Ever since the first
nuclear weapons test in the deserts of New Mexico
and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons
have become significantly more powerful. Since the first test in
New Mexico by the United States in 1945,
2,475 nuclear weapons have been detonated
across the globe. Over 85% of those
detonations have come from only two
countries, however-- the United States and
the former Soviet Union. Only two of those
thousands of detonations were ever used in a
war-- the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during
World War II by the United States. But those bombs were very small
compared to modern weaponry. The Hiroshima bomb produced
an explosion of 15 kilotons, or 15,000 tons worth of TNT. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki
had an explosion of 21 kilotons. But how much bigger can
nuclear weapons possibly get? The answer is, terrifyingly,
much, much bigger. The largest nuclear weapon
currently in the United States arsenal is the B38,
which can produce a blast of 1.2 megatons. To understand the
scale from here out, one megaton is equal to
1 million tons of TNT, and that is equal
to a 1,000 kilotons. Remember that the Hiroshima
blast was just 15 kilotons. So that means that the B83
produces a blast 80 times more powerful than that. What I've been
showing on this scale is only the size of the mushroom
cloud that the bombs produced. So to further add
to the scale, we're going to place the size of Mt. Everest, here, and the average
altitude of a commercial airliner that you would
normally fly on, here. So the Castle Bravo bomb is
the largest nuclear weapon ever tested by the United States. It produced a blast
of 15 megatons, or about 1,000 times
the scale of Hiroshima. But even that
pales in comparison to the largest nuclear
weapon ever detonated. In October 1961,
the Soviet Union created the largest man-made
explosion ever in human history when they detonated this
device-- known as the Tsar Bomba-- here, over
this territory known as Novaya Zemlya. The bomb detonated
with an astounding force of 50 megatons, or
about 3,333 Hiroshima blasts. It was so powerful
that it almost destroyed the plane that dropped
it-- shattered windows as far away as Norway and Finland. And the shock waves
created by the bomb circled around the
entire earth three times. But this test was
actually just a scaled down version of what
was theoretically possible. Although never
tested, the Soviets did have plans to
create a bomb that would be twice as powerful as
even the Tsar Bomba-- a bomb so powerful that it
would have produced a mindboggling 100 megaton
blast, or about 6,666 Hiroshima blasts all together. To get another sense
of scale, let's imagine that Times Square
in New York City would be the epicenter
of these blasts. You can test this stuff out
yourself on the website Nukemap after watching this video. I'll provide a link
for it after the end, but let's see the results first. First off, we're going to show
the size of this detonation, which was caused by the recent
North Korean test in 2013. Following this, here is the size
of the Hiroshima detonation, which isn't really
that much bigger. But let's move on
to the B83 bomb that we were talking about. As you can see, it would
affect a much larger area than the Hiroshima bomb. But moving on past that
to the Castle Bravo test, we can see how it truly
dwarfs everything before it. But even that blast
is incredibly tiny when we move on towards the
Tsar Bomba, as seen here. And then finally,
for our scale, we move on to how large the
blast from the theoretical 100 megaton version of the
Tsar Bomba would be. The blast would be
so powerful-- this is what the blast
radius would look like if you were observing it
from the International Space Station. So the question then
becomes, should any of this really worry you? How many nuclear weapons
exist today anyway? Well, in total,
there are estimated to be around 15,600 nuclear
weapons in the world currently-- enough to
destroy the entire planet dozens of times over. But only nine countries
control that stockpile, and 92% of those weapons are
controlled by only the United States and Russia. The other 8% of the
global nuclear arsenal is controlled in
descending order of numbers by France, China,
the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. Israel is, however,
highly secretive about its nuclear
program and has never publicly confirmed nor denied
the existence of their nukes. It's just one of those
things where everybody knows that they have
them, but nobody really comes out and says so--
unless your name happens to be Mordechai
Vanunu-- a man who did reveal details about
Israel's nuclear program and spent 18 years in
prison, including over 11 years in solitary confinement. Also interesting to
note, South Africa used to be in possession
of six nuclear weapons, because the past
apartheid regime was afraid of the 79% of the
population that couldn't vote and communists trying to
overthrow their government. But they eventually agreed to
dismantle all of them, which makes South Africa
the only country to ever acquire nuclear weapons
and then voluntarily get rid of them. Well, unless you don't
count Ukraine, Belarus, or Kazakhstan, which
all had nuclear weapons for a brief amount
of time after they declared their independence
from the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukraine is particularly
awkward, because after their independence,
they found themselves in possession of over
5,000 nuclear weapons, which would make Ukraine-- for
a brief period-- the world's third largest nuclear
power, and probably one of the most powerful
countries on earth as a result. They agreed to hand them all
over to Russia in exchange for a super serious
promise that nobody would violate their territory
or borders in the future. And we all know how
that turned out. As a result of that
happening, it's doubtful that other
countries would be thrilled to ever give
up their nuclear weapons in the future. But leave your
thoughts and comments below about how you feel
one way or the other. I'd also like if you posted
any questions that you have to ask about me, personally. My channel recently surpassed
100,000 subscribers, and I'll be doing a short
Q&A video about myself very shortly. I'll try my best to answer
every question in that video. So if you're interested
in that and more content, just like this
video, in the future, I hope that you'll
subscribe to my channel by clicking the link here. And you can check out
some of my other videos that I've posted over
here on the left. As always, everybody,
thank you all for watching, and we'll see you all next time.
Modern nuclear weapons aren't scary because of megaton yield. They're scary because of delivery method.
A US nuclear sub carries 24 Trident missiles. Each missile has 8 x 100kt warheads (possibly less depending on configuration). So that's one single sub carrying enough firepower to obliterate 192 cities.
Oh and by the way the sub will park itself off your coast before launch, giving you barely any time at all to react - certainly not enough time for any kind of evacuation.
Nuclear war is scary shit.
Edit: Whoops, it's worse than that. See comment below - Trident II is now in service and carries 12 warheads up to 475kt. Perfect for when you really need to vaporize 288 targets with little to no warning.
"Modern" nuclear weapons? Can't this video give any dates at all? The Tsar bomb was detonated in 1961, more than half a century ago. It's closer to WWI than it is to today.
Fun fact: one of the designers of the bomb, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, fought heavily for non proliferation of the technology and was awarded the Nobel Peace prize 1975.
This would have been a very interesting and modern video if I watched it circa 1961.
He says "detonation" weirdly.
Good comment from u/Duck_president when this video was posted in r/mealtimevideos.
Really shitty video.
The premise of the video is about revealing the "true" nature or the realities of the "scale of nuclear weapons". But then the video arbitrarily mentions a bunch of bombs that seem significant not because they are the standard or the most common in quantity but because they set the record for biggest yield. So these record setting bombs really have no relevance when it comes to the "true scale of nuclear weapons" does it? Do people still think the only delivery for a nuclear weapon is via a bomber in the 21st century? Why is there nothing about nuclear missiles? You know how whenever North Korea tests their missile capabilities, people lose their shit? Yeah, you know those B83 BOMBS and those Tsar BOMBS? You can't attach them to ICBMs. The M standing for MISSILE. You know, the shit everyone loses their mind over because this is the shit that really scares us. Not a bomber slowly getting ready, fueled, armaments loaded, crew checking everything, then flying slowly to its destination. No what scares people is that there can be a hundred nuclear missiles heading towards them from over 5000km at the push of a button (not really).
And by the way, none of this is new information, new perspective or new anything. Who hasn't seen or heard of the Tsar Bomb before this?
The video then shows the scale of the explosion by enlarging the same detonation image with shitty microsoft paint. You know what this horribly lazy video creator could've done? Gotten images of detonations that correspond with the actual bomb it is representing.
Then the video lazily overlays the google map from Nukemap (which they didn't even link in the description) over google satellite images which is mildly jarring to look at. Then the video doesn't explain at all what the different colors of the explosive radius indicate. And by the way, like a dozen channels have already used Nukemap in their videos, so my question is; what is the damned point of this video? Why does this video even exist other than to make money.
You know it took me like 2 minutes to find out that all these bombs he is fear mongering with by showing how big their detonations are, aren't what you should really expect or what you should be terrified of.
As with all "COOL FACT" youtube channels, Research is minimal. Production is minimal. Effort is minimal. What an absolute trash video.
Imagine if humans took all the determination and science invested in military and decided to put it in something that is actually useful.
TL;DR You're going to be dead before you can even do anything about it, so don't worry about it.
If anyone is interested, Bombs Away is a great alternate history fiction book about what could have happened if the United States had used nukes in the Korean War.
It's an interesting video, but the thing to remember is that after a certain point bigger bombs don't mean better weapons. They become harder to transport, more difficult to detonate and have higher risk of unintended consequences.
A war state will much prefer to pepper a target with multiple smaller nukes - they haven't gotten bigger in decades, but they sure as hell know how to deliver them faster and in far greater numbers.