Dear Bethesda,
Hi! It’s me! You know me! I’m Austin! The guy who deconstructs your universe with
the feverish devotion of a religious zealot! So, what have we got on the agenda this week?
Let’s see...super mutants, ghouls, where does everybody poop, oh, OH OH. Look! A question
from Gaijin Goombah, the guy who makes Culture Shock and Game Exchange. He wants to know about the apparent
absurdity of your mini nukes--specifically, he wants to know about their radiation. But,
well. This isn’t the show where we look at just one little thing. Hell no. This, friends,
is fucking SCIENCE, and in SCIENCE, we tear everything down to the smallest part, eat
it, poop it out, throw it in a video editor, and KABLAM, we get an episode. Where was I?
Oh, right. So, Bethesda, this week, ahaha, this week we are going to look at your mini
nukes really closely. Will they survive the inquiry? LET’S FIND OUT.
Mininukes are awesome. Introduced when Bethesda took over the helm of the Fallout Franchise
in Fallout 3, they’re football-sized, small-scale, anti-personnel nuclear weapons that, instead
of utilizing a chemically-induced explosion like your boring, ordinary frag grenade, unleashes
the awe-inspiring power of the building blocks of the universe by inducing nuclear fission in
the form of tiny-yet-terrifyingly-effective nuclear explosions. But are these micro-nuclear
weapons even possible? The answer may surprise you.
First, let’s get something out of the way, something that will bug me for the entire
video if I don’t mention it immediately. The mushroom clouds? They’re bullshit. Mushroom
clouds are caused by all kinds of explosions, not all of them nuclear--in fact, incredibly
vivacious volcanic explosions can create them--the physics behind them are incredibly complex
and interesting. When a sufficiently large explosion goes off, hot air rises. As it rises,
a Rayleigh–Taylor instability is formed, and the hot cloud of gas and debris pulls
more air up into it. This air rising up into the cloud causes it to rotate, which gives
it the distinct mushroom shape. Now, these fluid-dynamic effects exist in even very tiny
explosions, but only in catastrophically large ones are the forces, volumes, and temperatures
high enough for long enough for them to be observable. So, no, the mushroom cloud, sadly,
is just for effect. Albeit a fucking awesome one.
But whatever, who cares. That’s just visual effects. I didn’t rage on the blindingly-hot
plasma of plasma weapons being a tame green color, nor did I give laser rifles grief for
being red and visible. No, here at Shoddycast, we don’t sweat the petty stuff. We just
nitpick the things that matter, like game mechanics.
So. How does a mini-nuke work? Well, first we have to go over some of the basics of nuclear
engineering. Don’t worry! Just the basics. As you may recall from ages ago when I covered
nuclear fission, nuclear fission is, essentially, atoms falling apart. The reasons are multifaceted,
but generally speaking the atoms are unstable because the particles making them up aren’t
capable of keeping themselves together, so they fly off into the ether. And it’s not
just elements like Uranium and Plutonium that are radioactive--almost every element on the
periodic table has isotopes that are unstable. The beauty of Uranium and Plutonium is, compared
to these other elements, they’re way more abundant and really easy to manipulate and
predict.
Whenever these atoms fall apart, they release energy, which can be harnessed in a few ways.
In the case of nuclear power plants, it’s used to heat up water, turning it into kinetic
energy that spins turbines. In the case of a nuclear bomb, though, all of this energy
is released almost immediately. But...how the hell does this actually work? Simple:
criticality.
Criticality is when a piece of fissible radioactive material is under the proper conditions to
self-sustain fission reactions. Thats is, there’s enough atoms of the stuff in the
right place, the right time, and under the right circumstances that, when the atoms split
apart, their neutrons are more likely to hit other atoms, which triggers them to split,
which triggers others to split, and so on and so forth. This is also sometimes called
“critical mass.” For the most part, this chain reaction doesn’t happen in masses
of radioactive isotopes that are below critical mass, or sub-critical.
With nuclear reactors in power plants, the mass of materials is kept under very carefully
controlled and constantly monitored conditions so that the reaction maintains a slow-yet-steady
pace. This is done with a combination of neutron-emitters, neutron reflectors, and a whole bunch of other
shit.
Nuclear bombs are a lot more fun. They all work in different ways. One of the fun ones
is the “bullet style,” where there’s a bomb, and on one end there’s a hunk of
Uranium in the shape of a hollow cylinder. And on the other is a piece of Uranium that’s
the exact size of the hollowed out hole in the piece on the other end. When it’s time
to detonate, a blast cap fires, launching the two pieces together--and when they connect,
fucking BOOM. Shit is real fucking bad for anybody nearby. All the atoms start to split
and go everywhere and release a literal assload of energy in fractions of a second.
Super Criticality has been the source of a few terrible accidents throughout history,
perhaps none so infamous than the Demon Core, which, as a friend pointed out to me, would
be an amazing Metal Band Name.
The Demon Core was a hunk of plutonium that was juuuuuuuuust barely subcritical, meaning
it was harmless. Well, mostly. It was still radioactive, but it wasn’t going to explode.
That being said, it was only 5% away from its critical mass, meaning that it wouldn’t
take too much extra mass to send it critical.
On August 21st 1945, physicist Harry Daghilan accidentally dropped a tungsten brick onto
the sphere, which was acting as a neutron-reflector. Although he quickly reached to remove the
brick, there’s no human reflexes faster than the speed of light--both he and a nearby sercurity guard
received a huge dose of radiation. Daghilan, who was closest, died 25 days later. The security
officer, who was further away, died of Leukemia at age 62.
But you don’t earn a name like the Demon Core for killing two measly people and taking
over 30 years to kill one of them. Nope. One year later, on May 21st, 1946, Physicist
Louis Slotin was showing off to a new arrival at their facility by holding beryllium reflectors
near the core with his hands, keeping them separated only with the flat edge of a screwdriver.
Well’p, you see where this is going. Doctor “I Have a Doctorate in Particle Physics
But Apparently Want To Die” Slotin’s hand slipped, and the reflector fell over the core,
causing it to go critical. He received a whopping 1,000 rad dose of neutrons directly into his
torso and bit the dust 9 days later. Demon Core. Should’ve called it The “don’t
be a dumbass with near-critical Plutonium” core. Although that’s a lot less metal.
Anyway. This perfectly illustrates one of the most important things we need to be aware
of for our mininukes moving forward. You see, folk have heard of critical mass before, and
they tend to think of it as “the amount of radioactive stuff you definitely need to
cause a chain reaction,” but that’s only about half of it. Sure, there are lists on
Wikipedia showing the critical masses of Uranium, Plutonium, and blah blah blah, but these are
how much you need if they’re a certain shape, under normal room temperature, one atmosphere
of pressure, and typical crystalline density, with no reflectors or moderators. But there
isn’t some sort of magical mass under which nuclear fission can only happen. Although,
somewhat ironically, it’s way, WAY less challenging from an engineering perspective
to make a huge bomb versus a small bomb.
There’s also a depressing void of information about some of this shit on The Internet. Probably
to keep people from building backyard nukes. Ah well. In either case, most of you have
probably heard of the Davy Crockett weapon, the IRL slingshot nuke developed by the United
States during the Cold War to use against Russian ground troops. It was never actually
used, disappointingly, but tests were run, and they were actually able to get explosions
that were well under a kiloton in strength. Of course, just shy of a Kiloton is still
powerful enough to wipe out an entire city block, and is way, WAY more powerful
than a mininuke. Well shit.
Actually, that brings up a great point. How powerful are mininukes? This was actually
a bit more challenging to figure out than I thought it would be. My preferred method is to to compare something to a real
thing, but mininukes aren’t even remotely real. I thought maybe I can compare
the blast radius with a hand grenade and things got...messy. But then I remembered:
the fucking creation kit.
The Creation Kit has hard, solid numbers for different weapons. Comparing the
mini nuke’s numbers to a frag grenade, an object that exists in real life, I can get
a pretty accurate power ratio. And I did! Taking damage and the radius of the blast
into account I created an aggregate number that perfectly landed at 200%--that is to
say a mini nuke is twice as powerful as a hand grenade.
This may not seem like much, but you have to realize that frag grenades are way, WAY
more dangerous in real life than they are in movies and video games. Instead of just
being effective a few feet around the grenade, they can be fatal for over 100 feet away.
Which makes sense, because they pack a wallop-- 800 KILOjoules of explosive force, which means
our mininuke unleashes a painful 1.6 MEGAjoules of energy. So. How...do we get something that
small to hold a nuclear load? All these radioactive elements have critical masses in the range
of 50 kilograms or a little less--WAY too heavy for you to launch from your shoulder, even on
a good day. Wait a minute. CALIFORNIUM. YES. Californium-252 has a critical
mass at normal atmospheric temperatures, pressures, and densities of only 2.7 kilograms! That’s
almost six pounds. You’d definitely feel that launching from your shoulder, but you
could do it. So, what, we just slap 2.7 kilograms of Californium-252 into a football and chuck
it? Well, I’d hold off on that if I were you.
Using Einstein’s magical formula, which I’ve been DYING TO USE ON THE SHOW FOR AGES,
E=MC^2, that means 2.7 Kilograms of super-critical californium-252 would have the explosive force
of the largest goddamn bomb ever detonated on our planet: the Tsar Bomba. And even if
it weren’t 100% efficient, it’d still flatten an entire city.
Another problem is that Californium is really difficult to synthesize, and as a result is
really, really, REALLY fucking expensive. I’m talking, like, twenty-seven-goddamn-million-dollars-a-fucking-gram
expensive, which means that a 2.7 kilogram warhead would cost over seventy-three BILLION
dollars to manufacture--actually probably moreso--that’s just the cost of the Californium--and
in Fallout’s economy in 2077, it’d cost thirty-six TRILLION dollars. Fucking inflation.
Thanks Obama.
Also, Californium-252 has a halflife of just over two years, so by the time our game starts,
it’d be completely inert. Californium-251, however, has a half-life of 900 years, and
only a slightly higher critical mass.
What we need to do is figure out how much fissile material we need to get an explosion
that’s twice as powerful as a hand grenade, and under what conditions it would need to
be in order to be turned critical. Thankfully, using our handy E=MC^2, the mass
is really, really easy, and it comes to 31 NANOgrams to make our mininuke, given an explosive
efficiency of 25%. How heavy is 31 nanograms? A liiiiiitle bit heavier than 1400 sperm cells.
Yep. If spunk were Californium, you’d...you know what, no. I can’t. I’ll say fuck
all day long, but no. I’m done. Anyway. This is an incredibly small amount of Californium.
The good news is that this makes the material in the mininuke an affordable 84 cents--or
$420-blaze-it dollars in Fallout 2077 money. Seriously, get your economy under control.
So how do we make such an incredibly small amount of Californium super critical? Well,
the answer is...beyond me. Sorry. I spent three days trying to teach myself just enough nuclear
engineering to answer this, and I couldn’t. Turns out, Nuclear Engineering is fucking
complicated. Probably for the best though. I shouldn't teach hundreds of thousands of people how
to build their own portable nukes.
In either case, this is an engineering hurdle that I believe any atom-obsessed society can
get around. So...there we have it. Mininukes are possible? Yes, they
actually are. Huh. That’s great. I guess we can just wrap this up and I'll just head on ou--oh, shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. FUCK. FUCK.
FUCK. I--FUCK. Gaijin Goombah’s actual fucking question DAMN IT. The Radiation, of course!
Fuck you’d be fucked.
Sure, you could build a mininuke that had the force of a high-powered grenade, but you’d
never want to. Remember those scientists from earlier? They died from what was an incredibly
small super-critical accident. Setting off an entire high-energy payload of nuclear Californium
would be hundreds of times more disastrous. The instant it goes critical and the Neutrons
start flying, it’d be chaos. Anyone within a 200 foot radius would be bathed in well
over a thousand rads--and I’m not talking sissy Fallout rads, real rads, where doses
this large can kill you in minutes as high energy gamma an X-Rays slam into your organs,
dislodging bits of your DNA and causing all your cells to completely forget how to function.
Best case scenario, you get riddled with like seven cancers, but you’re likely to die
vomiting your stomach up on the spot. And then that’s not to mention the fact that burning
up all the Californium is impossible, and there’d be tons of trace radioactive metals
in the air in a mini fallout. Presuming you survive the initial blast of death and DON’T
get cancer of the butt, you’d risk breathing in microscopic metals, which are known to
bind in both your skeleton and other organs, where they can stay for YEARS, irradiating
surrounding tissue and causing them to definitely give you cancer of the butt. God DAMMIT Mininukes
would be fucking terrifying. FUCK.
Sincerely....
Austin.
P.S.
A lot of you, and I mean alot more than I expected to, liked my video where I examined
the wartime tactics and politics of the Fallout: New Vegas world and determined that the Legion would
objectively lose to the NCR. I’ve read Sun Tzu’s Art of War about six times throughout my life, but, I discovered
on Audible that there’s a version narrated by Aidan Gillen--that’s right, LITTLEFINGER.
FROM GAME OF THRONES. It’s like getting a lecture from an actual character in Game of Thrones. You can listen
to it for free if you sign up for an Audible account today using the address audible.com/shoddy.
BUT if that’s not your thing, there’s over 250,000 other titles they have on hand
you can choose from. Heck, if you want to get a head start on my next war video, I’m
actually reading several books--one of which is On War, by the 18th Century General Carl
Von Clausewitz, which is also on Audible. Head over to Audible.com/shoddy to start your
first month free and pick out your audio book. You’ll get addicted. Like me.
ALSO, head on over to our Twitch Channel twitch.tv/shoddy RIGHT NOW. I’m playing Competitive Overwatch and
very likely getting my ass kicked. So, you know. Enjoy that. I stream every monday starting
at 10 AM Central Time. Look up GMT yourself I’m not your mom.