This Way Toward Enemy - How The Bomb Didn't Quite Go Boom
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- čas přidán 22. 08. 2024
- I can do nothing about the way I say Nuclear. If that upsets you please don't bother commenting
A brief history of the many ways that nuclear weapons nearly killed us all
Apparently my pronunciation of "nuclear" upset some folks, so to them I say • Why Do People Pronounc...
Notes - ourworldindata...
One in a million Given the Accident - www.osti.gov/s...
Want to see what happens when you drop a nuclear weapon on your home town? Go here - nuclearsecrecy...
Books
I tried to use David Ellsberg’s “Doomsday” as a source but he is so far up his own bottom that I wound up throwing it across the room several times and eventually gave up
Much more helpful was “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser (2013), “The Dead Hand” by David Hoffman which includes a properly insomnia inducing discussion of chemical and biological weapons as well as nuclear ones, and “The Bomb” by Fred Kaplan
Incidents
Wikipedia’s List of military nuclear incidents is pretty good and can be found here - en.wikipedia.o...
Explanation of Weak Link / Strong Link theory en.wikipedia.o...
Ahhh, the B-36. Officially: Six turning, four burning. Unofficially: Two turning, two burning, two smoking, two joking and two unaccounted for.
It doesn't seem like the best design; sadly I wasn't aware of the Goblin fighter that was supposed to pair with it until I'd done the video. A marriage made in heaven
At the Strategic Air Command museum in Nebraska they have a B-36 and a B-52 in the same hangar. The B-36 is so bafflingly huge that the B-52 looks small in comparison.
Somewhere on the interweb, there is a picture of a B17, a B29 and a B36 all sat on the apron together.
What gets you is the fact that the B17 and the B29 are smaller than the B36's wings.
Ugly but enormous!
Correction: there's a C-47 in the photo as well, I looked it up!
@@joshcarter-comThey also have the only surviving Goblin parasite fighter.
@@HardThrasherAllegedly, the only reason it entered service was because its competitor, a flying wing design by Northrop with roots in mid-ww2. Was canceled by someone who, shortly thereafter, went on to work for Convair. The claims of graft which accompanied this turn of events, were solid enough that Northrop had grounds to Sue and the case was actually litigated to my understanding.
Excellent presentation! I was a CBRN guy about a decade ago and I remember our instructor teaching us about a "Soviet" nuclear accident involving a bomber disintegrating near Moscow and how, had it gone off, none of us would have been born. Laughs and groans were had as he gleefully described the idiocy of those silly communists and their shoddy handling of nuclear weapons. Then he lifted up the projector screen and pictures describing the North Carolina Incident were posted to the whiteboard behind it. The lesson that day was: Take your training seriously, it's far more likely than not, you'll need to use it and it's a miracle nothing has happened yet.
Good on him frankly. I'd like to try and find out more about Soviet weapons handling, but I don't think a lot of information came out even during the 90s
@@HardThrasher Like American politicians, Soviet nuclear forces never admit -- er, MADE mistakes.
@@alancranford3398 huh? Yeah… the US screwed up with at least handful of warheads as is known about… but as far general corruption, handling of nuclear materials both gov/civ/mil the US and the west have done a far sight better in mostly competent security controls. Let’s say for example, no Chernobyls, no communities taking cesium fuel home to spread through their communities, etc. lots of nuke stuff to be angry about with the west, this isn’t it.
@@br0k3nman At least two nations have misused Atoms for Peace to develop nuclear weapons--the real number may be higher. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it has a nuclear arsenal, though the rumors are strong with this one. Pakistan wouldn't have nuclear weapons if not for Atoms for Peace. As nuclear weapon programs are highly classified, facts are hard to come by.
Mistakes happen, especially when you are in a hurry. My father dropped a large bomb from the plane he was working on.
Were it a small bomb it would have armed before it hit the ground and I would not be writing this.
However, it landed flat and he followed the rest of the workers behind the sand dunes.
No-one could imagine how it happened! 🤐
This feels like a video produced by a history channel with Half a million subs. You managed to be very entertaining and super informative at the same time. Stellar Work!
Thanks man, not going to lie this was an utter bastard to pull together
@@HardThrasher well thanks for sticking to it
Having watched some of Simple History's content, I'd say this video feels A LOT better than something produced by a history channel with half a million subs
The art of true quality is not appearing to give a toss whilst producing and delivering an awesome presentation ! Well done that man!
P
My dad worked on the Manhattan Project but he was very security conscious and never told us anything interesting until he was near the end, so, nothing in your video surprises me. I would like to see more on this topic but I think you could really do a number on the B-36 ("two turning, two burning, two smoking, two choking, and two more unaccounted for").
Hah, my great uncle worked on it too!❤❤❤ And his brother in law helped get the heavy water out of Norway before the Nazis got hold of it
Oh yes, the B-36.
Having his Lordship rant about it would be funny, indeed!
Yeah the B-36 looks like something i drew when i was 11, the whole pusher propellers thing, the weird cylindrical body that looks about 50% too long, and then the random addittion of a couple of jets, and to top that the rocket assisted take off! The complete package that illustrates the insanity of that period of the cold war!
I'm a fellow child of the 80s and remember vivid nightmares about Vulcans overhead dropping almost innocuously small white devices under parachutes and then the sky boiling and catching fire.
Obviously this video has completely assuaged those childish concerns and I will now sleep long and well.
Sooo, glad my parents generation had nuke, tornado, Earthquake proof desk!
Your generation brought mine into this world now deal with the consequences! Lol.
Threads.
@@kikidevine694 OMG Threads! We turned up at a remote cottage in Devon after going mushrooming on Dartmoor. The inhabitants said "Shh... Threads has just started!"
We lasted until the cat struggling in the radioactive rubble scene before we retired to the kitchen and formed the "Who gives a fuck anyway!" club.
500 fresh Liberty Caps & realistic nuclear war do not a happy person make!
I've since watched the whole thing... That poor moggy was still the worst bit for me. It was something so ubiquitous & mundane that brought home the horrors of a thermonuclear strike against everything you hold dear.
Never really affected me but loved the vulcan
Impressive that you've managed to get footage of an actual supplementary storage area (nuclear bomb dump). I was in the RAF during these times and worked in the security of these weapons. In the QRA, we had aircraft armed permanently with these weapons, jaguars then tonkas. We were live armed and if the aircraft were alerted, the pilots and aircrew scrambled, which happened all the time and we didn't know if it was real or an exercise. We had two failsafes; there was a physical steel pin which had to be removed or the weapon couldn't be dropped. We removed that pin and if any groundcrew went anywhere near them during an alert we were to shoot them dead. Also, the pilot taxiing out the HAS had to show a code and a picture which he had on a canvas pouch round his neck, which had to match the code and picture you had round your neck. The codes were deliberately altered for the exercise so the aircraft couldn't be allowed to take off, then replaced with the genuine codes and photos. If the code or the photo didn't match, you were to indicate to the pilot that they were not going anywhere, (the cut throat action). If the pilot didn't immediately stop and shut down the engines (and I mean within two seconds), our instructions were to shoot through the canopy and kill the pilot, anathema to an airman, but we took it seriously. There were other failsafes like closing the gates onto the taxiway, but no one had tested whether a jet could generate enough momentum to hop over them.
Do you have a link to manuals and stuff stating on this? because this sounds very odd and interesting
9500 subs is absolutely criminal for this level of content. Ive seen channels of tens of thousands large that put maybe a third of the effort Ive seen thusfar. Yes, the Pig sent me, but I feel I would have found my way here eventually. Keep it up, mate!
Dude two days ago it was basically me here 😀
@@HardThrasher Your killing it!
0:25 don't worry sir, some of us watch 1+ hours of powerpoint presentations on military logistics for fun, great and very informative video!
Perun?
@@kikidevine694 If you have another one I would be willing to give it a try...
@@kikidevine694 I just came from his latest.
Saint Peter: "So how did the world end?"
"... Accidentally..."
Howdy, so just a note. My grandpa used to work as an officer at an ICBM station back in the day. He told me that when they were using liquid fuel they had just a ton of near misses (the worst being when a welder didn't hear the alarms as they were preparing a test and they ended up taking out 3 unarmed missiles due to fire). The interesting thing I wanted to note was that he told me a ton of the people there were drop outs from the Navajo code talker school. He was Cherokee and apparently the recruiter didn't know the difference so when he failed out they gave him an assignment with nukes cause at least he had the clearance. Mildly terrifying that the ones with their fingers on the button were a bunch of almost disillusioned highschool kids from some of the worst treated and schooled areas in the US
In the late '70s, I worked for Lockheed on the Trident II program. Even though I was working on the missile, I still needed a working understanding of (and clearance for) the "payload." I can honestly say that your assessment in this video is excellent, with only a few minor wrinkles. IIRC, the "Always/Never" ratio for the Mk. 4 system (the warhead on the Trident II) was 10:1 biased towards Never.
My personal take on weapons safety is that with all of the thousand or more incidents over the decades, there has never been an accidental nuclear explosion, despite the efforts of random chance working towards it. They really, really do think these things through, it's just that the systems are all so damned complicated.
I joined the USAF in 1969 hoping to not get sent to Vietnam. It worked. I spent my 4 years at SAC Hq in Omaha. I worked in the basement level of the 3 story HQ building. Three stories below me was the Underground Command Post with its Big Board and red telephones. The most ironic aspect of working there was the card I carried in my wallet. It showed my designated shelter area in case of nuclear attack. Since my shelter area was by default my work station, I was to report to one of the prime targets in the country for protection.
Tbh probably the best place to be if the balloon really did go up. What's worse than being killed in a thermonuclear world war? Surviving a thermonuclear world war!
The idea of being one of the few survivors in a country where most of the population was dead or dying, the land was irradiated and toxic for millenia, and the few left were almost inevitably going to be involved in a brutal battle to just not starve to death really did not appeal.
The message I got from this is that it’s spectacularly hard to get a nuclear bomb to actually detonate
Indeed! It has to go PERFECTLY.
yup. There were several plutonium bombs assembled well before the end of WW2. The holdup in using/testing them was getting something to synchronise the detonation of all tbe explosives within 1-2 milliseconds for the implosion effect to work
that said, you wouldn't want to be in the vicinity if something only partially went off. A fizzle is still quite a few kilotons of BOOM
@@retiredbore378 The demon core incident wasn't an explosion
@@retiredbore378 it DID kill people, but there was not enough heat to melt anything and no explosion (in any case, just like uranium, molten plutonium exposed to air will _burn_ more furiously than magnesium)
In tbe same way, the accident which killed Hisashi Ouchi wasn't an explosion
@@retiredbore378 I don't think building an actual fission weapon would be possible, all the casting and machining of the pit and explosive lenses would be beyond the capabilities of just about every terrorist organisation (plus you'd have to get hold of explosives, which would seem to be another major hurdle).
However I've got to say I'm surprised and relieved that no terrorist organisation has yet used a dirty bomb using Americium, I can't believe that smoke detectors are that hard to come by, even if you're buying 1000's of the things. 'I'm a big landlord who's putting them in all my rental properties' etc. etc. (I'm not going to go into all the ways that even I can imagine you could get hold of these things, and I've got plenty of better things to think about, but there are many!).
Just the scare factor would be crippling, and cleaning up a city centre would be incredibly disruptive and costly.
Maybe our spooks are more effective than we imagine, but then I hear myself thinking that and think 'really!?' probably just luck.
My dad was an RAF instrument repair man. He told us many years after about a time he visited the nuclear weapons store at a UK airbase. It was in Norfolk. My dad found the place was guarded by two RAF airmen who were armed with a pick axe handle. They took turns to carry the pick axe handle.
I guess at least it was guarded by someone!!
Yeah i've an uncle that spent most of his national service doing that too at a radar station in wales (aberporth?)
Your Dad must have been winding you up. That's nonsense. They were guarded by well-armed very paranoid RAF self-important Coppers and Rocks. They were guarded thus since day one of their delivery to the RAF in the 1950s.
Marham. I was one of the guys who guarded the QRA and the SSA (the area with aircraft armed with nukes and the nuke storage area). You could get on camp, but to get to the weapons you would need to get past the attack dogs unnoticed ( impossible), then get past the ground radar (equally impossible, I've tested it myself many times), then past the trembler alarms on two separate rings of fences, then survive being attacked by a dedicated defence force. We even tested it by 'attacking' the sites by fast roping from Chinooks. I'm not giving anything away, there's much more to it than that. When I was in, nobody ever managed to penetrate these sites either in the UK or Germany. The only occasion when someone got vaguely near was a pissed up rock ape who got caught immediately.
it did have a steel sleeve round the buisness end to give it a little oomh tho
Fantastic. Never apologize for lengthy products. This was excellent.
Yeah, I much prefer long form videos on the Tube, I love the nitty gritty that is often important in understanding what's really going on, and you just don't get that in 5 min clips.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was not an implosion type device. It was much cruder than that. They went for a so-called "gun-type" mechanism. Basically shoot a tube of Uranium down a track at several hundred mph with explosives (although you could use other methods), allowing it to slide onto a target to create a critical mass, and then blast it with a neutron source.
The bad thing about this kind of design is that it isn't very reliable. There is a small but definitely meaningful chance that the Uranium, being radioactive, just releases a neutron while it's sliding onto the target, causing it to go off prematurely enough to generate a stupid amount of heat or rip the device to smithereens but not actually enough to make a nuclear level explosion. You need a large amount of neutrons at once and a highly supercritical assemblage of fissile material for that. Thus, there might have been as much as a 10% chance that Little Boy wouldn't detonate, and that chance is purely based on true randomness, god playing dice with the universe. Not engineering tolerances or anything like that.
Plutonium has a much greater radioactivity and is therefore unsuitable for this type of assembly method. Instead, it must be rapidly compressed and then blasted by a neutron source at peak compression.
It's not so much the greater radioactivity of plutonium which causes problems for the "gun-type" nuclear weapon design, but the decidedly non-trivial rate of spontaneous fission. However, it is possible to make a nuclear weapon of this type using plutonium, just more difficult and hence less practical. To make a supercritical mass with a reliable enough chain reaction to achieve the design yield (energy output and explosive force) using plutonium in a "gun-type" weapon, the two separate parts of the core need to be assembled much faster.
This means using a more powerful "gun", capable of firing the plutonium sleeve down the barrel (or track) towards the plutonium cylinder at much higher velocity. Off the top of my head, I cannot recall exactly how much faster it needs to be, but it was still technically possible: Just using a longer "gun barrel" to achieve a higher "muzzle velocity", a well established and understood method when it comes to guns.
The reason this was considered impractical (and/or impossible) in the 1940s was because the "gun barrel" required to make this design work with plutonium would have been considerably longer than the nose-to-tail length of the largest aircraft in existence at the time. Or in other words, if they had actually made a "gun-type" nuclear weapon with plutonium, they would have also needed to construct a specially designed extra-large aircraft to carry it.
That was morbidly fascinating and objectively terrifying! You've clearly done a HELL of a lot of research for this, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. XD
Thrasher I was born in the USA when they used to test bombs above ground. Our snowballs had strontium 90 in them. We had wicked snowball fights. Pretty badass, eh? The nuns told us not to eat snow off our mittens on-a-cowna the falllout. We knew better. They just didn't want us getting super powers.
I read that the Americans actually killed more Americans than Japanese with Nukes due to the fallout from above ground testing in the US.
Like getting bone cancer or Leukemia for example?
I volunteer at a place with a man who was a US Air Force mp and worked with the atomic energy commission in the 50s guarding nuclear bombs. He basically said that it was extremely scary and that he was happy when he was sent to France and no longer needed to stand next to the bombs all day. I honestly didn’t understand what he was talking about fully before this video.
Very informative - I didn't know about most of these incidents. As a child of the late fifties I was still in very short pants when the Cuban crisis kicked off but vividly recall going to bed one night totally convinced me and everyone else would die that night - must have picked up on my parents fears. Putin has reawakened those old nightmares recently for me but I just sat here laughing my head off at your closing comment. Thank you so much for the therapy I have needed all my life. Subscribed and liked.
I'm about the same age, and though I can't remember anything about the events, I do remember having nightmares and being unable to sleep around that time. Just like you, I must have picked up on what must have been serious fear for my parents, who knew more than most, having campaigned in CND since its inception. So, last-line therapy for me, too, brother. Still, at least nowadays we can trust these things to NATO.... Oh, wait....
Please don't apologise for making 'long' videos, I tend to have these running in the background whilst working on my Mac, learning and working, who says blokes can't multi-task! Love your content and have been work-binging for a week on your stuff, planning to continue as long as my sensibilities can survive your odd bit of colourful language (tender souled individual who learned your naughty vocab at school and have been trying uselessly to un-learn it since, terrible habit!) Keep up the superb content.
Thank you for describing why that one bomb armed itself -- as it appeared the breakup caused to the arming wires to be pulled in such a way that the bomb "thought" it was a "normal" release. Only the fact that the "Kill" switch (pun intended) was turned off kept it from exploding. Jeez the last Generation in my family that lived before MAD has passed away, from now on it is a dark part of every life on the planet from now until whenever.
I'm enjoying the exponential increase of your subscribers. It was less than 1k yesterday, 5k when I went to sleep, 9k as of time of posting. Well deserved.
My uncle, who I care for now (silent generation) worked for Sandia and Lawrence Livermore as a nuclear physicist post manhattan. He has always been remarkably relaxed about a lot of this kind of thing. They literally did thousands of detonations in many, many places. Some places that we/or anyone else should not be necessarily happy about… different times… He still can’t talk about some stuff, but needless to say: there is a reason we have never had a full detonation out of our control. Lots and lots of money. In fact, that’s a US govt fear in Ukraine is about. We’re both as pro-Ukraine as it gets…we’re
not Russia, when we got lucky from an error, there was an investigation of a very serious nature with no holds barred and corrections made, which is a process. From cryptic response, this was always shared with the Brits and any other friends with similar designs. He once said, we understood that hardware and computer failures were expected, but the human failure element was the most tested for as that was the most reliable failure point. Russia can’t afford this, they can’t spend our entire nuclear maintenance and security budget on rockets and warhead, because that equals their entire military budget, even considering the Price to work ratio. Sure, they may have a sub or silo that still works, but the Sabre rattling is what it’s all about. Having warheads does not equal functionality or maintenance, and that goes for delivery vehicles, too. No expensive program with danger is without its risks, it’s how you handle them. But when you’re corrupt completely from top to bottom in a way where no truth exists…. Then you’re someone with nuclear weapons that isn’t in the west, if that makes sense. I’m not downplaying screw-ups that could have had huge implications, I’m explaining why they on the whole didn’t happen and why the Soviet era stocks are so damn dangerous.
An hour long video of Lord HardThrasher's sarcastic enlightenment? Yes please old chap.
You have joined Perun as one of my favourite purveyors of internet info. And terrific British humour. The Pig didn't send me, I found you on my own, but i'm glad i did. Also pleased you seem to be getting the respect you deserve.
I'm as irreverant as the next guy, but if ever I had a reason to believe in divine intervention, the incident/event ratio exposed here has gotta be it! I was a bit young to understand what was going on during the cuban missile crisis but still survived the rest of the 60s, 70s and 80s in the UK, largely because of the same stoicism others have mentioned. There's nothing I can do about it, so why worry? Worrying gets you nothing but ulcers (or deep psychosis) but has no positive results ever! The best hope was the certainty of being close enough to a valid target to assure instant, painless, vaporisation!
The same feelings have resurfaced since Feb 24 2022. There is, once again, a paranoid megalomaniac in charge of a corrupt and inept regime which owns half the worlds nuclear warheads. And i'm NOT talking about Joe Biden (though Trump made me edgy, how HE survived 4 years in office without being assassinated is a constant source of wonder to me) One of the best and likeliest outcomes is that he will give a launch order, only for the poorly maintained ICBM or whatever to detonate in the silo and blow HIM to kingdom come! Though I seriously doubt any launch order would get as far as the silos, I have to believe that not everyone in Russia is barking mad!
The whole "WE'RE GONNA DIE IN A NUCLEAR WAR AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH" bit actually led me to discover Tom Lehrers songs. One of them, "We Will All Go Together When We Go", perfectly encapsulates the stoicism you mention
Born in '64... The Protect & Survive clips made me go cold. It's the representation of the fallout that gets me. That animation of little fluttering pieces used to haunt my dreams. I'd hear groaning as the fallout came in through a window or into the loft.
Then I'd wake up. The groaning was me trying to shout "Fallout!" to my partner through R.E.M. paralysis.
Minor correction: the Air-2 Genie wasn't a missile.
it was a nuclear air-to-air *Rocket*
who needs guidance systems if you can just melt the closest ten miles?
By the way, a product improved nuclear air-to-air missile was the radar-guided Nuclear Falcon.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-26_Falcon
"Not a missile, an A2A rocket"
Well that went from already pretty scary to WAY worse.
@@jadefalcon001 Wait until you read the launch profile--that rocket had to be lobbed because after the fuel ran out, it coasted to the target. Firing a Genie point-blank was not a healthy thing--firing it from extreme range and then diving away with a sharp turn to maximize the distance between the nuclear explosion minimized damage from blast and from the enhanced radiation warhead.
@@alancranford3398 If you want wild stories, when they test-fired Genie they had a group of five officers (and one NCO photographer) standing at ground zero while it exploded 20,000 feet over their heads, to demonstrate how safe air-to-air nuclear combat was. Or something like that.
Let's not forget that the Kriegsmarine were maulled in the battle for Norway. Caught between the Norwegians, the RAF, and the British Navy destroyer divisions - the later of which were basically Imperial Stormtroopers with better aim. I mean, seriously, their doctrine was that the 'best' range was point-blank, which came as a great surprise to German cruisers and battleships who on paper should have been avoided. It takes a crazy kind of bravery to charge the enemy knowing you're expendable, but the enemy hardware is not. Special shout out to the destroyer that somehow came back to blighty with a bunch of stolen German motorcycles. I mean it's a ship... wtf...
Brilliant work! And I mean brilliant in the American sense, not in the snotty, derogatory British use of the word. I had thought that I was aware of most of the horrifying fuckups having to do with nuclear weapons, until I watched the video, transfixed with horror. After spending several hours under my desk, curled into a tight fetal position and rhythmically banging my head upon the floor in a sort of autistic self soothing fashion, I've now managed to sit back in my chair and write this comment.
You have produced the best video I have ever watched regarding this topic, and others as well. You've managed to combine fantastic scholarship with prime British humor, and I believe you will see a fantastic increase in subscribers as word gets out. Keep up the great work!
Concerning the topic of nuclear weapons and the cold war, I grew up on a small dairy farm near the small town of Atlantic, Iowa in the US. The headquarters of Strategic Air Command (SAC) was located just south of Omaha, Nebraska - a mere 60 miles away. My generation never spoke of nuclear war, as we all were fatalistic about our chances of survival and hoped that should nuclear war come we would be one of the lucky ones to be incinerated at once and not linger on for days after.
One of my earliest childhood memories, when I was three years old, occurred in February, 1964 (I spent many hours searching for this event online, finally finding it mentioned in a small article in a local newspaper).
B-52 crews at that time were still being trained to evade detection by Soviet radar should they receive orders to attack. This training generally was held near sparsely populated areas, including southwestern Iowa, and involved a flight of B-52's and B-47's flying in close formation at the highest speed they could maintain, at elevations of around 200 feet above the ground as they attempted to avoid detection by an Air Force train car (which was the target) as it attempted to detect the incoming planes with its radar systems.
The scenes in Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove' of the speed and altitude of the B-52 heading towards Russia may actually have been very realistic, as was the bucking, wobbling pilot's yoke - I've read that after extremely lengthy flights some pilots had to be literally carried from the plane as they were too exhausted from handling the plane.
My memory as a toddler was of hearing a tremendous roar, almost an explosion, directly over our house on several occasions i would run to the window and peer upwards but could only see our large maple and cottonwood trees swaying back and forth like weeds in a gale, with an oily black smoke drifting down over them. This took place several times during that week in February, the concussion at one point actually breaking the glass in one of the house's windows.
Pilots would refer to these flights as 'oil burners', or 'bunny suckers' due to the insanely low altitudes they were forced to maintain.
From what little information I have found, these flights were claimed not to be carrying any nuclear weapons (although I think that at the time each plane could carry four 5 megaton hydrogen bombs, although that information is sketchy as well). God only knows if they were loaded with nukes, but I wouldn't be surprised, considering the hair-trigger atmosphere of the time and the ongoing Operation Chrome Dome.
The next time you are in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (and I'm sure you visit often, as we are the gateway to slightly north of east-central Iowa and our streets are always choked with tourists admiring the beautiful Cedar River and the numerous grain mills and ethanol plants), I'll ply you with as much fine whiskey as you can drink. Cheers!
The Tsar Bomba at 50 Megatons, had a rather curious effect on exploding, which had not quite been expected, and it did give everyone pause for thought. (I think they said at the time?) That was it created a rather large bump in our atmosphere, which then remained, while the atmosphere did its usual thing, rotating around our planet 8 times
Yes this scared the Soviets straight, that state addicted to bigger is better. They also hadn’t intended for the Tsar Bomb to be this large and it did occur to them that maybe the bomb itself had instinctively understood more about large thermo-nuclear explosions than they did 🤔
Actually it was other way around - original design for Tsar bomb was around 100Mt, but soviets feared that it would release too much radiation and deliberately made it "safer" (I have also read somewhere that there were theories that at 100 Mt it could cause crack in earth's crust). In the end, revised design was thanks to this surprisingly "clean", considering insane yeald of the bomb.
On the other hand, there were americans and their absolute shitshow called Castle Bravo...
Umm the atmosphere doesn't rotate? Earth rotates with its atmosphere, it is a closed system. You misunderstood that I guess.
Also the tsar bomb was actually made for 100 MT. It had its tamper replaced to tone it down a bit.
@@AllisterCaine Think your comment through for a moment.
Love the longer format, my vote for more of the same (or even longer)
I had a coworker who was a supply officer at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota, he told me a story of how, on a training mission to transfer nuclear weapons between bases, one of the three dummy nukes, was actually a real nuke, only discovered when the plane was unloaded at the other base.
No one was ever in any danger, but a lot of people including Minot's CO got fired over it.
Comparing a packet of Malteasers to 168g of TNT. Well done. Quite enjoyed this one. Learned a lot
Presumably measured in a Bomb Calorimeter.
LazerPig Is the GOAT for bringing me here. great content
Excellent video the ratio for malteasers to explosive power was a great touch
Half an hour of explosions and nostalgia? I'm in.
I really didn't think I would live past my early 20s, fully expecting to die fighting WW3 or an adjacent proxy war. Joined the army straight out of highschool and everything. 1976er!
Well made video mate came here from lazerpig, definitely a video I will recommend to others in future
Cheers for that snippet of Monster Munch advert.... it made me smile.
the reason arkansas is pronounced the way it is is because the word came from one of the local native languages
This I did not know!
@@HardThrasher And of course you can really blame the French, specifically their silent "s" that they tend to stick on the end of words. Arkansas, being in the midst of what was French territory until 1803, had that "s" stuck on the end of a native name.
I still pronounce Ar-Kansas. But I like being an ass at times
@@jonc4403 I think we can all agree if you look hard enough, almost everything can be blamed on the French.
@@texasforever7887 Except maybe for French Fries...
Fun fact, the tsar bomba was actually rated for either 50 or 100 MT yield depending on configuration. They decided to test the 50 MT yield cuz like it's just stupid powerful either way lmao. But yea it was potentially twice as powerful as what was tested
'3-D Sunburn'... Well, I thought I'd heard all of the terrifying terms re: acute radiation sickness, but I think I have a new #1.
...3-D Sunburn. (*shudders).
What a stonking great video. Thoroughly enjoyed this and cant wait for more. Im currently binge watching the channel and the quality is enjoyably consistent. :)
I'm going through your back-issues, so this comment is very late, but this is one of the best CZcamss I've watched in ages. Funny, informative and pretty scary at the same time!
Many thumbs up.
I live about 20 minutes from the Goldsboro/Faro drop site. About a mile down the road from the (sealed and monitored) impact site, there is a church with an MGM-1 Matador cruise missile displayed in the parking lot.
So long story short I can get on a watch list for ordering 100's of thousands of maltesers
I mean basically yes ;)
Ferb I know what we're gonna do today
Went to the living room and gave my boomer parents a hug.
amazing video, just amazing.
also now come to think of it, a military doesnt care about ANY people as long as it performs its function.
Thanks man, glad you enjoyed it.
The reality is that when you're talking about organisations who are tasked with administering state violence, they necessarily have a very different set of decision making criteria. If you agree with the mission that's good, if you don't that's bad. When you put nukes into the mix and start talking about megadeaths it all goes batshit
Thank you. I'm a total layman when it comes to all things nuclear devices but now I can boast at parties about our possible destruction dew to flawed designs. Brilliant channel! Well done and keep up the good work.
Excellent and informative as always.
An additional Iowa anecdote you may find to be of interest, especially regarding the testing of nuclear weapons - the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, situated just west of the small city of Burlington, Iowa, a port city on the Mississippi River, has a long and thoroughly disreputable history concerning nuclear weapons. This site, which is fenced off and guarded, is over 19,000 acres in area. In comparison, the New York borough of Manhattan has an area of slightly more than 14,000 acres.
During the 1990's, then Iowa senator Tom Harkin managed to get the Department of Energy to declassify a number of records pertaining to the horrific mistreatment of workers at the plant, who had to routinely handle highly toxic or radioactive waste materials with little or no protection - workers were even 'encouraged' to leave their dosimeter badges in their lockers instead of wearing them during their work. As you can imagine, the illness and mortality rate of these workers was very high, causing a number of them to file suit against the government to at least get some idea of what they were exposed to during their work at the plant.
One of the interesting bits of information that was declassified at the time was the fact that the plant was the site of over 700 nuclear weapons explosions, which they referred to as 'hydroshots', using depleted uranium instead of fissile material. This occurred over a number of years during the 1960's and early 1970's, often releasing a plume of toxic explosive residue and depleted uranium into the air.
A friend of mine, who grew up in Burlington, told me that during her time in school she often heard distant explosions coming from the west, and was informed that this was merely 'blasting at the quarry'. Her father worked at the plant, purportedly in maintenance (workers held security clearances and no one spoke of their work), and died in his early 30's of esophageal cancer.
Since Harkin managed to declassify some of these documents in the late 90's, they have slowly but steadily been disappearing from the web.
Iowa also took a very heavy hit during the time of above ground testing in Nevada, with many tests dropping a great deal of fallout across the entire state. I grew up on a dairy farm, guzzling raw fresh milk as a child, when in July, 1962 the US conducted Operation Sedan, to illustrate how useful nuclear weapons could be to create ports, burying a nuke a few hundred feet underground, then detonating it. The crater is still the largest man made crater on earth, and it lifted a mountain of hideously contaminated soil far up into the stratosphere and jet stream, with a fair amount of it precipitating out several days later during heavy rains over the pastures of my farm and being consumed by the cattle, who were milked shortly after and the milk then consumed by myself. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1989 and underwent a total thyroidectomy followed by a dose of Iodine 131 to kill any remaining thyroid cells.
I vividly remember the technician who administered the I-131 to me. it was a small paper cup of water, spiked with the I-131, which he handed to me holding it carefully at arm's length, wearing a plastic face shield, a full lead apron extending to the ground, and what looked to be like a heavy leaden falconer's glove on the arm he used to hand me my little cocktail.
'Here', he said, 'drink this'.
I was instructed that I had been given a dosage of 29.9 milliCuries of radiation because a dosage of 30 milliCuries would require me be hospitalized and isolated for several days. I was instructed to stay away from people, avoid sex, and flush the toilet at least three times each time I used it.
Afterwards I wandered over to a friend's lab in the biology building in Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, where he was working on his doctorate in microbiology. As usual I picked up the lab's Geiger counter, just fucking around, and turned it on, pegging the needle. My friend, who was not aware I had just swallowed a radioactive cocktail, immediately panicked thinking there had been some terrible radioactive spill. He was reassured when I told him of my treatment and found that the Geiger counter could pick up my gamma ray glow from over 15 feet away.
He cancelled our plans for dinner later that night.
That's absolutely wild! First the absolute disregard for health and safety by the people who operated these facilities, then the fact that your treatment involved such a high dose!
Hope you're ok now.
I read somewhere that the U.S killed more of it's own citizens than Japanese citizens despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki just from the fallout from the testing of bombs in the USA.
Well done, nuclear annihilation near misses and entertainment as well...how thoroughly British, good work Thrasher, keep it up!
Canada got sucked into installing the Beaumark missle system by the US. (It never worked and they were removed) At this time the government cancelled a Jet program named the CF105 Arrow, going as far as cutting up all the prototypes and Avro Canada went bankrupt. It was one of the greatest tragedies of the aviation industry here, one that they never recovered from.
Thought I knew my nuclear accident history. Turns out I knew of the accidents, and not the massive number of near misses and also I don't know the accident history as much as I thought. Very impressed.
Truly the B-36 Peacemaker was one of the aircraft of all time...
Well the B-36 was the biggest piece of junk ever to actually get into the air.
Finally someone else said that the B-36 was horrendously ugly.
Do a video about it, and in the one about the B-17 you mentioned the B-29.
I absolutely love the way you present this stuff
Thank you kindly, good sir!
I found this to be an excellent overview of the development of the Always/Never concept and factually correct, with the possible miss of mentioning the Little Boy bomb architecture. As I'm sure you understand, this was the original methodology of producing a critical mass and neutron cascade, but would not work with plutonium as the cascade does not develop properly and results in a fizzle. A faster development of critical mass is necessary with plutonium, and this led to the implosion concept, the development of the explosive lenses, the bridgewire detonator, the x-device, et al. The need for all of this was due to the difficulty in separating the 235 uranium isotope from 238. A significant fraction of the billion 1940's dollars for the Manhattan project was the development of Oak Ridge and the TVA to power it, all to separate the (IIRC) 0.7% mass fraction U-235; (also IIRC) mostly by gas diffusion of the hexafluoride, and it took till early '45 to get enough 235 for one bomb, by the physicists reckoning. Meanwhile, Hanford and some other places found it was relatively easy as pie to produce plutonium, which would work great for an A-bomb, except that it didn’t with a gun bomb design. This necessitated the development of implosion and all that went with it if the Manhattan folks wanted to produce more than one bomb every two years. The rapid fire development of the implosion technology led to the decision that despite all of the blood and treasure of opportunity cost (the war ground on), they simply had to test it. This, of course, became Trinity. There was enough confidence in Little Boy that it was used untested, and, grimly enough, it worked better than expected. It was later calculated/discovered that the actual amount of U-235 that actually fissioned and produced the 16kT Hiroshima explosion was approximately the weight of a dollar bill.
Trinity and Fat Man worked well enough that this became the de facto atomic bomb design.
I reckon that the simplicity of the Uranium 235 bomb would work against the Never part of the Always/Never principle. It is fortunate that it is a very difficult separation to produce sufficient fissionable U-235 from uranium ore, as uranium is much more prevalent than originally thought at the time of the Manhattan project.
Nuclear weapons are typically measured in megatons, in theory, but in practice measured by how much more powerful they are than Little Boy, which did it's famous swan dive over Hiroshima.
Hearing the mispronunciation of NucLEAR as NucUler is really grating from a fellow Brit is like nails down a chalkboard. Saying that forced my way past it because you have a wonderful wit and delivery.
The mispronunciation of the word ‘nuclear’ is as baffling as it is widespread. I had assumed it was a peculiarly American phenomenon, but was dismayed to hear that it had made its way into His Lordship’s otherwise commendable elocution.
Look, I suppose we have to allow the Americans their unpalatised pronunciation of the first syllable (‘noo’ vs ‘nyew’) on the grounds that that’s just what they do. But there is no excuse for gratuitously inserting a palatised ‘u’ between the ‘c’ and the ‘l’. and then, to add insult to injury, neglecting the diphthong in the final syllable (‘ear’ as in, er, ‘ear’). The resulting ‘noocyoolar’ is an abomination, and has no place on the lips of an Englishman, which I take His Lordship to be. A range of English voices can be heard here, demonstrating how it should be done forvo.com/word/nuclear/#en
So all that protesters said in the 60's were indeed true. As a 70 year old, I can tell you we also was scared about nuclear. And the cuban crises didn't help. Thankyou for clarifing. And indeed in a captivating manner
Fun little factoids: The giant fire extinguishers in RAF QRA sheds (I think that they were 500lb dry-powder) were wheeled. Fine. But, the MT nutters classified said extinguishers as vehicles - thus they had to be fitted with fire extinguishers! That was one of the questions asked of crews on the annual proficiency re-qual. ALSO - when the weapon (WE177) was fitted, on top of it there had to be placed 2 layers of blue absorbant paper - Kimwipe. NOT ONE, NOT THREE but TWO. (To absorb fluid drips from the aircraft)
Vital stuff to know!
Lots of actually important stuff too though.
What a fascinating, horrific, and informative overview of nuclear weapons safety, accidents, close calls, and outright bonkers heavenly intervention of what should have been a catastrophe of global proportions. I’ve known of a handful of these nuclear accidents on the US side, but had no idea how many there were or how large the risk was for such accidents to occur. I really learned a lot from this post.
Opposite my parents home lived a chap who had, like many of a certain age, served in the British army in his youth.
He told me that when the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height he wa so stationed in Berlin and watched the sunset one evening fully expecting to never see it rise again.
The BBC production Threads in the early 80s, along with the US film ‘The Day After’ really shocked a lot of people in Britain who had thought a nuclear war would be like a re run of the Blitz of 1940.
Instead they realised it would be the end of civilisation and most of humanity.
As time goes on and more information is released it becomes more and more amazing that we didn’t accidentally start WW3.
As for the future. I think eventually either a nuke will go off by accident, a terrorist group will manage to obtain or build a bomb and will detonate it in a city or somewhere like Pakistan will become unstable with an extremist group taking control of the nukes using them to attack India or the West leading to a massive exchange.
Humans are so stupidly clever
2003 i was installing equipment at a nearby naval weapons station. We were being escorted and Guarded by mps with guns at the ready. I assumed we were in the nuclear torpedo room because it wasn't normal to have guns ready when i was being escorted in the past at other facilities on this station. The mood was very tense at the moment in that room. Then just as i was about to crack a joke to try to lighten the mood one of the guards beat me to it and made a joke that i can't recall his exact words but it was too the effect of " please don't make us shoot you because we are fairly confident the sound of gunfire will make these bombs go off". But after watching your video i realize they weren't making a joke. Holy shit that's scary.
I'm a child of the cold war. I was born at the Naval Ordnance Test Station China Lake CA. My dad was US Navy enlisted. He crossed over to the USAF and worked those F-106 Delta Dart interceptors shown in your film. I did my time in the Air Force too, I'm glad we stood against Soviet expansionism, the Soviet system murdered more people than the nukes that held them in check did.
I hope you don't misinterpret the need to apply saftey standards so we don't nuke ourselves for some kind of approval of the Soviet system
@@HardThrasher Nope, but I have to note that the Soviet system made slipshod a standard. I just don't believe they should be left out of the equation because they made lying to the world nearly comical. I remember the Norwegians complaining to the UN that Soviet subs were operating within their 12 mile territorial limit and the Soviets vehemently denied it only to have one run aground in a fiord and be exposed to the world when the tide went out and left it high and dry.
I'm not trying to be a what-a-boutist, but at least the USAF endeavored to correct the issue, not just lie about it and sweep it under the rug. Suffice it to say the Soviets set off a bomb so enormous that they had to evacuate a town 34 miles from ground zero. And there was Chernobyl, admittedly a civil disaster, as much as civil could be in a socialist police state. Those two incidents irradiated more Europeans than the USAF ever did. You'd think they'd at least get honorable mention...
I'm pretty sure I called out that the US was the gold standard in that it's generally reported and expected that those who handle weapons will learn from it. We simply have nothing from what was the Soviet Union or Russia beyond stuff that is easy to detect - a couple of sub accidents, failed cruise missile test and a few domestic reactor problems. However the Soviet system had some advantages over the US one because movement and handling of nuclear weapons was not a thing done anywhere nearly as regularly- becuase the system was terrified of internal dissent it controlled who had access and what they could do to an almost pathological extent. Who knows, I'd love to find out more, but it's seriously unlikely anyone ever will
Great channel - used to Perun length content- do your worst 😂
Marvelous video.
My dad supposedly single-handedly prevented a missile accident that must have had a nuke on it.
I remember what a significant event it was when the Berlin Wall fell.
Kids nowadays don't even know there was a wall?
(Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is worth picking up too.)
"Threads" was a 1980s mockumentary about the build up to war, the war, and its aftermath. A right old barrel of laughs.
Fucking hilarious...
Being a country formed of a diverse range of peoples, it's understandably confusing to the more antiquarian and homogenous cousins that those in North America might use the Dutch word Pit as the term for the seed inside of various fruits. After all, Pit does mean Kernel, core or seed in Dutch, and Dutch Americans (lots of them in Pennsylvania) established many orchards in the early years of the country.
Arkansas is actually a transliteration of an american indian name. It was spelled by some in a more english like way by some americans, but earliest people making contact with them were French, and the french spelling won out. So you can thank them. As for how the name got spread around to other places in other forms such as Kansas, there is some indelicate history involving smallpox and forced relocation of those indigenous peoples to less desired land, which more the more correct if rudely sounding term "genocide" could fairly be applied. But that sort of vocabulary naturally does not appear in textbooks in the states were the few survivors now live.
I didn't know that - so we can blame the French for something else. Good.
As to the fate of the First Nations of north America, I never ceased to be shocked by what happened and continues to happen, to them
Leaving aside the democratic genocides for a moment - as I lack the wit to deal with the subject in any meaningful way - I was told years ago by an English guy born in the 40s that a 'pit' was the soft-ish bit inside the stone of soft fruit like plums and apricots.
Another brilliant treatment.
This work inspires me to get a job. Looking forward to you 10Xing your subscribers.
Grand Slam and Big Boy were designed to create minor earthquakes near the target and shake the foundations to destruction, hence it's effectiveness on viaducts which are extremely difficult to hit with conventional bombs.
Tallboy?
As insane as the Davy Crockett was, it's important to remember that's just the most insane thing to make it out of the planning stage. We had *MUCH* worse ideas that didn't survive that long (thank god). Project Pluto's a personal favorite, because if it had ever been completed it would have been the perfect manifestation of the American approach to weapons design.
Specifically, that there's no kill like overkill, and any good weapon ought to be destructive enough and ridiculous enough that the enemy may actually shit themselves to death at the mere thought of Americans being allowed to handle them.
What's not to love about a robot flying mach 3 at tree-top height powered by atomic ram jet? On the British side, I'm a fan of Blue Peacock, the nuclear landmine powered by chickens.
I’m still amazed having started the 60’s with my birth, that I, or in fact anyone is still here to discuss this….
How ?
Thanks for your excellent content.
I think i am the only German who enjoys this British humor. Keep it up good Sir.
Never did I ever think anyone would calculate the Tzar Bombas yield in Maltesers 😃👍
Brilliant Sir simply brilliant
It's mental how much energy is contained in a packet of maltesers! Which is why places like custard powder factories and grain silos are such dangerous places! (seriously!, they are very prone to suddenly blowing up in a big way, and they have to be operated and maintained rigorously to avoid danger)
I worked on Vulcan QRA'a at Coningsby and Cottesmore where we would load and off-load Nucs regularly. I was only 18 then so I had no complete comprehension of what would happen if something had gone wrong. I had seen the movies in training and being that close to IT didn't really bother me. Although I was never happy about the thin cables that were used to winch IT up into the bomb bay, thought they could have been thicker but what did I know.
Your videos are incredible. Thank you.
My kids think it's strange that to this day I get tense when the civil defense sirens test each month. Wondering if they'll stop, or one day keep going. Long live generation x. Wolverines!!!
Another great post, just the right balance of technical info and potty mouth.
I survived both the 1960s and 1970s and suddenly feel much better about doing so.
Sometimes, the CZcams algorithm does work unexpectedly well... You also did and therefore gained a new subscription, sir! 😅
And then there's this delightful little occurrance from the "other side":
Where one guy in a Soviet defence centre thinks his shiny new system is telling him lies, so disobeys standing orders and refuses to fire weapons in retaliation for something that didn't actually happen.
Because his system was indeed giving false positives as it had failed.
Stanislav Petrov: Hero of the -Soviet Union- World
There's probably dozens of other instances of nuclear disaster being averted by one person being halfway sensible in a sea of paranoid insanity.
We truly are a frightening people.
Stanislav Petrov unquestionably saved all our arses and got court martialled as a result
yeah this channel is gonna grow
The 'distributor in a petrol engine' metaphor for the detonator timing is an excellent one, one which I'm not sure I've heard before...
Since stealing another's work is the supreme compliment, I'll be appropriating that metaphor for the next time I have to explain how and implosion-type capital-B Bomb worked... Which is surprisingly often, lately (see: Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy, et al.)
Cheers!
Steal away!
Planning to use this video to show my undergrad students when we start the lectures on radioactivity...
Thanks for this - no-one under, say 45, can comprehend how fckd up growing up in this was. Worse by far for some too. By 10yo I was mapping the blast radii of 1mt airbursts over Sydney. Airliners scared me most days, yeah, I was at the upper end of the PTSD spectrum. I knew my different MIRVs & differing payloads, our library had a great nuclear war section.
Any day the end could, as you say, randomly happen. Probably wouldn't, but it could. Australia seemed half-safe outside major cities & ports.
My Cold War life: after a strict boys' school til '84, with Reagan & Thatcher actively destroying my hopes for our biggest allies, it was a great but very crap time. Looking at the world, it looked safer long-term to be in the RAN if sh*t went down, so I'd taken a navy scholarship. Not kidding, that was the big factor over doing mining engineering, which seemed dangerous in a lot of ways, including being a target. I figured that if the missiles started flying, no-one would be much interested in a random frigate or mwv in the Pacific or on an obscure, distributed shore establishment.
MAD is not a common deciding factor in 2023 Australian career choices afaik.
_Tbh, I'm old enough that I originally trained as an NBCD officer. CBRN is a post Cold-War term. 'R' was assumed to be 'N'._
As a child of the '60s, you grew up in the '70s, I approve this message
Excellent video. I am also a child of the Nuclear Anhelation Era. I had a recurring nightmare of the Mushroom cloud on my way home from primary school. I can still see it now. I remember my Dad borrowing one of these trolleys with a TV and Video on it that companies and schools used before we had a vcr ourselves and watching Threads. For some reason he let me watch it with him.
To this day it's the scariest film I've ever seen. The kids watching Words and Pictures on the totally fucked farm is still nightmare fuel to me.
I don't know how we got out the 80s semi intact. Maybe we didn't? Maybe we are all badly traumatised and we just don't realise it. It might explain everything going to shit after the 80s though I do do still blame that on Reagan and Thatcher.
What a world?
Luv and Peace.
appreciate your dedication to accuracy.
I was just thinking, "I haven't even heard of a B46..."
There was a B-46. Two prototypes were built but, as the B-47 was better, it didn't go into production and service.
Ah yes, as a Canadian may I thank you for ruining my childhood with Threads and When The Wind Blows. A friend from Sheffield asked if I wanted to rewatch Threads and I physically shuddered.
Genuinely terrifying- Threads was the moment I realised the world could bite
Another banger of a video. Brilliantly informative and entertaining as always 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
I found your video informative, entertaining & terrifying- thank you, great job! But enough dissing the B36. It was high performance, high maintenance, high cost and ... well, high everything. And barely worked. It was the first bomber specifically designed to carry nukes, it never fired a shot in anger & they called it the peacemaker. It's the Cold War personified.
Dear diary,
Today I was acknowledged by a CZcams creator! Finally my pointless, dull & inconsequential existence has meaning!
Also, I forgot to mention that when the US experimented with nuclear powered aircraft & discovered the truth of "just because you can doesn't mean you should", the aeroplane they used was the B36.
Point of clarification the Tzar Bombay was no designed as a 50 megaton it was a 100 Megaton bomb. They ran it at 50% because and I am not joking the fireball at 50 was the diameter of the ATMOSPHERE. In other words at full power most of the explosion would have been in space. As it was the shockwave was so powerful it blew out windows over 600 MILES away.
Also an atom bomb (fission) splits atoms but what that really means is that Matter gets converted into pure energy. This is important, because while everyone knows how atom bombs are big what people don't understand is how much matter gets converted. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was roughly 1.6grams that's all it took to wipe out entire cities
Your Lordship, that was very interesting. Thank you.
As an aside, I am just finishing reading "Abyss" by Max Hastings about The Cuban Missile Crisis.
I was a lad at the time and knew something was amiss considering what I gleaned from my dad's paper and what was on BBC television.
Having now read this book, which is Hair-raising, it is a complete miracle as to how we are still here today.
For anyone wanting further information on past nuclear accidents, like the Titan 2 incident in Ar-can-saw, and the potential for future accidents read Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. I wrote this before hearing the recommendation but the book really is great. 2 more I would recommend are On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn (of the infamous RAND Corporation) and Fate Of The Earth by Jonathan Schnell. If you really want to get in depth on the subject, and depression isn’t a problem for you, there are declassified studies by the DOE on the environmental/ecological impacts of both large and small scale nuclear exchanges that are morbidly fascinating.
side tangent to the main thrust of the video - the reason arkansas is pronounced the way it is comes from french explorers learning the Algonkian name for the Quapaws people that lived in modern day arkansas, whom they called the Arkansaw, meaning 'south wind' as they lived south of the Algonkian speaking peoples. the french being french, they transliterated it as Arkansas, that was picked up by later english settlers. then i think in 1881, the state's general assembly settled a dispute on the state's name and pronunciation by declaring it'd use the french spelling but the Algonkian pronunciation.
before that name was formalized, arkansas actually had a couple other known spellings - those being akansea and acansa, so this whole affair could have been so much worse.
Thank you that's fascinating! Never knew that!
As an American, I appreciate that you used malt balls as a unit of measurement!
RAF Leconfield was about 10 miles from where I grew up.
Interestingly I remember that about that time the city council did a test where a vehicle with an air raid siren blasting away had to drive through parts of the city to warn everyone of an imminent nuclear attack. It failed miserably. Especially as they would only have four minutes before the missiles struck. And later I learnt that we were down for four warheads. So with r without a four minute warning that mobile siren was not going to be of help.