Hey Thoughty2 here. The atom bomb, hydrogen bomb, nuclear bomb,
whatever you want to call it, is the single most destructive thing humanity has ever created,
one nuclear device could flatten a city the size of London. And the United States of America has lost
eight of them. Permanently misplaced, these estranged nuclear
warheads are called "broken arrows" by the Department of Defense. How does the world's largest superpower lose
over 1,000 kilograms of nuclear explosives, eight times? The first was lost on February 13th, 1950. A B-36 bomber was flying from Alaska to Texas,
it lost power and began to free-fall. To prevent the bomb from detonating when the
plane crashed he dropped the payload, a Fat Man nuclear bomb into the Pacific Ocean. Submarine search teams were dispatched to
find it, but it was never located and to this day, one of the world's most powerful nuclear
bombs remains undetonated, somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific. Another two bombs with a combined yield of
3.4 megatons went missing in 1956, when a B-47 left from Florida. Whilst traveling over the Mediterranean sea,
through thick fog, it went missing, it was never heard from again, the nuclear weapons
were never found. Another went missing in a swamp, another bomb
rolled off a US navy vessel just off the coast of Japan, which Japan weren't too pleased
about, to say the least. And another two were lost at sea when a US
submarine mysteriously sank along with all 99 crewe members. But whilst America has been busy losing nuclear
warheads, Russia were hard at work building them. At the height of the cold war, in 1985, the
Soviet Union had a terrifying 39,197 nuclear weapons, many more than the count of America's
peak stockpile of 31,139. It has often been said that nuclear war is
madness and mad it is. M.A.D. as in Mutually Assured Destruction. The only thing that has so far prevented the
end of the world. A doctrine of war that means if one side uses
their full nuclear arsenal on the other, then the other side will automatically use their
nuclear arsenal upon the attacker in response, therefore wiping out both countries. It is based on the Nash equilibrium, which
dictates that when both opponents possess the same strategy, neither side has anything
to gain by using their strategy and therefore the best course of action is to do nothing. And so the world is frozen in a constant state
of being on the brink of blowing each other up. But how did it come to this? Fleeing persecution from the Nazi regime,
many Jewish scientists fled to the West during the early days of the war, including highly
influential physicists such as Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and John von Neumann. Most of them joined the Manhattan project,
a brand new, top-secret program between United States, United Kingdom and Canada with one
primary goal, to invent the atomic bomb. The enormous project employed 130,000 people
and cost the US the modern-day equivalent of $25 billion dollars. Just three years after the project was established
the US detonated the world's first ever nuclear weapon in the New Mexico dessert. It was codenamed Trinity. They didn't waste any time and just three
weeks later they detonated a Uranium bomb over Hiroshima, killing over 140,000 people. In the bloody aftermath of the war there was
a twilight struggle between the Communist Soviet Union and Capitalist America to gain
control of and shape how the post-world war would look. Russia had also gone nuclear and the arms
race had begun. An arms race that would last 44 years, this
was the Cold War. It was the ultimate contest of might and each
side went to extraordinary lengths just to prove they were the most endowed country. The USA seriously considered a plan to airdrop
enormous condoms labelled "Medium" into the USSR to demoralise the Soviets and give the
impression that Americans had a greater "manhood". The US also developed a top secret plan to
detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon as a display of military prowess but it was a tad too expensive. So when that didn't work out, they created
project Acoustic Kitty. The CIA implanted microphones attached to
a radio transmitter inside cats. The plan was to use cats to spy on the Kremlin,
but during the very first test, the cat was accidentally run over by a car, so that threw
a spanner of doubt into the general reliability of spy cats and the Acoustic Kitty program
was scrapped. The tension grew until it all came to a climax
during the most intense and uncertain 13 days of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis. October 16th 1962, Russia gets a bee in its
bonnet over ballistic missiles that America had deployed in Italy and Turkey, conveniently
in easy reach and pointed right at the USSR. Russia responded by placing a bunch of their
nuclear weapons in Cuba, in frightfully close proximity to the US, giving Russia the opportunity
to destroy any number of American cities with ease. During these nail-biting thirteen days the
world was closer to complete nuclear annihilation that it has ever been. Eventually an agreement was reached between
John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev that both parties would dismantle and remove their respective
weapons from, Italy, Turkey and Cuba. But what few people know is that during the
Cuban Missile Crisis we came just a hairsbreadth from total nuclear annihilation, because of
three men in a submarine. During the crisis Kennedy put a blockade on
all sea traffic to Cuba to prevent Russia from delivering even more nuclear weapons
to the small island nation. But a Soviet submarine is hiding, deep in
the Caribbean sea around Cuba. US navy vessels pick it up on their radars
and start dropping depth charges to the left and right of the submarine, to try and deter
it back to Russia. The sub is violently shaking, the on-board
temperature rapidly rising, a decision has to be made quickly. The sub hadn't made contact with Russia for
several days, they were too deep for their communications to reach the surface, they
had no idea what was going on above the water. Completely in the dark, the three Soviet submarine
commanders on board the vessel came to the conclusion that full-scale nuclear war had
erupted above the surface. They thought World War III was underway, hence
the aggression they were receiving. Little did the Americans know that this submarine
was equipped with an enormous nuclear torpedo, capable of wiping out a nearby fleet of US
destroyers or an entire city. One of the submarine captains proclaimed "We're
gonna blast them now!". They readied the nuclear torpedo and their
hand was hovering over the red button. If they had fired the nuclear weapon, it would
have lead to a chain of events that would have actually caused full-scale nuclear war
and the end of the world. But they didn't fire the nuclear torpedo because
of the calm temperament one man, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. Soviet submarines were only allowed to fire
their nuclear weapons if all three on-board commanders agreed to do so, unanimously. The other two commanders had agreed to fire
and were pushing Vasili to acquiesce, but he would not. He believed this was not an attack but just
a not-so-subtle way of America telling them to get away from Cuba. He remained calm and talked down the other
two commanders, saving the world. These instances aren't as rare as you might
hope, in total, there have been 13 events were nuclear weapons were nearly launched
due to accidents or false alarms. But why is nuclear war MAD? Why does Mutually Assured Destruction have
to be the only way? Is it not possible that America could use
their full nuclear force on Russia's nuclear facilities in a pre-emptive strike, completely
wiping Russia off the map before they even have a chance to retaliate? Or vice-versa? Well, at the height of the cold war Russia
feared this very scenario and America had begun to develop sophisticated anti-ballistic
missile systems that could detonate Russian missiles at altitude, way before they hit
their target. Russia didn't like this, so they developed
the ultimate weapon, a world destroying weapon that would leave no survivors, The Doomsday
Device. The Soviet Union created the largest nuclear
bomb in history. Named Tsar Bomba, the "King of Bombs", it
was tested in 1961 in the wilds of Siberia. It had 1,600 times the combined power of the
bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even the soviets were surprised by how immensely
powerful the blast was, it destroyed an entire nearby village, flattening stone houses. And it shattered windows a thousand miles
away in Finland and Norway. But Nikita Khrushchev wasn't satisfied. It's no use having the world's most powerful
weapon if nobody is left alive to use it. So he came up with a plan, a real life doomsday
device that Dr. Strangelove would be proud of. The plan was to take a large cargo ship and
turn the entire vessel into a nuclear bomb. The entire cargo hold would be filled with
fissionable radioactive material, it would be many times more powerful than the Tsar
Bomba and truly powerful enough to destroy the entire planet, all on its own. It would permanently circle the coastline
of Russia and onboard sensors would detect radiation levels. If at any point extremely high radiation was
detected, indicating Russia had been hit with a nuclear weapon. The ship would automatically, with no human
intervention, detonate itself, destroying the planet. It was completely automated and would ensure
that even if no Russian was left alive that they would still have the last laugh by killing
everything. What a truly terrifying prospect, luckily
Russian scientists managed to persuade Khrushchev to drop the idea. It never went ahead. But another plan did, a real doomsday device
that still exists today. Dr Strangelove may have been fictional, but
the Doomsday Device is very real and it's called "Russia's Dead Hand" because even when
Russia is dead, they can still play their hand. The system was code-named "Perimeter". Thousands of sensors were placed all around
Russia. These sensors measure seismic activity, light
levels, radioactivity, overpressure and sound levels. All this is fed back to underground computers. The data is crunched and if the data suggests
that Russia has been hit by a nuclear blast the system automatically activates itself. Once activated the Dead Hand system sends
a signal to every missile silo in the country and they will automatically and instantaneously
fire at every major city around the world, but mostly America. Absolutely no human interaction is needed
for the system to function. This seems pointless and totally excessive
but it serves a very important function. It is the only real deterrent that can stop
America from launching a pre-emptive strike on Russia's nuclear facilities and heads of
government, disabling their retaliation abilities. So in a twisted way, the world's most chilling
device is actually the only thing saving us all. The scariest part? You would think such a system would have been
turned off at the end of the Cold War, but high-ranking Russian insiders have reported
that the system is still fully functional and remains activated today. But Russia committed the cardinal sin of a
Doomsday system, they forget to tell anyone. Russia kept the existence of their Dead Hand
top secret for years, until a high-ranking official leaked knowledge of it in the 90s. And in the words of Dr. Strangelove "The whole
point of the doomsday machine is lost, if you keep it
a secret!" Thanks for watching.
