The shock wave hit it,
caused the refrigerator to get lofted,
and now it's moving faster than the shock wave.
Well, that just can't happen.
My name is Greg Spriggs.
I work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Prior to that, I worked at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory in the critical mass lab.
Today we're going to be looking at nuclear explosions
and trying to judge how realistic they are.
What are you doing?
Batman: I can get it out over the bay.
Actually, that was one of the better ones.
It had the right shape, and it had the glow time.
The fireball eventually cools,
and it cools very rapidly by radiative heat transfer.
So, the length of time that the fireball continues to glow
is referred to as the glow time.
It's out over the bay. It's clear of the city.
These mushroom clouds can go up as high as
40,000 feet in the air,
so you'd be able to see it from way off.
There'd be no danger for nuclear fallout
unless the wind was blowing directly towards them.
So, there's a general rule of thumb.
If you look at the cloud, the mushroom cap, if it's white,
then you will have zero fallout, for the most part.
If it looks dirty,
then it means that dirt got into the fireball,
and now there's a carry material,
which will bring the nuclear bomb debris down
and create local fallout.
So if you detonated over the water, very little fallout.
The people that were standing on the bridge
kind of felt a breeze.
That happened a lot too soon.
It would've taken a finite length of time
for that shock wave to make it out there.
And I would give it a seven.
The flash was good,
and the shape of the detonation was good.
[beeping]
It went off, and then this plasma was squirting out
through that fissure.
Potentially, if they actually could do that,
it would break up the asteroid
if the asteroid is small enough.
It would be very difficult if you had a large asteroid
to get a weapon big enough in yield
to cause it to completely break up.
That would be a very difficult thing to do.
In outer space, of course, there is no shock wave,
and if there was, why would it be disk-shaped?
It's a spherical shock wave.
There would be a bright flash,
and everything would cool within 20 microseconds,
so you wouldn't be seeing this
long glow time that they show in the movie
and people on Earth looking up and seeing this white flash.
You would see the flash,
but it would only last for 10 to 20 microseconds.
If it's small enough and you could break it up,
then it could possibly dissipate in the atmosphere.
It could burn itself out.
These two halves, yeah, that would be very unpredictable.
For realism, I'd give it a one.
If you went in and actually drilled into an asteroid
and tried to break it up, how do you know
what it's going to break up into
and where are the pieces going to fly?
This is a matter of life and death.
They were trying to hold all the cables in place.
This was a test. They weren't certain
that this particular design was going to work,
and so this was sort of the prototype,
and they didn't go to great lengths
to make everything really robust.
So they were just basically winging it with duct tape
to hold things in place.
And the actual one probably was a little bit more structured
and more engineered to be a real weapon.
The reason they suspended the bomb from the tower,
they wanted to get it above the ground
so they could measure the shock wave.
There was a lot of uncertainty, since it was the first one.
There was a lot of uncertainty as to whether this would work
and if it did work, how much energy would be released.
And so they needed to be able to film this,
and they didn't want the shock wave
interacting with the surface.
They thought that if they suspended it up high enough,
that they would kind of suppress
the amount of nuclear fallout that would occur
by all the dirt being lofted.
Detonator's charged.
They had actually built several shelters
for the scientists.
I think the closest shelter was about 5 miles away.
And of course everybody was wearing goggles.
When the detonation goes off, it would look very bright,
but it would protect their eyes.
Here are the glasses. Very, very dark.
Right now, I can't see anything. It's pitch black in here.
But if a nuclear detonation went off, I could see it.
Three, two, one.
They were all laying down thinking that the shock wave
might get to them and if they were laying down
that it wouldn't be a direct hit.
You don't want to have a big surface area
if the shock wave is coming over.
You want to be kind of laying flat.
There have been situations where we've had tests
where the yield was a little bit higher
than what people thought or the wind blew the bomb
a little bit closer to the observers,
that people have actually gotten a little bit of a sunburn.
I don't think the sunscreen would've helped very much.
It's basically a heat flux that hits you.
I guess it would've helped a little bit, but not much.
For the accuracy of what the weapon looked like
and how they hung it from the tower and so forth,
maybe a seven.
Oh, that can't be good at all.
Back in the '50s, they were very, very conscious
of showing the nuclear weapons.
The weapon that was hanging off of that tower,
they actually had what were called tower cabs
that were built up at the top.
The cab itself had either plywood walls
or had some sort of curtain.
They were paranoid that
some other nation was going to fly over
and take a photograph of what the bomb looked like.
The bomb was just sitting in there hanging off of a cable.
Again, not quite true to history.
Loudspeaker: Seven, six,
four, three.
The lead-lined refrigerator kind of struck me odd.
Everybody knows about lead poisoning.
Why would you have a refrigerator with lead in it?
You would need several feet thickness of lead
in order to actually knock down the radiation
to the point where he might've been able to survive it.
If the house had a basement,
I would've gone out, gotten into the basement.
That's probably the only thing that would've saved him
from the thermal blast and from the shock wave.
Got several of the physics things correct.
The first thing that happens
after a nuclear detonation occurs
is that you get a large burst of prompt radiation.
You get neutrons and prompt gammas
coming off of the fissioning process.
You don't necessarily see that.
An observer might actually feel it if they were
in close enough, and that would be a bad thing.
The next thing is that there's a very intense thermal pulse.
You get this very intense thermal blast
from a nuclear detonation
that you do not get with a conventional explosive.
And so anything that's close to that detonation point,
such as the mannequins that they had standing out
in the front yards, those would be incinerated.
The timescale was a little wrong.
That incineration occurs very, very quickly.
Those mannequins would've disappeared into a puff of smoke
within a couple tenths of a second.
As for the glass,
the thermal pulse would've gone right through it,
so the glass probably wouldn't have shattered.
And it's not until the shock wave gets there
that things actually get smashed.
Here you have a shock wave,
and the car is keeping in front of it,
and then the refrigerator's actually moving
faster than the shock wave.
The shock wave hit it,
caused the refrigerator to get lofted,
and now it's moving faster than the shock wave.
Well, that just can't happen.
As the shock wave goes out, it eventually degenerates
into what we call an acoustic wave.
It's traveling at the speed of sound.
So imagine this refrigerator hitting the ground
going at 760 miles an hour.
I don't think it has the structural strength,
even with the lead in it,
to withstand that kind of an impact.
When the shock first goes out, it's moving outward,
and it leaves behind a very low-density bubble
where the detonation occurred,
which causes a huge buoyant force.
And as that bubble starts to rise,
it sucks everything back in.
So this is called the negative phase.
So, in this case, Indy would not have been thrown out,
but he would've been thrown out
and then sucked back in again.
I would give it a three in terms of realism.
He got the thermal pulse right,
and he got the positive phase of the shock wave correct.
But the rest of it kind of fell apart.
The subsidence crater is produced
by a cavity that's created underground.
When the detonation goes off, it vaporizes the material,
but the material's still there, it's just in a plasma state.
And there's a lot of air spaces in dirt and in rock.
And what happens basically is you get this
very high-temperature, very high-pressure region underneath,
in the cavity, and it compresses everything around it.
It's kind of like taking a thick piece of Styrofoam
and stepping on it. And it squishes this dirt and rock,
surrounding dirt, into this higher, denser layer,
which leaves the cavity behind.
[beeping]
This is one of the problems
with these nuclear detonations in the movies,
is they try to incorporate everything into one shot.
Where did that bright flash of light come from?
If it was underground, you wouldn't see a bright flash.
There certainly is a shock wave in the Earth's crust,
and it moves very, very fast.
The way it was portrayed in this film clip,
it looks like it's some sort of a tidal wave of dirt
bulging up and kind of moving along at a slow pace.
And they've actually filmed this.
They did approximately 800 tests in Nevada Test Site.
After they stopped doing atmospheric testing,
they decided they would do all the testing underground.
There's no tidal wave of the dirt
bunching up the way they showed it.
And there would be no shock wave coming out of the ground
that would damage a helicopter flying over.
Shock wave took down the damn chopper.
That's EMP, electromagnetic pulse.
You don't get an EMP unless you have a detonation
high in the atmosphere,
which then can interfere with communication,
electronic equipment on the earth.
You generate these high currents in the atmosphere.
You would not get that with a detonation underground.
They were trying to take all of the basically understood
nuclear-weapon effects and put it into
one detonation underground.
I would also give it a one.
It certainly wasn't realistic.
If you took a nuclear weapon, you detonated it
out in true outer space, not in the upper atmosphere,
but in outer space, what happens is
the bomb would vaporize because of all the energy
that would be deposited in the weapon itself.
There is no shock wave in outer space.
Shock wave can only occur when you have this disturbance
moving through some other medium.
And they kind of show this ball of gas,
which, that would not be associated
with the nuclear detonation itself.
Too much mass involved with it.
And also, it would cool almost immediately.
When you're in outer space, you get these radiative cooling,
and you would see a bright flash,
and it would last for maybe 10 to 20 microseconds,
and then it would go completely black.
Now, the fact that they put this inside of
some sort of a structure might have been their fuel
that was actually exploding there
and not the nuclear detonation.
You know, if this explosion was propagating
down the length of this spaceship,
then OK, it lasts longer.
But if it were an instantaneous kind of thing,
it would cool almost immediately.
It was my least favorite.
I'd give it a one.
I have never even seen that before.
I don't even know what would cause a hole like that.
I'm not sure where they came up with that.
If they had detonated this much deeper down,
you may not have gotten a cloud at all.
It's sort of like an underground shot.
If you go deep enough,
you really don't see the effect on the surface at all.
When the detonation goes off,
it creates this low-density region,
and it basically would be a big bubble underneath the water.
And that has a buoyant effect.
And as it pops up, it causes this waterspout.
They do have the shock wave moving out,
and the water spout does kind of form.
These kind of shots do produce waves.
They're not very big waves, but they do produce waves.
That's not something that would destroy an aircraft carrier.
The shock wave would've traveled through the water,
and then it would hit the hull of the ship.
And there's a possibility that when you hit it
on the side like that with a really strong shock wave,
that it could cause antennas on the deck to break.
But certainly there wouldn't be a shock wave
above the surface that was causing that to tip over.
During Operation Crossroads,
which was the first detonation after World War II,
they wanted to see what the effect would be
on the Navy fleet if a detonation were to occur underwater.
So they took a lot of the destroyers and aircraft carriers,
and they put them in the middle of the Bikini Atoll,
and they detonated the shot under it.
The other ships ended up getting a lot of damage
from the nuclear fallout.
Again, it was close enough to the surface
that probably the shock wave would've hit the ships,
hit the hull, and could have caused damage.
But for the most part, it was mostly radioactive material
that settled onto the decks.
Some shock wave emerging from underneath the water
and then propagating through the air
and knocking the helicopter out, probably not realistic.
But again, I mean, if it were close enough
and it became part of that waterspout, yeah,
it would certainly take out the helicopter.
Again, I would give it a low mark here. Maybe a two.
No, sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do.
The doomsday machine is designed
to trigger itself automatically.
I have no knowledge of any doomsday device in existence.
This is a fabrication of Hollywood.
Woohoo!
They actually have to put the weapon on a parachute
to give the plane time to get out of the way.
So as soon as they dropped the bomb,
the bomb would drop, free-fall for a while,
the parachute would open and start going down slowly.
In the meantime, the plane would do a hard right,
go at 90 degrees, and that would make
the distance between the detonation point and the plane
the largest distance when it actually went off.
It has to be far enough away from the detonation point
that the shock wave doesn't destroy the plane.
Woohoo!
Film clip of the detonation was real.
So he did go to the trouble of putting that into the film.
I would give the detonation a 10,
and I would give the rest of it sort of a two.