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the link, choose a country, and start fighting your way to victory right now! On August 6th, 1945, an American B-29 bomber
flying low over the Japanese city of Hiroshima dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on
the city’s unsuspecting inhabitants, immediately killing 80,000 innocent civilians. 3 days later, a second bomb was dropped on
the city of Nagasaki, killing a further 40,000 men, women and children. In the aftermath of the bombs’ initial explosions,
tens of thousands more people would die excruciatingly painful deaths due to radiation exposure. While the world may be familiar with the tragic
story of the first use of the atomic bomb, we are less familiar with exactly how it works
- the atomic bomb was a devastating act of cruelty, but also a technological marvel that
would forever alter the face of war. The devastating bombing of Japan was enough
to deter the use of nuclear weapons for at least a few decades, but after World War 2,
increasing tension between the U.S. and Russia led to the Cold War, a nuclear arms race between
the two world powers that saw both sides rushing to increase their stockpile of nuclear weapons,
ostensibly as a means to deter war. People built bunkers in their backyards and
stocked up on canned foods, schools ran nuclear war drills, and the world waited with bated
breath for the outbreak of nuclear war and what felt like the imminent end of the world. But although the existence of nuclear weapons
was common knowledge, and despite the widespread panic about nuclear war, few people truly
understood just how an atomic bomb works. To understand how the atomic bomb works, we
have to take a trip back to high school physics class to revisit the concepts of atomic structure
and radioactivity. An atom is one of the smallest units of matter,
and it is made up of 3 subatomic particles. The nucleus at the center of an atom is made
up of protons, which are positively charged, and neutrons, which have a neutral charge. Negatively-charged electrons orbit the nucleus
of an atom. When the ratio of protons to neutrons is 1-to-1,
the atom as a whole will have a neutral charge. But, if the number of protons in an atom is
changed, an entirely different element will be created. If the number of neutrons changes, you end
up with an isotope. For example, the Carbon atom has 3 naturally
occurring isotopes - in its common, stable form, Carbon-12 has 6 protons and 6 neutrons;
Carbon-13 has 6 protons but 7 neutrons, and while rare, is still a stable element. Carbon-14, with its 6 protons and 8 neutrons,
is both rare and unstable - or, radioactive. Radioactive nuclei emit particles called radiation
through a process called radioactive decay, and it’s this process that scientists harnessed
to create the powerful atomic bomb. There are a few different ways to destabilize
a particle, but for understanding how nuclear bombs work, the most important processes to
grasp are fission and fusion. Fission involves splitting the nucleus of
an atom in 2, which scientists can do by bombarding it with free neutrons. As the nucleus splits, it ejects neutrons
along with bursts of electromagnetic energy called gamma rays. Fusion, in contrast, involves bringing together
the nucleus of two atoms to form a single larger one. This is actually the process by which our
Sun produces energy. Through endless experimentation and a process
of trial and error, scientists eventually discovered that uranium was the element that
was most cooperative in inducing a fission reaction. The isotope Uranium-235 is one of the few
materials that can be forced to undergo fission by bombarding its nucleus with neutrons, rather
than waiting 700 million years for it to decay naturally. U-235’s nucleus will readily absorb the
neutrons, become unstable and split, throwing off 2 or 3 new neutrons in the process. These new neutrons can then go on to collide
with the nucleus of other U-235 atoms, starting a fission chain reaction. The splitting of the nucleus happens incredibly
quickly - in the order of picoseconds, or 0.000000000001 seconds - yepp, that’s 11
zeros! The scientific principles underlying the atomic
bomb had been well known since Einstein’s days, but they wouldn’t be successfully
applied and weaponized until the Second World War. In the 1930s Italian scientist Enrico Fermi
successfully bombarded elements with neutrons, transforming them into new elements, and shortly
thereafter German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman were the first to fission
uranium by bombarding it with neutrons, producing the radioactive barium isotope. These breakthroughs led the scientific community
to wonder if it was possible to create a fission chain reaction that could release enormous
amounts of energy that could be harnessed and weaponized - an idea that greatly intrigued
the world’s governments, who were in the midst of fighting World War 2 at the time. In an effort to be the first to weaponize
fission - and beat the Nazis to the punch - the U.S. government recruited the brightest
minds in physics from all over the world and launched the secretive Manhattan Project with
the goal of creating the world’s first functional atomic bomb. In 1941, scientists at Columbia University
tried to initiate a chain reaction using uranium-235, but failed. Shortly thereafter, Fermi, now working for
the U.S. at the University of Chicago, successfully achieved the world’s first controlled nuclear
chain reaction in his lab underneath the school’s squash courts. Also in 1941, Berkley scientists discovered
a new element - element 94 - with nuclear fuel potential, which they named plutonium. With these discoveries, the race to develop
a nuclear bomb was on in earnest, and within just a few short years, the world’s first
nuclear bombs would be used in war. Understanding the concept of fission was only
part of the problem - figuring out how to weaponize it and constructing devices to harness
atomic power was a whole other challenge. Critical mass is the minimum amount of material
needed to sustain a chain reaction, so to harness nuclear power, the nuclear fuel has
to be kept in separate subcritical masses that won’t support fission. When it’s time to detonate, the subcritical
masses are brought together to form a supercritical mass, and free neutrons are introduced to
jumpstart the fission process. A small pellet made of the elements polonium
and beryllium serves as the neutron generator, and the entire reaction is confined within
a dense material called a tamper, usually made of another uranium isotope, U-238, to
reflect the neutrons back into the core and to slow the core’s expansion to ensure that
as much fission as possible happens before the bomb explodes. Scientists developed 2 different trigger systems
for the first atomic bombs. Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
was a gun-triggered bomb with a 14.5 kiloton yield, equal in power to 14,500 tons of TNT. Little Boy was 1.5% efficient, meaning that
1.5% of the material fissioned before the bomb exploded. In a gun-fired nuclear weapon, a bullet of
U-235 is placed in one end of a long tube packed with explosives, which will fire the
bullet down the tube where it collides with the neutron generator, initiating fission
and starting the chain reaction that will lead to the bomb’s explosion. In contrast, Fat Man, the bomb that was dropped
on Nagasaki, was an implosion device with a 23 kiloton yield and 17% efficiency - much
more effective, but also much more complicated to make than Little Boy. Implosion bombs feature a sphere of radioactive
U-235 as the tamper around a plutonium-239 core. The entire sphere is surrounded by high explosives
which, when detonated, create a shockwave that compresses the core and initiates the
fission chain reaction. In the wake of World War 2, scientists recognized
that fission bombs were wildly inefficient, and turned their attention to fusion next. Fusion bombs, also called thermonuclear or
hydrogen bombs, rely on the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium as fuel, and can yield
up to 10,000 kilotons, making them up to 700 times more powerful than the Little Boy fission
bomb. Hydrogen bombs combine fission and fusion
to achieve a more powerful and more efficient explosion. Within the bomb’s casing is a tamper made
of U-238, which is packed with hydrogen isotope fuel, and surrounds a hollow rod of plutonium-239
at the core. An implosion fission device detonates first,
compressing the fuel and causing the plutonium core to fission. The fissioning rod in turn gives off heat
and pressure, which initiates fusion in the hydrogen isotopes and causes the bomb to explode. The entire process takes just 600 billionths
of a second. Not only have the bombs themselves improved
drastically, but the delivery methods have come a long way since World War 2. Philip Morrison, a former member of the Manhattan
project, told Scientific American in 1995 that "All three bombs of 1945 - the [Trinity]
test bomb and the two bombs dropped on Japan - were more nearly improvised pieces of complex
laboratory equipment than they were reliable weaponry." Today, nuclear weapons come in many forms,
from ballistic missiles that can exit the atmosphere and travel thousands of miles before
reentering and detonating; to cruise missiles, shorter range missiles with smaller warheads
that are harder to detect and intercept; to a range of tactical nuclear weapons like artillery
shells and land mines that can target a smaller area. Nuclear weapons are terrifying because of
their immense destructive power relative to their size. The most severe damage happens at the blast’s
hypocenter, or ground zero, where everything is immediately vaporized. Outward from the center, most of the damage
is the result of flying debris, intense heat, a powerful shockwave and acute exposure to
high radiation. Beyond the immediate blast area, death and
injury can result from heat and resulting fires, as well as from radiation. The physical destruction caused by a nuclear
bomb is no doubt catastrophic, but the most dangerous part of a nuclear bomb is the radiation
and radioactive fallout. After the initial explosion, clouds of fine
dust made of radioactive particles are carried away by the wind and fall back to the ground,
poisoning the water supply and getting ingested and inhaled by people even miles away from
the blast. We now know that radiation affects the cells
in our body that readily divide, like hair and gut cells, bone marrow and reproductive
organs, leading to nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, and long-term health consequences like cataracts,
hair loss, loss of blood cells, and an increased risk of leukemia, cancer, infertility and
birth defects. At the height of the cold war in the 1980s,
scientists warned about the danger of a nuclear winter. In a worst case scenario, so many nuclear
bombs could explode that great clouds of radioactive dust could travel high into the atmosphere,
blocking out sunlight and lowering surface temperatures. This could lead to major disruptions in the
food chain and mass extinctions of species - including humans. The Cold War may be over, but the threat of
nuclear war is by no means gone. Countries around the world have signed treaties
agreeing to limit their stockpile of nuclear weapons and prohibiting them from using them
against other countries, but still, the number of nuclear weapons around the world continues
to grow - and not all countries have agreed to use them responsibly. At least 9 countries currently have ballistic
nuclear weapons, and 3 of those countries - the U.S., Russia and China - have weapons
powerful enough to hit any target anywhere in the world. Then there’s North Korea - in 2009, they
tested a nuclear bomb as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the underground
test explosion caused a magnitude 4.5 earthquake. There’s no doubt that nuclear warfare still
presents a huge threat to world peace - not to mention the continuation of our species! If you thought this video was fascinating,
be sure and check out our other videos, like this one called “Scientists Discover 2 Billion
Year Old Nuclear Reactor”, or perhaps you’ll like this other video. Thanks again to our sponsor Conflict of Nations,
the free online pvp strategy game set in a modern global warfare! We’ve set up a custom game for our viewers. Click the link in the description, create
an account, and enter in the game code “infographics” and password “infographics” to join today!
