What makes Nuclear War so scary?

so this is going to be a video about what makes nuclear weapons so scary because I've been doing a bit more research into nuclear weapons recently because obviously go talk a lot about chemical weapons and solve biological weapons on here but not so much about nuclear weapons strange enough even though they're the most famous of all of them so what makes them so scary there's quite a few factors to go into in this video which I will do so let's just start off of the pure size of the bombs or the explosive forth of the bombs if you like because the nuclear weapons themselves don't have to be so big now what we're going to be using is measurements of TNT for this video in the metric system because that's what you know is the easiest way of thinking about least and understanding the sheer scale of the power of a nuclear weapon so you have dynamite or TNT that's just using with TNT that's the proper word which I don't think is pure dynamite there lots of people use it interchangeably so you have TNT and TNT is an explosive is fairly big in itself now a kilogram of TNT and I'm sure you know know what kilogram ways that makes a pretty hefty explosion you can go on YouTube look at videos of a kilo of TNT being detonated and you'd realize if you're pretty close to that you'd be dead you know there's a lot of explosive force in a kilo of TNT now lots of conventional bombs were you know like anywhere between several kilos of TNT to about a metric ton of TNT a metric ton is a thousand kilos so easy to think of you could have you know one kilo ten kilos hundred kilos 200 kilos all the way up to a thousand kilos but to simplify it a thousand kilos is called a tunnel or a metric ton because there's an imperial ton Burson different measurement so the metric tonne is a thousand kilograms of TNT now 1,000 kilos of TNT would be a pretty damn big explosion you know probably kill people pretty close to it you know and further away and it would shatter windows and everything much further away so obviously a ton of TNT the metric ton of TNT would be pretty powerful now what happens when you have a thousand tonnes you get something called Aquila ton so as I said imagine if you're close enough to it a few kilos of T and he would easily to kill you we've now gone to the thousands of you know amounts of kilos of TNT to tonnes and now we're going to kilo tons so once you've got a thousand it's a thousand again so a kilo ton is pretty massive so if we look at the bombs used in world war two little boy that was dropped on Hiroshima and fat man which was dropped on Nagasaki little boy was I think estimated to be around 15 kilo tons and fat man drops on Hiroshima was about 20 kilo tons gouget the test bomb used in the Trinity exercise the first nuclear bomb ever detonated I think was about 20 kilo tons as well but that wasn't a conventional bomb it was like a big kind of sphere wide up wired up you know to a machine to do the test so if you've seen the pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki you will know that obviously if a 15 kilotons bomb airbursts near a city it's going to do an incredibly large amount of damage now if you do look at the pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki what you will see though is that the buildings that are made out of concrete did do a much better job of surviving because lots of buildings would or you know like I guess like bricks they're the ones that take the most damage now the thing was the bombs didn't stay at that size they got bigger and bigger so during the Cold War of the America and the Soviets both developing their own nuclear weapons and later communist China and obviously Great Britain as well and the French you know there was quite a few countries involved in nuclear arms race but mostly it's between the Soviets and the Americans because they obviously were the big world superpowers at the time now what you have to now understand is the way we said 15 or 20 kilotons is enough to kill a hundred to two hundred thousand people in a city of detonate you know air burst and this is ignoring all the radiation we'll get into this later so that's pretty big and scary however during the nuclear weapons tests now I'm going to go into this again I've some interesting videos there's two kinds of nuclear weapons primarily there's what's called a fission device which is an atom bomb basically fishing is where you split the atom and then you a fusion which is also known as Furman you clear all the hydrogen bomb where you essentially combine atoms together to make a much more devastating explosion now hydrogen bombs are the really scary ones we'll get into that in a moment but regardless the nuclear bombs didn't say at 15 and 20 kilotons I think greenhouse Georg which is the biggest of the non hydrogen bombs I think that was about 250 kilotons but basically as you can understand the bombs got bigger and bigger until it got into the hundreds of kilo ton range which you know it's pretty big and the bombs got smaller as well as the point they manage to you know make smaller bombs with a much bigger explosive yield due to I guess better engineering and design of the bombs so the point was the Obama could carry more you know bombs with a higher explosive capacity or with a nuclear missile you could put more on them like a nerve warhead so that was that but then you get to the hydrogen bombs now the hydrogen bombs in themselves are incredibly frightening they're in the Megaton range of explosives so you know how a ton of metric ton of TNT is the fouls and kilos and kiloton is a thousand obviously metric metric tons a Megaton is a thousand kilo tons and they didn't just stop at one Megaton so America tested two bombs which one I don't think proper bombs they were kind of wired up the systems and they were called I'm also testing modernist but the two famous ones was IV Mike the first Megaton bomb you know bomb to exceed over a Megaton first hydrogen bomb and then there was a castle Bravo now if you want to see how scary Castle Bravo was there's a really good film called Trinity and Beyond which is narrated by William Shatner and it's about the development of nuclear weapons and it's all like restored footage some of it was previously classified so yeah it's got a really good soundtrack as well I can't recommend it enough it's a very frightening film but when you get to the Castle Bravo sequence and you realise just how much energy is being released by the nuclear weapon you know the hydrogen bomb Castle Bravo was summated I think to be about six megatons how you know that's what they designed it for however it ended up being about 15 megatons when it was detonated so it actually did kill Anna radiate people that it wasn't designed to outside of the test area because of just the pure size of it but wait it gets better because the Soviets didn't want to be outdone so the Soviets developed a bomb called the Tsar bomb as in the King Bob cell bomber was its name and the Tsar bomb was 50 megatons 50 and apparently the Soviets had the capacity to make it a hundred megatons suppose that he goes 40 miles high the mushroom cloud from Sun when it was detonated and the energy from it was recorded going around the world three times so that gives you some idea of the explosive power of some of these weapons so let's just theoretically say 50 to 100 megatons as drops on a city well that entire city is gone the fireball range of it would get most of the city anything else the shockwaves would you know completely destroy but what you have to understand in a nuclear war is it's not just one bomb dropped it's not like everybody just targets the capital of the other country and that's it no there's hundreds you know thousands and nuclear warheads thrown around now there's some good news if you want to consider this good news is the nuclear warheads are not the size of the Tsar bomb or castle Bravo they tend to be sort of four megatons or less for the most part now if you want the better news it seems because there's not proper nuclear disarmament but there is sort of some agreement you know on disarmament processes it seems both Russia and America at the moment are quite keen on having more lower yield bombs than they are on having lots of kind of monstrous hydrogen bombs so what that means is in the event of a nuclear war it's more likely that if only military targets were targeted less collateral would happen due to you know if a hundred kilo tons has dropped on every airbase that's much better than four or five megatons being drops on every airbase if you're going to understand that it's not good regardless but for civilians that's a good a good thing but you know as we said there's radiation everything else when you clear weapons so the most famous type of radiation from nuclear weapons is called fallout there's not really the only kind so what you have is the bomb is detonated when our nuclear weapon is detonated first you have an amazingly bright flash if you ever watched a test footage you'll see all the people putting on like the goggles which like welding goggles or like covering their eyes or their arms or looking away I think it's about 8 to 10 seconds as that flash lasts if you look into the flash of your bare eyes you can be permanently blinded or you can have you know damaged vision for the rest of your life because of just the pure energy of the light you know it'd be like staring at the Sun if you're much closer to the Sun than we are so that's what initially happens you have the amazingly bright flash then you have several things happen you have all of the gamma radiation everything else come out of the bomb and that basically starts to cook everything you get ultraviolet camera and infrared as far as I'm aware that comes out may be x-rays as well that come out of the bomb so initially you'll see things if you watch some of the footage and Trinity and Beyond you actually see the paint and everything essentially burning off of the things before anything ever hits them which is incredibly frightening I think as one bit from the Castle Bravo segment and Trinity and Beyond where you can see all the pine pine trees so your palm trees alum basically cooking off and and you can see the birds dying and falling out the trees from just being essentially burnt alive by the all the radiation microwaves essentially so that's your initial thing then you have to shockwave hip and if you've ever seen these things you'll see like vehicles crumple in on themselves and get thrown along like they've been hit by a giant with a sledge hammer or a golf club you know golf club just taking a swing at them you'll see you know trees splinter it looks like a massive massive gust of wind hits things basically you see the trees will bend over and break you know that and this is when sort of Helm's this start to collapse then what you get now is the sort of range of the nuclear fireball so this is gonna obviously depend on the bomb with all of these things how far the ranges but a nuclear fire will basically incinerates and evaporates everything in its way but the fireball this is the smallest part from what i've understood from looking at them of most nuclear weapons that's you know pretty much the Ground Zero effect but being irradiated you know and getting horrible burns being you know having a bone smashed or your house crushed by the force of the nuclear weapons that's quite a bit of the longer range there's a very good site called Newcomb up you can use it's quite famous the Newcomb applets you basically pick a place on the map to decide if you want to air burst or ground versus a nuclear weapon pick from a load of presets or type in your own amount of terms or kilotons or megatons whatever and watch what happens and you know you can use that if you knew no where you live and you know where your closest sort of Air Force bases are or military bases and drop some bombs on that and see if you're going to be all right or not probably not gonna be all right as I found though even though I'm not I'm only I'm about 40 miles from the closest RAF base and if that was hit by a Megaton little more I'm toast so it gives you a good idea of you know how scary these nuclear weapons are as I've said not just one being drops if there's a man exchange there's going to be a lot flying about so okay let's talk about the fallout and all the most famous bit fallout is primarily alpha radiation now if you're lucky everything's an airburst airburst maximizes damage but it causes less radioactivity ground versus the really dangerous woman what happens is all the ground burst does less damage the things around it because you know it's got more obstacles blocking the force of the bomb a ground burst is where when the nuclear bomb detonates hitting the ground what ends up happening is the all the dust and dirt and debris is sucked into it and blown up and outwards being becoming irradiated so this is your foil it's basically all the dust and everything from the nuclear weapons that then settles being horribly horribly radar radioactive primarily alpha radiation now what makes this fallout so obviously dangerous is most people don't have the preventative measures to protect themselves from it now there's a good a good news of Fallout and alpha radiation if you've got a gas mask with a working filter on it or even just a particle filter that works you're going to protect yourself from the vast majority of it just through that alone not just through the mask obviously but protecting your respiratory system in your eyes is going to give you much bigger survival chances because alpha radiation primarily gets into the body through inhalation however you know this still have a risks obviously if you're in the blast range and you were partially cooked by the bomb but still alive you'll probably have got you probably a fatal dose of radiation there are some people from Hiroshima the victims that did you know survive and live too quite long ages even with the horrible burns all over their body from basically the gamma radiation whatever I was cooking them but um and the beta burbs but you know I think maybe in the minority really especially because you're not going to get very good medical treatment after the world ends of this nuclear exchange so that's obviously your fallout risk now DP you are the better you are protects the games fallout so if you had a big building with a basement especially found an air filtration system you're going to be relatively safe from the fallout now it's going to take several months for the amount of fallout to reduce to be a safe level you know and in that time how likely I used to survive because of course another problem of nuclear war is that the other people left alive probably don't have the drinkable food or edible oh sorry drinkable water edible food so they're probably going to come and kill you to get some so you know you don't have humans trying to kill you as well as the threat of radiation and you know destruction of pretty much everything well there gets worse because one of the scientifically considered factors in a nuclear exchange is something called a nuclear winter and the idea is that if so many nuclear bombs are set up or foreign crap into the atmosphere it would have a similar effect to an asteroid hitting the earth where sunlight fails to kind of penetrate this layer it gets a very very cold it's very hard to grow crops even regardless of the radiation if you had a nuclear winter without any of the destruction of the bombs or anything like that you know it would still be very very bad for everybody but you know you're throwing this on top it's the icing on a [ __ ] cake really isn't it if you have all this nuclear stuff going off and then you've got a nuclear winter on top of that and I said the nuclear winter is going to make things very very cold you haven't got a very good shelter because all of that's been blown up and destroyed and everything's horribly irradiated the food is running out and people are trying to kill you for your food so overall this is probably why nuclear war is considered to be very very scary because there's a good chance that a full-on nuclear exchange happen mutually assured destruction between the superpowers there nobody would survive it you know there's also lots of theories that maybe one to ten percent of the population might survive it but there's also you know lots of factors where just due to all of the things like nuclear winter the massive amounts of radioactivity you know how cold it's going to get and everything like that that you know maybe nobody would survive it we basically wipe out all life on the earth maybe some isopods would survive which can endure all these horrible conditions but overall the earth would be a very very different place so there you go hopefully I have done a good enough job in this video explaining why nuclear weapons are just so scary you

Channel: Weaponsandstuff93

Views: 3,991

Rating: 4.9446368 out of 5

Keywords: weapons and stuff 93, Weaponsandstuff93, gas mask, respirator, NBC mask, What makes Nuclear War so scary?, nuclear war facts, nukes, atomic bomb, hydrogen bomb

Id: N2jN--z92IM

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2018