The Computer Designed To Die In Microseconds
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- čas přidán 27. 05. 2024
- I found this fascinating story about a computerized telemetry system which was designed to be placed in the heart of a nuclear warhead, replacing the plutonium pit in a test device. I'm not 100% sure this was flown because the documentation disappears about 20 years ago, which is likely to be the case if it was actually used in a test.
Some references:
www.lanl.gov/orgs/padwp/pdfs/...
www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/66...
repository.arizona.edu/bitstr...
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/ scottmanley - Věda a technologie
Happy birthday Scott. May it be many years before you reach your half life.
Hah, I like what you did there lol.
I love this. Very clever. oddpride would be proud
He's decaying faster than Hydrogen-5, sorry...
His hair has a half life from birth of approx. 6 years, but fortunately as time is relative he still has a full head of hair less than 35 lightyears away.
excellent, ever more precise and accurate ways for violent america to destroy the world by continuing to be the world police no one outside of the US asked for or wanted.
next week, learn how 200 years of perfecting guns has helped day-care shootings and civilian executions as easy as 1-2-3
As a programmer, I find the notion of a computer not living long enough for a 14-bit wraparound to be a problem highly amusing.
Los Alamos: What is the meantime between failures of your package?
Contractor: WUT
@@-danR Ha ha - back to the dictionary of internet slang { BDIS } - WUT?
Processor: What is my purpose?
Programmer: To die in glorious fire and insane pressure! And write about it while you are at it.
@@Thoran666
Processor: i fucking love my job-
If the device lives long enough for a 14 bit integer overflow to actually happen, then something else has failed.
I’m nearly 20 years ahead of you, and I worked in Los Alamos in the 1990s, alongside many of the scientists and engineers who had been part of the post-war testing, both above- and under-ground. They had great stories!
Devices like the one you show, even though not used for testing an actual nuclear detonation, we’re called “first light” detectors. The earliest first light system consisted of a vacuum-evacuated conduit leading to the weapon under test, with sensors at the far end. They would capture their signals and forward them just before immolation, like the device you talk about here. Later they migrated to fiber optics and perimeter transducers (set up in racks in underground test tunnel alcoves). Then when underground nuclear testing ceased the stockpile stewardship program shifted to component tests like the one you describe, as well as computer simulation. Alas, we really don’t know how effective this testing is, and some believe that as much as 80% of the arsenal will fail to detonate, despite being “remanufactured “ every ten years or so. We simply do not understand the decay of these complex devices well enough.
I still have some pressure sensors calibrated in giga-pascals. :)
Do you know anymore about how they got the information out of the sphere? for the digital tests(that this video discusses) with the device inside the sphere? The fixed tests seems doable, with fiber optics running to a recorder nearby, but if the device is self contain inside a metal sphere(on a warhead), that seems like the worst place for radio signals.
@@diox8tony I might not be a nuclear weapons specialist, but I know the basics of how they work.
First off, if the explosives go off, that metal casing isn't gonna stay there for very long, so it might not be as much of a problem for a radio transmitter as you might think.
Secondly, they might also be not even using a metal case for the physics package, because the tamper (along with the fusion fuel, if it's a thermonuclear device) is usually placed on the inside, close to the pit, so the exterior casing just has to be strong enough to hold the thing in the required shape. It doesn't have to contain the pressure of the blast. Since this test device is only interested in the performance of the explosives, they don't even need a metal pit.
So they could be using something like a fiberglass composite as the outer casing, which is what the radome of an airliner's radar is usually made of, so you know radio waves go right thru that no problem.
With a fiberglass composite case, the telemetry package would have no issue transmitting the data it needs to transmit in the short time it has available to do so.
@@diox8tony throw enough wattage at it and you'll get through a lot of interference
@@diox8tony If you think you're getting any answers to these questions, I have a bridge to sell you.
@@alldeeplearning949 Spent a lot of time in the diplomacy school did we?
It's also interesting from a software standpoint - I was talking to someone who used to work with missile software and apparently one place they worked some new person came in and was upset that the code had memory leaks and would almost certainly fail and crash - but it didn't matter because the missile it was controlling could only fly for X seconds so they just had like 2x the amount of memory the software could ever possibly consume in that amount of time, making impossible to crash because it would always detonate before it could fill up the memory.
I'm graduating to 60 years old in 24 days. Imo, turning 50 was barely noticeable. You're already well into weird pains and seeming to injure yourself while sleeping, so 50 is just a number in hindsight. Stay active; learn to stretch, and try to start a habit of stretching when you get up in the morning. Your days will be much more enjoyable.
And drink a highball every night:)))
Take a lot of care with stretching. It _can_ cause injuries also.
And for some of us, bones make cracking/crunching sounds where you didn't know you had bones
You are lucky to have avoided this so long. Some of us started getting random cracks, pops and injuries at 30. Although I love working outside.
Atheist...but Amen to that.
God that spherical shockwave footage looks incredible.
It's easy to forget how incredibly fast modern computers are. Even this computer you're talking about is running 50 times slower than most desktops, or the same speed as microcontrollers I work with for less than $2. We live in fascinating times. Happy Birthday Scott, keep flying safe.
heh replace the (probably) $2million system with an esp32, love it. Even got the wifi built in lol
@@zyeborm Keep in mind though, this is a real time system implemented in an FPGA, not like a CPU. It's doing way more stuff per cycle
@@Robert-un3cf the smily faces and LOLs should be giving you a hint as to the level of seriousness I was giving the suggestion.
@@zyeborm what smiley face?
@@Axodus my mistake. The "heh" and the "lol" are the clues that I wasn't making a serious suggestion. You can keep your engineering feathers unruffled.
the anicdote about the orange wasn't as much of an over-reaction as you'd think. British military liasons were able to accurately discern that the Soviet Union's new T-72s tanks were using a 125mm gun based on one of them putting an apple in the bore then later measuring it when on a patrol in the berlin area. BRIXMIS was a weird fascinating program that wouldn't happen today
Funny story does not mean it is true. 007 would be ashamed if that is the only way you could come up with to figure out the diameter of a gun.
According to wikerpedia, it was a BMP-2, and its 30mm gun. But wikerpedia also doesn't cite a source for that specific factoid, so you could easily be correct. I just imagine that the average apple isn't big enough to impression a 125mm smoothbore tank gun lol
A can of soda was used as a reference point to appromately measure the diameter of Iran’s solid fuel boosters.
First off. Having 1 item in the captured photo would do little for comparison. You would need both the apple and barrel to be able to figure it out. This was just an orange on a desk. Far from a reasonable response.
P.S. it is Anecdote.
So, if a spy managed to get a photo of an orange sitting on a physicist's desk, and could later get hold of the orange to measure it, they could estimate fairly accurately the size of the physicist's desk.
Happy Birthday Scott. I just turned 81 on December 22nd and I'd give a lot to be a Kid of 50 again, you are still wet behind the ears. When I think of all the stuff I did at 50 that I can't do now it is mind boggling. Looking forward to another year of your superb videos!
Sup old-timer, let's hope future generations never make use of these devices ever again hey.
What do you think is a important development, technology wise, which will be helpful for mankind's future?
Hey, 80 is the new 60! My grandma is still kicking at 98, soon to be 99. May you have many years ahead of you sir.
@@blackhawks81H Thank you so much from me and all the old codgers still hanging in there.
The computer designed to die in microseconds: aka my pc build when I mess up the power connections and fry something
Years ago I worked for a company that made something that was of interest to the government. The things we made were designed to be used 1,000 of times typically. In discussions with my contact at the government agency, I asked, “What is duty cycle?” Meaning how many times does it have to work. He said, absolutely deadpan, “Once.”
"Once... but it *must* work that one time, with 100% reliability, after sitting in a warehouse for 40 years." This is precisely why "nuke-cert" materials cost an insane amount of money - it's the same grade-8 bolt you can buy at Home Depot for $1, but because 50% of the production lot is tested to destruction, we taxpayers pay $10 for the exact same bolt. Because it absolutely, positively, MUST work when call upon to do so. Failure is NOT an option.
@@MrJest2 Yes, I understand and agree. We also used to produce electronic components for spacecraft. The company I worked for (GE) helped develop the procedures of how to produce components with XXX degree of reliability but without testing all of them to distruction which of course would leave you with none left! The full procedure too lengthy to put here but yes, they resulted in ordinary 5 cent diodes costing $10.00 after all the testing and other procedures. Most people do not understand that this is the reason that certain pieces of equipment can end up costing so much. I do not know if "that department" ever used our product in the application.
@@MrJest2 Lol and yet a lot of stuff fails anyways. Often not even the hardware, but the people.
I worked in Los Alamos in the 90's doing Environmental Restoration characterization. One of the projects was measuring Cs-137 activity in the surface vegetation in the canyon that the RaLa experiments were conducted. That was fun.
I have a Ludlum model 12 with it's old LANL ERM tag on it. Lots of cool history there.
I had never seen that footage of the warheads test-detonating after reentry like that. Fascinating.
The Atari VCS 2600 console was famously programmed using the paradigm of "racing the beam", referring to the electron beam that was painting the image on screen.
People working on this thing where racing the detonation front. At 8km/s.
Love it.
Coincidentally, I was at Los Alamos last week and saw some of this hardware in their science museum. Super cool stuff.
Great video and many congratulations on reaching the half-century. I studied Physics at Bristol Uni - where Klaus Fuchs gained his PhD before working on the bomb , travelling to Los Alamos and eventually giving the Allies' secrets to the USSR. I remember one of our lecturers saying that we students, in 1970, now had all the tools needed to calculate the critical mass of a nuclear weapon. He wasn't allowed to tell us how to do it, but hinted that it was basically a matter of solving the neutron diffusion equation and Bob's your uncle. PS I'm turning 73 in a few days.
I attended a review for DARHT controls at one point. Didn't have a security clearance so I didn't get to see the secure camera gear, but the accelerators and controls were not classified. The concrete noses of the accelerator buildings were covered with protective netting where the beams came out. The "netting" was wire rope shredded by the shock waves. The beams were used to take high speed xray images of the explosion processes. The images were reflected with mirrors down through tubes to the underground cameras, the blast would obliterate the mirrors but the cameras were protected. Interesting stuff.
I always wondered how they spared the certainly digital imaging system of that thing from the blast. Such an obvious solution with hindsight. There must have been a scintillator panel between the test article and the mirror and some means of enclosing the setup to exclude ambient light.
@@Muonium1 Don't know, but I think the shots were done at night. Perhaps the scintillator was the mirror.
@@Muonium1 The x ray beams passed through a hole in a sturdy rotating disk inside the building so the shock wave would be later and not aligned with the hole to protect the target that converted the accelerator's particle bunch to xrays from it.
Scott, First of all, Happy 50th Birthday! I am 21 years ahead of you. I’m still not used to having young ladies open the door for me and call me sir, but I guess I’ve earned it. I enjoy your very informative video blogs. I have learned a lot from you. I can’t claim to understand all of the equally, but I do learn from each of them. I found “The Computer Designed to Die…” particularly interesting. I live in the Texas Panhandle about 15 minutes from the Pantex plant. I have witnessed the special trucks and escorts that travel with the nuclear devices and used to see the “White Train” that used to transport them. I haven’t driven out that way recently, but have seen the protesters on the highway. I’ve always been fascinated by the high explosive bunkers surrounding the plant. I used to go into the plant with an escort to conduct inspections. It’s a pain getting in and I’m glad that I no longer have to do that. More recently, I’ve participated in various exercises and I’m thankful to be retired and to be spared from that for several years now.
Anyway, I found this video blog to be interesting and educational and it makes me thankful that my computers last MUCH longer although I’ve had a few I would have donated to be blown up. I’ve enjoyed hearing about your recent flight training experience. I’ve had the FAA License for remote pilot for several years and have come very close to signing up for ground and flight school.
I’ve lost several pilot friends to Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly to borrow a phrase so that has discouraged me from going forward. Thank you again for your work. I like keeping my brain challenged so keep it up my friend.
Many happy returns of the day Scott.
This reminds me of a story from my days at Digital Equipment Corporation Supposedly some ingenious government contractor decided to measure underground nuclear tests by lining the area with a dozen or so PDP 11/03s who's only job was to measure something highly classified and then transmitting the data up to the surface as fast as it could before they all vaporized. The data was received by a PDP 11/34 which immediately wrote it all out to magnetic core memory and then shut down before the shock wave from the nuclear blast underneath it reach the surface. Some poor customer service engineers had to pull the core memory out of the remains of the 11/34, put it back together, then install it into another 11/34 whose job was then to read the data off of the magnetic cores to come up with whatever useful data they were trying to measure in the first place. There was one side complaint that when digital equipment stopped making the 11/03 the contractor had to replace them with PDP 11/23s which are two or three times as expensive as the 11/03. Your tax dollars at work.
I will always have a soft spot for DEC's VAX/VMS: taught myself computing on it!
When you have a DARPA budget, the concept of "disposable computers" is no longer a coffee machine joke.
Before I retired from my electrical engineering career 10 years ago my primary job was the implementation of various types of RF modems. Seeing those block diagrams in your video showing a 64-QAM IQ modulator pumping out 25M symbols per second brought back old memories.
How many bauds is that? 😁
@@PinataOblongata 25 million. Baud is a measure of symbols per second, not bits per second. It's a term coming from teletype terminology (where it was characters per second).
In comparison, modern satellite DVB transmissions use 27,5MBaud at the same 64QAM modulation. So basically this thing was sending out a few frames worth of HD video before it could go pop.
The most common stand in material for these X-ray shots were nickel. In fact nickel is used for a lot of “semi public” nuclear weapons or implosion analysis. I say semi public because they are sitting on university shelves as dissertations that can be read by anyone that can find them but have never been referenced outside the US weapons complex.
I still use an HP-28S calculator I bought in 1986. They don't make 'em like that anymore...
Can you remember how much it cost?
My father bought one of the first calculators on the market (maybe in the '60s, I'll ask him) and it cost $100 USD which was a lot! He said that it was worth every penny. He used a slide rule up until then.
We've come so far.
All the best. 👍
I'm 11 years ahead of you, and I started working at NASA back in 1994 and still am there. Age doesn't matter -- our future is bright and full of hope! Happy New Year! 🥂
These nuclear videos are definitely my favorite topics that you cover, always looking forward to more. Happy Birthday!
Spy.
Happy 50th Birthday Scott!! Thanks for all the effort that you put into this channel, it's definitely one of my favorites on youtube.
I worked for a company called Birdwell which did wireline logging (not lumber but data) for the DOE at Mercury Nevada. We logged the 10’ diameter bomb wells but also all the smaller monitoring wells surrounding a subsurface test. The inner monitoring wells were destroyed but sent data as you mentioned. The outer wells were used to measure various spectrum data. Fascinating work.
Let's have a microsecond of silence for the brave computer,done.
Fascinating Scott! I was on an SSBN in the Navy and then did data acquisition at a national lab after that so your talk is so real to me it’s kind of ironic!! I never thought of measuring the explosion itself, amazing! I attended a short course on data acquisition from a Morton Thiokol engineer and he was talking about measuring booster exhaust gas that is so hot it would melt anything you put in it!! Crazy stuff. I guess they measured the gradient as you got closer to the exhaust and extrapolated…
Good talk!
Thanks man!!
And happy birthday!!
I absolutely love your sense of humor and I almost always learn something on this channel.
It’s always a nice experience watching your videos. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten bored of this channel or any of your content.
And I love the way you think like a mechanic. 👍
Happy birthday Scott.
I genuinely hope you have another wonderful fifty.
And By the way, hope your new year is a smooth sail full of prosperity, love, and friendship. 🍻
Tangent or tangerine?
Happy 50th Sun-circumnavigation!
And to think that all you needed to do to achieve that was "Keep Breathing" xD
also fly safe in his plane and this little space ship called earth.
Oh, I think it's a lot more than that. He needs to keep eating, drinking, defecating and sleeping. Also his heart need to keep pumping, his brain need to be kept oxygenated, all his internal organ needs to keep working, etc...
@@magnetospin KISS baby . . . breathe and all the rest follows . . .
This reminds me of a song by Judy Bailey "Riding round the sun".
Reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story from my first job. I worked in one division, but down the road was another, more scary division. They had to specify some precision gear trains to get a Swiss manufacturing company’s bid. The Swiss company saw the soec, and no-bid the project because “we cannot build a gear train that will operate reliably long-term with those specs.” The engineers from the company I worked for responded that they can guarantee that these gear trains only needed to operate for 8 minutes. The Swiss still balked, concerned that they would bot work repeatedly and might ooen them to warranty claims. The engineers reiterated that this would not be a problem. The Swiss still balked. So the engineers made it clear that if these gear trains were ever put into operation, neither the Swiss company nor the company I worked for nor any court capable of enforcing warranty claims would exist.
…because the company down the street was GE Re-entry Systems Division. Their product was MIRV vehicles for nuclear missiles.
I just know that Vault-Tec would use that to make money somehow.
"We've calculated that we only need to actually build 27% of the nukes they order and the rest can be washing machine parts"
This is .... well.... TELLING.
My first thought was it would be the device that sets off the detonations in the first place, but as soon as you told me what it actually does, I realized the circuit that sets off the implosion would simply need to be remarkably good at simply sending parallel impulses.
Happy 50th. Have a happy new year too. 😁❤ That gizmo is called a pindome readout module. The sensor is a sphere with a bunch of fibers in it that detect the flash as the shockwave hits it, inside the center it has a wavefront symmetry sensor that is pass or fail. Also it only senses half a sphere as a full sphere implosion would sever the fiber bundle before it gets the most critical (pun intended) data. That they shrunk it to that small though! 😲
I thought this was about a gizmo that was surrounded completely by explosion and measured the full sphere...? Fibers going toward center, computer sitting in the middle?
Not sure what "bundle" you're worried about, each fiber indeed gets destroyed immediately after sensing the detonation reach its tip and that's by design. The one you have in mind could totally be a real device but that's a different one from the one described in the video.
Happy solar lap complete day, Scott! Nice hoodie too. Always informative in the best possible way. Happy new year!
Lodi dodi, he likes your hoddie
Happy birthday! I turn 70 on Jan 3, and I am still enjoying life. Writing code, playing games, spoiling grandkids. You have much to look forward to!
That's a bit of a flashback. My thesis work was part of a high density generator and computerized detonation system for ~30mm munitions (they kept pushing the scale down to smaller calibers). While the devices do only have to operate for a fraction of a second, they also have to sit fully assembled for decades and remain reliable with zero maintenance. They also have to fit in as little volume as possible and withstand absurd mechanical loads.
What better way to celebrate your 50th, Scott, than to publish a classic video about nuclear weapons tech. BTW, I briefly dated someone who worked in the executive briefing center at Xilinx down in San Jose. I had no idea they had their hands in the nuclear weapons business. No wonder they survived for so long!
That is some of the the most beautiful slow motion footage I've ever seen
both film and high speed photography technologies improved by huge leaps as a direct result of nuclear weapons testing
Those are french tests from the 50's
There’s slow motion footage of nuclear detonations floating around on CZcams.
Scott, During the 1980s we were selling Digital vax mini computers with a single Ethernet port, limited disc and memory, and ordered in large numbers.
Turned out they were laying Ethernet cable as sensors, with the signal time being used to measure explosion wavefront travel. As the front destroyed the cable, the ‘ping’ time reduced. This was forwarded on, until the unit was consumed.
Happy birthday! This is great I’d never seen a motion film of the WW2 implosion (radiography?) tests before.
yeah I'm gonna hijack this comment because there's several video clips of ultra highspeed film of explosive detonation wave propagation in this video that I've never seen before and would really, really like to know the origin of them.
I think I've seen these labelled as footage from the French nuclear program.
@@AccAkut1987 Yes you're right.
Maybe we can get Scott to tell us -
@@johnwatson3948 It was probably one of his tweets I saw it on 😄
Happy birthday, Scott. Genuinely didn't realize you were quite that age yet - keep up the good work!
Welcome to the half-way club! Been doing telemetry for 28 years, never had to deal with anything that fast or self destructive though.
30 years ago I accepted the professor's challenge on the 1st day of the lecture "the one who by the end of the semester calculates and makes a design of an implosion system with two initiation points does not have to take the written (harder) part of the exam". Succeeded as a plus added radiation-ablation implosive secondary system with a "spark plug" and as an additional award was placed on "The List". Today, when I go abroad, I have to ask for a permit and give explanations, not to mention constant electronic surveillance. The old people were right "The less you know, the happier you are".
Scott's a New Year Born??? How much more awesomeness can fit into one guy anyway?
Well that was a great piece of techno trivia, pretty ingenious device. Great detail about sensing an high speed processing but got me wondering about the antenna as that also needs to survive long enough to get the data out.
Well, neither the antenna, battery or other auxiliary component will be hit by the explosion until after the sequence of interest.
@@johndododoe1411 Would superconducting the electrical components help ?
@@88njtrigg88 I doubt it. I don't think resistance significantly impedes the flow of electron fluid (soup).
I wondered the same. I’m not a radio engineer, but I’m guessing that they would need to put out a pretty strong radio signal to get through everything including the outer shell, which I have assumed was thick metal. But maybe that assumption is incorrect? How do the radio signals get out?
@@johndododoe1411 But how could the antennae be Inside the metal sphere? wouldn't it be blocked? It was interesting when he mentioned the gamma ray recievers, because the gamma rays penetrated the copper sphere,,,but that was for an "analog"(no digitals in the sphere) test. Maybe you could build an antennae that lasted just long enough that breeched the sphere? or maybe you used an EM wave that penetrated the sphere from the inside.
reminded of how the GLRMS used by HIMARS have all the sensitive electronics for guidance being in the nose.
so when it impacts the ground just before detonation all of it is pulverized
Don't those detonate in the air? Uh, I guess there are multiple warheads -- isn't one of them an air-bursting cluster pow-pow-pow thing?
@@cacogenicist One of 7 (?) warheads is airburst but it’s not a cluster munition. More like a airburst fragmentation but it doesn’t drop mini bombs like a cluster bomb.
New years with a bang, Scott! Thank you for all the adventures this year!
Lived as a kid on Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. It was very very active in those days in the early 60' s, shooting up missiles almost weekly. I remember many were blown up on purpose, presumably because of bed trajectory. Anyway if this happened in the ,still light of the evening, the resulting effect of the cloud produced by the explosion was awesome.
Happy birthday! You've gotten me so much into space through your ksp tutorials and now help me to thrive in all the space news and cool things you talk about!
Congratulations on the big 50 mate!! I used to be really into space and astronomy as a kid and your channel has helped me rediscover that fascination. Plus Scotland is awesome (hello from Dundee)
Happy New Year! Please keep the videos rolling out.
Happy birthday Scott! Very much enjoyed this delve into micro-technology! Always something new to learn! I hope you continue to fly safe! :D
That's all super amazing. I had never seen an animation of what happens at the core of a nuclear weapon during the detonation. I would love to see more of that and a description of what we are seeing as it implodes. It would be neat to see more on the original implosion experiments and their aftermath. I wonder what those experimental cores looked like after they were imploded. Were they still intact but more compact? Did they compact into a perfect sphere of some new dense material? It's like a scene out of Superman movie where he compresses coal with his hands and creates diamond. I think one time the bad guys held Lois Lane hostage until Superman manufactured some diamonds with his hands.
The dummy cores probably have so much energy in them as they implode that they "bounce" at the center and explode into a fine mist of liquefied metal.
@@r0cketplumber I can imagine that happening. Sounds plausible.
At peak compression the volume of the core is roughly halved and its density doubled. The amount of energy stored in the compressed material is huge and it would quickly rebound and explode into dust if the nuclear explosion didn't vaporise it first.
I think this would be the technological equivilent for r/perfectlycutscreams, as the chip shouts out into the void before its doom.
Imagine trying to make a warranty claim on one of those computers?
Happy B-day Scott !!.
Your knowledge of physics is top rate...as tool & die maker...I built 10 warhead loading rings for MX missiles..we had dummy's to make sure they would fit. Good work back in the Regan days.
Keep doing your thing bro! I look forward to your videos every day! Keep the knowledge coming, and keep the stories coming😤😤😤
Yes, the iPhone 6S gets updates still. But the design life is significantly reduced in practice because of the anti right to repair things Apple does. The other phone manufacturers do similar things, but not nearly as much and successfully. Fridge manufacturers/John Deere/ medical equipment are also known for it. So there can be many aspects that affects it's life
I remember having a software book with a quote about what was and was not "hard" real-time programming. I seem to remember it being about a processor at the end of a 1m rod actually attached to a nuclear bomb but it may have really been this. In any case it's a lot "harder" real-time than anything that I ever did :-)
Happy Birthday Scott, loved your videos for years now
Happy birthday Scott and happy new year! I love these interesting stories of yours, thank you for what you do!
Scott, first, Happy Birthday, young'un. Second, your video was like reading "Sum of all Fears" again. I never got over the level of detail from Tom Claney's book about how a modern nuclear bomb works, not how it can go wrong. I always wondered what fraction of the readers followed along with the description of actions occurring on the nanosecond time scale. That for the fascinating comparison of your life versus the HAR computer. Great job.
There’s a lot of artistic license in that book, I still enjoyed it when I was a kidz
I still remember the chapter title: "Three Shakes of a Lamb's Tail". A whole friggin' chapter about nuclear detonation.
Welcome to the club Scott! Coming up on 51 myself, though I probably feel no different than when I was 15...
Absolutely gorgeous channel. Well done Scott
Happy birthday, Scott!
Thanks for another great Video! Always a pleasure to stop by your channel!
Happy Birthday dude! Thanks for all you do, youve taught me so much with your videos, especially with the Orbital Mechanics are counterintuitive video.
Highly recommend anyone interested check out the book "100 Suns" by Michael Light. So many amazing photos, both of the nuclear explosions milliseconds after detonation, before the fireball even gets to the ground, to full up atmospheric event MT mushroom clouds, to the Starfish Prime upper atmosphere tests. Great coffee table book.
Hey Scott. Love the video. I was curious as to where you got the footage of the reentry vehicle detonation? It looks amazing and I wanted to see if there was a longer video out there. Thanks.
Happy Birthday Scott. Thank you for your work and all the wonderful content you create.
Happy birthday, Scott! You inspired me as well as a lot of people to learn about space more in-depth than just a pencil and folded paper. You're THE man!💫
I'm fascinated by anything to do with the development of the atom bomb - so much so that Richard Rhodes' incredible book The Making of the Atomic Bomb is an annual read for me. Thanks for the info and very interesting video clips in this video and Happy Birthday!
I think that I'll have to read that one. Cheers. 👍
@@ivancho5854 I'd highly recommend the audiobook version if you can find it 😊
I find it interesting that in their early block diagrams, they are using [C]PLD's and the 1998 block diagrams, they're using FPGA's. Any idea what the date on the early block diagram was? Be interested to see when they began using CPLD's.
Very interesting video. When all nuclear weapons testing was stopped I wondered how they could possibly remain confident that the thing would work years/decades later after improvements in design were made, QC was changed, etc. Well, they simply install this device at the center in place of the plutonium core. When the thing is detonated this device can test the engineering aspects, which are all outside the core. Once the implosion reaches this device everything is down to 100% physics, and the physics doesn’t need testing since it is guaranteed to work exactly the same until the end of the universe.
Amazing content as usual. Thanks for taking the time to produce stuff like this.
This is one of my favorite videos I've seen from you, Scott. Fantastic, and happy birthday! I hope your next trip around the sun is your best yet! I doubt we will contend with real weapons anytime soon, but even if we do, hopefully not in the western hemisphere. Either way, carpe diem! Love from Appalachia.
Happy Birthday, Scott, and Happy New Year as well! I wish you and yours all the best for the year to come, and look forward to many more entertaining and informative videos.
Amazing that the Manhattan Project was successful considering how large it was and how much security was involved. Looking forward to watching the new show about Oppenheimer coming out soon.
50? No worries - I was 52 when my 4th was born and 56 when her brother appeared. Mind you, being a dad of two teenagers at 69 IS bloody hard! Happy Birthday! (Great video too.)
You give me hope that this can be achieved.
People need to stop breeding so much.
I hear you brother! I was late to the party too. It's wonderful, but I wish that I had started a couple of decades before.
All the best. 👍
Cheer up, in a few days, I'll hit 71. In Japan, I was called 古代人 - an "Ancient Person!" Urrgh!
Congrats and happy new year Scott. Please keep making these nuclear videos. They are definitely my favorite topic.
Scott I love the videos especially of this one since I live and work out here in Kwajalein Atoll. I fly by the Tower that receives the info on Illeghani everytime I bring people in.
Happy birthday Scott I just turned 69 my self. The craziness of security can be hilarious. One time I had a low level security project that only two of us were read into. One per shift. We could not tell any one who the project was for or what it was. We had a security guard when we were not running but could not tell them what they were guarding.
Sounds fun. And probably boring sometimes?
Yes boring but only lasted a couple of weeks and was fun when the high ups would come and ask what I was doing and I could tell that for security reasons I can't tell them.
@@turnerdan53 sounds like almost two weeks off for a couple days work to me. I think in the military they call it "malicious compliance." I mean, you were just following the protocol. haha.
This totally reminded me of an Iain M Banks book where an AI inside a a Culture weapon monitored it's own detonation and was extremely happy with itself.
Happy birthday Scott, and thank you for this fascinating story (and all the others!)
Happy Birthday Scott. Its hard to believe I've been subscribed for 10 years now. Here's to another 10! Stay happy, stray healthy, and most important of all.
Fly Safe.
Big 5-0? From my perspective, you're a young fella😂. Enjoy it!
Same here.
Happy birthday Scott and happy new year.
Very interesting video. Quite amazing how that little computer worked.
Happy Birthday and New Year fella! Thanks for all the great videos and wishing you the best.
Happy Birthday! 🥳 May you have many more! Thanks for the great content as always!
Happy birthday Scott, and wishes for many more enjoyable trips 'round the Sun! You made a great video for celebration #50, as this covered (at least touched on) device and substance lifetimes, computation speed vs blast wave speed vs missile speed, security requirements, security management silliness, deformation due to alpha decay, triboluminescence, explosive lenses, integer overflow, USFS tree management, and more, and you made it so enjoyable.
Congratulations on the big 50 Scott! Trust me, with the right attitude and a bit of luck, the best is definitely yet to come!
Happy birthday and happy new year Scott. This was a particularly interesting presentation I’m amazed at what you’re able to come up with and the special photography. This was just great.
Absolutely wild. Thanks Scott, happy birthday and happy new year!
Happy Birthday Scott. I love your enthusiasm and knowledge. Keep flying brother!
Happy Birthday Scott! Been a fan of the channel for a while. Started with the Kerbal Space Program videos, but always enjoying your take on the latest or historical science.
Cheers!
Happy Belated Birthday Scott and welcome to the 50's. You're going to love them.
Happy half a century! What an amazing birthday topic - well done as always!
Many Happy Returns! My Sixty Second is tomorrow and I never want to stop learning and always enjoy you informative videos. Really loved the one about cooking the turkey.
Congratulations. Glade you still have a lot of life left in you as I love your work. Long may it continue. Thanks
Happy Birthday Scott! And this was a really interesting video, not something most people would even think about.
Super interesting! Well done,it's not often i see something genuinely new
Happy birthday!! Thank for all your hard work!