Setting off an M388 (the type of warhead used on the Davy Crockett) in the middle of the Pentagon... wouldn’t barely hit the outer ring of the building and wouldn’t affect anyone outside the property. Not because the device isn’t powerful, it’s because the pentagon is just that F’ing big.
And that's our season! We'll be filming more in the spring, and there will be audience tickets available -- keep an eye out for announcements here and on Twitter. Thanks for watching, everyone!
Just a note on the davy crocket system it did fire far enough for you to be out of the blast range. “With caveats” 1 - if you were downwind there was a risk of being hit by fallout. 2 - it was essentially a mortar system in how it fired so theres the issue of it not making it to your planned target leaving you in the blast radius. 3 - it was actually apparently test fired 1 or 2 times though I can’t really find any particular details apart from listing a test site for one test firing. You would probably need to be from the US and file a freedom of information act request to see if the test footage is declassified as it doesn’t seem to exist online.
I seem to remember having seen the footage for at least one DC test, from what I remember it really doesn't look like a nuclear explosion, just a large normal explosion
@@richardmillhousenixonAs far as I know, it effectively squished the explosive power of a WWI land mine into something four guys and a jeep can haul around, detonating with the energy of twenty tonnes of TNT. The current largest conventional bomb in military use, the American GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast is, 8,5 tonnes, nine meters long and needs to be thrown out the cargo door of a C-130 and is “only” 11 tonnes TNT equivalent. The one time it was used, 13 April 2017, it flattened a small village in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. And the Davy Crockett had twice the explosive power and the burst of radiation would kill anyone within 160m of the blast who wasn’t killed by the explosion. To add in to the power of the system, it was equipped with a 20mm _spotting rifle,_ a light cannon whose ballistic arc would roughly follow that of the main gun, so the crew can be sure their atomic warhead will hit its mark. But even then, the recoilless rifle itself had a 50m radius in where the warhead would actually land.
GeweldigWereld the chicken is either irradiated or vaporized and we cannot know which state it's in until we open the box, but opening it will seal the fate of everyone in a five mile radius.
+jcxz - Indeed you can, and a nuclear bomb that has yet to start its fission reaction isn't thát dangerous. Sure, you'll get a decent radiation dose by being near it, but it's not a one-way ticket to acute radiation sickess or radiation-born cancers on its own.
@@alansmithee419: On the one hand: fair point. On the other: If the bomb hasn't gone off I could check my own pulse and infer that the nuke can't have exploded (yet). ** checks pulse.... Hmm, no nuclear war going on under my bed today. Monsters, maybe. But at least now I know that those must be conventional then.
@@jcxz983 if the bomb hasn't gone off you can do literally anything that's physically possible and infer the bomb didn't go off. Also I've now got the phrases "conventional monsters" and "nuclear monsters" in my head.
@@esobelisk3110 To be fair, the only Belgian comic protagonists most of the largely-American audience would know about are: Tintin, Johan, and the Smurfs.
@@divicarpe1844 Well, here in the USA the most well known are the Smurfs (moreso than Johan himself even though in the original comics he's the lead) and Tintin
2:36 This is actually referring to the "fireball" liquid salt thorium reactor design. It was pitched to the air Force as a way to make bombers that could patrol for days on end without refueling BUT the reactor designers knew it'd never fly a plane, they just needed lots of cold war money to build and research the design. Go look up LFTR, the fireball was the grandfather of that.
Ya, there were several attempts, most were just reactors they put inside the plane to see if it would operate and how much shielding they could get away with not having, cause planes need to be light.
speaking of crazy atomic designs: Project Orion think Empire State Building, going to space, _whole_ , on a _series_ of nuclear detonations, spaced just few seconds apart
666Tomato666 There's video of Project Orion tests on TH-cam. They made a smaller vehicle and used chemical explosives for a proof of concept and launched it.
The atomic bomb not fired in Spain that Gary mentioned was accidentally dropped on Palomares by a US plane, on the sea, and the Minister of Internal Affairs of that time went swimming after that. Oh, sweet Francoism times.
@@greggregoryst7126 : What you're talking about is doing things _perfectly,_ not properly. Let me rephrase what I said: when done _sensibly,_ as in when done with any sort of forethought about the problems that you might encounter and knowledge of the different methods available, it is very simple to build a nuclear power plant that cannot physically have a catastrophic meltdown unless the stars themselves align (metaphorically, the stars don't actually affect things), and even if that somehow happens, the result wouldn't be _nearly_ as devastating as past examples. The nuclear power plants of the past were built very poorly, and without forethought into what could go wrong or any real understanding of what they were doing beyond the very basics. Now we know _exactly_ how to build a nuclear power plant to minimize risk, and we have much less unstable reactants at our disposal.
@@notagoat281 I don't think it is sensible to assume we even know all of the different edge cases. Assuming things will act in a normal mode of operation at all times is extremely dangerous.
@@mattymerr701 : By that logic we should never do anything because we can never be 100% sure nothing will go wrong. You could say the same thing about electricity. There are numerous, well documented cases of things going wrong and lives being lost due to our use of electricity. And let's not forget _fire._ How many cities have burned to the ground in human history because of an "edge case"? Of _course_ there's a chance of something going wrong, there's _always_ a chance of something going catastrophically wrong with _anything,_ so if you live your life in fear of "what ifs" you'll wind up paralyzed with fear, which is just as dangerous, if not more so, than the alternative. The fact is we know with as much certainty as we reasonably can that modern designs for nuclear energy plants are safe. To put it simply, the nuclear reactants we would use _cannot do anything except when they are together._ Knowing this, it's child's play to design a system where if things start to get out of hand and the reactor starts to melt down, the meltdown itself separates the two reactants in such a way that the reaction is completely halted and cannot be reinitiated without intentional human input. It doesn't need computers to monitor the system, it doesn't rely on code that could have a bug in it (though we could even build these things in to add even _more_ layers of security), it doesn't use complicated chemical reactions that only people with a PhD can understand, it uses simple, reliable grade school physics to stop any meltdown before it can happen. It is as safe as we can make it, and probably even safer than most other power sources.
OOOH! I just remembered something while re-watching this episode: The idea for using the Davy Crocket - as I am told - was to shoot it, and then dive into a trench or bunker to wait out the blast. The warhead was so small that the irradiation effect would only last a day or so, and in the meantime the areas where the shell went off was impassible without killing the invading army. That would then give West Germany and NATO time to fortify and prep for the Soviet army, which would already be suffering from appalling attrition due to having to walk through a tiny nuclear wasteland. Then again, that is what I have been lead to believe, so take a grain or two of salt with that. ...Future Things You Might Not Have Known video?
Bare in mind though, when they thought of it, they had only tested about 20 of the atomic weapons and barely put people near them to test the effects and whether you could actually fight near one
1:40 Looking into this and come to find out when learning with a Resusci Annie doll, trainees are told to ask "Annie, are you okay?" Which is why Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal song uses those as lyrics talking about resuscitation of a murder victim named Annie in the song...
Big_Adam_2050 I recently saw a video that described a terrible chemical that sets everything on fire and lights/explodes in such calm environments as overly humid air, and somebody's bodily harm abatement strategy for it was "a good pair of running shoes".
OrigamiMarie - The compound is chlorine trifluoride (ClF3), and the quote is from John Drury Clark, author of _Ignition!_ , which everyone should read. Especially the bit about the rocket which used liquid mercury in the propellant to get the specific impulse up a bit...
Yeah, and you WERE out of blast distance just not out of radiation range. Also not fired from the shoulder or hip unless you're some electrokinetic Soviet super soldier.
Well, I'd hope a typical bazooka would have a better than quarter-mile effective range, if used correctly... which is what the limit of fatal dose was. Ideally, in line with the usual Time, Distance, Shielding mantra for radiation safety, you'd fire it from within or behind some kind of structure, even if just a hurridly dug foxhole, behind (or into) which you could duck and be protected from the immediate radiation burst (which would be the main risk with such a weapon - it's not going to create a massive gout of fallout) by a good few hundred feet of earth between you and the landing/explosion site. After which you book it out of there in the opposite direction. I mean, I assume you're using it as a last-line-of-defence tool. But the US in the 50s/60s being, well, the US in the 50s/60s, it wouldn't be too much of a surprise to find they had designs on it being a frontline _offensive_ shock-and-awe weapon...
OriginalPiMan The downside could be that high levels of external radioactive emissions might start the chain reaction of the nuclear explosion, and it's a bit expensive for a mine that has to last a week.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators generally use alpha emitters. Alpha particles are stopped by a sheet of paper and generate a relatively large amount of heat in the process. With RTGs keeping the amount of gamma rays and other penetrative radiation low is also a priority. So RTGs produce little or no external radiation.
Hey, tom scott, here's an idea for an ending: a mounted horseman shot a bullet from the home end of Liverpool FC's stadium grazing the Liverpool manager; A cop near Kop on clip clops clipped klopp!
The nukes that were lost off the coast of Spain were recovered. The casings are in the nuclear museum outside of Sandia national labs in Albuquerque, near to the Davy Crockett casing. I think the museum is worth a visit if you're in the area.
Yes, and audio sync is in and out depending on the camera shot. This feels like the old Premier issue where if your machine got maxed out on encoding, you would end up with artifacts and audio sync issues
I cant help but feel that when Mystery Biscuits have been achieved the audience should be allowed throw biscuits up in the air or towards the stage. No Jaffa Cakes, Fig Rolls or Club Biscuits though, that'll just muddle things
Preferably the nice foil wrapped chocolate ones, with the nice red wrappers. Could get a biscuit manufacturer to quite easily turn out a roll of special "Citation Needed" wrapping foil with the logo on it as well. Will cost Tom around 1000 pounds to have the gravure die made up and the 10 rolls printed, and then the lifetime of the show will be covered, even if they have to wrap them up themselves, though I daresay he could also make a mint just selling 5m rolls of aluminium foil with that on it, or give them as prizes. Just note the rolls are 30kg each, and half the cost will be the freight from India ( probably the cheapest place to get them printed in small lots) for the half ton of aluminium. Around 5km of foil per roll as well, and you could even get the boxes printed for the custom wrap by the same place and the foil rolled onto them as well for a little more.
It looks like you have done research in to this. As nice as I think having citation needed biscuits and packaging produced. I would also like to see a cavalcade of all manner of biscuit varieties suddenly launched in to the air. Even the contested ones. Such as Wagon Wheels, Club, Jaffa Cakes and Figrolls. As much as I think those disputed ones might muddle things up
I was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The story Tom is referencing at 10:38 or so actually happened there. In 1961, A B-52 bomber broke apart above the town, and the crew had to drop its payload of 2 3-4 megaton nuclear bombs before bailing out themselves (5 casualties still resulted). The two bombs essentially buried themselves into the nearby swamps, and the incident was covered up. But declassified reports indicate that both bombs very nearly detonated, essentially because a low voltage switch failed to fire. So the United States almost kick-started World War 3 by nuking itself.
1. That was a long walk for some cookies. 2. You could get somebody to fire the thing, but they'd be so stupid, you wouldn't want them to. 3. The FBI isn't headquartered in the Pentagon. They have their own building. 4. What . . . How were they going to keep the chicken alive?!?!?!?!
they werent going to keep the chickens alive. they were going to let them slowly starve, and after that, the mines would get dug up and either placed somewhere else, or they would have gone boom
Wear headphones, watch at 15:00, Chris' laugh passes through your head. There is a weird sound thing happening, possibly an error in the edit, that makes the laugh gradually but quickly switch from left to right. And it happens to consist of, presumably, low enough frequencies that it feels like something is physically moving between your ears.
As a side note, there is a famous nuclear almost-disaster incident in South Carolina. A plane which was carrying an atomic bomb flew over Mars Bluff (A small town in the upper bit of our state) and the crew accidentally dropped the bomb on the small town. The bomb was unarmed, however, and the bomb's detonator (Which was live and dangerous explosives) made a small crater. And that is how the US dropped an atomic bomb on a small town in South Carolina.
Note about recoilless rifles: they aren’t just a hollow tube. They have a counterbalance you insert into the tube before the ammo so that when the booming death comes out the front, the counterweight shoots out the back, making it so the forces cancel out and no recoil is exerted on the rifle and the shooter
@@user-rk3yb6nd1n depends on the size of the payload. Dinky little rockets like what’s put in an RPG or other close range rocket launchers don’t produce much thrust so they don’t need a physical counterweight, but for heavy duty rockets like Javelins or, in this case, a rocket carrying a nuclear payload, you’re gonna want a counterweight
A lot of weight of the already ten-engined (six pusher propellor, and four turbojet) Convair B-36 'Peacemaker' atomic 'plane, was a huge lead plug between the small General Electric reactor and the crew. The aircraft helpfully carried large 'Radiation hazard' markings on the tailfin. This pales into insignificance when you consider how many modern atomic weapons the U.S.A.F. have 'lost' over the years, through crashes, or error. Some they know where they are, but are near impossible to recover, others... Well, let's say they're not exactly sure where they went.
Strategic Nukes (atomic artillery shells, fired from howitzer sized guns) are actually still a thing, have been around probably since the 50s but definitely didn't go away, or atleast not until the 1990s. These ones can actually be used on targets less than 1km away, designed to take out groups of armoured vehicles.
If I remember correctly, the scientists developing these weapons said that they could make one as small as a hand grenade. The trouble was finding someone to throw it, haha.
I believe that fairly recently it came out that the Soviets did create an atomic powered bomber however without the shielding, so it would fly... So the crew became terribly irradiated and it's spued radiation through an open cycle reactor. I'll look around for sources. Can't wait for more episodes!
There was also the attempts at nuclear jet propulsion with jet engines that used air cooled nuclear reactors as the heat source instead of burning jet fuel. They also had the ramjet version of that designed as a sort of cruise middle before ICBMs were ready and they found there was a possible modification where after dropping it's nuclear payload it could intentionally be dirty and fly around for possibly weeks or even months just spreading radioactive exhaust just to really stick it to the target.
For those confused about the nuclear plane, they initially just tester a nuclear engine in a regular plane to see how bad the radiation in and around the plane was. The test showed too much radiation, and hence they were discontinued.
The window between Tom and Chris is one of those optical illusions that make their way around Twitter and the like. At the intersections of the white lines there are gray dots, but when you look directly at them they disappear.
There was an American atomic tipped torpedo as well, that had a lethal radius greater than it's range. It was cynically described as having a kill probability of two. Can I also mention the pigeon guided missile?
You should see about covering the SLAM, Supersonic Low Altitude Missile. It would have used a direct exposure "air cooled" nuclear jet engine that would have scattered radionuclides across the land as it wandered around depositing thermonuclear bombs.
My Dad’s unit was issued Davy Crockett missiles. They had a yield between 10 and 20 tons, that’s right, tons. They had a range of between 1.25 and 2.5 miles and the radiation was dangerous out to 400 yards. The plan was to fire them over mountains into Warsaw Pact forces invading Italy through the mountain passes.
Nuclear engines for airplanes are on display outside a place in Idaho called EBR-1. They never made the planes because the lead shielding would have been too heavy, so the crew would have died.
Probably not the greatest concern if you're sending them up there to be defensive patrols when the USSR are already on the offensive and chucking out the occasional tac nuke of their own, in the pre-ICBM days.
I like to think that Tom still wakes up in the middle of the night yelling "THE DAVY CROCKETT WEAPON SYSTEM!!!" to this day
That and "IT WAS NEVER NOT A COW"
Chris Joel: "That's a hell of an organ". Which, coincidentally is exactly what Mrs Bach said. (JS Bach fathered 20 children)
+
+
To quote a song from Prairie Home Companion:
JS Bach had seventeen kids
'cause his organ had no stop.
+
+
I can't believe none of you answered "how do you keep a nuclear mine warm?" with "put some radioactive stuff in it"
That's EXACTLY where I thought that was going to go! "Just let it bleed a little radioactivity, and it will stay warm"
That is genius
With a radium blanket - that's genius!
I was going to mention that radioactivity can cause problems with microcontrollers - but they probably only used discrete electronics for them.
Compost! Idiots
"Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my nuclear sword!"
Okay... Who invited the Comissars?
You Sir, I like you
Jack Churchill, probably.
Nakul Maletira nuclear bagpipes
You have sullied your hands with filthy parchments of heresy Guardsman, how do you plea?!??!
@@JohnSmith-jp5bj I read that in a particular Arma player's voice.
Plot twist: Since Gary doesn't know the FBI offices aren't in the Pentagon, the package is returned to sender.
Also for for has this weapon
I believe the FBI HQ is in Langley, Virginia.
@@BertGrink CIA is in Langley; FBI Headquarters is in DC; the forensic labs and training sites are in Quantico VA
Setting off an M388 (the type of warhead used on the Davy Crockett) in the middle of the Pentagon... wouldn’t barely hit the outer ring of the building and wouldn’t affect anyone outside the property.
Not because the device isn’t powerful, it’s because the pentagon is just that F’ing big.
@@metropod the blast probably won't destroy anything outside of the pentagon but the shock wave would blow out windows kilometers away.
And that's our season! We'll be filming more in the spring, and there will be audience tickets available -- keep an eye out for announcements here and on Twitter. Thanks for watching, everyone!
When Tom comments 1 week before the video is released
zolika1351 i think he left it unlisted but idk why
Tom Scott Hi. Where do you film these?
Just saying the cameras look llike an earlies 2000's TV with pixels going grayscale etc. But good episode :)
Because then he can upload some videos at once and can set a release date and then he can live his own life while it is released I guess
"Did Bach ever write an atomic canon?"
Unless it hit the cutting room floor, I am stunned no-one mentioned Tchaikovsky. 1812 Overture, anyone?
1812 Overture but it's nuclear explosions instead of cannon shots
PDQ Bach might have.
Also how the obvious reference for an orchestral 'canon' is Pachabel.
Atomic cannon a mix of classical and speed metal
Who ever came up with that mine was a clucking idiot
@@pocarski What's the halflife of that symphony? * dead *
Just a note on the davy crocket system it did fire far enough for you to be out of the blast range. “With caveats”
1 - if you were downwind there was a risk of being hit by fallout.
2 - it was essentially a mortar system in how it fired so theres the issue of it not making it to your planned target leaving you in the blast radius.
3 - it was actually apparently test fired 1 or 2 times though I can’t really find any particular details apart from listing a test site for one test firing.
You would probably need to be from the US and file a freedom of information act request to see if the test footage is declassified as it doesn’t seem to exist online.
I seem to remember having seen the footage for at least one DC test, from what I remember it really doesn't look like a nuclear explosion, just a large normal explosion
@@richardmillhousenixonAs far as I know, it effectively squished the explosive power of a WWI land mine into something four guys and a jeep can haul around, detonating with the energy of twenty tonnes of TNT.
The current largest conventional bomb in military use, the American GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast is, 8,5 tonnes, nine meters long and needs to be thrown out the cargo door of a C-130 and is “only” 11 tonnes TNT equivalent. The one time it was used, 13 April 2017, it flattened a small village in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.
And the Davy Crockett had twice the explosive power and the burst of radiation would kill anyone within 160m of the blast who wasn’t killed by the explosion. To add in to the power of the system, it was equipped with a 20mm _spotting rifle,_ a light cannon whose ballistic arc would roughly follow that of the main gun, so the crew can be sure their atomic warhead will hit its mark.
But even then, the recoilless rifle itself had a 50m radius in where the warhead would actually land.
@@richardmillhousenixonWere you planning on dropping it on Charlie?
Should've given yourself some Mystery Biscuits for that joke, Tom!
More realistically, Chris should have.
@@timothymclean Hell yes.
Gary's atomic shells on beaches joke went very under appreciated. That was one of my favorites.
I can't believe no one made a Schroedinger's chicken joke.
GeweldigWereld the chicken is either irradiated or vaporized and we cannot know which state it's in until we open the box, but opening it will seal the fate of everyone in a five mile radius.
I think you'd be able to tell from the outside whether a nuke has gone off inside the box.
+jcxz - Indeed you can, and a nuclear bomb that has yet to start its fission reaction isn't thát dangerous. Sure, you'll get a decent radiation dose by being near it, but it's not a one-way ticket to acute radiation sickess or radiation-born cancers on its own.
@@alansmithee419: On the one hand: fair point. On the other: If the bomb hasn't gone off I could check my own pulse and infer that the nuke can't have exploded (yet).
** checks pulse....
Hmm, no nuclear war going on under my bed today. Monsters, maybe. But at least now I know that those must be conventional then.
@@jcxz983 if the bomb hasn't gone off you can do literally anything that's physically possible and infer the bomb didn't go off.
Also I've now got the phrases "conventional monsters" and "nuclear monsters" in my head.
You win a French fast-paced music hall dance performed by a metal container with a Belgian comic protagonist in it
It's a Tintin tin can can-can
A renowned Belgian news reporter
a bit late, but I think “fictional belgian journalist” might be better if anyone’s gonna have an actual shot at guessing it.
@@esobelisk3110 To be fair, the only Belgian comic protagonists most of the largely-American audience would know about are: Tintin, Johan, and the Smurfs.
@@ZeldaTheSwordsman Johan before Spirou? As a French growing up with Franco-Belgians comics, that surprise me.
@@divicarpe1844 Well, here in the USA the most well known are the Smurfs (moreso than Johan himself even though in the original comics he's the lead) and Tintin
I'd dare to say that this is the funniest episode so far. I can't even eat my mystery biscuits or sit on my chair... I'm rolling on the floor
i like how years later, tom used the resusci anne story as a question on the lateral podcast
ok bro
2:36
This is actually referring to the "fireball" liquid salt thorium reactor design. It was pitched to the air Force as a way to make bombers that could patrol for days on end without refueling BUT the reactor designers knew it'd never fly a plane, they just needed lots of cold war money to build and research the design.
Go look up LFTR, the fireball was the grandfather of that.
Ryukachoo the Russians made one, it was open cycle running air directly through the core. And it did fly. The crew just all got a bit cancery
Ya, there were several attempts, most were just reactors they put inside the plane to see if it would operate and how much shielding they could get away with not having, cause planes need to be light.
speaking of crazy atomic designs: Project Orion
think Empire State Building, going to space, _whole_ , on a _series_ of nuclear detonations, spaced just few seconds apart
666Tomato666
There's video of Project Orion tests on TH-cam. They made a smaller vehicle and used chemical explosives for a proof of concept and launched it.
Mystery biscuits to everyone here
The atomic bomb not fired in Spain that Gary mentioned was accidentally dropped on Palomares by a US plane, on the sea, and the Minister of Internal Affairs of that time went swimming after that. Oh, sweet Francoism times.
The Minister was hoping to gain super powers like the hulk.
matts delivery of the word chickens will never not catch me off guard and send me into a laughing fit
Those solid tubas - foiled every time
Tubeless tubas.
The correct mime for playing a solid tuba entails immediately collapsing onto the floor since it weigh >1T
Vivienne Gucwa ii
Foiled? Did someone flatten them into very thin sheetmetal once it became obvious they were unplayable?
I never knew I needed Tom angrily saying "THE DAVY CROCKET WEAPON SYSTEM" in my life.
My favourite part of this is Tom's reaction to the Bach pun.
Timestamp?
sorry for being late, 6:34
Recoilless rifle = sergeant reckless
Jack Langsdon Sergeant Reckless with an atomic rocket launcher would end all wars.
with jack churchill.
unni running through a minefield, with hero's never look back explosions
Theory: The entirety of Citation Needed was just a ploy to discover better wartime tactics.
Nuclear horse breaking the speed of sound
Holy crap, Atomic Trebuchet would make a great name for a metal band.
despite the false start he's still my favorite Gary Brannon
2:48 I would just like to point out that nuclear power, when done _properly,_ is actually extremely safe and has almost no chance of going wrong.
The thorium salt reactors, right? I remember reading something about that.
Most stuff has almost no chance of going wrong when done properly. Thats kind of the thing about something going wrong
@@greggregoryst7126 : What you're talking about is doing things _perfectly,_ not properly. Let me rephrase what I said: when done _sensibly,_ as in when done with any sort of forethought about the problems that you might encounter and knowledge of the different methods available, it is very simple to build a nuclear power plant that cannot physically have a catastrophic meltdown unless the stars themselves align (metaphorically, the stars don't actually affect things), and even if that somehow happens, the result wouldn't be _nearly_ as devastating as past examples.
The nuclear power plants of the past were built very poorly, and without forethought into what could go wrong or any real understanding of what they were doing beyond the very basics. Now we know _exactly_ how to build a nuclear power plant to minimize risk, and we have much less unstable reactants at our disposal.
@@notagoat281 I don't think it is sensible to assume we even know all of the different edge cases.
Assuming things will act in a normal mode of operation at all times is extremely dangerous.
@@mattymerr701 : By that logic we should never do anything because we can never be 100% sure nothing will go wrong. You could say the same thing about electricity. There are numerous, well documented cases of things going wrong and lives being lost due to our use of electricity. And let's not forget _fire._ How many cities have burned to the ground in human history because of an "edge case"? Of _course_ there's a chance of something going wrong, there's _always_ a chance of something going catastrophically wrong with _anything,_ so if you live your life in fear of "what ifs" you'll wind up paralyzed with fear, which is just as dangerous, if not more so, than the alternative.
The fact is we know with as much certainty as we reasonably can that modern designs for nuclear energy plants are safe. To put it simply, the nuclear reactants we would use _cannot do anything except when they are together._ Knowing this, it's child's play to design a system where if things start to get out of hand and the reactor starts to melt down, the meltdown itself separates the two reactants in such a way that the reaction is completely halted and cannot be reinitiated without intentional human input. It doesn't need computers to monitor the system, it doesn't rely on code that could have a bug in it (though we could even build these things in to add even _more_ layers of security), it doesn't use complicated chemical reactions that only people with a PhD can understand, it uses simple, reliable grade school physics to stop any meltdown before it can happen. It is as safe as we can make it, and probably even safer than most other power sources.
Just came from work, had a shitty day and now I'm watching this and am happy again.. Thanks for making one of the best shows on TH-cam. :)
OOOH! I just remembered something while re-watching this episode: The idea for using the Davy Crocket - as I am told - was to shoot it, and then dive into a trench or bunker to wait out the blast. The warhead was so small that the irradiation effect would only last a day or so, and in the meantime the areas where the shell went off was impassible without killing the invading army. That would then give West Germany and NATO time to fortify and prep for the Soviet army, which would already be suffering from appalling attrition due to having to walk through a tiny nuclear wasteland.
Then again, that is what I have been lead to believe, so take a grain or two of salt with that. ...Future Things You Might Not Have Known video?
Officially yes. In real life everyone involved knew that firing these things was a death sentence. There's a reason the crews were all volunteers.
I'm reminded of Red Alert 2 desolators. Turns out the Allies were no better.
Bare in mind though, when they thought of it, they had only tested about 20 of the atomic weapons and barely put people near them to test the effects and whether you could actually fight near one
1:40 Looking into this and come to find out when learning with a Resusci Annie doll, trainees are told to ask "Annie, are you okay?" Which is why Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal song uses those as lyrics talking about resuscitation of a murder victim named Annie in the song...
On the Davy Crockett the suggest firing method was to haul ass on a Jeep and fire to get away quicker.
Big_Adam_2050 I recently saw a video that described a terrible chemical that sets everything on fire and lights/explodes in such calm environments as overly humid air, and somebody's bodily harm abatement strategy for it was "a good pair of running shoes".
OrigamiMarie - The compound is chlorine trifluoride (ClF3), and the quote is from John Drury Clark, author of _Ignition!_ , which everyone should read. Especially the bit about the rocket which used liquid mercury in the propellant to get the specific impulse up a bit...
that stuff is scary, a tanker full was spilt once, burned through 3 metres of concrete then a further 5 metres of gravel before it stopped.
Yeah, and you WERE out of blast distance just not out of radiation range. Also not fired from the shoulder or hip unless you're some electrokinetic Soviet super soldier.
Well, I'd hope a typical bazooka would have a better than quarter-mile effective range, if used correctly... which is what the limit of fatal dose was. Ideally, in line with the usual Time, Distance, Shielding mantra for radiation safety, you'd fire it from within or behind some kind of structure, even if just a hurridly dug foxhole, behind (or into) which you could duck and be protected from the immediate radiation burst (which would be the main risk with such a weapon - it's not going to create a massive gout of fallout) by a good few hundred feet of earth between you and the landing/explosion site. After which you book it out of there in the opposite direction.
I mean, I assume you're using it as a last-line-of-defence tool. But the US in the 50s/60s being, well, the US in the 50s/60s, it wouldn't be too much of a surprise to find they had designs on it being a frontline _offensive_ shock-and-awe weapon...
Thank tom really cheer up my day
My thought on keeping a nuclear mine warm would be to stick more radioactive material in there and rely on the radioactivity to keep it warm.
OriginalPiMan The downside could be that high levels of external radioactive emissions might start the chain reaction of the nuclear explosion, and it's a bit expensive for a mine that has to last a week.
that's what i was thinking
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators generally use alpha emitters. Alpha particles are stopped by a sheet of paper and generate a relatively large amount of heat in the process. With RTGs keeping the amount of gamma rays and other penetrative radiation low is also a priority. So RTGs produce little or no external radiation.
...Or just a chicken. I feel like you are over thinking it.
Very good points on RTG design, but did RTGs of that sort exist yet back then?
Hey, tom scott, here's an idea for an ending: a mounted horseman shot a bullet from the home end of Liverpool FC's stadium grazing the Liverpool manager; A cop near Kop on clip clops clipped klopp!
The nukes that were lost off the coast of Spain were recovered. The casings are in the nuclear museum outside of Sandia national labs in Albuquerque, near to the Davy Crockett casing.
I think the museum is worth a visit if you're in the area.
anyone else see flickering lines just below the middle line?
Yes, and audio sync is in and out depending on the camera shot. This feels like the old Premier issue where if your machine got maxed out on encoding, you would end up with artifacts and audio sync issues
There's also a lot of noise in the darker parts of the shots. Is that also to do with Premier? Didn't notice on the other videos of this series.
Indeed
That noise has been on all of the videos in this season, but it seems like it has gotten worse for this video.
Oh good I was afraid my GPU was in the process of dying. Already.
Seasons too short...
It's an episode longer than seasons 3, 4 and 5, so I'll take it.
Think I may have developed a small citation needed addiction
hey its twice the length of two of these people are lying season 3
"Drive me closer I want to hit them with my nuclear powered sword!" Have to admit wasn't expecting a 40k reference on this show.
I like how it wasn’t mentioned that the alternate title for the Project Blue Peacock Wikipedia article is Chicken Powered Nuclear Bomb
Chicken powered?
That's just as riddiculous as the cat powered glider
Any chance you'd sell a "Mystery Biscuits" apron? My girlfriend says that'd be amazing. :D
Oh yeah.
Or even a biscuit tin/cookie jar
Im thinking of makeing mistery biscits
Yes, the world needs this!
10/10 for the Warhammer 40k reference!
Aww that was great. Absolutely fantastic. Love the show, I'll miss it dearly until the next season.
I like how you can tell how tired they all are at the end of this run by how many stupid answers they give.
Why is this episode not called Atomic Annie and M. Night shawaddywoddy?
> no, that's just a Thursday night in Paris so far
The wheel spins... You know what happens from there.
Thursday night in pre-WW1 Paris. The place was two stops short of Mos Eisley.
"Blonde bombshell"
There's one for the Christmas special
I cant help but feel that when Mystery Biscuits have been achieved the audience should be allowed throw biscuits up in the air or towards the stage. No Jaffa Cakes, Fig Rolls or Club Biscuits though, that'll just muddle things
Preferably the nice foil wrapped chocolate ones, with the nice red wrappers. Could get a biscuit manufacturer to quite easily turn out a roll of special "Citation Needed" wrapping foil with the logo on it as well. Will cost Tom around 1000 pounds to have the gravure die made up and the 10 rolls printed, and then the lifetime of the show will be covered, even if they have to wrap them up themselves, though I daresay he could also make a mint just selling 5m rolls of aluminium foil with that on it, or give them as prizes. Just note the rolls are 30kg each, and half the cost will be the freight from India ( probably the cheapest place to get them printed in small lots) for the half ton of aluminium. Around 5km of foil per roll as well, and you could even get the boxes printed for the custom wrap by the same place and the foil rolled onto them as well for a little more.
It looks like you have done research in to this. As nice as I think having citation needed biscuits and packaging produced. I would also like to see a cavalcade of all manner of biscuit varieties suddenly launched in to the air. Even the contested ones. Such as Wagon Wheels, Club, Jaffa Cakes and Figrolls. As much as I think those disputed ones might muddle things up
Origami biscuits so it's easy to sweep up, no mouldy food
The run of Atomic Kitten puns pleased me greatly.
Did Chris just reference a Wh40k meme? My life is complete
Aaaaaaaaaaa
At what point?
@@peltimies2469 "Drive me closer I want to hit them with my sword!"
@@peltimies2469 8:25
Nobody tell Matt that cutting-edge fighter jets have something as primitive as wheels on them.
It feels like this episode had the most tangents and nonsense in it ever. Not that I'm complaining, all the tangents and nonsense make it fun.
I was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The story Tom is referencing at 10:38 or so actually happened there. In 1961, A B-52 bomber broke apart above the town, and the crew had to drop its payload of 2 3-4 megaton nuclear bombs before bailing out themselves (5 casualties still resulted). The two bombs essentially buried themselves into the nearby swamps, and the incident was covered up. But declassified reports indicate that both bombs very nearly detonated, essentially because a low voltage switch failed to fire. So the United States almost kick-started World War 3 by nuking itself.
1. That was a long walk for some cookies.
2. You could get somebody to fire the thing, but they'd be so stupid, you wouldn't want them to.
3. The FBI isn't headquartered in the Pentagon. They have their own building.
4. What . . . How were they going to keep the chicken alive?!?!?!?!
they werent going to keep the chickens alive. they were going to let them slowly starve, and after that, the mines would get dug up and either placed somewhere else, or they would have gone boom
@@robertlinke2666
I think six years ago, I was going for a laugh.
"Developed about when?"
"Right Now."
...I'll get my coat.
The best 21st birthday present I could have asked for, new episode of Citation Needed! 😄
Alice Baker Happy birthday!
Rօֆɛʍǟʀʏ Thank you very much! 😊
From me as well 😊
Happy birthday!
Congratulations!
that white window frame in the background still giving the black dots optical illusion for me!
Really appreciated the string of Atomic Kitten puns
Mmhmm!
Wear headphones, watch at 15:00, Chris' laugh passes through your head.
There is a weird sound thing happening, possibly an error in the edit, that makes the laugh gradually but quickly switch from left to right.
And it happens to consist of, presumably, low enough frequencies that it feels like something is physically moving between your ears.
Atomic Trebuchet - should be a punk band
Would they do punk rock covers of all those Atomic Kitten songs?
HA!
Sadly, i think they would.
No. Covers of Ned's Atomic Dustbin songs, _in the style of_ Atomic Kitten.
Irradiated Chicken would be a tribute act for Atomic Rooster (an already existing prog rock band!)
Congrats on 1 Million Subs!
I have no idea why, but the solid tuba bit is the hardest I have laughed in a while.
After seven seasons, i still don't know what they are doing... but it is quite entertaining!
Lubo Stankosky same here, its like theres too much inside jokes and im just too stupid but at least they put a smile up on my face
As a side note, there is a famous nuclear almost-disaster incident in South Carolina. A plane which was carrying an atomic bomb flew over Mars Bluff (A small town in the upper bit of our state) and the crew accidentally dropped the bomb on the small town. The bomb was unarmed, however, and the bomb's detonator (Which was live and dangerous explosives) made a small crater.
And that is how the US dropped an atomic bomb on a small town in South Carolina.
...and then tried to claim it _wasn't_ deliberate
I've watched them all; I've listened to all the audio episodes; MORE PLEASE!
6:50 "What were they planning on doing in the 50s with 20 canons?!"
"Shooting the Russians, remember?"
I lost it there
Aww, literally yelling at my phone for most of this knowing the answers 😂
Chris is excellent in this one
The nuclear sword bit killed me!
Note about recoilless rifles: they aren’t just a hollow tube. They have a counterbalance you insert into the tube before the ammo so that when the booming death comes out the front, the counterweight shoots out the back, making it so the forces cancel out and no recoil is exerted on the rifle and the shooter
Generally speaking, the counter mass is the gasses of the powder charge going out the back.
@@user-rk3yb6nd1n depends on the size of the payload. Dinky little rockets like what’s put in an RPG or other close range rocket launchers don’t produce much thrust so they don’t need a physical counterweight, but for heavy duty rockets like Javelins or, in this case, a rocket carrying a nuclear payload, you’re gonna want a counterweight
8:50 Solid Tuba
no the Nuclear powerd Airplae DID work but it shat out nuclear fallout at near sonic speed.
A lot of weight of the already ten-engined (six pusher propellor, and four turbojet) Convair B-36 'Peacemaker' atomic 'plane, was a huge lead plug between the small General Electric reactor and the crew. The aircraft helpfully carried large 'Radiation hazard' markings on the tailfin. This pales into insignificance when you consider how many modern atomic weapons the U.S.A.F. have 'lost' over the years, through crashes, or error. Some they know where they are, but are near impossible to recover, others... Well, let's say they're not exactly sure where they went.
When they start talking about recoilless rifles, how come they don't remember what they are? They've done an episode on them before this!
Get in the mine! What are you? A chicken?
Strategic Nukes (atomic artillery shells, fired from howitzer sized guns) are actually still a thing, have been around probably since the 50s but definitely didn't go away, or atleast not until the 1990s. These ones can actually be used on targets less than 1km away, designed to take out groups of armoured vehicles.
You know what else generates its own heat for a long period of time?
Plutonium.
One of the Atomic Annies is like 50 miles away from my house
I cannot wait for series 8. I honestly think these guys should get their own show on TV
If I remember correctly, the scientists developing these weapons said that they could make one as small as a hand grenade. The trouble was finding someone to throw it, haha.
why does it look like analogue TV?
Perhaps Tom has concealed a message using steganography
I believe that fairly recently it came out that the Soviets did create an atomic powered bomber however without the shielding, so it would fly... So the crew became terribly irradiated and it's spued radiation through an open cycle reactor. I'll look around for sources. Can't wait for more episodes!
There was also the attempts at nuclear jet propulsion with jet engines that used air cooled nuclear reactors as the heat source instead of burning jet fuel. They also had the ramjet version of that designed as a sort of cruise middle before ICBMs were ready and they found there was a possible modification where after dropping it's nuclear payload it could intentionally be dirty and fly around for possibly weeks or even months just spreading radioactive exhaust just to really stick it to the target.
As a tuba player, the solid tuba bit brings me great joy.
I'm crying of laughter. This is by far the best show I've ever seen
For those confused about the nuclear plane, they initially just tester a nuclear engine in a regular plane to see how bad the radiation in and around the plane was. The test showed too much radiation, and hence they were discontinued.
How to atomic sword:
Make the blade out of Uranium
Additional fun fact: Resusci Anne, the CPR doll modeled on L'Inconnue de la Seine, is also the "Annie" in the Michael Jackson song "Smooth Criminal".
The window between Tom and Chris is one of those optical illusions that make their way around Twitter and the like. At the intersections of the white lines there are gray dots, but when you look directly at them they disappear.
Damn... You guys were on form here. Excellent material!
There was an American atomic tipped torpedo as well, that had a lethal radius greater than it's range. It was cynically described as having a kill probability of two.
Can I also mention the pigeon guided missile?
It is said that to this day, Chris Joel still has not found where the clicking noise comes from.
Chris, at some point in the future: "I found the source of the clicking! It's a pipe bomb!"
@@U014B "yaaaaaay!"
The 3 stages of tuber.... Hollow tuber, solid tuber, and... TH-camr
You should see about covering the SLAM, Supersonic Low Altitude Missile. It would have used a direct exposure "air cooled" nuclear jet engine that would have scattered radionuclides across the land as it wandered around depositing thermonuclear bombs.
My throat hurts from laughing from just this episode. Best show on youtube! Sad that's the end of this season already
My Dad’s unit was issued Davy Crockett missiles. They had a yield between 10 and 20 tons, that’s right, tons. They had a range of between 1.25 and 2.5 miles and the radiation was dangerous out to 400 yards. The plan was to fire them over mountains into Warsaw Pact forces invading Italy through the mountain passes.
There is at least one of those cannons left. It's on display near Fort Riley in Junction City Kansas. I visited it about 15 years ago.
"...It's the Davy Crockett Pocket Rocket."
Now that I see it, I can tell how hard it would be to do this with the fusion
Nuclear engines for airplanes are on display outside a place in Idaho called EBR-1. They never made the planes because the lead shielding would have been too heavy, so the crew would have died.
Probably not the greatest concern if you're sending them up there to be defensive patrols when the USSR are already on the offensive and chucking out the occasional tac nuke of their own, in the pre-ICBM days.
Can anyone else see some artifact about a third up the screen?
ye
Will B-C flashes of a white or black bar or dot?
One line of what seems to be corrupted video
radiation?
It looks like the type of thing you would see in an old VCR.
The goat survived this year
Phillip Parkinson-shanley oh really?
Suddenly Irradiated Chicken sounds like the name of an Atomic Rooster tribute act