Nuclear Weapons: Everything You Need to Know

Simon’s beard now qualifies as mega project.

Nuclear scientist here. Bravo on the explainer. I’m consistently impressed by the writing from you guys.

Fun fact, high speed photography and thus ultra slow motion video was developed out of the timing mechanisms made for nukes.

1:55 - Chapter 1 - How do nukes work
10:45 - Chapter 2 - Early work
20:10 - Chapter 3 - The manhattan project
46:30 - Chapter 4 - Hiroshima & Nagasaki
1:06:50 - Chapter 5 - The age of the H Bomb
1:27:40 - Chapter 6 - Development in delivery systems
1:48:00 - Chapter 7 - Legislation
1:54:10 - Chapter 8 - The nuclear world today

I truly love the long form simon whistler no matter the channel, I work nights so this is perfect

Simon saying to stick around for a couple hours made me check the video to make sure he wasn’t toying with my emotions!

Thank you for a Mega long video !!!!! More please

I remember reading Tom Clancy's "The Sum of all Fears" in highschool, and that kind of roughly explained how nuclear bombs work, I'd recommend it, and a lot of other Tom Clancy books, they are great reads.

For some comparisons to put things into context:

Little Boy's yield of 15kt is equivalent to a pile of TNT that's just a smidge under the weight of the German WW2 era Admiral Hipper class cruiser (most famously including Prinz Eugen, which ironically was used as a nuclear guinea pig at Bikini Atoll)

The first fusion weapon Ivy Mike's yield would need a pile of TNT 4 times heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza

I consumed twenty six beers, a multipack of Wheat Crunchies, a large mixing bowl of popcorn, two small children and a pack of sausages watching this. That was a good watch to take up half of my night!

A small section of inter fission/fusion bombs are often overlooked, with two notable shots.

The first of the two "Item" shot was a boosted fission bomb where a small amount of tritium was burned in the plutonium core. This fusion itself provides a negligible amount of power, but the fast neutrons it releases allows a close to doubling of the plutonium that is fissioned before the core blows itself apart.


Item yielded 45 killotonnes.

The second was "George" shot which was a semi staged hydro test. This was a further refinement of boosting in which a significant portion of the power delivered was from fusion itself. Its practical scale however was limited by the incorporation of fusion fuel into the fission device itself. You could argue the soviet RDS6 is a version or variant of this design.

George had a yield of 225 killotonnes.

Simon, my father worked on Project Hurricane, he told me that the reason why the UK went down the path of an independent nuclear deterrent was because we had the US with nuclear technology demonstrated, we knew that the soviets were working towards it. But we found ourselves in the middle. After the US slammed the door on us in 1946 by the US, after we had given them every thing we knew, we were piggy in the middle, we had no choice. This caused a massive reallocation of funds and we could not afford the old colonial system, not that I defending it. The simple fact is that in the late 40's and 50's London was the financial capital of the world and the worry was that if the Soviets sailed a boat with a nuclear device on board into the port of London they could have wiped out the world's banking industry and turned the clock back to the middle ages. Let us also consider the massive economic advantage of nuke missiles, you don't have to pay an air crew to over fly enemy territory to drop their cargo, or have to avoid flak from pissed off natives as you fly back after dropping it. Your videos are awesome but we do need to consider all the points of view

Petition for Simon to make a video: Battleships: everything you need to know

One thing I like about your many channels is that you give the informations you have found, usually very good information, but you also warn us not to be surprised if we find different information on a specific point . And it is very pleasant, respectful and informative towards your audience in order to preserve our critical spirit with regard to your comments. And that’s something that’s increasingly rare in today’s media. This is one of the things that makes me prefer your very informative videos to those of other channels. Continue to educate us intelligently 👍

Wow, nearly 2 hours - I need to grab the popcorn 🍿 👍

The fact he dipped out of physics is the most tragic thing. He could of added as much as fermi or durack etc. Sad. The fact he felt guilt after being left in a zero choice scenario is depressing. He was a scientist, not the best, but damn he was the right man to corral that bunch of off the wall physicists. He should have been proud. The bomb was inevitable. Mr Anderson.

I was just running out of nuclear documentaries. Thanks for filling my void.

Anyone who is interested in the Manhattan Project or the development of atomic weapons, I recommend "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Just finished it and while it goes into depth (for a non-theoretical physicist) about nuclear physics, it seems to be the best single piece of first hand accounts of the birth of atomic physics ever written.

Simon has yielded to us Americans and now measures in Great Pyramids of Giza.

I don't know about everyone else but I love these long form videos. I'm a truck driver, and these are my background noise for the day. This one was especially interesting. It's crazy to me that there are those world leaders out there that have all this information and more, and yet they're still seemingly chomping at the bit to use them. If humans ever go extinct, I'm betting it will be our own fault, or rather their's