Fallout’s Mini Nukes Really Exist

this episode of because science is sponsored by fallout 76 our future begins on November 14 2018 did you know that fallout 2 mini nukes really exist hello that wanderer looking to return post-nuclear America to its former glory when you're headed toward some pretty bad territory pal better take one of these do you know how to use one of these but did you know that fallout style mini nukes actually exist nuclear weapons have always been super critical to the Fallout series but in these games errs perhaps no weapon more famous than the so called mini nuke the size of a football and launched from a shoulder-mounted catapult there are few armaments more devastating it's the perfect weapon for a franchise built by the power of the atom and though it is certainly sci-fi the concept of a miniaturized nuclear bomb is more feasible than you think generally speaking nuclear weapons attempt to aim both nuclear fusion and nuclear fission towards destructive ends in nuclear fusion we force atom so close together that they eventually combine and when that happens they lose some of their mass and that mass is converted directly into energy according to Einstein's e equals mc-squared and a neutron is emitted in nuclear fission we split atoms in half and when that happens energy is also released and neutrons come flying out of that split both nuclear fusion and nuclear fission require relatively extreme conditions to occur like conditions you'd find inside of a star and so nuclear weapons are humanity's best attempt at tricking mother nature into letting us grasp cosmic power what was that what's that like you're Neil deGrasse Tyson impression or something no I mean maybe both nuclear fusion and nuclear fission are different physical processes but in bomb form we initiate those processes in the same way by bringing atoms close enough together until something bad happens in nuclear fission bombs we use high explosives to bring something like uranium-235 so close together that the element goes critical meaning that if one randomly emitted a neutron or underwent nuclear fission which releases on average 2.5 neutrons then one of those neutrons would be close enough to another uranium atom to sustain the reaction as you can see these chain reactions can get out of control very very quickly which is why nuclear physics is kind of dangerous in the first place after just 20 rounds of this process up to 90 million uranium atoms in this example could have undergone fission releasing energy at every single step millions of times more energy per unit mass than coal releases when you burn it and in nuclear fusion bombs we put nuclear fission bombs inside of them to kick-start the fusion reaction which releases even more energy per unit mass than a fission reaction does oh no the first nuclear weapons trying to get all this physics right were enormous the first fusion bomb was the size of a bus literally the weapons did get smaller over the years thanks to improve methods and technology but to get to mini nuke level a different approach is needed one idea that scientists came up with is gas boosting here's a diagram of a gas boosted fission bomb around the outside of it you have high explosive underneath that you have some fission material and at the very core you have some gas that you want to undergo nuclear fusion when the high explosive goes off it compresses both the fission and the fusion material at the very core this fusion reaction at the core releases extra neutrons into the fissionable material which creates an even more vigorous fission reaction then you would have started with which means you do not need as much fissionable material which means you do not need as much high explosive which means the bomb doesn't need to be as big gas boosting allowed nuclear weapons engineers to miniaturize their terrible creations and they came surprisingly close to mini nukes size adds up when you emerge harnessing the power of the atom will be just as important to your survival as it was before the bombs fell do you know where to start I do with the smallest and most convenient nuclear weapon system ever developed you might want to get a haircut though what not I mean it's fine I think oh you sure yeah it's not I mean it's not that bad okay what as nuclear scientists got better and better at miniaturizing the closest thing that they came up with to the mini nuke would have to be the Davy Crockett weapon system this was a nuclear warhead mounted on the top of a recoilless gun that could be fired from a jeep and armored personnel carrier or mounted on to a tripod and fired in the field by a three-person team it was a fission warhead and relatively speaking it was shockingly small literally this big still pretty hefty but the important part is that it can be carried by just one person now let me just Oh 20100 davy crockett nuclear weapons were created and actively deployed in the years between 1961 and 1971 at a cost of half a billion dollars to the taxpayers this was a real mini nuke the Davy Crockett nope the Davy Crockett nuclear device approached the minimum practical size for a fission bomb the bomb was small but it still packed the energy equivalent of 10 to 20,000 pounds of TNT into something small enough that you could pick up and carry this was a relatively speaking tiny yield for a nuclear weapon and reportedly during testing the Davy Crockett only produced minor blast damage what really made this weapon scary was the fallout oh oh all right this should be far enough away it's definitely not far enough okay what made the Davy Crockett's so potentially dangerous with the amount of radiation that a warhead would spew out upon detonation if you are within 500 feet of a Davy Crockett blast you would be doused with enough rats to kill you in a few days if not a few hours if you were a thousand feet away you would initially feel some nausea and some confusion and then you'd feel fine unfortunately they call this the walking ghost condition because you're dead you just don't know it yet your body hasn't caught up to the fact that critical components inside of you like your bone marrow have been fatally damaged if you move back out to a quarter of a mile from a Davy Crockett blast your chances of survival are improving but they're still not great move 1/3 of a mile away or more and you'll probably survive though your lifetime risk of cancer has gone up more than you would want it to the Davy Crocket weapon system has the distinction of being the last open-air nuclear test the United States ever conducted they found them to be wildly inaccurate and though they were actively deployed for over a decade thankfully one was never fired this is all fine and dandy science boy but how does the Davy Crockett really compare to the fat man system it's seriously close and now I'm over encumbered just to see just how close we came to real mini nukes let's compare the real and the fictional directly this is the actual size of both warheads as you can see the Davy Crockett is a lot larger and it's about six times heavier if you weigh the mini nuke based on what it weighs in fallout survival mode though the diameters are pretty similar and like the fat man in the mini nuke the Davy Crockett needed a separate launcher to fire and once it was fired it had no failsafe it just detonated so both of these weapons are similar in that they're more like grenades and they are missiles I'm still over encumbered I dropped like 20 cans already I'm not dropping those papers I might need them unlike the fat man in mini nuke though the Davy Crockett weapons system had decent range up to four kilometers but then again it had to have decent range because it could make a quarter mile of earth uninhabitable for 48 hours this range though means that a target wouldn't even see the warhead coming oh the biggest similarity between the two weapon systems though might be the boom from all the nuclear testing that we've done we've established a relationship between the height of the mushroom cloud and the yield of the weapon looking to recent Fallout games the mushroom cloud of the mini nuke looks to be about three deathclaws tall and if each deathclaw is nine to ten feet tall that means the yield of the mini nuke is sub 1 kiloton exactly the same energy range as the Davy Crockett and thanks to historical footage we don't even have to speculate about whether or not a Davy Crockett warhead and a mini nuke look the same in action put the two weapons side-by-side and it more or less matches someone at Bethesda must have done their homework because video games get better graphics and armies get new weapons but under the same constraints in this universe physics physics never changes so fallouts famous mini nuke and Fatman system were real the Davy Crockett weapons system is as close as you can get to something in the Fallout universe of course the fat man would have to have greatly increased range to not irradiate the user completely but the fact that a real weapon so closely matches a fictional one to me is rad in the Fallout universe a universe centered around advanced nuclear technology it's even plausible that the fat man is just a fictional extension of the Davy Crockett system the Davy Crockett is designated m28 and the fat man is designated in Fallout as M 42 sometimes fiction is just as strange as the truth because science [Music] actually I know that Bethesda did do their homework because I spoke to them about this and though they were definitely aware of the Davy Crockett weapon system they think that they developed The Fatman actually before they even knew about it and going through fallout lore it says that The Fatman testing was initially really bad because it had very decreased range just like just just like the Davy Crockett and you didn't want the range to blow yourself up and radiate you so science pop culture one tumbling wheel thank you again to fallout 76 for sponsoring this episode of because science bethesda game studios the award-winning creators of Skyrim and fallout 4 welcome you to fallout 76 the online prequel where every surviving human is a real person work together or not to survive under the threat of nuclear annihilation you will experience the largest most dynamic world ever created in the legendary Fallout universe fallout 76 will be available worldwide on Wednesday November 14th but you can pre-order the game at participating retailers today plays a beta first on Xbox one thank you so much for watching if you want more of me you can go to alpha at project alpha comm and sign up now for a free trial if you do that you can get this show two days earlier before anyone else if you want to fall because science and give me suggestions for future episodes you can follow me at these handles here [Music]

Channel: Because Science

Views: 627,695

Keywords: Nerdist, Fvid, Because Science, Kyle Hill, fallout 76, mini nukes, ps4, gaming, video games, nuclear, davy crockett, physics, fusion, fission

Id: pBUcPToDFP4

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 01 2018