Thanks to 'Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer (⧖) 🏳️‍🌈 ' who reminded me of a few of these @NuclearAnthro twitter.com/NuclearAnthro Don't try this at home kids.... or parents.

Concrete vapour is not a term one hears very often.

I did some tests (in a video now removed due to use of explosives) that proved that the metal plate would have been deformed into a cone or even rod shape during launch thus greatly increasing its chances of making it through the atmosphere. Also I figured that the time, direction of launch and a 6x earth escape velocity would result in a highly elliptical orbit about the sun with the perihelion well below the orbit of mercury. This means that not only was it the fastest moving object created by man it very well still could be.

Ever heard about the crazy idea to use small low-yield nuclear bombs to make the tritium necessary to make the high yield hydrogen bombs? This was before anyone figured out how to make tritium in research reactors, and before the Canadians had made their heavy water "CANDU" reactor, which creates some tritium as a by-product of its normal operation. In the 1950s and 1960s, getting hold of enough tritium to make the really big warheads was a big problem, exacerbated by the fact that it has a half life of about 12 years, so every few years you need to replace some of it. It was however known that if you subject lithium-6 to a short but intense neutron flux, it splits into equal quantities of helium-3 and tritium. So they came up with an idea with an appropriate acronym: BATS, aka Bomb Assisted Tritium Supply. Basically, make a shallow depression out in the desert somewhere and line it with a thick layer of asphalt, with loads of lithium-6 mixed into the asphalt. Then bang off a few low-yield (a few kilotons each) nuclear bombs next to it. The neutron flux from the nuclear detonations converts some of the lithium into tritium. So you then wait for the fallout to disperse and the short half-life isotopes to decay away (a few months, maybe a year maximum), then go in and rip up the asphalt and process it to get the tritium out. All perfectly feasible, and was a serious consideration until the partial test-ban treaty put a stop to it.

Play connect 4 on the moon's surface with the other nuclear powers. Luna(tic) World Series

“If you have nuclear weapons please don’t try any of these”. Nice public service announcement from Scott. 😎

Scott Manley: "You could use nukes to propel a spacecraft!" Also Scott Manley: "Fly Safe!"

"I'm Scott Manley. Fry safe!"

I am so glad that Scott spoke about the extinguishing of oil wells in Russia! My grandfather took part in this, and this is my favorite story of his!

2:00 I don't usually smoke, but when I do, I light it with nuclear bombs.

Mythbusters with a nuclear device...imagine the possibilities!

I love XKCD's euphemism about certain events energetic enough: You don't "burn" or "explode" or anything like that. You just stop being biology and start being physics. wait you have that book behind you in frame.

"if you have any nuclear weapons, please don't use them at all" But I blew my budget on making them. All this effort and I can't even use them?

11:30 "They now have a reservoir which is only slightly radioactive" - only slight radioactive, the gold standard of Soviet engineering.

Use nukes to power a flashlight, so i can finally realize my dream of a flashlight with noticeable recoil.

I'm sorry, did I hear: _"The_ *Most Fun Things* _you can do with Nuclear Weapons?"_

Today: NOOO WE CANT USE NUCLEAR POWER ITS TOO DANGEROUS 1950's: Atomic bomb powerplant!

“Let’s nuke the moon!” “... just... why?” “idk, sounds fun... wait, no I mean... morale! America! O-oh say can you - hey where are you going?”

Best thing we could do with nuclear energy: to *send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri*

"If you have nuclear weapons then don't try any of these ideas" He prbably means Jeff

Orion is used to great effect in the fictional "Footfall" by Niven and Pournelle. Great SF, well worth a read.

LOL using nuclear explosions to extinguish fires. If that ain't "burning the village in order to save it", I dunno what is. After Gulf War 1, lots of nations contributed to the effort to extinguish all the oil wells Saddam Hussein set on fire. IMO, the Hungarians had the best, most practical and effective idea -- they put a jet-fighter engine on a flatbed truck, pointed the exhaust nozzle at the fire, revved-up the engine to full blast, and blew-out a raging oil-well inferno as if it were a birthday candle. No nukes required!

"Don't do any of these" But i really really wanna see them nuke the moon!

Given the timing of this video, I thought for sure you were going to mention nuking a hurricane.

Brand new subscriber...fantastic content, love physics and you've absolutely made it accessible and easy to understand so thank you!!

You forget the most important thing of all. To make sure that the Spider is really gone.

Lets not forget my favorite. Project Excalibur. Nuclear. Explosion. Lasers. EDIT: anyone knows any games to utilize this concept? Besides SoTS 2

1% of 1 bar? Those are rookie numbers. Gotta pump the numbers up, Musk.

Good job on your selection of supporting graphics, you really did a good job hunting down those animations of nuclear blasts (Plow shares, propulsion, etc)

I think part of the reasoning for melting the polar ice caps on Mars isn't just to release the carbon dioxide there, but to increase the surface temperature of Mars enough to start outgassing some of the CO2 locked in the soil across the whole planet. At some point this should create a feedback loop that continues to feed itself and grow. I remember reading about this in Robert Zubrin's book.

Does it involve removing a hurricane? Asking for a friend....

13:43 "yeah its possible but we would need enough nukes to turn the enirity of the soviet union into a radioactive wasteland" "agreed, we might aswell just use the nukes on the soviets

I watched the footage of the space tests, and it's one of the most beautiful nuclear explosions I have seen, plus the aftereffects were very beautiful.

"If your only tool is a nuclear weapon then every problem looks like it needs a giant hole in the ground" - Scott Manley, the Shakespeare of our time

5:55 You can see this effect yourself in games like Kerbal Space Program if you have ridiculous propulsion bugs like the stack separator launcher or Danny's "RCS Sling" (which you happened to cameo in when the physics_significance=1 on the RCS thrusters was discovered) where the Kerbonaut, or any other payload, would instantly incinerate, provided you don't go *so* fast that Unity doesn't even calculate atmospheric drag and heating.

Glad he gave that warning at the end, I was about to try that moon one.

Wow so Karl Pilkington wasn't talking absolute bollocks about a manhole cover placed on a nuclear bomb 😅

God: Thou shall not refine deuterium and tritium. Moses: Uh, what are those? God: Okay, this is going to be a problem then... God: Thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me.

So... if nuking the polar ice caps of Mars would release CO2, albeit a small amount, couldn't you theoretically start dropping asteroids & comets that are made up of ice onto Mars?

nother gem in the series! Old (by internet spacetime), but Gold! You nail so many subtle side effects, and in some cases benefits, and the research and economics that comes out of these is fascinating... Where is a good place to go looking for this data and dig around material that's just been declassified or is about to...? This would be an interesting area of research essentially meta-analysing data that was previously inaccessible but can have important implications for future civil and commercial applications.

Super sweet corn was developed in the 60's by agricultural specialists in Illinois. We lived across the street from one of the guys working on it. He gave us some of the corn from one of the first developed breeds. It's was amazing an revolutionary. Oh, and NO nukes invoked. Just a lot of hard work crossbreeding .

Fun fact, I used to work a few km's from that reservoir crater in Kazakhstan.

When you mentioned Edward Teller I thought for sure you would have mentioned the x-ray laser from the Reagan Star Wars era. If you could focus the x rays of a nuke explosion they could take out the enemy warhead. If you had it's exact track and could focus the x-rays from a nuke. They did experiments. Turns out you can't. Or, that this was a very, very, very silly expensive folly.

Damn, now i want to disassemble my smoke detector and make supercharged cannabis seeds. (Not actually, and you shouldn't either lol)

Scott Manley for nuking asteroids to hit mars!

Maybe use nukes to steer comets into mars... Water, CO2, CO, CH4, a little more mass from dust etc.

Great stuff! Loved the Carl Sagan "billions & billions" reference!

Idea: use thermonuclear warheads in fusion reactors to form ridiculously large pressure waves which would kick the hydrogen into a super-compressed state, which will be hot so you can start a fusion reaction. One method of fusion they are looking into is a method to do something like this but with huge pistons - a high pressure and temperature is generated, before the pistons are shoved in increasing the pressure by a LOT and setting off the fusion reaction.

Carl Sagan had "billions and billions" of problems with that plan. Lol.

I don't have any nuclear weapons but IF I did I'd probably be taken a lot more seriously.

One demonstration of the power of a blast, was the Cannikin test in Alaska. A 4.7MT warhead for a Sprint ABM was tested underground, at the bottom of a 1 MILE deep shaft in solid rock. The blast lifted the site 25 FEET up, and permanently raised the shoreline 2 miles away by 5 feet.

I got a real bang out of that, thanks. Orion brought back some fond memories, but sadly not practical ones....

Next time on KSP: terraforming Duna by crashing asteroids into it!

And there's the annoying thing that Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere so the gases would just get blown off by solar winds.

Freeman Dyson is a genius. I love his mind!

Ok Scott, good idea, I'll keep my arsenal in storage. Cheers!

This kind of subject seems the perfect compliment to your technical humor way of explaining things, thanks for another fun video!

Codydon Reeder (Cody's Lab) did some tests with high explosives, and found the manhole cover just may have become an explosively formed projectile, and could have survived into space.

I always thought about setting some bombs off along fault zones to maybe trigger earthquakes manually and prevent bigger ones from occurring without notice

Hello Scott. You spoke of the behringer crater in this episode. Kind of off topic but what do you think would be the viability of turning the crater into a United States version of arecibo. It already has the shape and would be easy to support under? Just a thought. Love your videos!

Quote of the Day: "If you have nuclear warheads, please don't use them." - Scott Manley

"If you have nuclear weapons, please don't try any of these." And also please turn yourself in to the authorities.

Just checking on "old" videos.... wow so minimal the desk is....🤣 no Lego SaturnV with 39A tower...no shuttle Discovery/Hubble (which happens to be my favorite series of yours) I built my Apollo lander while watching live....Thanks @Scott Manley , fly safe, even in ZeroG !

Thanks for the great suggestions, I never knew what to do with mine.

Hi Scott. The ‘Nuke Mars’ idea has been around since the 70’s, maybe earlier. I recall watching the British Interplanetary Society propose this on the BBC, most likely on the Sky at Night, when I was a kid.

Sadly not digging due to the leftover isotopes. The idea of easily making lakes and channels was too beautiful to be true:(

I love how this video has the xkcd "What If?" book in the background. I'm not sure that a more appropriate book could exist for the topic of this video.

Entire "Nuclear" Playlist excellent. You've covered a lot of the hard parts ... but the only powerplants are more incidentally described. Thorium options, breeders, etc - discussing 'from the power side' would really complete this! In other "Crazy things to do with nuclear ... waste" was "send it to space" and yet ... Elon's getting to reliability and scale levels that sort of take this out of "Bogglingly silly" to ... "Well, we've done crazier things actually."

good thing you told me not to use nuclear weapons...I was already one foot out the door with mine in tow when you said that. disaster averted.

you can probs heat your home w/ one for about 0.3 seconds, to a few thousand °C

I've got number 11. Package Thieves. Call me Captain Overkill .

Lighting a cigar or cigarette with a nuclear explosion. I feel like this is something Clint Eastwood would do on a daily basis.

"Hands on experimenters"

8:00 YET! There is a lot to say here. I am switching from telecommunications engineering to plasma confinement device controls engineering. This is a fun rabbit hole to fall down. Omega Tau has good podcasts on it, and there is a freely available 2012 IAEA textbook called "fusion physics". Those two sources cover most relevant questions to fusion as it exists today.

Star Trek: Enterprise actually featured a concept in one of its episodes that used a planetary beam fired from the surface of Mars that can reach out to any comet or asteroid in the entire solar system (hell, it can reach Earth as the episode demonstrated) and use it to deorbit the target and crash a comet filled with ice into the atmosphere of Mars and use it to add pressure to the atmosphere. This was their first step towards terraforming a whole planet.

Congratz for the 1.000.000 👌

If you want to melt the ice cap on Mars, divert a 3 km asteroid... with an Orion drive.

The craziest thang you can do with a nuclear weapon is BUILD ONE. At one time there are about 60,000. We are truly an insane species.

I'm old enough to get the joke and laugh out loud about Sagan having billions and billions of problems with that idea. Manley, you're endlessly fun!

There was an early Macintosh space flight sim (appropriately named Orion) that used the Orion drive concept to explain the propulsion. This was on the early monochrome macs, though, so you basically got a planetarium program where you could reposition the observation point. The planets were marked with their astrological symbols as well, instead of being able to get a view of them up close.

The most crazy thing you can use nuclear weapons for is destroying a city.

I mentioned about the cigarette guy, Ted Taylor, a ways back on one of your videos, also it should be noted, Taylor ran Project Orion with Dyson.

My take on this “We need more POWER Scotty”

In the wildfires we had last year here in Sweden, the airforce did an experiment to put out a wildfire in one of the armed forces training and testing grounds. In short, they bombed it with help of a jet fighter. As far as I understand, the inital fire was more or less put out - but the blast started more fires around. And no fire fighters could be anywhere near, wich meant time to evacuate and reenter the site. All in all, they concluded it was intersting but nothing they would do again anytime soon.

Great video Scott. Although I think it would be crazy not to consider nuclear powered rockets for use in interplanetary space. Science progresses when people think outside the box and even though these schemes to harness nuclear energy were impractical they were interesting to contemplate.

Love your videos! So very well researched, and even as an old-fart guy, I've learned so much from them.

A water reservoir, that is radioactive. Great!

I would be willing to bet the core geometry was a floating hollow pit. Probably the last of this series of core. A lot of times Teller made fizzles or in this case with the core not effected by surrounding detonation to reach critical mass no matter how roughly it was handled in transit. You can just picture how this detonation occured on a single ignition source. As the wave front of the detonation reached the suspended hollow pit the wave front timing though the seeming vacuum around the pit was large enough distance to blend the arrival time on one side of the cavity around the pit so that while it never reached the pit exactly as a wave front perfectly spherical it pushed in the side of the hollow pit a nanosecond before the compression reached the far side of the pit. A nanosecond is quite a bit of time in this detonation front so the calculation was it would smear out the compression wave. But the calculation hadn't been carried through to the inside of the hollow pit which almost reached the center simultaneously. Almost. Sort of like Ivy Mike, what do you mean tritium is generated during the detonation, ya'll kinna make that much in the time available.

Exploding one on your own planet sounds like the craziest thing you can ever do.

I believe Edwin Teller also proposed digging a canal with nuclear weapons from the Mediterranean Sea to the Qattara Depression Project to create an artificial inland sea in Egypt. Naturally the Egyptians at that time weren't too keen on the idea of using nukes, but the canal and project itself is very interesting. Making the canal big enough to become tidal would solve most of the 'lake' salting up over time. There's a Wikipedia page on it.

The Project Orion book is one of my all time favourites--along with MIR.

I was an Officer of the Crown, employed by the Parliament and the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, attached to the Australian Department of Defence and embedded in the Australian Military (at this particular moment in time, the Australian Regular Army) as a Special Placement Officer, specialising in Military Planning. One day whilst at work I happened to see (in an Adult Comic Book) an Advert for a Six Pack of Thermonuclear Hand Grenades (including Suggestions for their possible use). I photocopied the Advert and placing it on a Specialised Weapons File, sent it on a General Distribution throughout the Military Headquarters. If only I’d been an Agent for that Company and Thermonuclear Hand Grenades had been an actual thing, I could have sold so many, both for Serious Weapons Testing and for April Fool / Prankster Gags. As far as I’m aware that Advert is still probably On File Somewhere.

my favorite thing is the "manhole" cover that we accidentally made into a flat bullet becoming the fastest man made object.

I could only name Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi in that photo! Can you point me to the source? I'd love to know the names of the others.

That explains those darned triffids running around my garden!

Concept films of Orion always show a pulse of one or two per second but I recall the design intended as many as several per second - in any case I’ve been curious how the bombs would not fratricide the next one in line with radiation and fission fragments.

"Six times the escape velocity from Earth" I laughed so hard. xD

Niven and Pournelle's fictional account of an Orion spacecraft in Footfall (used to repel invading aliens) is an excellent read. All sorts of other nice tech to enjoy like spurt-bomb lasers and one-man stove-pipe craft built around the barrels from battleship guns. Great fun read.

Thoroughly enjoy your channel your banter your accents your bald head and your idea about moving a comet to crash into Mars pretty ingenious if you ask me and sounds plausible. 🙏🤘🏼❤️

*Eats corn* _"Mr. Stark...I don't feel so good..."_