@@r1yamahamini I read somewhere that they planed 2 Gt bomb but due to some unknown factors cancelled project.If i remember correctly thay wanted to use that as shape charge to cause mega tsunami that would have destroyed cost of north america
I used to sit in the bushes of Northern Italy at the hot end of a Sargeant missile armed with a 200kt warhead pointed east at the Warsaw Pact, waiting to play my part in the end of humanity. Its easy to forget or ignore just how real that threat was and still is watching this clean and rational description of the mechanics of utter destruction. We must not gloss over that horror, ever.
I believe late seventies was the time a USSR detection system had spotted nearing nukes and an order was given to fire retaliation. Though risking with his life, but certainly post, the launch officer was held back by a "hunch" and did not launch. Turned out to be some weather phenomenon. The amount of times we have almost burnt ourselves to a collective death after having come up with fire is mind-boggling and sad.
@@JurisKankalis Yes. Perhaps we were lucky or we are that this is just bias of the observer due to necessarily living onatimeline where extinction didn't happen.
A view from the former eastern block. We - the Czech Republic - enjoyed the joys of soviet occupation for 31 years. To this day soviets/russians didn't officially acknowledged emplacing nuclear munitions on our soil. But interestingly enough, there are many "soviet style" nuclear munition bunkers across our country. And many rocket emplacements which were manned exclusively by soviet rocket troops and were hurilly disarmed after the Velvet revolution. I still remeber the state of the western Bohemia in the 90s. It was still frozen in the 40s. Why? The region was expected to be destroyed by nuclear strikes from both sides, so why rebuild it? Some buildings in Pilsen still had marks from shrapnel and bullets from WW II by early 2000s.
The scariest fact about the Tsar Bomba is it was originally designed to be 100 megatons but at the last moment the bombs designer got scared that it might be too powerful and reduced it down to 50 megatons
@@night_gryphon That "extra layer" as noted was the uranium tamper being replaced with lead. You wouldn't add more layers, as it would just be more efficient sizing up the ones you already have. Also the real reason for this change wasn't as much the size of the blast, but how much fallout it would have falling down on the USSR (as it is, the tsar bomba barely had any fallout, especially for its size).
Not too powerful, they didn't care about that, they removed the final stage as it would result in a lot of fallout over Moscow otherwise. As it was, the 50 megaton fireball vapourized most of the crap.
@@abloogywoogywoo i'll dissapoint you even twice. The Russia is big. It is REALLY big. And blast site was far enough that even with 100 MTons and even in worst case nuclear cloud was unable to reach Moscow or any large enough city in any dangerous concentrations. Also the nuclear bombs are not that dirty as the crap dirty bombs US throw on to Japan. Well made nuclear bombs spread radioactive isotopes as less as possible. Spreading unfissioned materials means loosing fuel making bomb less effective. Furtermore only brain dead ones need to turn battlefield in to radioactive desert unusable in hundreds of years forward. The main concerns why power was reduced was about damaging earth plate and possibility of chain reaction within atmosphere (don't ask). Also even less powerful test was enough to proof concept of this scalable solution allowing to create bombs of virtually any power.
Fun fact: subject zero died but using some Automated Space Science Magic (or A.S.S. Magic for short) he managed to resurect himself, explaining the hiatus he took from youtube...
That "Alright folks, we're done here" reminds me so much of Cave Johnson. You know what, this whole thing can already be made into a Aperture Science AD
“If you’re interested in an additional sixty dollars, flag down a test associate and let him know. You could walk out of here with a hundred and twenty weighing down your bindle if you let us take you apart, put some science stuff in ya, then put you back together, good as new.”
@@alexreiser6325 to get a chain reaction you need a critical mass - enough fissionable material in a small enough space. So the little boy used a subcritical cylinder and a subcritical cylindrical shell, which when brought together, became supercritical. A lot of people assume that the cylinder was shot into the cylindrical shell. In reality, the shell was the projectile and the inner cylinder was the target. This was mostly a manufacturing and assembly decision - they had to design things before they had certainty on some of their calculations, so they needed to be able to adjust the amount of uranium in the system. So the cylinder target was actually designed to be made of uranium disks held together by a bolt running through them. And they could just adjust the number of disks used when the time came. Harder to do that with a cylindrical shell, and bad to use a bolted-together projectile. So the single-cast cylindrical shell was made the projectile, with an inner, cylindrical stack of disks as a target.
It was a fail-boom design. Even if all the switches and sensors and timers and explosives failed to work it was gonna slam the mass into the cup anyway on ground impact.
Big errors - Fat Man didn't use U-235, (04.10) but Pu-239. And "Radiation Implosion" is for the secondary stage in a multi-stage weapon. It used RADIAL implosion.
Filip Tůma this is all well known public info, I mean sure maybe we get put on a list for checking out nuclear physics but probably not, or at least not an I,portent list like a high risk list....
None of this is a secret. There is almost nothing here that isn't learned in principle by getting a BS in physics. I know because I have and MS in physics.
4:08 - "With only 6.4 kg of plutonium, ... compression uranium-235 to twice its normal density." Well, which was it - plutonium or uranium-235? The answer is it was plutonium, and there was a uranium tamper in Fat Man in addition to the core, but it was uranium-238, not -235. The core was compressed to 2.5 times its diameter, which is 17 times its volume, therefore 17 times its density. This is NOT radiation implosion - that refers to the manner in which the fusion secondary of a thermonuke (like the Tsar) is imploded. The implosion in the Fat Man was straight-forward explosive compression. 6:12 - "Since details are not available, I'll have to extrapolate..." The details have been available since published in a popular magazine in 1977, which the AEC made a huge stink over. The magazine claimed all the details were published piecemeal in other unclassified documents; they won their case. That was 40-50 years ago. The details are available. The internals of the Tsar are available; hell, in Wikipedia, in an article charmingly named "Tsar Bomba". There were two primaries and two secondaries on each end of the massive tertiary stage; special work was done on the electronics to synchronize all of the pieces. 6:35 "...but lithium also breaks down, increasing yield." You betcha. If the lithium did not breakdown into tritium, there would have been no secondary yield. The reaction is very specifically "deuterium-tritium fusion", other combinations of hydrogen require even higher temperatures. 6:41 - The Castle Bravo contained large quantities of Li-6 and Li-7 which were responsible for a 2.5 times increase in blast yield, from 6 to 15 megatons." Very confusing - 2.5 times what? Actually, the Li-7 was thought to be unreactive, so the 6 megaton yield was based on the 40% Li-6 in the "Sausage" test bomb. The Li-7 turned out to be (surprise!) just as reactive as the Li-6, thereby increasing the yield by 1.5 times over the estimate. 8:51 "At first the Tsar Bomba was supposed to have a third stage capable of adding an extra 50 megatons.", Well, this is often confused when speaking of nukes. The Tsar had three stages - the primary is the fission bombs, the secondary was two fusion stages on either side of the tertiary stage - another fusion stage of a massive scale. That combination raised 50 megatons. Surrounding all three stages individually was that uranium-238 tamper, a fixture of (nearly) all nukes, starting with Trinity. That is not referred to as a "stage" in bomb engineering literature; it is simply the tamper. Surrounding fusion stages, the tamper releases huge amounts of fission (obviously of much higher yield than the primary fission bombs) from the high-energy neutrons. As you say, THAT was what was absented from the Tsar (or rather replaced by a "base metal" tamper) to keep its yield to 50 megatons. So it had three stages, and the tamper was replaced to keep the yield rational from a safety and PR standpoint. Insult to injury - your title is click-baity, which I'm sure you realize. Your point is that the Tsar could have been 100 MT and was, therefore, mightier than the actual Tsar, but you don't state that in the video, so the point of your title is lost. The Tsar, as is, is the world's record-holder in terms of actual, realized yield.
"The core was compressed to 2.5 times its diameter" It was compressed such that its diameter was 2.5 times larger than originally? That's not a compression, that's an expansion. Its diameter was not decreased by a factor of 2.5, it's volume was. Also 2.5^3 is 15.625, not 17. The density increase according to open literature was by a factor of 2 - 2.5. First principle efficiency equations indicate a compression factor of 2 was required for the yield it produced. Plutonium cannot be compressed by a factor of 17 by a single shock. Nor is a compression factor of 17 necessary to produce the yield it did. The Tsar bomba did not use two primaries. Without lithium transmutation, there would still have been secondary yield from sparkplug fission, D-D fusion and some tamper fast fission. D-D reactions dominate early on in the fusion burn. Its the neutrons from this reaction that breeds the tritium. 2.5 times 6.
A thing you're missing is that the Tsar Bomba and the B41 both had multiple 'spark plug' assemblies, so that they were fission-fusion-fusion weapons. The B41 had only one extra fusion stage, while the Tsar Bomba is reported to have had several. The primary (fission) stage caused the secondary (fusion) stage to detonate, and that in turn set of the tertiary (fusion) stages. (As I understand it. This stuff is hard to work out the details of, if you don't have clearance.)
Yeah. He missed the most important fact that it's a three stage fusion device, fission-fusion-fusion en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Product_202 Have to thumbs down for that; given it's like the #1 thing that makes the Tsar bomba unique
@@elpechos B41 and Tsar Bomba almost has same design internally, they employ three stage/tertiary stage or fission-fusion-fission design. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
In theory tertiary fusion will be powerful but in practical it is very hard to achieve, the Li-D fuel might get blown away by them before it can achieve fusion
He olso missed that we dont know exactly the weight of the tsar bomba but i heard that they not only reduced the power by a half but also tried to make it not explode befor the time
@@ricodelpiero The fast fission of the secondary jacket in fission-fusion-fission bombs is sometimes referred to as a "third stage" in the bomb, but it should not be confused with the obsolete true three-stage thermonuclear design, in which there existed another complete tertiary fusion stage such as in the Tsar Bomba. From your own link
Nice graphics, but tons of wrong... What you show as "Radiation Implosion" most definitely isn't. You also misrepresent a single stage of the Tsar Bomba as being two stages. The components you describe are inherently part of a single stage. Also, you show particles bouncing around within the Hohlraum interior of the bomb when it is WAVES of soft X-rays that create the radiation pressure that implodes the secondary.
Well technically most thermonuclear bombs use the neutron pressure to compress the secondary(through a intermediate know as fog bank) but ya the video is full of factual errors. the kind most elementary school kids would probably not make.(or at least be smart enough to research the correct answer)
R-36: still mostly carried multiple smaller warheads rather than one big bomb. Poseidon: still on drawing board, not ready both torpedo itself or warhead it would be carried.
@@DOSFS mostly =/= always. Stop with the Goalpost Olympics. Poseidon is not finished? PROOF? Hope that desperate dopamine fix to one up in the comment section was worth it.
@@DOSFS more than "on the drawing board". its in testing. they already modified a test sub that takes the massive torpedo for a while now. not only that but id bet that all the mapping of the ocean floor for this thing to travel autonomously is already complete. russia also has 60 years experience making small nuclear reactors. have a look at the "sub brief" channel.
“Their designs were so simple, it makes me wonder why the Germans never figured it out” Actually, the hard part isn’t the design used, Little Boy’s design didn’t even get the dignity of a test, the hard part is the fissile material. Iirc, the Germans couldn’t get any to test with in the first place.
There were some early experiments towards nuclear reactors. But instead of fuel rods it was more of a chandelier. Didn't go anywhere near to a functional reactor, but the experiments where there.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Meant they didn’t get enough fissile material to test with. Not only do you need reactors for it, but also centrifuges that can concentrate the correct isotope of Uranium afterwards. It’s very tricky.
More technical errors: 4:00 shows Fat Man bomb labeled with "Radiation Implosion". Wrong, it's high explosive compression. Radiation implosion is the mechanism for igniting the secondary of the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear bomb.
No, shielding has nothing to do with this point. Radiation implosion was first used with later "Hydrogen Bombs" (multi-stage thermonuclear devices using both fission and fusion). Both the Trinity test and the "Fat Man" bomb involved Pu-239 core implosion powered by conventional explosives, not by radiation.
Also it is official that Tsar bomb had 3 stage filled with lead , this was due to cancelation of the project for which it was designed. Also the bomb was designed in such a way that more stages could be added increasing the power
ERROR in this video - Fat Man is first described correctly as a plutonium bomb at 4:05. Then at 4:12 the core of the Fat Man bomb is described as U-235. WRONG. The core was Pu-239. Also, the video misses the REAL reason a plutonium bomb has to have such a complex implosion triggering mechanism. Pu-239, unlike U-235, fissions and goes into a chain reaction much much faster and easier. The gun device is far too slow in compacting enough Pu-239 together into a critical mass fast enough to create a powerful nuclear explosion. Instead, enough of a runaway chain reaction would have started at the leading edges of the impact point between the two sub-critical masses to blow the two fissile masses apart before most of the Pu-239 had entered into a good size bomb quality runaway chain reaction. The result would be a "fizzle" a very very low yield explosion. Some of North Korea's atomic bomb tests have been like this - so low yield they were probably fizzles. Pu-239 is a natural byproduct of most nuclear reactors using uranium and can be separated out relatively easily using chemical means. However, Pu-240 will also be in the mix, and it has a lower ability to undergo fission after getting hit by a neutron (it tends to capture the neutron instead and turn into Pu-241), which ruins the explosive fission chain reaction qualities of Pu-239. And so plutonium derived from ordinary uranium reactors has to also undergo isotope enrichment to bomb grade Pu-239. The other option is to build a special breeder reactor using U-238 to specifically produce highly concentrated Pu-239. U-235 occurs naturally in mineral ores, while Pu-239 with its shorter half life does not. And, so in any start up program to build an atomic bomb, it's a lot easier and you save a lot of steps by going for a U-235 enrichment program to make your first bomb. Uranium enrichment thus becomes the first step towards building an atomic bomb.
The issue of Pu-240 is less to do with its poorer neutron properties and more related to its high spontaneous fission rate increase the predetonation probability. There's no record of Plutonium ever being enriched. Any conventional civil PWR can be operated such that it produces weapons grade material.
@@Evan_Bell Yes, Pu-240 will also under spontaneous fission more easily than Pu-239 (this is a separate problem from its tendency to capture neutrons whizzing around from the ongoing fission reactions), and this also increases the likelihood of a high Pu-240 content plutonium bomb detonating with a fizzle. Running a nuclear reactor with the uranium fuel undergoing fission and neutron bombardment for only short periods of time before the fuel is taken out to be chemically processed to isolate the plutonium results in the highest concentrations of Pu-239 and lowest concentrations of Pu-240, and this is how weapons grade Pu-239 is most easily produced. Current commercial nuclear reactors for this very reason are not designed to easily operate in this fast breeder mode, with a constant cycling in and out of the uranium fuel. This could be done, but is much more of a slog than using a fast breeder reactor specifically designed to do this. The spent uranium fuel from commercial reactors thus contain plutonium with relatively high percentages of Pu-240 relative to Pu-239 from the long periods of time that the fuel has been in the reactor under neutron bombardment. Isotopic separation of Pu-239 and Pu-240 is possible, but impractical because it's just so much easier to run a uranium reactor in a fast breeder mode to get the weapons grade high concentration Pu-239 and low concentration Pu-240.
@@gandalfgreyhame3425 Spontaneous fission is the prime reason for minimising Pu-240 content. Weapons have been tested with as high as 19% 240. Modern weapons can be made such that their incubation time is shorter than their insertion time, rendering them predetonation proof. Low burn-up campaigns are not reactors operating in "fast breeder mode". Commercial LWRs can't operate in the fast spectrum.
“Making a bomb is simple” is where your incompetence shows. It not only hard to produce enriched uranium, is also quite hard to create a clean explosion by compressing the fissile material quickly enough. If you don’t do this properly, they yield will be small, parts of fissile material will just melt and fly in all directions. There’s plenty of math and engineering tricks involved. And Plutonium is different from U235, harder to work with. Fusion bombs are hard too.
Little Boy was a security failsafe weapon. Even if the altitude triggers AND explosives all failed, it was going to hit the ground nose first and the rear mass would have slammed into the front mass anyway. That was the point of the design, an insurance plan.
There are enough mistakes in this video that people shouldn't watch it. 0:20 "thermonuclear bombs are quite easy to make" - not really. Perhaps easier than acquiring plutonium, but still not easy. 1:20 There were good and sufficient reasons that Germany, and 180 other countries in the world, didn't create nuclear weapons. 2:00 You're confusing tamping with reflecting. A tamper uses inertia to contain the fissile material for a fraction of a second; a reflector bounces neutrons back into the core. 4:08 Fat Man did not use "radiation implosion". That's a different concept than explosive implosion. 4:58 The core of Fat Man wasn't "tuballoy" (natural uranium). It was plutonium. 7:00 Oh god please stop.
0:54 - LB was 9 kT, not 15 kT yield. 1:20 - To add, Heisenberg completely screwed up the calculation as well and thought that they (the Germans) needed 10 times the actual amount to create a criticality explosion. 2:55 - No, it was not 40% and 60%, it was much higher than that. A lot more Uranium was used that was actually necessary. The target was almost a critical mass in it's own right (approximately 90% of a critical mass) and the projectile was 60%+ of a critical mass. LB was actually what's known as a fizzle as so much of it's potential was wasted. And again, LB was only 9 kT, not 15 kT. 6:06 - No, Li6 absorbs a neutron then quickly decays through alpha decay into He4 and H3 (Tritium). H2 (Deuterium) and H3 (Tritium) then fuse under the temperatures and pressures found in the explosion. Seriously SZS, don't do another one of these unless you spend more time doing the actual research.
Agree with you , David. There is way too much misinformation in this video to be acceptable for a channel purporting to be "science." The animations are wonderful though!
All of your comments are 100% correct. The tamper is so important that the Manhattan Project physicists considered using gold as the tamper because it was cheaper than uranium in 1945. As the compressed core fissions and starts expanding, once it reaches 1.12 times its diameter the fission stops because it is no longer dense enough for fission to continue. That's how important the tamper is as the additional inertia created by the tamper keeps the core critical for milliseconds longer which greatly increases the yield.
@@buckhorncortez The diameter would have to increase by a factor of 1.15 for second criticality. The tamper definitely does not extend the energy production time by a matter of milliseconds. It only provided a confinement time of around 79 nanoseconds.
Fun fact, the tzar bomba was actually a nerfed version, supposedly they originally wanted (correct me if I'm wrong) a 100 mt bomb, but someone thankfully convinced them to do a "smaller" one.
@@JonMartinYXD It would also spread the material from U-238 tamper they were originally going with across a significant portion of USSR, which is at least part of why lead tamper was used in the actual test.
@@JonMartinYXD There may be some truth in that. But the USA should not be too quick to mount the "high horse" on this topic, given all of the radiation exposure to US troops, civilians, Pacific Islanders and the environment in general, that resulted from our own excessive number of above-ground nuclear tests, especially in the 1950's. In some ways, the most disgusting actions of the US government involved not immediate exposure (sometimes the result of honest mistakes with estimates) but rather the government''s later legalistic refusal to pay anything for the huge medical expenses of many thousands who were nuclear test victims.
The hard part is always manufacturing the fuel. Uranium enrichment is still the bottleneck that stops most countries from making their own bombs. The plutonium has to be made in a uranium fission reactor then separated chemically. So it's not any easier since the reactor designs good at making plutonium need enriched uranium too.
graphite moderated _natural_ uranium was used in many of the early plutonium production reactors - look up Windscale. Even the RBMK design from the Soviet Union (Chernobyl was that style) whose spent fuel was processed for plutonium used only slightly enriched fuel. One key thing to remember about a plutonium production reactor is that the fuel canisters or rods are changed frequently, either like Windscale and Hanford which pushed new canisters in the front which displaced old canisters out the back; or the RBMK design where they had a refueling machine that could open up one fuel channel at a time and swap out the rod while the reactor was running. If you leave the rods in too long, you'll burn up the Pu you want, so frequent fuel changes are a normal part of the design. Going directly to plutonium is actually an option, at least for fission and boosted fission bombs - if you want to go thermonuclear you will need _depleted_ uranium (plus lots of lithium deuteride, tritium, etc) but there's no place where you absolutely _need_ enriched uranium in a bomb. Power plant yes, bomb very much optional.
@@chouseification The earliest stages of enrichment are actually the most difficult. Getting to 1% U235 is like 85% of the work to 90% weapons grade uranium.
@@sethsims7414 I'm not sure how that's really relevant as you can go directly to Pu and not enrich at all - as I already called out, a lot of the early production reactors were fed _natural_ uranium. That's unenriched, so it's about 0.7% 235 (7 parts out of every thousand) and most of the rest as 238. That's enough for a graphite or heavy water moderated (Candu from Canada) reactor to sustain a chain reaction - without any enrichment. You only need to enrich uranium if you're going to use "light" water in a power plant, or something exotic like a submarine's reactor.
I think he meant the neutron flux from small counter-nuke would cause them to pre-detonate in a fizzle. Except we know that Japan was not even looking at nuclear weapons development.
@@davidweihe6052 They had a rudimentary nuclear research program, no more. Japanese scientists assessed that it would not be possible to build a bomb during the war so resources were directed elsewhere.
The first British Thermonuclear bombs had a layered structure with the fusion fuel layered around the fission primary. The Tsar Bomba was also a layer cake design. In theory you could just add more layers to make it as big as you like.
Sorry, you do not understand how a layer-cake (sloika in Russian) thermonuclear device works at all. Layer cake devices are compressed by high explosive, not radiation, and have a maximum yield about 1MT. Tsar Bomba was a Teller-Ulam-Sakharov radiation compressed device. All of this information has been public knowledge for over 25 years.
@@vibrolax Not only that... a sloika design has an inherent limit on scalability beyond a which you cross the line of a critical mass. Yes the first fission-fusion-fission bomb was a layer cake design but, as you said... Tsar was a three-stage Teller-Ulam design. This video is trash... it throws the ball, not only when it comes to the physics of the bombs... also regarding plain (and public) historical fact
@@vibrolax It's public knowledge, but it's not as though it's simple to understand. Even if you can separate the true stuff from the deliberate obfuscation and the plain wrong, nuclear engineering is up there with rocket surgery as a difficult subject.
@@akizeta It isnt particularly hard to grasp the concept of using a fission bomb to compress and ignite fusion. Wht the tsar did was then use that resulting fusion to compress and ignite yet more fusion.
Thanks for the video. Few interesting facts you didn't mentioned though. -Sources don't agree on the yield, US sources says it was 58 MT, Soviet source says the bomb had 50 MT -Tsar bomba original yield was about 100 MT but was reduced for the live test by about a half -Theoretical limit for TB design was about 150 MT -Sakharov in his memoirs mentions that the main design in theory could be modified to increase the yield to 1 GT! Creating huge single bombs is not practical because a lot of power is simply wasted by escaping into space. A single missile with power of 30 or 40 MT but divided into many smaller warheads will be able to basically destroy the whole country size of France. For example new Russian missile R-28 Sarmat can have yield up to 50 MT but in 20 or more warheads or MIRVs. This will mean 20 bombs 2.5 MT each. So in case of France, 20 big cities can be destroyed with just one missile. A whole country would collapse in the matter of minutes. A single 50 MT bomb would not be able to do that.
You're right, huge bombs are grossly inefficient. The weapons effects drop off as the cube of distance. That applies to any explosive. So the big bombs waste a lot of scarce materials.
@@daveeyes But since most national leaders (and the citizens of their respective countries) aren't nuclear physicists, such huge yield numbers do have a desirable (for deterrence) psychological effect. Such high-yield bombs will be useful for peaceful purposes--as safety explosives for mining asteroids, the Moon, Mercury, etc., and to propel Orion-type large interplanetary spaceships and starships. (West Germany, for a time, was working on nuclear safety explosives for use in mining [on Earth].)
Neutrons do not reflect, the tamper acts to both slow the neutrons so they will cause fission and the high density holds the reacting material together longer and therefore increases the yield.
They undergo elastic scattering. The moderation of neutrons adversely affects the effective neutron multiplication rate, and is undesirable in a weapon.
The main reason for a tamper, is for kinetic impetus and inertial containment of the fissile material; to keep it in a supercritical state for as long as possible. The ingenious later addition to this, was to introduce an air-gap between the inner wall of explosives and the tamper. Unfortunately little was known about the nuclear cross-section of lithium7 at the time of Castle Bravo.
New here and just wanted to say I love the way you present these topics. Love the graphics and the 3D work and the way its all explained. Really good job!
It was my understand the Rusians determined any weapon above 50 MT would waste most of its force into space. The Tzar bomba wa originally design to yield 100 MT but was scaled down.
The Tsar Bomba was a political statement, it was never a practical weapon. They didn't go to the full 100 Mt because that would have destroyed the plane that dropped it.
The 100 MT uranium tamper design would also have been incredibly dirty. It would have increased the total amount of nuclear waste in the atmosphere by several fold. Enough to have been considered a crime against humanity by some..
Fun Fact: The eruption of the volcano Krakatoa was actually about 4 times more powerful than Tsar Bomba, and even if the B41 was the same weight as Tsar Bomba, it would still be smaller than Krakatoa's explosion.
Yeah one thing men can never compete with is nature, if the yellowstone supervolcano was to erupt it would criple the whole united states. Just think of a meteor hitting earth, makes nukes look like firecrackers
Just a small notice, MK41 of the same size would probably have around or less than 100Mt as it doesnt increased linearly with weight The more the matter, the further apart are the furthest individual atoms, unless you increase density.
It increases exponentially. A more voluminous mass of fusion fuel of the same density will reach higher burn up efficiencies, due to decrease thermal losses and the whole assembly is larger relative to the photon mean free path.
Okay, Fat Man was NOT easy to build. You try getting a perfectly symmetrical implosion. Took a breakthrough in explosives lensing plus extremely precise machining.
Today with numerically controlled, hyper precise machine tools it should not be to difficult to form/shape explosive lense. So today assuming availabity of weapons grade plutonium, its relatively easy.
One of the breakthroughs was the explosive wire detonator system thought up by Luis Alvarez. After some work, they got the detonators and timing system working so all 32 detonators were within fractions of a millisecond.
@@DrDeuteron No. George Kistiakowsky was the person who developed the explosive lenses. Von Neumann helped run the hydrocode calculations required to verify the blast wave interactions. None of it was created "off-the-cuff."
@@buckhorncortez Yo you seem to be in the know. Is a yellowcake nuclear bomd possible? If its possible then how praticable as a deployable battlefield weapon as to it possible size.
Even if Tsar Bomba in it's full yield (100 Mt) configuration it's still has 3.7 to 4 Mt/ton of yield to weight ratio, still lack behind B41 5.2 Mt/ton.
What a fantastic invention. I mean the people who created these things must be so proud of their invention they couldn't wait to tell their stories to their grandchildren. Who wouldn't 🤦♂️
Slight mistake there - the implosion from the implosive lens mechanism of the Fat Man is NOT radiation implosion. Radiation implosion is what happens when X-rays emitted in a primary fission process compresses the secondary fusion material through the pressure of the X-ray radiation.
Little correction: you need slow-moving neutrons to achieve fission. They're called thermal neutrons. The faster ones will bounce off of the nucleus. A slow one will impact and stick, further destabilising the structure of the nucleus and causing it to fiss.
Many reactors use a moderator to thermalize the neutron flux, but fission bombs do not. All fission bombs ("A-bombs") undergo fast fission. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_fission
No. Weapons use fast neutron spectra. Thermal and fast neutrons are more likely to undergo elastic scattering than any other reaction with fissile materials.
Don't forget Atomic Annie. Not just missiles... Nukes in artillery shells! (rumor has it, some were made to be fired from the 14-16" guns of battleships.)
- The M-110, 8" self propelled howitzer was nuke capable. - During the cold war, our firing tables had a page top heading NUCLEAR with necessary plot info, but weight & dimension info columns & rows were empty with red color CLASSIFIED; TOP SECRET Ref. No. ***** across the blank columns & rows. An additional unknown crew member would be assigned to the crew if the situation required a nuke artillery shell who's location was also unknown & not part of our standard ammo supply. But could become available ASAP if needed. - Retaliation from an incoming nuke was to be to protect yourself by bending down with head between your legs & kiss your ass goodbye!
What did you mean by the early nukes being easily disabled? Both fat man and little boy used a radar fuze to detonate at the proper height, that potentially could be jammed. However, IIRC there were pressure and contact backups as well. Of course, intercepting a B-29 is easier than an ICBM, but Japan at this stage of the war hardly had the means to do so.
I know very little about this subject, but I'm also really enjoying the comments here. Almost seems as though the sum of the comment section exceeds the content of the video.
The real reason why Tsar Bomba wasn't yielded at 100 megatons is because the plane that carrying it will not survive the blast, that's the reason. Soviet also cancelled "Ivan bomb project" where they want to construct few hundred "Tsar bombas" because it simply impractical to deploy if real nuclear war is about to happen, instead they develop a small tactical nuclear warhead that can be carried by ICBM.
I think you have conflated tamper and reflector. The neutron reflector is a material that reflects neutrons back into the reaction so they have a second chance to trigger a fission event. The tamper was jus a really heavy she'll surrounding the reaction so it's inertial mass would hold the reaction from expanding for a few extra microseconds because a few extra microseconds can dramatically increase the yield of the reaction. They were usually in the same layer but not the same materials. I believe beryllium is usually used as the reflector and whatever the heaviest material they have available when designing the device is used for the tamper.
1) Fat Man used a plutonium 239 core. The very fact that it had to be an implosion design had to do that, otherwise, it was not possible to use plutonium 239 synthesized in reactors (it had too much plutonium 241, which undergoes too much spontaneous fission and adds excess neutrons to the core, making it impossible to build a gun type bomb without predetonation.... the core would just disintegrate well before getting fully assembled). 2) Radiation implosion had NOTHING to do with core compression by means of chemical high explosives... it's an entirely diferent notion, relevant to thermonuclear weapons. Buddy... this is ELEMENTARY nuclear weapons design. And by that I mean... introductory wikipedia level elementary. At that point the video lost all credibility. Research better your topics, because this is shameful.
The designed capacity of Tsar Bomba was more than 100 Mt rather than 50 Mt. But the bomb was investigated with its half capacity. There haven't ever been any others bombs created or exploded with higher capacity (including B 41) in the World. So it's the most powerful bomb in the World. It's a real fact. And it's strange try to guess what the capcity of B 41 would have been if it had been three times larger.
I know you probably don't care and I'm not sure if you even read the comments, but I wanted to say that your channel was absolutely excellent, there are almost no flaws in the video in terms of what people want to learn and what you explain, and you have the technical knowledge to talk about subjects that no one else covers, not only that but also give your opinion on them, really great stuff If I had one complainbt and it would be very small, it would be that maybe the videos do not go in as much depth and detail as they could, I realize you do a lot of editing and very well made graphics so of course the longer the video the more work has to be put in it, but idk, maybe keep the same ammount of graphics and work on the visual aspects of the video, but have the video be a bit longer by including some more technical talk and details, it's not that the videos are surface level, but I feel like they would be even better by being slightly longer and really explaining everything there has to explain, something like 15-20 minute long videos with the same ammount of graphics and editing, but a more thorough look Regardless, really really great channel, some of the best stuff on youtube
And yet he gets basic facts wrong. Fat man was not a radiation implosion device, just straight implosion. Radiation Implosion is the technique used exclusively with multi-stage thermonuclear devices, where the X-ray radiation from the primary fission device (straight implosion) is focused to compress the secondary fusion device (this part is the radiation implosion).
@@Degenerate76 Oh yeah, I thought that was weird when he said that, since he said "radiation implosion" but then he showed a bomb that worked by chemical explosive detonation shockwaves So two criticism then, slightly more in depth videos and being extra careful to avoid mistakes But I mean come on, it's still far better than stuff like sci show or pbs, that are made by people with 0 understanding of anything and full of mistakes consistently
@@Degenerate76 He got other stuff wrong too, or simply skipped over how it, like how lithium deuteride works. You can't make a bomb with normal hydrogen, you need it's heavy isotopes (deuterium and tritium), and you can't use only one or the other, you have to use both and they need to be well mixed. Tritium doesn't exist in nature so has to be made, and it's highly radioactive. So the easiest thing is to react deuterium with lithium to make a solid fuel, and use the bomb's neutrons to transform the lithium into tritium as the bomb explodes.
There was no reason for the U.S. to build a bomb equal to or more powerful than the Tsar Bomba because the Tsar blast exceeded the upper limit of the atmosphere. This meant that no matter how much more powerful a bomb could be, it could not do much more damage at the surface of the Earth because the blast had nothing (the mass of the atmosphere above) left to push against.
In the early days Russia built higher yield warheads because their missile guidance systems weren't very accurate and might miss the target. Today the highest yield for the majority of US warheads is W88 which has a yield of 475 kilotons. Russia uses a 700 kiloton warhead. Since the destructive power increases by the cubed root of the increase in yield there isn't much practical difference between them. More lower yield bombs are therefore more destructive than fewer high yield bombs of the same total megatons. Therefore 200 W88s would be far more destructive over a much wider area than two Tsar Bombas even though the total yield of the W88s is slightly lower.
This relied on 'IF this American bomb had been much bigger' it would have been more powerful - brought to you by : If I could run 3 times as fast as I can , I'd be faster than Ben Johnson .
I thought the reason the tsar bomb was "only" 50 MT when tested compared with a design yield of 100 MT was because they used an non fissionable lead tamper to reduce fallout. Using a uranium tamper instead would have increased the yield considerably through fission due to the neutrons released by the fusion stage or stages. I think I read this in Richard Rhodes book "Dark Sun".
Almost correct. The final quaternary fusion stage was left off, because the resulting blast of a 100Mt explosion would have destroyed the dropping plane.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 royhills is correct. The 50Mt difference was from changing the U238 tamper to lead. There was never a fourth stage. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Product_602
Tsar Bomba was the equivalent of showing a Soviet male with a 30" dick, ignoring that no woman could "accept" such a member. The USA no longer keeps hydrogen devices greater than 1 megaton in its arsenal because accuracy gives better return in destructiveness than raw power. You could use one Tsar Bomba to take all of Great Britain out, or a score of smaller devices exactly targeted, and one golden BB takes out the Soviet plane before delivering it.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 from the wiki: "AN602 had a "three-stage" design: the first stage is the necessary fission trigger. The second stage was two relatively small thermonuclear charges with a calculated contribution to the explosion of 1.5 megatons, which were used for radiation implosion of the third stage, the main thermonuclear module located between them, and starting a thermonuclear reaction in it, contributing fifty megatons of explosion energy. As a result of the thermonuclear reaction, huge numbers of high-energy fast neutrons were formed in the main thermonuclear module, which, in turn, initiated the fast fission nuclear reaction in the nuclei of the surrounding uranium-238, which would have added another fifty megatons of energy to the explosion, so that the estimated energy release of the AN602 was around 100 megatons." I hope that clears things up.
You don't understand the purpose of the larger (5-15 mt) H-bombs. They weren't designed to take out cities. They were to be dropped by bombers to destroy AIRFIELDS. The idea was to hit enemy airfields very early in a war before they could launch *their* bombers. The bombs were made very powerful so they could destroy the bombers on the airfield even if the bomb wasn't dropped right on target. The assumption was the bomber might come under attack before getting into the perfect position so a bomb that could wipe out bombers many miles away was used. As ICBMs came on line the idea of using bombers to knock out enemy bombers on a first strike became impractical so the larger bombs weren't needed.
Sure thing, if the B41 weighted as much as the Tsar Bomba, it would've been more powerful. But it didn't, and the Tsar Bomba still is the most powerful to this day. Also, you should consider that the Tsar Bomba's yield was decreased from 100 to 50 Mtons so that the pilot who had to drop the bomb would not die haha
Amateurish video. For example you miss label the stages of a Ulam-Teller design. The First Stage comprises both the primary and the spark plug. They serve the same purpose, to compress and heat the lithium deuteride to a temperature and pressure that allows for fusion to occur. The Second Stage is the fusion of deuterium and tritium, two distinct hydrogen isotopes. Deuterium is part of the lithium-deuteride obviously and the tritium is produced during the reaction by deuterium capturing neutrons and also the decay of lithium-6 under the intense neutron bombardment. The Third Stage is the fission of the tamper-pusher, the outer casing of the bomb. This casing acts as a reflector concentrating the X-rays emitted by the primary onto the fusion core. The process which creates the pressures needed for compression of the core is classified but it is believed it is based on ablation pressure, the rapid vaporization of the surface of the core under X-ray radiation creating a massive inward pressure. To be suitable as a reflector the casing has to be extremely dense and two materials can be used - lead or depleted Uranium (U238). Using lead does nothing, there is no third stage. Using depleted Uranium roughly doubles the yield. U238 is the tame Uranium isotope, it cannot chain react since it's atoms don't fission when struck by fission neutrons. But they do fission when struck by the higher energy neutrons created by the fusion of the second stage. This generates a huge boost in yield, as mentioned but also massive radioactive fallout. The third stage being extremely simple there is no reason to test it. It will work every time so in test bombs it is always replaced by lead to avoid dealing with the fallout.
Tsar bomba had two Fusion strages ... the final fission tamper stage was lead (hence the 58mt instead of 100+) It was a true 3 stage weapon ...you don't count the tamper as a stage
No. The sparkplug is part of the secondary. The primary serves to compress the fusion fuel, the sparkplug serves to heat it. The tamper/pusher is not the outer casing of the bomb. It is not true that the tamper is always replaced with a non-fissile material for tests. It's usually not replaced.
@@Evan_Bell Oh look mister details graced me with an answer. The way I was thought this shit is both fission devices - the primary and the spark plug make up the first stage. The second stage is the fusion stage and it can also be a primary for a third stage which is another bigger fusion stage and so on. The last stage which can be the third, fourth or nth depending on how many fusion stages are used is the tamper-pusher atoms undergoing fission when struck by the high energy fusion neutrons. Because the tamper/pusher is incredibly heavy and strong it doubles as the casing for the bomb. Of course an outer casing is added to enable handling the device and mount fins and other stuff that a bomb needs but structurally the tamper is the casing. As for bombs being tested with U238 tampers you are right and wrong. Most early tests by all nuclear powers used U238. Later tests didn't and this one certainly did not. Had they used a active tamper the blast would have definitely killed the crew of the aircraft and also created a large amount of permanent nuclear fallout.
@@sardoniclaugh9646 Well I don't know who taught you that, but it's wrong. The sparkplug is part of the second stage. The second stage tamper is not the bomb casing. The radiation case and the ballistic case can be integral, but not the secondary tamper and the ballistics case. Many of the early tests used HEU secondary tampers. Also it's a bit odd that you mock me for detailing errors in your comment, when your comment details errors of video... Erroneously.
@@Evan_Bell It took me 20 seconds to make that comment. It's mostly right. He's making a lot of errors in a video that took him hours if not days to make. There's a difference.
I've been fascinated with nuclear weapons since I was in primary school. My mathematical abilities kept me from pursuing any profession in the physical sciences. Your breakdown here is very informative and greatly appreciated.
So folks, all you have to do now is go to your local Home Depot and buy all the stuff in this video, and you can be the first to blow up your neighborhood.
Except for the most important part of the weapon- fissile material. The process to enrich U-235 or create Pu-239 is far more involved than constructing the simplest nukes using them. Luckily you won't find these at the local hardware store.
@@CoryMcCarvilleSchueths Depends on the store. When the Soviet Union collapsed , there were some loose nukes that went missing. Nobody talks about it , because they still are. Sweet dreams.
Yep, there's nothing even remotely easy about acquiring the materials, let alone engineering a feasible nuclear weapon. The bridgewire detonators alone are specifically made for the ultra-precise timing of implosion devices and require particular expertise to manufacture. One of a myriad of other specifics required that's beyond even seasoned professionals without the exact knowledge.
The Nazis failed not because of theory, but the engineering difficulties. The allies bombed the cr*p out of key resources required to do development, such as heavy water and special steels, and also bombed the development sites themselves. The Manhattan project is still (probably) the largest project ever undertaken, with no enemy interruptions, and almost all of it was about the engineering (although, of course, the theory improved as the engineering developed). But the Germans never had enough time, resources, and trouble-free location to match anything like the Manhattan project: the penalty of waging war on everybody else.
From what I heard, germany scientists were close to it but they feared that hilter might use it on mass scale and simply said "give us time" or "we can't do it" since nobody else can question it, they are in the big brains club, right? (It's one of versions I heard but I beleieve it)
@@SnoopyDoofie kurzgesagt and other quality youtubers used to upload seldomly as well before they got bigger and had more resources. it is still unfair how TH-cam's algorithm doesn't promote these kinds of channels enough
@@nilsmeta641 TH-cam is a business that relies almost entirely on ads. Why would advertizers bother advertizing on a channel that seldom uploads? Makes no sense. Advertizers are only interested in lots of viewers and not about content quality. It took Kurzgesagt years to get a large number of subscribers and on average they upload once a month.
It only seams "so simple" now that we've done it. At the time, it was very difficult. Just look at the massive "secret" infrastructure for refining and enriching Uranium. When all you have are pencils and slide rules, the calculations for an implosion device are impossibly hard. Nazi Germany didn't manage to build one because of these hurdles. 20/20 hindsight, it's _possible_ they could have, but it would've taken such large infrastructure the Allies would've known about it, and bombed it. The US had the luxury of vast areas to work, lots of people to do the work, and no risk of anyone bombing any of it.
Then you haven't been looking very hard! There are quite a few here on TH-cam dealing with exactly that. Even when they don't get it completely correct, there are always plenty of comment contributions to set them straight.
The scary thing is the maximum achievable efficiency of thermonuclear warheads with current technology is 25% (only 25% detonates before the rest is vapourised up from 1.4% efficiency with little boy) So the B41 8,800lbs weight only 1000lbs (450kg) is actually nuclear material. So a 27 tonne version would only have 6.75x. The amount 3,073kg (6,600lbs) of nuclear material. Meaning with technology with current warheads we could make a theoretical yield of 560 Mega tons for large bombs or 82Megatons for warheads that could fit on Trident Missiles. If nukes were 100% efficient. And that’s before you explore other theoretical anomaly’s. Nuclear science currently is only a glimpse at what physics allows theoretically.
Are you referring to fission or fusion efficiency? Either way it's incorrect. 35% fission and 40% fusion efficiency have been demonstrated. How did you arrive at that 450kg value? It's not correct. It contained at least 1.24 tons of fissionable material. The largest warheads that could theoretically be carried by the Trident II would be 2.16Mt, not 82 Mt. This ignores the fact that the theoretical specific energy limit is only achievable in very large devices.
@@lucasduque8289 he was a POW in a mine near Nagasaki and was above ground when it went off. It looked like he had a sunburn on his forehead. He was in the Dutch military in Java when it was overrun by the Japanese with my grandmother, my dad and one of my uncles.
a 140 megaton bomb weighing 27 tons would be an excellent candidate for an unmanned submarine, sneaking it's way into a harbor waiting for orders to go BOOM. Wait...... is there not such a thing already?
Apparently there's a lot more problems then the title, tho I can't say whether that's true myself since I don't actually know anything about the subject.
Much of this isnt correct. For example, the tamper isn't the neutron reflector that's usually a lightweight material lille beryllium. The tamper is present to slow down the initial expansion of the fireball for a long enough time to achieve neutron saturation. A few extra microseconds is the difference between a cumbersome low yield dirtybomb and a compact deliverable physics package with high yield (100kT -10MT) and minimal fallout (if delivered as an air burst), or a fallout nightmare country killer (if delivered as a ground burst). The "radiation implosion" section is also completely incorrect! Let me know if you want to fix the video. It should only require editing the script to fix the errors and re dubbing.
There's nothing "easy" about making a plutonium bomb, neither making the appropriate high explosive symmetrical implosion geometry or timing all the needed triggers to ignite simultaneously. Blithely characterizing it as such while slurping the knowledge off from the internet with no effort of your own is laughable.
Considering that it was made for the first time in 1944-45... given access to the critical materials (which essentially reduces to... fissile material) it's amost certainly doable in any more or less equiped hacklab with the right people having the right skills (mostly high pressure hydrodynamics... something you can get from century old published material, that in this day and age, circulates freely as pirated books on the net). There's absolutelly NOTHING technically challenging about the design of a nuclear weapon at this point... only the procurement of it's nuclear explosive proper... fissile material
@@leninalopez2912 If by "nothing technically challenging" you mean some clumsy mechanism to smash two subcritical masses together for a dirty bomb... then sure. But anybody with five minutes of spare time can read (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man#Development) and see that your "hacklab" comments become laughable when it comes to designing an and machining an implosion bomb of any actual efficiency. I'd love to see your hacklab associates design anything remotely capable of doing the simultaneous bridge-wire detonation of the polygonal high-explosive lenses, after they confirmed they're operating correctly with flash-xray photography in test detonations. I'd wager they'd be killed in some criticality event long before they could "google" enough to adapt some clumsy Arduino project to the task at hand. No... they would opt to just use a professionally designed complete warhead assembly smuggled out of a corrupted military base long before LARPING the role of pioneering physicists.
A very interesting and extremely engaging video. The narrator is especially skilled and presents the details with great clarity and infectious enthusiasm. However it is quite a long way off when it comes to the real facts of the matter. 'Fat Man' used a plutonium core, not uranium. The tamper is there primarily to hold the device together via inertia for long enough that an appreciable yield is generated. Critically it also works to make the explosive compression wave as uniform as possible. When chosen with care the tamper's substance will also act to reflect neutrons back into the core. If natural/depleted uranium is used for the tamper in a hydrogen weapon it will contribute enormously to the final yield due to fast-fission from the masses of neutrons generated by the fusion reaction. In fact in many ways this phenomenon could be considered the main destructive component of a modern nuclear warhead. The primary fission and secondary fusion stages may be thought of as present only to generate enough neutrons to allow this pseudo-tertiary stage to occur rather than for their own explosive effect--although obviously the Secondary in particular does make a sizeable contribution. The pure fission weapon 'Fat Man' was triggered by conventional shaped charges _not_ Radiation Implosion. In the real world 'Radiation Implosion' is a process employed by a staged thermonuclear device. It is the method by which the X-Ray photons created by a fission primary, when mediated through FOGBANK or a similar substance compress first the fusion fuel and then the fissile 'spark plug' in the Secondary to reach their operational densities.
"How were they able to achieve 50 megatons?"
By reducing the originally-intended 100 megatons by half.
Took the words out of my mouth
It was like 40% yield. So like 120 MT bomb. The actual potential is still classified. Our tests were the same, we mostly did 20-30% yield in our tests
Yeah, they apparently did that to give the bomber a chance to get away:)
@@r1yamahamini I read somewhere that they planed 2 Gt bomb but due to some unknown factors cancelled project.If i remember correctly thay wanted to use that as shape charge to cause mega tsunami that would have destroyed cost of north america
was about to say the same thing
I am alive. if anybody is interested in seeing some behind the scenes stuff - th-cam.com/video/xWMmE2KCkxA/w-d-xo.html
Good to know.
I'm dead
Glad you are back
What is alive?
Thank goodness. I was kinda worried that I lost one of my favorite channels.
I used to sit in the bushes of Northern Italy at the hot end of a Sargeant missile armed with a 200kt warhead pointed east at the Warsaw Pact, waiting to play my part in the end of humanity. Its easy to forget or ignore just how real that threat was and still is watching this clean and rational description of the mechanics of utter destruction. We must not gloss over that horror, ever.
I believe late seventies was the time a USSR detection system had spotted nearing nukes and an order was given to fire retaliation. Though risking with his life, but certainly post, the launch officer was held back by a "hunch" and did not launch. Turned out to be some weather phenomenon. The amount of times we have almost burnt ourselves to a collective death after having come up with fire is mind-boggling and sad.
@@JurisKankalis
Yes. Perhaps we were lucky or we are that this is just bias of the observer due to necessarily living onatimeline where extinction didn't happen.
A view from the former eastern block. We - the Czech Republic - enjoyed the joys of soviet occupation for 31 years. To this day soviets/russians didn't officially acknowledged emplacing nuclear munitions on our soil. But interestingly enough, there are many "soviet style" nuclear munition bunkers across our country. And many rocket emplacements which were manned exclusively by soviet rocket troops and were hurilly disarmed after the Velvet revolution. I still remeber the state of the western Bohemia in the 90s. It was still frozen in the 40s. Why? The region was expected to be destroyed by nuclear strikes from both sides, so why rebuild it? Some buildings in Pilsen still had marks from shrapnel and bullets from WW II by early 2000s.
you part of the glickem program?
@@mr.rogers1019 never heard of it
The scariest fact about the Tsar Bomba is it was originally designed to be 100 megatons but at the last moment the bombs designer got scared that it might be too powerful and reduced it down to 50 megatons
Right, Andrej Sacharow the father of the AN602 zar bomb got doubts about the madness of a 100 megaton bomb, so he halves the explosive power.
@@achimgeist5185 yeah. and this was achived by removing just a single layer of fuel. Increasing power is the same simple by just adding extra layers.
@@night_gryphon That "extra layer" as noted was the uranium tamper being replaced with lead. You wouldn't add more layers, as it would just be more efficient sizing up the ones you already have. Also the real reason for this change wasn't as much the size of the blast, but how much fallout it would have falling down on the USSR (as it is, the tsar bomba barely had any fallout, especially for its size).
Not too powerful, they didn't care about that, they removed the final stage as it would result in a lot of fallout over Moscow otherwise. As it was, the 50 megaton fireball vapourized most of the crap.
@@abloogywoogywoo i'll dissapoint you even twice.
The Russia is big. It is REALLY big. And blast site was far enough that even with 100 MTons and even in worst case nuclear cloud was unable to reach Moscow or any large enough city in any dangerous concentrations.
Also the nuclear bombs are not that dirty as the crap dirty bombs US throw on to Japan. Well made nuclear bombs spread radioactive isotopes as less as possible. Spreading unfissioned materials means loosing fuel making bomb less effective. Furtermore only brain dead ones need to turn battlefield in to radioactive desert unusable in hundreds of years forward.
The main concerns why power was reduced was about damaging earth plate and possibility of chain reaction within atmosphere (don't ask).
Also even less powerful test was enough to proof concept of this scalable solution allowing to create bombs of virtually any power.
Fun fact: subject zero died but using some Automated Space Science Magic (or A.S.S. Magic for short) he managed to resurect himself, explaining the hiatus he took from youtube...
Automated Space Science Magic (A.S.S. Magic). I will start using it in conversations xd
A.S.S. Magic wins the internet today! Love it, and I'm gonna use it, too!
hawaii, it's a magical place.🤣🤣
A.S.S. Magic is my favorite.
Reminds me of Craig Ferguson and Geoff Peterson.
A.S.S. Mode... a way of life.
That "Alright folks, we're done here" reminds me so much of Cave Johnson. You know what, this whole thing can already be made into a Aperture Science AD
Chariots chariots.
I am glad I am not the only one
And the Dark matter reactor reminded me of quantum science
"back to testing"
“If you’re interested in an additional sixty dollars, flag down a test associate and let him know. You could walk out of here with a hundred and twenty weighing down your bindle if you let us take you apart, put some science stuff in ya, then put you back together, good as new.”
I love how he got little boy’s projectile right. (It’s commonly switched up with the target)
I used the little boy projectile as a quality check as well, which tbh I just recently learned from a youtube video lol
@@Chainsaw-ASMR can you explain for my uninformed curiosity?
@@alexreiser6325 to get a chain reaction you need a critical mass - enough fissionable material in a small enough space. So the little boy used a subcritical cylinder and a subcritical cylindrical shell, which when brought together, became supercritical.
A lot of people assume that the cylinder was shot into the cylindrical shell. In reality, the shell was the projectile and the inner cylinder was the target.
This was mostly a manufacturing and assembly decision - they had to design things before they had certainty on some of their calculations, so they needed to be able to adjust the amount of uranium in the system. So the cylinder target was actually designed to be made of uranium disks held together by a bolt running through them. And they could just adjust the number of disks used when the time came. Harder to do that with a cylindrical shell, and bad to use a bolted-together projectile. So the single-cast cylindrical shell was made the projectile, with an inner, cylindrical stack of disks as a target.
It was a fail-boom design. Even if all the switches and sensors and timers and explosives failed to work it was gonna slam the mass into the cup anyway on ground impact.
@@prjndigo Fail-Boom🤣😂🤣😂
Best thing i've read today, thanks
Big errors - Fat Man didn't use U-235, (04.10) but Pu-239. And "Radiation Implosion" is for the secondary stage in a multi-stage weapon. It used RADIAL implosion.
Yea,didn’t it have a mini- conductor in it shaped like a spiked ball.
@@cassiecraft8856 what? No
@@cassiecraft8856
It wasn’t spherical.
Subject Zero: *showing detailed animations of exactly how nuclear bombs work*
The CIA: “...not sure if we should keep on eye on this guy, or hire him”
pretty sure the CIA would be looking for something a bit more than publicly available knowledge.
We are all on Black list 😎
Filip Tůma this is all well known public info, I mean sure maybe we get put on a list for checking out nuclear physics but probably not, or at least not an I,portent list like a high risk list....
I guess everybody who has been on wikipedia is on that same list then, huh.
None of this is a secret. There is almost nothing here that isn't learned in principle by getting a BS in physics. I know because I have and MS in physics.
Welcome back! I missed your ultra high quality content, keep it up 🌸
4:08 - "With only 6.4 kg of plutonium, ... compression uranium-235 to twice its normal density." Well, which was it - plutonium or uranium-235? The answer is it was plutonium, and there was a uranium tamper in Fat Man in addition to the core, but it was uranium-238, not -235. The core was compressed to 2.5 times its diameter, which is 17 times its volume, therefore 17 times its density. This is NOT radiation implosion - that refers to the manner in which the fusion secondary of a thermonuke (like the Tsar) is imploded. The implosion in the Fat Man was straight-forward explosive compression.
6:12 - "Since details are not available, I'll have to extrapolate..." The details have been available since published in a popular magazine in 1977, which the AEC made a huge stink over. The magazine claimed all the details were published piecemeal in other unclassified documents; they won their case. That was 40-50 years ago. The details are available. The internals of the Tsar are available; hell, in Wikipedia, in an article charmingly named "Tsar Bomba". There were two primaries and two secondaries on each end of the massive tertiary stage; special work was done on the electronics to synchronize all of the pieces.
6:35 "...but lithium also breaks down, increasing yield." You betcha. If the lithium did not breakdown into tritium, there would have been no secondary yield. The reaction is very specifically "deuterium-tritium fusion", other combinations of hydrogen require even higher temperatures.
6:41 - The Castle Bravo contained large quantities of Li-6 and Li-7 which were responsible for a 2.5 times increase in blast yield, from 6 to 15 megatons." Very confusing - 2.5 times what? Actually, the Li-7 was thought to be unreactive, so the 6 megaton yield was based on the 40% Li-6 in the "Sausage" test bomb. The Li-7 turned out to be (surprise!) just as reactive as the Li-6, thereby increasing the yield by 1.5 times over the estimate.
8:51 "At first the Tsar Bomba was supposed to have a third stage capable of adding an extra 50 megatons.", Well, this is often confused when speaking of nukes. The Tsar had three stages - the primary is the fission bombs, the secondary was two fusion stages on either side of the tertiary stage - another fusion stage of a massive scale. That combination raised 50 megatons. Surrounding all three stages individually was that uranium-238 tamper, a fixture of (nearly) all nukes, starting with Trinity. That is not referred to as a "stage" in bomb engineering literature; it is simply the tamper. Surrounding fusion stages, the tamper releases huge amounts of fission (obviously of much higher yield than the primary fission bombs) from the high-energy neutrons. As you say, THAT was what was absented from the Tsar (or rather replaced by a "base metal" tamper) to keep its yield to 50 megatons. So it had three stages, and the tamper was replaced to keep the yield rational from a safety and PR standpoint.
Insult to injury - your title is click-baity, which I'm sure you realize. Your point is that the Tsar could have been 100 MT and was, therefore, mightier than the actual Tsar, but you don't state that in the video, so the point of your title is lost. The Tsar, as is, is the world's record-holder in terms of actual, realized yield.
"The core was compressed to 2.5 times its diameter"
It was compressed such that its diameter was 2.5 times larger than originally? That's not a compression, that's an expansion. Its diameter was not decreased by a factor of 2.5, it's volume was. Also 2.5^3 is 15.625, not 17. The density increase according to open literature was by a factor of 2 - 2.5. First principle efficiency equations indicate a compression factor of 2 was required for the yield it produced. Plutonium cannot be compressed by a factor of 17 by a single shock. Nor is a compression factor of 17 necessary to produce the yield it did.
The Tsar bomba did not use two primaries.
Without lithium transmutation, there would still have been secondary yield from sparkplug fission, D-D fusion and some tamper fast fission. D-D reactions dominate early on in the fusion burn. Its the neutrons from this reaction that breeds the tritium.
2.5 times 6.
@@Evan_Bell Sorry for the wording. No, it was compressed by 2.5 times.
@@puncheex2 Somewhere between 2 and 2.5 according to open literature. 2 according to first principle efficiency equations.
A thing you're missing is that the Tsar Bomba and the B41 both had multiple 'spark plug' assemblies, so that they were fission-fusion-fusion weapons. The B41 had only one extra fusion stage, while the Tsar Bomba is reported to have had several. The primary (fission) stage caused the secondary (fusion) stage to detonate, and that in turn set of the tertiary (fusion) stages.
(As I understand it. This stuff is hard to work out the details of, if you don't have clearance.)
Yeah. He missed the most important fact that it's a three stage fusion device, fission-fusion-fusion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Product_202
Have to thumbs down for that; given it's like the #1 thing that makes the Tsar bomba unique
@@elpechos B41 and Tsar Bomba almost has same design internally, they employ three stage/tertiary stage or fission-fusion-fission design.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
In theory tertiary fusion will be powerful but in practical it is very hard to achieve, the Li-D fuel might get blown away by them before it can achieve fusion
He olso missed that we dont know exactly the weight of the tsar bomba but i heard that they not only reduced the power by a half but also tried to make it not explode befor the time
@@ricodelpiero The fast fission of the secondary jacket in fission-fusion-fission bombs is sometimes referred to as a "third stage" in the bomb, but it should not be confused with the obsolete true three-stage thermonuclear design, in which there existed another complete tertiary fusion stage such as in the Tsar Bomba.
From your own link
Our scheduled dose of quality right here. Good stuff
This is the most aesthetically pleasing video about mass destruction I have yet seen
Nice graphics, but tons of wrong... What you show as "Radiation Implosion" most definitely isn't. You also misrepresent a single stage of the Tsar Bomba as being two stages. The components you describe are inherently part of a single stage. Also, you show particles bouncing around within the Hohlraum interior of the bomb when it is WAVES of soft X-rays that create the radiation pressure that implodes the secondary.
Well technically most thermonuclear bombs use the neutron pressure to compress the secondary(through a intermediate know as fog bank) but ya the video is full of factual errors. the kind most elementary school kids would probably not make.(or at least be smart enough to research the correct answer)
But if you consider quantum physics, what you call waves are made of modular particles, so the graphics is right.
Can you introduce what you said in English yoooo????
@@Lucinat0r Dude I'm pretty smart, though no f**king idea what you're talking about. :)
Why dont you make the video then?
"There was no need for these megabombs"
Russia's 20 megaton R-36 Satan ICBM warhead and Poseidon Autonomous Torpedo: "AM I A JOKE TO YOU?"
R-36: still mostly carried multiple smaller warheads rather than one big bomb.
Poseidon: still on drawing board, not ready both torpedo itself or warhead it would be carried.
@@DOSFS it's worse then. MIRV has the advantage of increasing the surface area of impact on the objective.
@@DOSFS mostly =/= always. Stop with the Goalpost Olympics. Poseidon is not finished? PROOF? Hope that desperate dopamine fix to one up in the comment section was worth it.
@@DOSFS more than "on the drawing board". its in testing. they already modified a test sub that takes the massive torpedo for a while now. not only that but id bet that all the mapping of the ocean floor for this thing to travel autonomously is already complete. russia also has 60 years experience making small nuclear reactors. have a look at the "sub brief" channel.
@@mrrolandlawrence It's probably not a good idea to create an autonomous device capable of destroying a city.
“Their designs were so simple, it makes me wonder why the Germans never figured it out” Actually, the hard part isn’t the design used, Little Boy’s design didn’t even get the dignity of a test, the hard part is the fissile material. Iirc, the Germans couldn’t get any to test with in the first place.
There were some early experiments towards nuclear reactors. But instead of fuel rods it was more of a chandelier. Didn't go anywhere near to a functional reactor, but the experiments where there.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Meant they didn’t get enough fissile material to test with. Not only do you need reactors for it, but also centrifuges that can concentrate the correct isotope of Uranium afterwards. It’s very tricky.
@@HappyBeezerStudios
“Chandelier”?
More technical errors: 4:00 shows Fat Man bomb labeled with "Radiation Implosion". Wrong, it's high explosive compression. Radiation implosion is the mechanism for igniting the secondary of the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear bomb.
There was shielding between the explosives and the Pu, it was radiation implosion.
@@prjndigo No, vibrolax is correct. The "shielding" of which you speak simply couples the mechanical compression from the explosive lenses to the pit.
No, shielding has nothing to do with this point. Radiation implosion was first used with later "Hydrogen Bombs" (multi-stage thermonuclear devices using both fission and fusion). Both the Trinity test and the "Fat Man" bomb involved Pu-239 core implosion powered by conventional explosives, not by radiation.
@@prjndigo You don't know what you're on about.
Also it is official that Tsar bomb had 3 stage filled with lead , this was due to cancelation of the project for which it was designed. Also the bomb was designed in such a way that more stages could be added increasing the power
ERROR in this video - Fat Man is first described correctly as a plutonium bomb at 4:05. Then at 4:12 the core of the Fat Man bomb is described as U-235. WRONG. The core was Pu-239.
Also, the video misses the REAL reason a plutonium bomb has to have such a complex implosion triggering mechanism. Pu-239, unlike U-235, fissions and goes into a chain reaction much much faster and easier. The gun device is far too slow in compacting enough Pu-239 together into a critical mass fast enough to create a powerful nuclear explosion. Instead, enough of a runaway chain reaction would have started at the leading edges of the impact point between the two sub-critical masses to blow the two fissile masses apart before most of the Pu-239 had entered into a good size bomb quality runaway chain reaction. The result would be a "fizzle" a very very low yield explosion.
Some of North Korea's atomic bomb tests have been like this - so low yield they were probably fizzles.
Pu-239 is a natural byproduct of most nuclear reactors using uranium and can be separated out relatively easily using chemical means. However, Pu-240 will also be in the mix, and it has a lower ability to undergo fission after getting hit by a neutron (it tends to capture the neutron instead and turn into Pu-241), which ruins the explosive fission chain reaction qualities of Pu-239. And so plutonium derived from ordinary uranium reactors has to also undergo isotope enrichment to bomb grade Pu-239. The other option is to build a special breeder reactor using U-238 to specifically produce highly concentrated Pu-239.
U-235 occurs naturally in mineral ores, while Pu-239 with its shorter half life does not.
And, so in any start up program to build an atomic bomb, it's a lot easier and you save a lot of steps by going for a U-235 enrichment program to make your first bomb. Uranium enrichment thus becomes the first step towards building an atomic bomb.
The issue of Pu-240 is less to do with its poorer neutron properties and more related to its high spontaneous fission rate increase the predetonation probability. There's no record of Plutonium ever being enriched. Any conventional civil PWR can be operated such that it produces weapons grade material.
@@Evan_Bell
Yes, Pu-240 will also under spontaneous fission more easily than Pu-239 (this is a separate problem from its tendency to capture neutrons whizzing around from the ongoing fission reactions), and this also increases the likelihood of a high Pu-240 content plutonium bomb detonating with a fizzle.
Running a nuclear reactor with the uranium fuel undergoing fission and neutron bombardment for only short periods of time before the fuel is taken out to be chemically processed to isolate the plutonium results in the highest concentrations of Pu-239 and lowest concentrations of Pu-240, and this is how weapons grade Pu-239 is most easily produced. Current commercial nuclear reactors for this very reason are not designed to easily operate in this fast breeder mode, with a constant cycling in and out of the uranium fuel. This could be done, but is much more of a slog than using a fast breeder reactor specifically designed to do this. The spent uranium fuel from commercial reactors thus contain plutonium with relatively high percentages of Pu-240 relative to Pu-239 from the long periods of time that the fuel has been in the reactor under neutron bombardment. Isotopic separation of Pu-239 and Pu-240 is possible, but impractical because it's just so much easier to run a uranium reactor in a fast breeder mode to get the weapons grade high concentration Pu-239 and low concentration Pu-240.
@@gandalfgreyhame3425 Spontaneous fission is the prime reason for minimising Pu-240 content.
Weapons have been tested with as high as 19% 240.
Modern weapons can be made such that their incubation time is shorter than their insertion time, rendering them predetonation proof.
Low burn-up campaigns are not reactors operating in "fast breeder mode". Commercial LWRs can't operate in the fast spectrum.
“Making a bomb is simple” is where your incompetence shows.
It not only hard to produce enriched uranium, is also quite hard to create a clean explosion by compressing the fissile material quickly enough. If you don’t do this properly, they yield will be small, parts of fissile material will just melt and fly in all directions. There’s plenty of math and engineering tricks involved. And Plutonium is different from U235, harder to work with.
Fusion bombs are hard too.
How the hell do you animate these videos so perfectly!
Pretty sure it's 10% a decent PC, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% Blender, 50% Render
And 100% reason to remember the name
@@NuclearTopSpot cringe
@Toy cringe
humus.
Bright Side and Lemmino be like:
Little Boy was a security failsafe weapon. Even if the altitude triggers AND explosives all failed, it was going to hit the ground nose first and the rear mass would have slammed into the front mass anyway. That was the point of the design, an insurance plan.
On paraschute? BTW. Ground explosion of such a small warhead would be failure anyway.
There are enough mistakes in this video that people shouldn't watch it.
0:20 "thermonuclear bombs are quite easy to make" - not really. Perhaps easier than acquiring plutonium, but still not easy.
1:20 There were good and sufficient reasons that Germany, and 180 other countries in the world, didn't create nuclear weapons.
2:00 You're confusing tamping with reflecting. A tamper uses inertia to contain the fissile material for a fraction of a second; a reflector bounces neutrons back into the core.
4:08 Fat Man did not use "radiation implosion". That's a different concept than explosive implosion.
4:58 The core of Fat Man wasn't "tuballoy" (natural uranium). It was plutonium.
7:00 Oh god please stop.
0:54 - LB was 9 kT, not 15 kT yield.
1:20 - To add, Heisenberg completely screwed up the calculation as well and thought that they (the Germans) needed 10 times the actual amount to create a criticality explosion.
2:55 - No, it was not 40% and 60%, it was much higher than that. A lot more Uranium was used that was actually necessary. The target was almost a critical mass in it's own right (approximately 90% of a critical mass) and the projectile was 60%+ of a critical mass. LB was actually what's known as a fizzle as so much of it's potential was wasted. And again, LB was only 9 kT, not 15 kT.
6:06 - No, Li6 absorbs a neutron then quickly decays through alpha decay into He4 and H3 (Tritium). H2 (Deuterium) and H3 (Tritium) then fuse under the temperatures and pressures found in the explosion.
Seriously SZS, don't do another one of these unless you spend more time doing the actual research.
Agree with you , David. There is way too much misinformation in this video to be acceptable for a channel purporting to be "science." The animations are wonderful though!
All of your comments are 100% correct. The tamper is so important that the Manhattan Project physicists considered using gold as the tamper because it was cheaper than uranium in 1945. As the compressed core fissions and starts expanding, once it reaches 1.12 times its diameter the fission stops because it is no longer dense enough for fission to continue. That's how important the tamper is as the additional inertia created by the tamper keeps the core critical for milliseconds longer which greatly increases the yield.
@@csdn4483 LB was 13-18kt. Not 9.
Nor was it a fizzle.
@@buckhorncortez The diameter would have to increase by a factor of 1.15 for second criticality.
The tamper definitely does not extend the energy production time by a matter of milliseconds.
It only provided a confinement time of around 79 nanoseconds.
Fun fact, the tzar bomba was actually a nerfed version, supposedly they originally wanted (correct me if I'm wrong) a 100 mt bomb, but someone thankfully convinced them to do a "smaller" one.
The design was capable of 100 Mt but that would have killed the crew of the plane dropping it. As it was they barely survived the 50 Mt version.
@@JonMartinYXD It would also spread the material from U-238 tamper they were originally going with across a significant portion of USSR, which is at least part of why lead tamper was used in the actual test.
@@EgorKaskader True, given how little regard the USSR tended to show for its troop's safety, they were probably more worried about the fallout.
@@JonMartinYXD There may be some truth in that. But the USA should not be too quick to mount the "high horse" on this topic, given all of the radiation exposure to US troops, civilians, Pacific Islanders and the environment in general, that resulted from our own excessive number of above-ground nuclear tests, especially in the 1950's.
In some ways, the most disgusting actions of the US government involved not immediate exposure (sometimes the result of honest mistakes with estimates) but rather the government''s later legalistic refusal to pay anything for the huge medical expenses of many thousands who were nuclear test victims.
In the end it was the cleanest bomb detonated measured on the yield/fallout ratio. And they basically only did it to show they can.
Loving the quality of your work so I don't mind the time it takes between videos!
The hard part is always manufacturing the fuel. Uranium enrichment is still the bottleneck that stops most countries from making their own bombs. The plutonium has to be made in a uranium fission reactor then separated chemically. So it's not any easier since the reactor designs good at making plutonium need enriched uranium too.
graphite moderated _natural_ uranium was used in many of the early plutonium production reactors - look up Windscale.
Even the RBMK design from the Soviet Union (Chernobyl was that style) whose spent fuel was processed for plutonium used only slightly enriched fuel.
One key thing to remember about a plutonium production reactor is that the fuel canisters or rods are changed frequently, either like Windscale and Hanford which pushed new canisters in the front which displaced old canisters out the back; or the RBMK design where they had a refueling machine that could open up one fuel channel at a time and swap out the rod while the reactor was running. If you leave the rods in too long, you'll burn up the Pu you want, so frequent fuel changes are a normal part of the design.
Going directly to plutonium is actually an option, at least for fission and boosted fission bombs - if you want to go thermonuclear you will need _depleted_ uranium (plus lots of lithium deuteride, tritium, etc) but there's no place where you absolutely _need_ enriched uranium in a bomb.
Power plant yes, bomb very much optional.
@@chouseification The earliest stages of enrichment are actually the most difficult. Getting to 1% U235 is like 85% of the work to 90% weapons grade uranium.
@@sethsims7414 I'm not sure how that's really relevant as you can go directly to Pu and not enrich at all - as I already called out, a lot of the early production reactors were fed _natural_ uranium. That's unenriched, so it's about 0.7% 235 (7 parts out of every thousand) and most of the rest as 238. That's enough for a graphite or heavy water moderated (Candu from Canada) reactor to sustain a chain reaction - without any enrichment.
You only need to enrich uranium if you're going to use "light" water in a power plant, or something exotic like a submarine's reactor.
Koreans use laser enrichment
Couple top o the line centrifuges and you’re good to go.
1:22 How could the japanese have disabled the first two types of nuclear weapons??
I guess if you just shot them.
i was wondering if this was an early April fool's joke video until halfway through, cus he said so much stupid shit
I think he meant the neutron flux from small counter-nuke would cause them to pre-detonate in a fizzle. Except we know that Japan was not even looking at nuclear weapons development.
@@JonMartinYXD They were, just at a stage farther back than the USA was when they built reactor underneath the U.Chicago bleachers.
@@davidweihe6052 They had a rudimentary nuclear research program, no more. Japanese scientists assessed that it would not be possible to build a bomb during the war so resources were directed elsewhere.
The first British Thermonuclear bombs had a layered structure with the fusion fuel layered around the fission primary. The Tsar Bomba was also a layer cake design. In theory you could just add more layers to make it as big as you like.
Sorry, you do not understand how a layer-cake (sloika in Russian) thermonuclear device works at all. Layer cake devices are compressed by high explosive, not radiation, and have a maximum yield about 1MT. Tsar Bomba was a Teller-Ulam-Sakharov radiation compressed device. All of this information has been public knowledge for over 25 years.
@@vibrolax Not only that... a sloika design has an inherent limit on scalability beyond a which you cross the line of a critical mass. Yes the first fission-fusion-fission bomb was a layer cake design but, as you said... Tsar was a three-stage Teller-Ulam design.
This video is trash... it throws the ball, not only when it comes to the physics of the bombs... also regarding plain (and public) historical fact
@@vibrolax It's public knowledge, but it's not as though it's simple to understand. Even if you can separate the true stuff from the deliberate obfuscation and the plain wrong, nuclear engineering is up there with rocket surgery as a difficult subject.
@@leninalopez2912 Pointing out gross historical or scientific errors in YT videos is a fool's quest, but sometimes we cannot resist.
@@akizeta It isnt particularly hard to grasp the concept of using a fission bomb to compress and ignite fusion.
Wht the tsar did was then use that resulting fusion to compress and ignite yet more fusion.
8:45 I forget which type of fallacy this is, but NO. That's not how it works. These do NOT scale linearly.
What 8:45 does not have any audio?
@@arifahmedkhan9999
Think he meant 7:45.
4:24 Ah yes, I also layout my explosives in the classic soccer ball pattern.
I like to lay my explosives out in a kit-kat pattern and hand them out to random passerbys.
Thanks for the video. Few interesting facts you didn't mentioned though.
-Sources don't agree on the yield, US sources says it was 58 MT, Soviet source says the bomb had 50 MT
-Tsar bomba original yield was about 100 MT but was reduced for the live test by about a half
-Theoretical limit for TB design was about 150 MT
-Sakharov in his memoirs mentions that the main design in theory could be modified to increase the yield to 1 GT!
Creating huge single bombs is not practical because a lot of power is simply wasted by escaping into space. A single missile with power of 30 or 40 MT but divided into many smaller warheads will be able to basically destroy the whole country size of France. For example new Russian missile R-28 Sarmat can have yield up to 50 MT but in 20 or more warheads or MIRVs. This will mean 20 bombs 2.5 MT each.
So in case of France, 20 big cities can be destroyed with just one missile. A whole country would collapse in the matter of minutes.
A single 50 MT bomb would not be able to do that.
It cant carry 20 it actually carries 10 heavy(1 megaton more or less) or 15 light (500 kilotons probably less) mirv.
You're right, huge bombs are grossly inefficient. The weapons effects drop off as the cube of distance. That applies to any explosive. So the big bombs waste a lot of scarce materials.
@@daveeyes But since most national leaders (and the citizens of their respective countries) aren't nuclear physicists, such huge yield numbers do have a desirable (for deterrence) psychological effect. Such high-yield bombs will be useful for peaceful purposes--as safety explosives for mining asteroids, the Moon, Mercury, etc., and to propel Orion-type large interplanetary spaceships and starships. (West Germany, for a time, was working on nuclear safety explosives for use in mining [on Earth].)
Neutrons do not reflect, the tamper acts to both slow the neutrons so they will cause fission and the high density holds the reacting material together longer and therefore increases the yield.
They undergo elastic scattering. The moderation of neutrons adversely affects the effective neutron multiplication rate, and is undesirable in a weapon.
The main reason for a tamper, is for kinetic impetus and inertial containment of the fissile material; to keep it in a supercritical state for as long as possible. The ingenious later addition to this, was to introduce an air-gap between the inner wall of explosives and the tamper. Unfortunately little was known about the nuclear cross-section of lithium7 at the time of Castle Bravo.
New here and just wanted to say I love the way you present these topics. Love the graphics and the 3D work and the way its all explained. Really good job!
It was my understand the Rusians determined any weapon above 50 MT would waste most of its force into space. The Tzar bomba wa originally design to yield 100 MT but was scaled down.
The Tsar Bomba was a political statement, it was never a practical weapon. They didn't go to the full 100 Mt because that would have destroyed the plane that dropped it.
You are correct, Joe. Anything above 50Mt is wasted into outer space.
The 100 MT uranium tamper design would also have been incredibly dirty. It would have increased the total amount of nuclear waste in the atmosphere by several fold. Enough to have been considered a crime against humanity by some..
@Cosmo Genesis This is true, troop safety was usually pretty low on the list of concerns for the USSR government.
@@JonMartinYXD idiotic propaganda cliche
Fun Fact: The eruption of the volcano Krakatoa was actually about 4 times more powerful than Tsar Bomba, and even if the B41 was the same weight as Tsar Bomba, it would still be smaller than Krakatoa's explosion.
Yeah one thing men can never compete with is nature, if the yellowstone supervolcano was to erupt it would criple the whole united states. Just think of a meteor hitting earth, makes nukes look like firecrackers
The Tsar Bomba still has twice the energy of the already gigantic Sumatra earthquake... 😳
There are a lot of inaccuracies in here. Take it with a pinch of salt.
Take all secondary sources with a pinch of salt
Maybe you should have made the video then, take it with a pintch of salt
@@youaredumbaf2442 why so aggressive? He is right when he says take the video with a pinch of salt
Just a small notice, MK41 of the same size would probably have around or less than 100Mt as it doesnt increased linearly with weight
The more the matter, the further apart are the furthest individual atoms, unless you increase density.
It increases exponentially. A more voluminous mass of fusion fuel of the same density will reach higher burn up efficiencies, due to decrease thermal losses and the whole assembly is larger relative to the photon mean free path.
What my dad drops in the toilet is really the most powerful, not even Russian engineering can defeat the demonic bowel movements of a father.
Okay, Fat Man was NOT easy to build. You try getting a perfectly symmetrical implosion. Took a breakthrough in explosives lensing plus extremely precise machining.
plus Jon von Neumann thinking it up, off-the-cuff.
Today with numerically controlled, hyper precise machine tools it should not be to difficult to form/shape explosive lense. So today assuming availabity of weapons grade plutonium, its relatively easy.
One of the breakthroughs was the explosive wire detonator system thought up by Luis Alvarez. After some work, they got the detonators and timing system working so all 32 detonators were within fractions of a millisecond.
@@DrDeuteron No. George Kistiakowsky was the person who developed the explosive lenses. Von Neumann helped run the hydrocode calculations required to verify the blast wave interactions. None of it was created "off-the-cuff."
@@buckhorncortez Yo you seem to be in the know. Is a yellowcake nuclear bomd possible? If its possible then how praticable as a deployable battlefield weapon as to it possible size.
You forgot to mention, that Tsar bomba was tested only at half power
Even if Tsar Bomba in it's full yield (100 Mt) configuration it's still has 3.7 to 4 Mt/ton of yield to weight ratio, still lack behind B41 5.2 Mt/ton.
he mentioned the U238 third stage was replaced with inert lead. 50MT of fission would have been a lot of fallout.
@@ricodelpiero yes but still, it is important nonetheless
@@ricodelpiero Who cares imo?
@@Янус_Ырт that’s why it was explained in the video
What a fantastic invention. I mean the people who created these things must be so proud of their invention they couldn't wait to tell their stories to their grandchildren. Who wouldn't 🤦♂️
Edward Teller and his 10 Gt nuke: Indeed.
Tzar bomba was almost certainly three stage. It is not teller-ulam architecture
You can have a 3-stage Teller Ulam arrangement.
Slight mistake there - the implosion from the implosive lens mechanism of the Fat Man is NOT radiation implosion. Radiation implosion is what happens when X-rays emitted in a primary fission process compresses the secondary fusion material through the pressure of the X-ray radiation.
Little correction: you need slow-moving neutrons to achieve fission. They're called thermal neutrons. The faster ones will bounce off of the nucleus. A slow one will impact and stick, further destabilising the structure of the nucleus and causing it to fiss.
Many reactors use a moderator to thermalize the neutron flux, but fission bombs do not. All fission bombs ("A-bombs") undergo fast fission. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_fission
No. Weapons use fast neutron spectra.
Thermal and fast neutrons are more likely to undergo elastic scattering than any other reaction with fissile materials.
The blast from Tsar Bomba was so big that a fall retardant shoot was used to allow the pilot time to get far enough away from the blast.
Chute?
@@owenshebbeare2999 Yes, thanks for the correction. I knew something didn't look right.
Don't forget Atomic Annie. Not just missiles... Nukes in artillery shells! (rumor has it, some were made to be fired from the 14-16" guns of battleships.)
- The M-110, 8" self propelled howitzer was nuke capable.
- During the cold war, our firing tables had a page top heading NUCLEAR with necessary plot info, but weight & dimension info columns & rows were empty with red color CLASSIFIED; TOP SECRET Ref. No. ***** across the blank columns & rows. An additional unknown crew member would be assigned to the crew if the situation required a nuke artillery shell who's location was also unknown & not part of our standard ammo supply. But could become available ASAP if needed.
- Retaliation from an incoming nuke was to be to protect yourself by bending down with head between your legs & kiss your ass goodbye!
They had them to be fired from 155 mm howitzers.
@@ricktotty2283 True, but that came later... 8" was cutting edge when I delt with them.
How far could these be propelled? I would imagine it would be much further than the blast radius...
@@fauzirahman3285 Unfortunately, not always. Battleship rounds go about 25mi. (before your have to switch to rockets -- "self-propelled ammo")
What did you mean by the early nukes being easily disabled? Both fat man and little boy used a radar fuze to detonate at the proper height, that potentially could be jammed. However, IIRC there were pressure and contact backups as well. Of course, intercepting a B-29 is easier than an ICBM, but Japan at this stage of the war hardly had the means to do so.
Some of the best science content on TH-cam. Thank you, SZS.
I know very little about this subject, but I'm also really enjoying the comments here. Almost seems as though the sum of the comment section exceeds the content of the video.
The real reason why Tsar Bomba wasn't yielded at 100 megatons is because the plane that carrying it will not survive the blast, that's the reason.
Soviet also cancelled "Ivan bomb project" where they want to construct few hundred "Tsar bombas" because it simply impractical to deploy if real nuclear war is about to happen, instead they develop a small tactical nuclear warhead that can be carried by ICBM.
3 months ago, but I'm no lord.
I do hope you're doing alright though.
Except that the designed yield of the tsar bomba was 100Mt, which means it only surpasses it by ~1.5x
I think you have conflated tamper and reflector. The neutron reflector is a material that reflects neutrons back into the reaction so they have a second chance to trigger a fission event. The tamper was jus a really heavy she'll surrounding the reaction so it's inertial mass would hold the reaction from expanding for a few extra microseconds because a few extra microseconds can dramatically increase the yield of the reaction. They were usually in the same layer but not the same materials. I believe beryllium is usually used as the reflector and whatever the heaviest material they have available when designing the device is used for the tamper.
This seems relevant given the current circumstances
1) Fat Man used a plutonium 239 core. The very fact that it had to be an implosion design had to do that, otherwise, it was not possible to use plutonium 239 synthesized in reactors (it had too much plutonium 241, which undergoes too much spontaneous fission and adds excess neutrons to the core, making it impossible to build a gun type bomb without predetonation.... the core would just disintegrate well before getting fully assembled).
2) Radiation implosion had NOTHING to do with core compression by means of chemical high explosives... it's an entirely diferent notion, relevant to thermonuclear weapons.
Buddy... this is ELEMENTARY nuclear weapons design. And by that I mean... introductory wikipedia level elementary. At that point the video lost all credibility. Research better your topics, because this is shameful.
Pu-240 is the prime nuclide concern with regards to spontaneous fission, not 241.
@@Evan_Bell Yep... you're right. My bad
The designed capacity of Tsar Bomba was more than 100 Mt rather than 50 Mt. But the bomb was investigated with its half capacity. There haven't ever been any others bombs created or exploded with higher capacity (including B 41) in the World. So it's the most powerful bomb in the World.
It's a real fact.
And it's strange try to guess what the capcity of B 41 would have been if it had been three times larger.
I know you probably don't care and I'm not sure if you even read the comments, but I wanted to say that your channel was absolutely excellent, there are almost no flaws in the video in terms of what people want to learn and what you explain, and you have the technical knowledge to talk about subjects that no one else covers, not only that but also give your opinion on them, really great stuff
If I had one complainbt and it would be very small, it would be that maybe the videos do not go in as much depth and detail as they could, I realize you do a lot of editing and very well made graphics so of course the longer the video the more work has to be put in it, but idk, maybe keep the same ammount of graphics and work on the visual aspects of the video, but have the video be a bit longer by including some more technical talk and details, it's not that the videos are surface level, but I feel like they would be even better by being slightly longer and really explaining everything there has to explain, something like 15-20 minute long videos with the same ammount of graphics and editing, but a more thorough look
Regardless, really really great channel, some of the best stuff on youtube
And yet he gets basic facts wrong. Fat man was not a radiation implosion device, just straight implosion. Radiation Implosion is the technique used exclusively with multi-stage thermonuclear devices, where the X-ray radiation from the primary fission device (straight implosion) is focused to compress the secondary fusion device (this part is the radiation implosion).
@@Degenerate76 Oh yeah, I thought that was weird when he said that, since he said "radiation implosion" but then he showed a bomb that worked by chemical explosive detonation shockwaves
So two criticism then, slightly more in depth videos and being extra careful to avoid mistakes
But I mean come on, it's still far better than stuff like sci show or pbs, that are made by people with 0 understanding of anything and full of mistakes consistently
@@Degenerate76 He got other stuff wrong too, or simply skipped over how it, like how lithium deuteride works. You can't make a bomb with normal hydrogen, you need it's heavy isotopes (deuterium and tritium), and you can't use only one or the other, you have to use both and they need to be well mixed. Tritium doesn't exist in nature so has to be made, and it's highly radioactive. So the easiest thing is to react deuterium with lithium to make a solid fuel, and use the bomb's neutrons to transform the lithium into tritium as the bomb explodes.
There was no reason for the U.S. to build a bomb equal to or more powerful than the Tsar Bomba because the Tsar blast exceeded the upper limit of the atmosphere. This meant that no matter how much more powerful a bomb could be, it could not do much more damage at the surface of the Earth because the blast had nothing (the mass of the atmosphere above) left to push against.
False.
YES!!!!!! IT'S BACK!!!!!!
tsar makes the bomb dropped in Hiroshima look like a little boy
literally
It’s pronounced “Mark” not MK.
Things that are not pronounced as they're written can go f themselves.
@@chesshooligan1282 true dat
In the early days Russia built higher yield warheads because their missile guidance systems weren't very accurate and might miss the target. Today the highest yield for the majority of US warheads is W88 which has a yield of 475 kilotons. Russia uses a 700 kiloton warhead. Since the destructive power increases by the cubed root of the increase in yield there isn't much practical difference between them. More lower yield bombs are therefore more destructive than fewer high yield bombs of the same total megatons. Therefore 200 W88s would be far more destructive over a much wider area than two Tsar Bombas even though the total yield of the W88s is slightly lower.
I think there may be some inaccuracies here regarding what's meant by "radiation implosion" and "stages"
BTW, slow neutrons are preferred to fast ones.
I thought it depended on the fuel type used.
Unless you are trying to fission the U-238 tamper, in which case fast neutrons are required.
nice video, lots of good info and well presented. One very minor nitpick: "Mk. 41" is pronounced "Mark 41" not "Emkay 41"
This relied on 'IF this American bomb had been much bigger' it would have been more powerful - brought to you by : If I could run 3 times as fast as I can , I'd be faster than Ben Johnson .
I thought the reason the tsar bomb was "only" 50 MT when tested compared with a design yield of 100 MT was because they used an non fissionable lead tamper to reduce fallout. Using a uranium tamper instead would have increased the yield considerably through fission due to the neutrons released by the fusion stage or stages. I think I read this in Richard Rhodes book "Dark Sun".
Almost correct. The final quaternary fusion stage was left off, because the resulting blast of a 100Mt explosion would have destroyed the dropping plane.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 royhills is correct. The 50Mt difference was from changing the U238 tamper to lead. There was never a fourth stage.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Product_602
Tsar Bomba was the equivalent of showing a Soviet male with a 30" dick, ignoring that no woman could "accept" such a member. The USA no longer keeps hydrogen devices greater than 1 megaton in its arsenal because accuracy gives better return in destructiveness than raw power. You could use one Tsar Bomba to take all of Great Britain out, or a score of smaller devices exactly targeted, and one golden BB takes out the Soviet plane before delivering it.
@@justinhannan1713 The tamper was the fourth stage.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 from the wiki:
"AN602 had a "three-stage" design: the first stage is the necessary fission trigger. The second stage was two relatively small thermonuclear charges with a calculated contribution to the explosion of 1.5 megatons, which were used for radiation implosion of the third stage, the main thermonuclear module located between them, and starting a thermonuclear reaction in it, contributing fifty megatons of explosion energy. As a result of the thermonuclear reaction, huge numbers of high-energy fast neutrons were formed in the main thermonuclear module, which, in turn, initiated the fast fission nuclear reaction in the nuclei of the surrounding uranium-238, which would have added another fifty megatons of energy to the explosion, so that the estimated energy release of the AN602 was around 100 megatons."
I hope that clears things up.
You don't understand the purpose of the larger (5-15 mt) H-bombs. They weren't designed to take out cities. They were to be dropped by bombers to destroy AIRFIELDS. The idea was to hit enemy airfields very early in a war before they could launch *their* bombers. The bombs were made very powerful so they could destroy the bombers on the airfield even if the bomb wasn't dropped right on target. The assumption was the bomber might come under attack before getting into the perfect position so a bomb that could wipe out bombers many miles away was used.
As ICBMs came on line the idea of using bombers to knock out enemy bombers on a first strike became impractical so the larger bombs weren't needed.
Sure thing, if the B41 weighted as much as the Tsar Bomba, it would've been more powerful. But it didn't, and the Tsar Bomba still is the most powerful to this day. Also, you should consider that the Tsar Bomba's yield was decreased from 100 to 50 Mtons so that the pilot who had to drop the bomb would not die haha
“…..Tsar Bomba still is the most powerful to this day.” As far as you know…..
Edward Teller once proposed to the Allies to build a 10 gigaton bomb.
Amateurish video. For example you miss label the stages of a Ulam-Teller design. The First Stage comprises both the primary and the spark plug. They serve the same purpose, to compress and heat the lithium deuteride to a temperature and pressure that allows for fusion to occur. The Second Stage is the fusion of deuterium and tritium, two distinct hydrogen isotopes. Deuterium is part of the lithium-deuteride obviously and the tritium is produced during the reaction by deuterium capturing neutrons and also the decay of lithium-6 under the intense neutron bombardment. The Third Stage is the fission of the tamper-pusher, the outer casing of the bomb. This casing acts as a reflector concentrating the X-rays emitted by the primary onto the fusion core. The process which creates the pressures needed for compression of the core is classified but it is believed it is based on ablation pressure, the rapid vaporization of the surface of the core under X-ray radiation creating a massive inward pressure. To be suitable as a reflector the casing has to be extremely dense and two materials can be used - lead or depleted Uranium (U238). Using lead does nothing, there is no third stage. Using depleted Uranium roughly doubles the yield. U238 is the tame Uranium isotope, it cannot chain react since it's atoms don't fission when struck by fission neutrons. But they do fission when struck by the higher energy neutrons created by the fusion of the second stage. This generates a huge boost in yield, as mentioned but also massive radioactive fallout. The third stage being extremely simple there is no reason to test it. It will work every time so in test bombs it is always replaced by lead to avoid dealing with the fallout.
Tsar bomba had two Fusion strages ... the final fission tamper stage was lead (hence the 58mt instead of 100+) It was a true 3 stage weapon ...you don't count the tamper as a stage
No. The sparkplug is part of the secondary.
The primary serves to compress the fusion fuel, the sparkplug serves to heat it.
The tamper/pusher is not the outer casing of the bomb.
It is not true that the tamper is always replaced with a non-fissile material for tests. It's usually not replaced.
@@Evan_Bell Oh look mister details graced me with an answer. The way I was thought this shit is both fission devices - the primary and the spark plug make up the first stage. The second stage is the fusion stage and it can also be a primary for a third stage which is another bigger fusion stage and so on. The last stage which can be the third, fourth or nth depending on how many fusion stages are used is the tamper-pusher atoms undergoing fission when struck by the high energy fusion neutrons. Because the tamper/pusher is incredibly heavy and strong it doubles as the casing for the bomb. Of course an outer casing is added to enable handling the device and mount fins and other stuff that a bomb needs but structurally the tamper is the casing. As for bombs being tested with U238 tampers you are right and wrong. Most early tests by all nuclear powers used U238. Later tests didn't and this one certainly did not. Had they used a active tamper the blast would have definitely killed the crew of the aircraft and also created a large amount of permanent nuclear fallout.
@@sardoniclaugh9646 Well I don't know who taught you that, but it's wrong. The sparkplug is part of the second stage. The second stage tamper is not the bomb casing.
The radiation case and the ballistic case can be integral, but not the secondary tamper and the ballistics case.
Many of the early tests used HEU secondary tampers.
Also it's a bit odd that you mock me for detailing errors in your comment, when your comment details errors of video... Erroneously.
@@Evan_Bell It took me 20 seconds to make that comment. It's mostly right. He's making a lot of errors in a video that took him hours if not days to make. There's a difference.
: her. please don't be weird in front of my parents:
me. after 2 drinks
It was the most powerful, just not the most efficient.
just casually shows us how to make a nuke:
*FBI wants to know your location*
Check out Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons pages. All sort of information there.
4:00 ah no, radiation implosion is when soft xrays from the fission compresses the holram containing the fusion fuel in a hydrogen bomb.
Exactly. Why didn’t this guy know that? Seems like he should have.
I've been fascinated with nuclear weapons since I was in primary school. My mathematical abilities kept me from pursuing any profession in the physical sciences. Your breakdown here is very informative and greatly appreciated.
So folks, all you have to do now is go to your local Home Depot and buy all the stuff in this video, and you can be the first to blow up your neighborhood.
Except for the most important part of the weapon- fissile material. The process to enrich U-235 or create Pu-239 is far more involved than constructing the simplest nukes using them. Luckily you won't find these at the local hardware store.
@@CoryMcCarvilleSchueths Depends on the store. When the Soviet Union collapsed , there were some loose nukes that went missing. Nobody talks about it , because they still are. Sweet dreams.
@mug wump Try your local cold war supermarket it's near Thuringia up the road take the Third Reich ------ lol
Yep, there's nothing even remotely easy about acquiring the materials, let alone engineering a feasible nuclear weapon. The bridgewire detonators alone are specifically made for the ultra-precise timing of implosion devices and require particular expertise to manufacture. One of a myriad of other specifics required that's beyond even seasoned professionals without the exact knowledge.
This was an attempt at a little sarcastic humor. I guess they don't teach sarcasm in school these days.
The Nazis failed not because of theory, but the engineering difficulties. The allies bombed the cr*p out of key resources required to do development, such as heavy water and special steels, and also bombed the development sites themselves. The Manhattan project is still (probably) the largest project ever undertaken, with no enemy interruptions, and almost all of it was about the engineering (although, of course, the theory improved as the engineering developed). But the Germans never had enough time, resources, and trouble-free location to match anything like the Manhattan project: the penalty of waging war on everybody else.
Fastest I have ever clicked! Glad to see a new video!
From what I heard, germany scientists were close to it but they feared that hilter might use it on mass scale and simply said "give us time" or "we can't do it" since nobody else can question it, they are in the big brains club, right? (It's one of versions I heard but I beleieve it)
dude's subscriber count should be 100 times bigger
Not when you only upload once every 3 months.
@@SnoopyDoofie kurzgesagt and other quality youtubers used to upload seldomly as well before they got bigger and had more resources. it is still unfair how TH-cam's algorithm doesn't promote these kinds of channels enough
@@nilsmeta641 TH-cam is a business that relies almost entirely on ads. Why would advertizers bother advertizing on a channel that seldom uploads? Makes no sense. Advertizers are only interested in lots of viewers and not about content quality. It took Kurzgesagt years to get a large number of subscribers and on average they upload once a month.
It only seams "so simple" now that we've done it. At the time, it was very difficult. Just look at the massive "secret" infrastructure for refining and enriching Uranium. When all you have are pencils and slide rules, the calculations for an implosion device are impossibly hard. Nazi Germany didn't manage to build one because of these hurdles. 20/20 hindsight, it's _possible_ they could have, but it would've taken such large infrastructure the Allies would've known about it, and bombed it. The US had the luxury of vast areas to work, lots of people to do the work, and no risk of anyone bombing any of it.
Possibly the first time I've seen a doc mention the lithium oopsie at castle bravo. Very good stuff.
Then you haven't been looking very hard! There are quite a few here on TH-cam dealing with exactly that. Even when they don't get it completely correct, there are always plenty of comment contributions to set them straight.
“Mankind invented the atomic bomb, but no mouse would ever construct a mousetrap.”
1:12 How could the bombs have been disabled if the Japanese had known how they work? 😲
Nice work and amazing graphics 👌
this suddenly got relevant again lmao
Russia has a nuke torpedo called possidon with 200 megatons of TNT
Me: hears making a nuke is easy to make
Me: looks at 400,000 views
'Nervous Sweating'
The scary thing is the maximum achievable efficiency of thermonuclear warheads with current technology is 25% (only 25% detonates before the rest is vapourised up from 1.4% efficiency with little boy)
So the B41 8,800lbs weight only 1000lbs (450kg) is actually nuclear material.
So a 27 tonne version would only have 6.75x. The amount 3,073kg (6,600lbs) of nuclear material.
Meaning with technology with current warheads we could make a theoretical yield of 560 Mega tons for large bombs or 82Megatons for warheads that could fit on Trident Missiles. If nukes were 100% efficient.
And that’s before you explore other theoretical anomaly’s.
Nuclear science currently is only a glimpse at what physics allows theoretically.
Are you referring to fission or fusion efficiency? Either way it's incorrect. 35% fission and 40% fusion efficiency have been demonstrated.
How did you arrive at that 450kg value? It's not correct. It contained at least 1.24 tons of fissionable material. The largest warheads that could theoretically be carried by the Trident II would be 2.16Mt, not 82 Mt. This ignores the fact that the theoretical specific energy limit is only achievable in very large devices.
My grandfather had a radiation burn on his forehead from the fat man bomb. Thanks for explaining the difference between them.
How'd he get that? Would you care to tell the story?
@@lucasduque8289 he was a POW in a mine near Nagasaki and was above ground when it went off. It looked like he had a sunburn on his forehead. He was in the Dutch military in Java when it was overrun by the Japanese with my grandmother, my dad and one of my uncles.
@@marcschouten3474 I can only imagine what it must be like to see this. Thanks for telling the story.
@@lucasduque8289 thanks he only spoke to me about it once and it was very hard to hear. Truly inhumane but then that’s war.
a 140 megaton bomb weighing 27 tons would be an excellent candidate for an unmanned submarine, sneaking it's way into a harbor waiting for orders to go BOOM.
Wait...... is there not such a thing already?
The title is misleading! In fact, the Tsar bomb was the most powerful bomb. However, it was not the most efficient bomb.
Apparently there's a lot more problems then the title, tho I can't say whether that's true myself since I don't actually know anything about the subject.
Much of this isnt correct. For example, the tamper isn't the neutron reflector that's usually a lightweight material lille beryllium. The tamper is present to slow down the initial expansion of the fireball for a long enough time to achieve neutron saturation. A few extra microseconds is the difference between a cumbersome low yield dirtybomb and a compact deliverable physics package with high yield (100kT -10MT) and minimal fallout (if delivered as an air burst), or a fallout nightmare country killer (if delivered as a ground burst). The "radiation implosion" section is also completely incorrect! Let me know if you want to fix the video. It should only require editing the script to fix the errors and re dubbing.
"Neutron saturation"? Meaningless. The tamper delays second criticality by a factor of a few dozen nanosecs, not microsecs.
There's nothing "easy" about making a plutonium bomb, neither making the appropriate high explosive symmetrical implosion geometry or timing all the needed triggers to ignite simultaneously. Blithely characterizing it as such while slurping the knowledge off from the internet with no effort of your own is laughable.
Plutonium bombs are half-century old technology, not 'easy' but hardly difficult for modern state-of-the-art technology.
Considering that it was made for the first time in 1944-45... given access to the critical materials (which essentially reduces to... fissile material) it's amost certainly doable in any more or less equiped hacklab with the right people having the right skills (mostly high pressure hydrodynamics... something you can get from century old published material, that in this day and age, circulates freely as pirated books on the net). There's absolutelly NOTHING technically challenging about the design of a nuclear weapon at this point... only the procurement of it's nuclear explosive proper... fissile material
@@leninalopez2912 If by "nothing technically challenging" you mean some clumsy mechanism to smash two subcritical masses together for a dirty bomb... then sure. But anybody with five minutes of spare time can read (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man#Development) and see that your "hacklab" comments become laughable when it comes to designing an and machining an implosion bomb of any actual efficiency. I'd love to see your hacklab associates design anything remotely capable of doing the simultaneous bridge-wire detonation of the polygonal high-explosive lenses, after they confirmed they're operating correctly with flash-xray photography in test detonations. I'd wager they'd be killed in some criticality event long before they could "google" enough to adapt some clumsy Arduino project to the task at hand. No... they would opt to just use a professionally designed complete warhead assembly smuggled out of a corrupted military base long before LARPING the role of pioneering physicists.
Just came across your channel for the first time today: Brilliant!
WAKE UP !, U BOZO !
This video contains a lot of factual Miss statements.
Oh well here an easy solution to your problem, make your own video
A very interesting and extremely engaging video. The narrator is especially skilled and presents the details with great clarity and infectious enthusiasm. However it is quite a long way off when it comes to the real facts of the matter.
'Fat Man' used a plutonium core, not uranium.
The tamper is there primarily to hold the device together via inertia for long enough that an appreciable yield is generated. Critically it also works to make the explosive compression wave as uniform as possible. When chosen with care the tamper's substance will also act to reflect neutrons back into the core. If natural/depleted uranium is used for the tamper in a hydrogen weapon it will contribute enormously to the final yield due to fast-fission from the masses of neutrons generated by the fusion reaction. In fact in many ways this phenomenon could be considered the main destructive component of a modern nuclear warhead. The primary fission and secondary fusion stages may be thought of as present only to generate enough neutrons to allow this pseudo-tertiary stage to occur rather than for their own explosive effect--although obviously the Secondary in particular does make a sizeable contribution.
The pure fission weapon 'Fat Man' was triggered by conventional shaped charges _not_ Radiation Implosion.
In the real world 'Radiation Implosion' is a process employed by a staged thermonuclear device. It is the method by which the X-Ray photons created by a fission primary, when mediated through FOGBANK or a similar substance compress first the fusion fuel and then the fissile 'spark plug' in the Secondary to reach their operational densities.
Instead of having one bomb with the ability to split the world in half, we now have 27,000 bombs with the ability to turn the world into a sun.