asking to reuse the tower!
Awesome, Scott! Great details of the different atomic bomb development labs and their productions!
i like the upshot knothole footage, you can actually see the flash but then a small puff of smoke
I thank God for the existence of Scott Manley. Life would be so much boring without you! How much? At least a MegaTon :)
I mean, the Mythbusters cement truck explosion had a better bang then the James bond one. Pure explosives and no kerosine to make it look bigger then it was
The explosion in Oppenheimer was very underwhelming 😑🥱
Haven't seen the film yet but hear it's rather boring when you want technical details.
@@samuraidriver4x4 - The movie is about the history both before and after the bomb.
@@samuraidriver4x4
The movie is called "Oppenheimer", because it's about Oppenheimer's history while developing Trinity.
If the movie was called "Trinity" then i would expect a lot more technical details over the bomb.
Dr Ted Taylor didn't get the recognition he deserved on the science of small fission weapons.The work on the Orion project and using small fission weapons to create a focused directed shock wave to get past superhard silos,20k psi or stronger,jmho that there's a lot of unsung heroes out there.
Do each one of the bridge wire detonators in the implosion type nukes have their own separate power source? Or are are they all fired from the same bank of capacitors? You mentioned sub-microsecond precision in your going nuclear video but i'm wondering how much the distance from the cap bank has on the synchronicity of the implosion. I'd imagine the best way to do it is to have separate power sources for each one and slightly time them differently to compensate for the small differences in distance from the spot where the electronics were kept.
@Scott I had heard that sometime in the 2000's, there was someone who went through a lot of the old test footage and determined, through observing the size of the fireballs etc., that the yields of the bombs were lower than advertised, meaning early scientists and military men overestimated the yields. Do you know anything about this?
6:38 Live the ‘legs’ that the explosion seems to grow - apparently these are due to the wire cables holding the balloon vaporising!
7:10 cars casually driving away makes it seem like this nuke was set off along a highway 😂
Scott, your videos are awesome man. Well done 👍🏻
Cars just casually driving by a nuclear test at 7:15.
That bit of expanding gas and dust in the Trinity test in the lower middle there that looks like a skull is freaking me out.
Terminator still has the best nuke representation in a movie.
I had to look up the "interstellar manhole cover."?That is crazy
Nice shortlist of potential recreational nuke warheads!
I misread the title, and thought it said the "smartest" nuclear expositions ever, which would also be a very interesting video!
@7:23 is that CIVILIAN traffic in the shot, for Operation Upshot Kettle???
8:30
"I AM BECOME DEATH, DESTROYER OF TOWERS."
Hadn't see that coming, it was so hilarious! 😅👍🏻
I was literally wondering this yesterday on my way back from work. Who created the smallest Nuclear blast, because the energy density could be taken advantage of.
people dont realize how many of these tactical nukes actually exist.