Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
Every cloud
has a silver lining.
Except nuclear mushroom clouds, which have a lining of Strontium-90,
Caesium-137 and other radioactive isotopes.
Upon detonation, atoms are literally gutted
and glutton at temperatures exceeding that of the surface
of our Sun. In the 1950s, Harold Edgerton's
rapatronic camera caught nuclear fireballs less than a
thousandth of a second after detonation. Using a special magnetic shutter,
each exposure lasted only a billionth of a second and captured
an other-worldly creature, its energy vaporising the metal wires
supporting its tower into stringing legs
of plasma. Watch the target
on the ground. Now, roughly visualized, here is a conventional
TNT explosion. Now, on the same spot,
a similarly sized bomb that uses nuclear
fission.
When 'Little Boy' was detonated over
Hiroshima only 1.38% of its uranium
actually fissioned. The rest was blown away before
that could happen, which means, as Eric Schlosser points out, the
fission of merely 0.7 grams
of uranium, that's less than the weight of a banknote, was enough to kill
80,000 people and destroy two-thirds
of city's buildings. When a country has tens of thousands of nuclear weapons
ready to go,
accidents are a possibility.
This was a problem during the Cold War and it still
is a problem. What if there is a fire or a miscommunication or a rogue
officer decides to
set one off. Or what if someone just drops
a warhead? How much risk
is too much, I asked Schlosser.
The acceptable probability of a nuclear weapon
accident? What is it now?
The acceptable probability
of the detonation of a nuclear weapon in an accident is one in a million.
In 2012, the odds of your dying
in a commercial airliner accident were about one in forty
million. So that's even more remote than the accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon.
There have been 'oopsie daisy' moments with nuclear weapons
on US soil. Luckily, none that resulted in critical mass
but accidents nonetheless. Just like when you
pee your pants, except your pants are the entire planet
and the "P" stands for Plutonium.
Eureka comes from ancient
Greek, meaning "I have found it!" And in
Eureka, North Carolina you can find
it. A giant sign that says
"Nuclear mishap". On my birth date
the year my father was born, a US B-52 bomber carrying
two 4 megaton thermonuclear bombs
over North Carolina tumbled
from the sky. A loose lanyard in the cockpit snagged the bomb release
switch. Each bomb contained a greater explosive yield
than all munitions ever detonated by mankind
combined. Lieutenant Jack ReVell discovered that only
one safety mechanism didn't fail that day.
A single low voltage arming switch remained
untouched during the crash. And that one switch is why,
he explained in 2011, we don't have
a bay where North Carolina is today.
The bombs were recovered... mostly.
The uranium-rich Secondary of one of the bombs was
never found. To this day it remains buried
underground in North Carolina. Here's something you can try
at home.
Build a nuclear reactor.
In 1994, a 17-year-old David Han attempted to build
a nuclear reactor in his mother's backyard
in Michigan. It wasn't that difficult. For instance,
common everyday smoke detectors contain small amounts of
radioactive Americium. And old glow in the dark paint
contains Radium. His reactor never reached critical mass but it did succeed
in exposing his neighborhood
to 1000 times the regular dosage
of background radiation. It was declared a Superfund hazardous materials cleanup
site
and all of his work was confiscated by authorities and buried
in Utah. It didn't end
there. In 2007 David Hahn was
arrested for stealing smoke detectors from an apartment building.
His face was covered with sores believed to be caused by constant exposure to
radioactive materials.
Three days after Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay
Charles Sweeney was ordered to drop Fatman
on Kokura. He flew boxcar over the city for nearly an
hour with the bomb bay doors open, but it was cloudy.
Sweeney couldn't achieve visual confirmation of the target and was
forced
to go to the secondary target - Nagasaki,
where 75,000 people died instead.
Kokura was spared because of the clouds.
We can build a weapon
that mimics the furnace of our Sun and the winds of Neptune but yet we can't
predict the weather more than a few minutes ahead of time.
During World War 2 Japanese soldiers spot for their
emperor in ways that made allied troops speechless.
Kamikaze planes and torpedoes, driven by a single pilot,
lost after use. When outnumbered,
without hope, Japanese soldiers were reported to have thrown themselves
off clips or swam out to sea to drown
rather than surrendered. Even after two
atomic bomb attacks, the Japanese Minister of War
urged his people to continue fighting.
But on August 14th, 1945, the Emperor of Japan
overruled that decision and unconditionally
surrendered. Men had leapt of off cliffs
for him, but in his own words, the enemy has for the first time
used cruel bombs.
The heavy casualties are beyond measure.
Richard Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics
in 1965. He also helped develop the first atomic bomb
at Los Alamos. In "The Meaning of It All," he wrote
"Is science of any value?"
And below that, "I think a power to do something
is of value." He elaborates by talking
about keys. Everything we learned about the universe, everything we invent or
discover within it,
is a key to the gates of heaven.
But the same key will
also open the gates to hell.
The Titan II Missile is great for delivering
lethal nuclear warheads.
But it also sent Gemini astronauts to space,
preparing us for a mission to the Moon.
Science doesn't tell us how to use
keys. It finds them or predicts them.
How we use keys is up to us.
And as always,
thanks for watching.