Not necessarily "miscalculation", maths may very well have been correct but the outcome still not matching reality, mostly because many of the relevant physical effects were previously unknown, being discovered for the first time...

@@u1zhacastle bravo moment

​@@billymcmedic4221Can you imagine being the guys in the control room for that one?

Unless you can squarely hit the antenna or two of the legs near the base, most of the energy just goes right through the holes!

ye, maybe a Earthquake Bomb like the Tall Boy or Grand Slam might worked, but they themself had been quite rare and die only bomb loads that would not have been offloaded somewhere and if if would have been worth the afford since the Towers can be replaced with relative ease, compared to Bridges, Tunnels and Bunkers for what they had been used

the only viable way to hit radar towers is to crash into them. then your out one pilot and one plane.

A good example of having towers up and running in 24 hours or less) is Iraq post 2003, providing endless examples. Repeated strikes with GPS guided 500 lb HE would typically be repaired by Iraqi teams in less then a day. Their abilities were impressive given the big money spent to knock them out, and the minuscule amount to have them up again.

You don’t go after the easily repaired towers - you go after the hard to hit electronics…

They're bombs. TF you think they're supposed to do when they *correctly* function? Play Kumbaya and lecture us on the climate, patriarchy and income inequality? And PVT Joe Snuffy, PV2 Schmuckatelli, CPL Tentpeg and SGT Rock having a SADM or Davy Crockett? That'd mean there's a major war. They don't issue out the party favors until there's a party. Commanders were loathe to even have the damn things because the paperwork and security requirements were a nightmare, and the generals and politicians were always worried that a mere Sergeant would nuke the Russians and kick off WW III over a misunderstanding. The point of them was to defend ground, and giving Mother-Earth-Gaia a new case of erupting radioactive acne was only if it was a no-shit emergency. Like if the WWII strength Soviet army came rolling through the Fulda Gap. Denying them the ability to resupply would blunt their ability to advance. In a way, not issuing them out in that situation would be insanity. The point of a war is to *_WIN._* By any and all means necessary. On the point of generalized danger, I was a soldier. It wasn't a safe job. I've handled conventional explosives before. Some parts of handling those explosives bothered me. (Blasting caps and frag grenades, mainly: They're a bit tetchy someimes.) But I learned what I can and cannot safely do with them. I carried around six 40mm HEDP rounds in pouches on a drop leg panel nearly every day for 13 months. One would be enough to make me and anyone within 5m of me chunky salsa. I've taken lunch sitting on a porch with a 155mm artillery round converted to a pressure plate triggered IED. (Why? Because EOD wasn't going to make it out until after *they* had lunch, so I may as well catch a meal while I waited.) I've been next to a 2,000 lb mk. 84 bomb on a bomb cart on a flight line. In every case, I learned to take it phlegmatically: No need to worry about things because if something went wrong, someone else would have a shitty day and lots of paperwork. And it would definitely *be* someone else because getting turned into bologna vapor would happen so fast I would be dead before I knew what happened.

Scorched Earth policy that literally scorches the Earth.

Checkering the area with radiation was part of the plan; it would kill exposed infantry and force vehicles to operate under hazmat conditions, reducing their effectiveness. The Cold War plans for WW3 were brutal.

*a lot

Honestly, the potential use of chemical weapons early in the cold war is likely far worse

"Soldiers, your task will be to use the Davy Crockett. You will learn how to properly set it up, select a target and fire it." - "Will we also learn how to reload it?" "Trust me, you won't need to know that."

whose*

@@h.a.9880 Another friend was a tank commander in West Germany who saw the battle plans a Lieutenant with special clearance would be exposed to and he noticed his tank unit didn't exist in any plans beyond the opening phase. I knew someone else who was talking with a Pershing crew member and he made some comment about East Germany being a smoking mess if Pershing was ever used. The Pershing guy replied that the targets of those missiles were all in West Germany because that's where the East German soldiers would be.

🎶 Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the artillery 🎶 🎵

​@@Peter_S_I was confused, I thought you were talking about the M26 Pershing tank... but you're talking about the Pershing missile.

a few jouls propelling a needle in the wrong direction will as well. Meanwhile, technically if we find a way to stop our squishy bits from sloshing we could start using lithobraking and springs instead of parachutes for humans. From Orbit. Its not about the energy, its always about the delivery.

@@AnonymousAnarchist2 I bet you were dropped on your head From orbit Byatch -Robert E Frost

@@AnonymousAnarchist2 Aye, about the delivery. I accidentally discharged a capacitor bank into my left arm recently, it held about 500 joules of electric energy. It hurt like hell, but was fine again half a day later. Somehow I think taking a 9mm bullet to my arm wich also has about 500 joules would have hurt more :D

I like how in the kinda medieval-like post-apocalyptic world of the manga/anime film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, people call radiation "poisonous light"

> _if we find a way to stop our squishy bits from sloshing we could start using lithobraking and springs_ Well, we're not alone with this problem: *Rincewind:* "I'm not going to ride on a magic carpet! I'm afraid of grounds!" *Conina:* "You mean heights. And stop being silly." *Rincewind:* "I know what I mean! It's the grounds that kill you!"

Fun story: The North Carolina one very nearly DID go nuclear. Both bombs had all but one safety fail... and it was a different safety in both. So it wasn't a case of one safety being better than all the rest, it was a case of blind luck if ANY safety would work.

Tybee bomb still missing, Savannah, Georgia

and to think they were designed to help stop the advance of soviet tank crews xD they were that terrified of those measely T's ? :D

Davy Crocket is not technically considered a neutron bomb.

​@@Evan_Bellthats fair, i guess it is the neutron effects that are scary to ponder, even if they werent the primary design goal.

@@ManBearPigCreative Yeah, it's just a natural effects of such low yield weapons.. A product of the scaling laws for effect magnitudes vs radius. For small weapons, gamma and neutron dosages exceed the lethal radius for blast and thermal radiation.

@@maeton-gaming Weren't terrified of the tanks themselves, but their numbers. The USSR made enough to roll over Europe easily (in theory at least). So the choice was to build and maintain equal number of tanks in Europe (very expensive), or just use a couple of small nukes to neutralize them (easy and cheap). Wasn't a hard choice. Also at that time tanks were far more dangerous than today. With no drones, GPS, RPGs, guided missiles, smart ammunition, or even helicopters, tanks were extremely hard to kill, and they had formidable firepower.

ukposts.info/have/v-deo/bKqEd5qQrGiB1Gw.html, 19:50 for the blue

It's never going to end well if you're antagonising Kiwis. Take it from an Australian...

Taylor didn't design the spaceship (known as "Project Orion"), but he was part of the team and was responsible for the nuclear shaped charges that would power the vehicle. In George Dyson's book, Taylor states that in the end he was okay with the project being canceled because he was getting pretty good at building small bombs and was worried it would catch on.

LOTS of interesting stories by Ted in "GEORGE DYSON - Strange Love - Or, how they learned to start worrying and love to hate the bomb." I found that online somewhere. Example: "The smallest tactically deployed nuclear weapon was the Davy Crockett, with a warhead weighing less than 60 pounds. It was not designed by Taylor. 'I tried to find out what was the smallest bomb you could produce, and it was a lot smaller than Davy Crockett, but it was never built in those years,' he said. 'It certainly has been since then. It was a full implosion bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about 6 inches in diameter.'” I suspect the "What The World Needs Is a Good Two-Kiloton Bomb" might be about what was said about defending Germany from a mass Soviet tank invasion without destroying the country: I paraphrase, "German villages are two kilotons apart."

@@winstonsmith478IIRC Taylor also became known for lighting his cigarette with a nuclear bomb. He put it at the focus of a parabolic mirror that was pointed at the bomb, and he ducked into a trench beneath it. When the bomb went off it lit it up. So not a healthy lifestyle in more ways than one, I guess, but he got cool points for it.

​@@RCAvhstapeTo piggyback off your comment, to address the OP's suggestion to make videos about the book's contents... Scott _did_ make a video about _Project: Orion_ so it's possible he's already come across and/or read the book in question.

Wait, banning atomic explosions in space - doesn't that make Type Ia supernovas illegal?

Still classified fun stuff too probably

bag‘o bombs

7:06 Doesn't it look like there is an open highway between the test site and this camera position? If that was a fizzle ...

Yes, imagine if it exploded at the expected yield...

This. I thought it was mostly flawless, guess there were way more than i thought!

Trinity wasn't trying to optimise to minimise radioactive materials or size. Later tests often were trying to do that sort of optimising, notably by increasing the compression level greatly. Or in some cases were trying to convert a non-spherical shape to spherical or close enough as it was being explosively compressed.

Trinity was over-engineered. Like all engineering, anyone can design a building to stand up. The impressive part is making a building that just barely stands up. Elegance in design isn't when there's nothing left to add; It's when there's nothing left to take away.

@@bobthecannibal1 well put

@@jamesday426 makes sense. I am really curious about the late atomic age stuff / probably still classified stuff. All sorts of interesting “pushing the envelope” size/shape wise, then also all the crazy shaped charge/laser pumper stuff. That and maneuverable reentry vehicles, and tech in the Inertial Guidance / Celestial Navigation, i think that is less classified i just need to read up on it more.

at one point it was expected we'd be fighting while nukes were going off left and right, and having a large civilian population was better, once ICBMs started hitting urban areas. It was a percentages game.

Probably just saw the Davy Crocket demo and confused the details. People misremember things all the time.

@@Pho7on No. My father was a Caltech graduate, a scientist, and would not confuse what he witnessed. He was intimately involved in multiple nuclear test shots.

@@Pho7on "People misremember things all the time" along with "details change over the years" and "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance" among many others are some of the favourite crutches of the false skeptic and conman alike. If you don't believe something, ask questions until you either know it to be true, or can prove it as false. Never just make an unsubstantiated claim against someone with no evidence.

How dramatic. I made an appraisal of an anecdote and you act like I infringed on scientific law.

Lets call it the smallest intentional man-made nuclear explosion. The smallest is propaply a single suitable atom undergoing spontaneous fission, or some kind of air- cosmic radiation interaction. In the slightly bigger category, many particle accellerator experiments come to mind.

​@@nos9784not really, by definition an explosion is the release of a wave of pressure where the rate of dispersal occurs above the speed of sound, forming a shock wave (see the difference between detonation and deflagration). Individual fission reactions do not cause this. As for the fusion reaction, I imagine there would be a small amount of pressure generated, but whether or not it was enough to cause a shockwave is another matter.

Regardless, inertial confinement fusion does act very similarly to a 1 stage thermonuclear device, no uranium fission bomb needed, just a high power chirp laser and an ablative polymer tamper

Actually…🤓 🤓 🤓 🙄🤣

@@BennyAscent interesting... sounds like we need a quantum dynamics equivalent to pressure for my stuff to count :D I'm more interested in nerding out than a battle of definitions, though. I think in nuclear reactions, the energy is released in form of kinetic energy of the products as well as radiation. So, a few particles and an electromagnetic field... if those particals are faster than sound, they might count as a dispersing pressure wave when they disperse their energy via interaction with an environment.

"Ye canny break the laws of physics" -- Commander Scott, Engineering, NCC1701B. The energy budget and physics doesn't add up - the Pascal B explosion was another squib shot, 300 tonnes yield. To get the "manhole cover" (actually a lump of concrete and steel weighing 800kg) to accelerate to anything like the speed extrapolated from the camera recording would have required accelerating the air in the vertical shaft (about 180kg in total) to the same speed and more, and the speed of sound in air is a hard physical limit to the velocity the air and the shaft cover could attain.

no, with shockwaves the speed of sound goes out the window

@@tommihommi1 Sadly they don't. It would be nice but... Nukes do cheat a little, direct radiative heating of the atmosphere around the fireball from X-rays cause a faster-than-speed-of-sound shockwave as measured by instruments at a distance, but that's a very special case that didn't apply in the Pascal-B test since there was no direct radiative coupling between the test device and the air in the shaft. It's a nice tale, the nuclear-powered manhole that flew so fast it left the Earth forever but unfortunately it's just a tale.

@@robertsneddon731 Speed of sound in air is limited to Mach 1, but the speed of air is not.

@@captsorghum If the air in front is being pushed from the back by more air then it travels at the "speed of sound", the speed a pressure pulse can move in a given medium such as air. Increasing the temperature increases the SoS for any gas but it's why guns driven by chemical propellant limit out at about 1700m/s (tank guns, typically), the very hot gas (mostly CO2) behind the shell can't move faster than its SoS to accelerate it more. The SoS for hydrogen is much higher than air so that gas heated up is used for collision experiments up to 7000m/s. For higher speeds there are railguns and rockets.

sorry to hear that, mate. Never know if it was deliberate negligence in those days or they just plain didn't realise the danger to the serviceman. Must have been one hell of a view though

The best Olympic shot put athletes might be able to throw a nuclear hand grenade far enough that they wouldn't be caught in the fireball or the instant-death part of the pressure wave of some of the smaller fizzles. Of course they'd probably die of radiation poisoning a few weeks later, but they could throw a nuclear hand grenade and not die instantly, and that's really something.

I have no idea whether this comment is gibberish or I’m just sleep deprived so ima leave this reply here so some notif will drag me back here when my brain isn’t scrampled egg

​@@oberonpanopticonmades sense to me

​@@oberonpanopticonIt's not gibberish, it's accurate. Or at least mostly. Many full two stage devices were also tested at NTS.

I don't know (and I don't know if it is declassified or not) the yield of primaries in Thermonuclear bombs, but I always assumed they had to generate around 1% of the final yield (or more in early ones), unless their technology to redirect neutrons and photons for long enough was really ingenious very quickly. Idea of 1kT primary detonating 5MT secondary (approx. 0.02%) would be really scary. Also (reason why I thought it could be classified) it could give insight into how efficient warhead geometry and materials were. Which would be one more information about those that is given to others. Not saying I don't believe you, I do in fact. I just wonder if you have any info on ratios or even specific numbers on some warheads (yield of primary and secondary - I don't think there were many devices that had tertiary, since it would be big and maintenance would be difficult) that you could share.

The Soviets and British had layered secondaries. Does make you wonder if the latter’s notoriously porous security is how Stalin managed to build his Tsar Bomba.

He should be the science officer on star trek or for UK space agency

The Mk-54 wasn't a true neutron bomb.

Actually they are not. An enhanced radiation, or neutron, bomb is actually just a very small thermonuclear weapon in the range of a few kilotons to perhaps 10 kt max. They are just optimized to generate a lethal pulse of neutrons instead of heat and pressure as their primary kill mechanism, but they are still just very small nuclear weapons with lethal ranges measured in perhaps 1 to 2 km compared to the city killing multi megaton weapons killing every thing withing many tens of km.

Why do you find them more scary than any other nuclear weapon?

​@@schr75 I guess the scary part is dying through the innumerous horrible effects that radiation can cause to you

Because the detonation may cause no apparent true devastation until living things begin vomiting and turning red.@@neshirst-ashuach1881

JPL v Goddard

Ah yes, the good old "who hates us more than ourselves"

You need to achieve critical mass to build a nuclear warhead, so there is a lower limit to how small warheeads can be.

​@@zockertwinsnot if you increase the density of the material. The critical mass of U235 is 52kg, but these 'backback' bombs will use less and rely on compression

You're in luck, he has a whole playlist on the subject made a few years ago

@@QuantumHistorian I know, already watched those twice now😂

@@samuraidriver4x4 taking notes, don't ya? ;)

@@ivoivanov7407 I find it hella interesting 😁

Orion actually designed special "shaped charge" nuclear devices to preferentially release energy in one direction. These evolved into a space weapon concept known as the casaba howitzer.

Perhaps because above 27 hours the counter will roll over to zero and trigger the detonation circuits instantly? 100.000 seconds is just over 27 and a half hours.

Very good point@@Stoney3K

You wrap around to zero and BOOM.

I love that your Grandfather pulled strings to get his grandchild CLOSER to a nuclear explosion... Men were MEN back then.

Yeah right, I know he is no CGI but they could of at least done some lense trickery to make it look bigger on the horizon

I can certainly agree with that, i know countries want to kill the enemy's soldiers, but you don't need to make it so they have internal bleeding and necrosis while they shit and vomit themselves.

You think instantaneous, say a millisecond or two from alive to char, vaporisation is hideous? Or do you want to put a minimum bound on how long someone has to live before death?

@@jamesday426 Radiation usually kills very slowly, if the tanks and it's operators aren't inside the plasma ball of a nuke, then i think they will die a slow and painful death, if you are going to kill tanks with nukes, at least vaporize them already.

They are not used, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t in the arsenal anymore for precisely those reasons…

Ha... interesting catch. My guess would be that those were in camera, maybe film perforation polluting the frame in a weird way when so much light hit the internals.