The Craziest Things You Can Do With Nuclear Weapons

[Music] hallo its scott manley here now nuclear weapons are arguably one of the most destructive devices ever created by human ingenuity but thankfully they've remained relatively unused as weapons since at least the end of the Second World War there have been many tests and there have been new more powerful more compact warheads developed and there have been a whole lot of crazy things done with the awesome power and when I say awesome I mean this in the literal sense of the word that it fills you with all before it blasts you across the landscape the scientists involved in nuclear weapons development cover a whole range of skills and personalities some worth quiet theoreticians other were very much more hands-on experimentalists some of them have proposed applications for weapons which may seem crazy but have four good fundamental theoretical underpinnings others have done some things in the field which would not look out of place on Mythbusters if they had access to nuclear weapons so I want to talk about ten crazy things you can do with nuclear weapons in no particular order so let's start with a simple one in 1958 a scientist called Ted Taylor used in nuclear explosion to light a cigarette now obviously a nuclear explosion does tend to release a lot of thermal radiation and we'll say it far to everything near the blast but if you want to be able to smoke your cigarette afterwards without everything else being on fire he needed to use a little bit of ingenuity so he found a parabolic mirror built a holder using a piece of wire and set up so that when the bomb went off this cigarette was lit and he could then walk around and you know feel really cool and all that obviously not thinking too much about the dangers and hazards of smoking after all nuclear weapons were involved and it was the 1950s and he wasn't the only one apparently there is film of this particular feat in the 1950s era a testing video related to the operation teapot and we know I know you all think that nuclear bomb powered cigarette light is a pretty neat concept and you wish you had the patent on it but hey you're not a smoker I'm you're wondering is there perhaps anything else that came out of the US nuclear test program that might make a difference in your life today so crazy thing at number two the invented new breeds of plants using nuclear tests legend has it that the modern version of super sweet sweet corn they came into existence essentially as a result of a series of nuclear tests where the exposed seeds and plants and other things to the nuclear radiation to see how they'd react and the radiation of course caused huge numbers of mutations in genetics of these things most of the seeds ended up being non viable or having uninteresting mutant mutations but in the 60s somebody figured out that some of these actually had were able to produce ten times the amount of sugar and therefore created super-sweet corn now there was a whole lot of other breeding that happened after that to produce the modern varieties but you know that's where it comes from of course you know if you just need the radiation you don't actually need an entire nuclear weapon to make it you could just have a radiation source and there are actually facilities called atomic Gardens where they would expose plants and seeds to radiation usually from cobalt-60 sources and then they would try to see if there were mutations were useful and you harness those powers for good number three use a nuclear bomb to launch things into space by accident years before Sputnik there's a story of a nuclear propelled manhole cover so in 1968 the u.s. began experimenting with something doing some of their nuclear tests underground to contain the radiation and there was Pascal a which was a test the first one and it turned into a giant roman candle pascal b would be the second attempt to this now this was a test where they wanted to determine the safety of one point detonation when you're detonating a nuclear weapon you have to create a perfectly spherical implosion and that requires triggering multiple detonations across the surface simultaneously only literally and microseconds of each other so Anna failure you would to test the failure then we detonate just one of these and see if the thing exploded or if it exploded with the lower yield so they put her in a big tunnel they had a block of concrete plug above it and then just in case on top of that they had a four inch thick cover which was essentially a sheet of Matt you know armor plating might as well be a manhole cover just in case anything escaped they also set up a high-speed film camera to record any motion or anything that might escape when they triggered it the one-point detonation that was supposed to be safe generated a blast equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT this instantly vaporized the concrete plug and that concrete vapor essentially exploded up the shaft like the propellant in a gun barrel hit that armor plating and shut it off upwards so fast there was only one frame on the camera showing the manhole cover airborne and doing the math on the pressures involved the shock reflection one of the scientists estimated that the velocity would have been roughly six times the escape velocity of the earth which is kind of crazy to think of at that point given that they haven't even launched the first Sputnik now of course the more boring people and realistic people out there point out the anything moving that fast in the lower atmosphere would probably disintegrate instantly due to atmospheric heating but we can dream maybe there's a few little bits of molten iron that made it to space and could be found one day but of course there are the more exciting people that look to this and said we could actually use this to launch spacecraft and that's where you get the idea for the Thunder well where you have the same shaft be fill it with water that's designed to be vaporized to launch an object to space once you're in space though the thing would need new propulsion and for that you have a crazy idea number four the Orion Drive yes propelling spacecraft using the power of nuclear bombs this was a brainchild of a guy called Freeman Dyson who did a whole bunch of work on it and the spacecraft that they came up with were huge so the way this would work anyway is you would have a pusher plate you have a tiny hole in the middle optionally with a door that could close a blast door and the bomb would explode the plate would get pushed up on Springs and then it would smoothly transfer the momentum to the spacecraft the small spacecraft were measured in hundreds of tons the largest ones they looked at were measured in millions of tons they were literally talking about they talked about one which was ten thousand tons and would put five thousand tons of hardware on the surface of the moon the million ton one would be flying an entire city with a whole population of people that would live there for a century and travel at a few percent of the speed of light to a nearby star that is the power of the Orion drive and that neatly brings us to crazy idea number five generating electrical power using pulsed nuclear bombs right the nuclear fusion is obviously as amazing technology that would solve all our world's energy problems the Sun uses it right but on earth is much harder for us to harness the power of fusion on one hand we have these magnetic containment vessels where we can sustain a plasma we can get fusion happening but they never release more energy than we put in on the other hand we have something called the hydrogen bomb which does release more energy than we pretend but unfortunately destroys itself and anything nearby so there was a project called Project pacer and its idea was you would Jim explored a nuclear weapon inside a large containment vessel something that was maybe a thousand feet to 300 meters across it would have water it would have steam and this would absorb the energy of the blast you would maybe pop one of these in there every few days and then tap off the steam energy and use that as a power system the problem is that when they did the math it turned out to be way too expensive because to build a giant chamber that was obviously unwi the early on and if you wanted to do a smaller version you would have to use a Lord yield weapon but the cost of a nuclear weapon is pretty much you practically independent of his yield these days because most of that high yield power comes from the fusion part which is relatively cheap compared to all that fissile material so when they looked at a small scale project it would cost ten times what a nuclear reactor would do so the project was shut down project pacer incidentally was part of a larger program called operation plowshare and that was an idea to find peaceful uses for nuclear weapons which neatly brings us to crazy idea number six civil engineering so Edward Teller father of the hydrogen bomb he always was looking for peaceful uses for his nuclear weapons sir I don't think it was a problem that I've heard him ready to talk about where he didn't have a solution that involves nuclear weapons he was like one of these guys you know the only tool you have a hammer then every problem looks like a nail the only tool you have is a hydrogen bomb then every problem looks like it needs a giant hole blasted in the ground so there were a few different ideas but yeah they looked at making widening the Panama Canal using these the they looked at making a harbor up in Alaska that nobody would ever use and most interestingly in Southern California they talked about using 20 of these to blow a pass through the Bristol Mountains near a Mojave you know that would allow Interstate 40 and a real way to travel through that space of course the problem with any of these ideas is the locals tend to get a bit antsy when nuclear weapons are involved and they would prefer someone else to actually test it first that being said operation plowshare did have a few interesting successes I mean in particularly scientific data they got allowed them to understand a nuclear synthesis and stars and the sedan test blew the biggest crater in artificial Kreator in the United States and that actually gave geologists like gene shoemaker the evidence they needed to recognize that the Barringer crater was actually an impact crater because they shared many of the same shocked minerals the Soviet Union also had their own version of this near an over like 120 tests the also had the ideas for canals and reservoirs and they did the chi gong test out in kazakhstan the blew a hole in the riverbed and he created a dam with the crater rim and then the now have a reservoir which is only slightly radioactive so cattle get to drink from it rather than people and this program brings us to crazy idea number seven use a nuclear weapon to put out a fire now obviously nuclear weapons are really good at starting fires but in the Soviet Union there were several cases for the used bombs to put out fires in gas wells like if the gas well was you know spraying out gas flowing in the air and they couldn't cap it or extinguish it by any other means they would drill a hole down tangential to it put a nuclear weapon in there and then detonate and the shockwave from that would obviously disrupt all the layers and it would collapse the borehole that was leaking upwards and therefore extinguish it when they fired these things the fires would go out when within about a minute or so also they would invent they investigated using nuclear weapons as a for fracking to basically free up gas deposits that also happened in the US but this never really was scaled up because you know it turns out there are better ways to end up to you know release materials to release their reserves these days crazy idea number eight is to generate an artificial radiation belt in space using a nuclear weapon and you might ask why the heck would you want to do that because we kinda like satellites in space and we'd prefer that they not get ruined well the theory was that if you went to war and you were facing an enemy using ballistic missiles those missiles that the enemy was firing would have to travel through space so if you could make an intense enough belt it would interfere with the missiles and reduce their effectiveness possibly rendering the entire Soviet missile fleet useless so they went head and tested this with something called Project Argos they were launching nukes into space detonating them and collecting data using the Explorer for satellite so yes they did found an artificial radiation belt was created but they also found that they would need an awful lot of weapons to really make it worthwhile and the other negative effects would probably render this whole approach useless and if you think humans have stopped at nuking low-earth orbit then you haven't heard of crazy plan number nine which is to nuke the moon so this was an idea to you it was a number of ideas they thought it could raise morale with the US the idea was they would fly a nuke to the moon and basically hit the dark side and create a giant an explosion which be visible to the naked eye from Earth they would actually try to launch a dust cloud into space so that would also be visible over the terminator and this idea is pretty crazy to be honest but one of the names involved you might know it was a guy called Carl Sagan who obviously had billions and billions of problems with this idea but yet definitely worked on and then accidentally revealed it to the public in a research application for a new position but yes crazy idea number 10 goes even further still Elon Musk says nuke Mars and yeah his whole idea comes from if you could melt the ice caps on Mars those contain lots of carbon dioxide do them apps fear on Mars is really really thin you could add all that carbon dioxide it would help cover the planet it would envelop the planet in a warming you're warming embrace they would melt the water and then you would have a livable world fantastic idea I love where you're going with this unfortunately current research probably shows there's maybe three to four trillion tons of carbon dioxide locked up in the polls and if you did manage to melt at all it would raise the atmospheric pressure by about one percent of one atmosphere obviously these numbers there's a lot of room for your wiggle room in this the data is by no means complete but even then to melt that amount of carbon dioxide just sublimated actually technically you would DEET the M nuclear energy equivalent to 500 Giga tons of nuclear warheads if they put all their energy perfectly into this which isn't gonna happen I'm to be its producing perspective at the height of Cold War when they're the were the most nuclear weapons deployed and ready to fire I think the global nuclear arsenal was still less than 20 Giga tons so we're talking a factor of 25 over that I on the other hand say if you really want to do something crazy like melt the solar ice caps on Mars why not find some near Mars asteroids and you know adjust their orbit just enough so that they crash into the poles you know if you take you know three kilometer asteroids that actually contains the energy required to mail all the stuff but you'd probably need more so yes ten crazy ideas to do with a nuclear weapons if you have nuclear weapons please don't try to do any of these but just please don't use them at all to be honest I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 152,933

Rating: 4.9654202 out of 5

Keywords: nuclear weapons, project plowshare, elon musk, nuke mars, sweetcorn, starfish, sedan, nevada, manhattan project

Id: pk_ymR0XFDg

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 23 2019