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An unearthly spectacle – The untold story of the biggest nuclear bomb (2021)
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- rightbyte 2y agoYe thanks for the reminder arethuza. Better not forget I might get glass schrapnel in the left side of the face without notice. WFH would have its advantages.
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- gambiting 2y agoThe documentary mentioned in the article is definitely worth watching. Some parts of it are undoubtedly propaganda, but it still offers an incredible view on what detonating a nuclear bomb actually looked like.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoMaybe this? https://youtu.be/Swmcldi_jc4 https://youtu.be/Swmcldi_jc4
- gambiting 2y agoYep that's the one
- achairapart 2y agoFor reference, there is declassified footage (very clear images, even with some original voice over) of the RDS-4 bomb[0] ("only" 1.5 Megatons) detonating at the infamous Semipalatinsk Test Site[1] (now Kazakhstan). [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHRLEMTsLyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHRLEMTsLyA [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipalatinsk_Test_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipalatinsk_Test_Site
- gambiting 2y agoWow, and that's "only" 1.5 megaton, not even that large by the standards of modern arsenals. Absolutely terrifying.
- delichon 2y agoI wish I could believe the argument that Russian corruption has reached the point at which their nukes are no longer a threat and the alternative view amounts to fear mongering. But it seems unlikely that they have regressed so far in the means of power in the last sixty years. As the Doomsday Clock moves ever closer to midnight it concerns me that its political salience has only diminished.
- aa-jv 2y agoIt is never a good idea to believe ones own propaganda. The 'weakness' of Russia is a fallacy that need not be tested, ever, with aggression. A far better use of ones time is to wonder where all the diplomacy has gone.
- Etheryte 2y agoStrong disagree. There is no diplomacy to be had when one side insists of war, because that's what they want. See Ukraine, everyone who is anyone tried to prevent the war, but Putin still went ahead with it. The leaked call with Macron is a good example, it's circling on Youtube and a variety of news outlets.
- aa-jv 2y agoWar is the end of diplomacy. Name a single effective Western diplomat capable of preventing wars?
- rcxdude 2y agoDo you think that diplomacy is just some magical spell that automatically makes everyone agree? It's not actually possible to just diplomacy harder in all situations and make things OK.
- The_Colonel 2y agoDiplomacy is able to prevent wars stemming from miscommunication / misunderstandings. There's not much you can do if both sides understand the other side's strategic aims correctly and still want to go to war.
- throwaway0394 2y agoI like the little bombs on the left of the page showing the difference. Nice touch.
- beAbU 2y agoWanted to say something similar. It's really effective to bring home how stupidly massive this thing really was. You just keep on scrolling and scrolling and the little bombs don't end!
- ignoramous 2y ago> Tsar Bomba is a potent example of how nationalism, fear, and high-technology can combine in a fashion that is ultimately dangerous, wasteful, and pointless. Yep. Some similar grandstanding by the Chinese Army in 1960s accelerated the Indian nuclear weapons programme (overriding the utter lack of political will of its then primary leaders). After, buoyed by newly acquired capabilities, in 1980s, the Indian Army conducted largest ever military exercise (Operation Brasstacks) providing much needed impetus & driving consensus in Pakistan to push forward no matter the cost, embodied in this notorious quip by their ex Prime Minister, "[Pakistan] will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own [atomic weapon]." The untold stories of these godly bombs are the devastation they wreak without needing to be ever "used". Devil's greatest trick...
- radicaldreamer 2y agoMuch more recently, you saw North Korea go through famine and economic development to build the bomb
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- waldothedog 2y ago“New” would be relative. I don’t think anyone but you can know the answer without giving the article a read.
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- Caroline1994 2y agoInteresting point of view.
- mikewarot 2y ago>At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons. Project Sundial was the ultimate expression of power, a bomb so big it would detonated here in the US, to kill everyone on the planet. I think that the "dead hand" system[1] built by the Soviets, and still operational today, might have incorporated a copy of this idea. This would nicely explain the hesitancy/restraint of the US in the Ukrainian conflict. Nobody wants a 10+ Gigaton bomb going off.
- simne 2y ago[flagged]
- russdill 2y agoA real life swordholder.
- jjk166 2y agoIt's worth noting that the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 was about 30 Gigatons TNT equivalent. Certainly a catastrophic event that affected climate around the globe, but a far cry from "killing everyone on the planet."
- mikewarot 2y agoOf course it didn't blanket the world in fallout, which matters.
- jjk166 2y agoNot substantially. The fallout produced would obviously be substantially larger than any one nuclear explosion, but it's still a small amount on a planetary scale. If you naively scaled up the contamination area of the castle bravo test from 15 Mt to 15 Gt, it would be 3% of earth's surface area. Further, the range that fallout can travel is limited by the half lives of the particles, not the size of the explosions, so it does not scale like this. We also have experience with large amounts of fallout released into the atmosphere. For comparison, in a 12 month period from 1961 to 1962 there were 340 Megatons worth of nukes detonated in atmosphere. While I would recommend against detonating a few times that much all at once, it's a few percent increase in global cancer rates scenario, not a nuclear hellscape scenario.
- sedan_baklazhan 2y ago> Tsar Bomba is a potent example of how nationalism, fear, and high-technology can combine in a fashion that is ultimately dangerous, wasteful, and pointless. Not to be confused with the way democracy, love, and science produce beautiful, useful and eco-friendly nuclear weapons.
- troyvit 2y agoSo true! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb 'The concept was originally developed by the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was seen as a "cleaner" bomb for use against massed Soviet armored divisions.'
- hydrolox 2y agoDemocracy in the US isn't mutually exclusive with any of those?
- samatman 2y agoIt seems you have no understanding at all of the goals of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It's worth reading up on.
- jjk166 2y agoI don't think anyone is claiming that nationalism, fear, and high-technology were a problem unique to the Soviet Union.
- nuancebydefault 2y agoLet's view earth as if we are aliens (or even normal people) visiting our moon, watching the blue planet and the behavior of its inhabitants. So these conscious people were building several 100 Mton weapons AND detonated one of them on the surface of the planet! Knowing that it would kill and destroy life and atmosphere around it and contaminate earth. AND they were starting a program for building a Gigaton weapon?? It is just surreal that anyone would even think of doing such, let alone doing so.
- arethuza 2y agoActually, it's better (worse) than that - the gigaton bomb was really being developed to be a primary for a 10 gigaton bomb! "When you merely wish to bury bombs, there is no limit to the size."
- pfdietz 2y agoI've been told that for a sufficiently large thermonuclear bomb, it isn't even necessary to compress the secondary -- just heating it is enough. Teller's original "Super" idea would work at scale. So once you've made a big enough bomb, attach it to a big tank of deuterium with thick walls and you're good. The problem of making such a bomb comes down to the problem of economically producing deuterium.
- Vrondi 2y agoA la Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, https://youtu.be/bPBzj90Su8A?feature=shared https://youtu.be/bPBzj90Su8A?feature=shared
- bdamm 2y agoWe don't really know what aliens would think, so you're anthropomorphizing. If the aliens were Klingons they might find it endearing. There's zero evidence that peace without weapons is possible.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago> There's zero evidence that peace without weapons is possible. I think a world without defenses would not exist. To me it is just a law of nature that defenses need to exist for life to be present. Attacks are part of nature. However in that comparison I would call the gigaton bomb a self destroying auto immune disease.
- beAbU 2y agoAppropriately timed video about the American version of this, that (presumably) got stopped at the planning phase. A bomb so big, you did not even need to deploy it to enemy territory. You just set it off in your own back yard. It was going to destroy the entire planet anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55uSCO5D2w&t=642s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55uSCO5D2w&t=642s
- arethuza 2y agoSundial was the 10Gt bomb - which is 2 orders of magnitude more powerful than the Tsar Bomba (as designed, not as tested). Edit: Good video!!
- smusamashah 2y agoKurzgesagt recently made a video about Final Bomb which would have destroyed a big part of planet earth, some 400km would have immediately burned https://youtu.be/E55uSCO5D2w https://youtu.be/E55uSCO5D2w
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- kundi 2y agoPerplexing is the nature of human - to create and destroy, compete, and fear itself.