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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
The Most Insane Weapon You Never Heard About
The Most Insane Weapon You Never Heard About
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
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13:55 · Nov 5, 2024
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In
the
1950s
the
US
began
the
top
secret
project
Sundial,
Translating…
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0:00
In the 1950s the US began the top secret project Sundial,
0:05
most of it is still classified.
0:07
The goal: a single nuclear bomb
0:09
so powerful it would destroy all of human civilization.
0:13
Conceived in cold logic from the mind of a genius scientist.
0:17
Sundial had the energy equivalent of 10 billion tons of TNT.
0:21
A pyramid of explosives thirteen times taller than the actual Great Pyramid.
0:26
Three thousand more than all the bombs dropped during World War II.
0:30
If you dropped the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima every minute,
0:33
it would take you over 15 months to match Sundial.
0:37
How was it even possible for us to achieve this insane level of madness?
0:42
Everything is Different Forever Let’s set the stage.
0:46
If you were 40 in 1945
0:48
that means you were you had been born in 1905 – back
0:51
then monarchs ruled over much of the world,
0:54
only 3% of homes in the US had electricity, cities were dominated by horses,
0:59
the first experimental planes had just flown.
1:02
Less than a hundred thousand soldiers died in war each year.
1:06
Imagine growing up in this world
1:08
and seeing change almost too fast to keep up with.
1:11
By 1945, 24 million soldiers
1:14
and 50 million civilians had died in two world wars.
1:18
And suddenly there were TVs, microwaves, jet planes and … nuclear bombs.
1:23
They kind of broke the brains of the people alive back then.
1:27
Overnight, nowhere from the edge of space to the bottom of the ocean was
1:31
safe.
1:32
It's hard for us today to understand the level of terror this instilled in
1:35
people.
1:36
The implications were wild.
1:38
Without nuclear weapons it seemed you would stand no chance in future conflicts.
1:43
Nations without that power would get trampled by those that did have it,
1:46
no matter how big their armies were.
1:49
There was one brief moment where it could all have been stopped:
1:52
In 1946 the US proposed the Baruch Plan
1:55
and promised to get rid of their atom bombs,
1:57
share nuclear technology with the world
1:59
and set up an international authority to make sure no-one ever builtds such weapons
2:03
again.
2:04
But the military advantage of nuclear bombs was too great to let go.
2:09
Just three years later the Soviet Union detonated their first atom bomb.
2:14
This caught everyone by complete surprise.
2:17
The Soviets were not decades behind American technology but had just pulled even.
2:21
Shock turned into fear.
2:23
And fear makes people do crazy things.The whole concept of what war was
2:28
and how it would be won was overturned in a hot second.
2:31
In a world where your enemy could fly over your soldiers
2:34
and vaporise your cities,
2:36
the only answer seemed to be a nuclear arsenal
2:38
that could strike faster
2:39
and harder.
2:40
The nuclear arms race began.
2:43
In 1946 there were just 9 nuclear bombs in the world.
2:46
In 1950 the number was 300.
2:49
In 1960 it would be 20,000.
2:53
In a way the nuclear arms race was pretty daft.
2:56
One superpower would develop a powerful new bomb and detonate it.
2:59
And then the other side would build something more powerful and blow it up,
3:03
and this would continue endlessly.
3:05
A dirty and wasteful game of creating more
3:07
and more horror that seemed totally reasonable at the time.
3:11
Superpowers spent trillions to have thousands of the most intelligent people show off how
3:15
hard they could destroy humanity.
3:17
Fear had to be met with much greater horrors,
3:20
and one man knew how to make nightmares real.
3:24
But What if We Destroy Humanity Even HARDER?
3:27
Edward Teller was a brilliant Hungarian theoretical physicist.
3:31
He was among the first people to realize
3:33
that the fission chain reaction in uranium could make a bomb.
3:36
And he helped to build it.
3:37
But for Teller, the bombs were not powerful enough.
3:40
He was ready to pay any price for security.
3:43
And to be more secure, to be less afraid,
3:45
he urged that larger bombs were the answer.
3:48
Even in the 1950s this was a pretty hot take
3:51
and many scientists were appalled by his ideas.
3:54
He didn’t care one bit
3:55
and incessantly lobbied scared politicians to green light more devastating nuclear weapons.
4:00
And lucky for him, his timing was just right.
4:04
Terrified by the rapid nuclear progress of the Soviet Union,
4:07
he got a blank cheque from the military to bring his most destructive fantasy
4:11
to life.
4:11
It took him only a few years to make them a reality:
4:14
The Hydrogen bomb.
4:16
A hydrogen bomb is
4:17
so powerful that it needs a regular atom bomb just to trigger it.
4:21
It is basically a nuke, the first stage,
4:24
next to a capsule of fusion fuel, the second stage,
4:26
encased by dense materials like lead.
4:29
When the atom bomb is detonated,
4:31
it releases stupendousungodly amounts of X-rays that get channelled onto the capsule.
4:36
The capsule’s surface explodes,
4:38
pushing inward and compressing the fusion fuel
4:40
so violently that for a brief moment it simulates a star.
4:44
When this bomb was first tested in 1952 it instantly erased a pacific island
4:49
from the map.
4:50
Two years later he tested an even bigger nuke,
4:53
1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
4:56
The world recoiled in horror.
4:58
With weapons this powerful war stopped being about winning
5:02
and total human annihilation became very real.
5:06
Teller celebrated.
5:07
In just two years he had enabled the creation of American warheads a hundred
5:12
times more powerful.
5:13
He had stolen the nuclear fire from the gods
5:16
and awoken cosmic horrors
5:17
but he insisted that it was still not enough.
5:21
His dream was to have a bomb of almost unlimited power.
5:24
And once again, his timing was pretty great.
5:28
When the Soviet Union detonated its own hydrogen bomb,
5:31
it sparked a new wave of fear.
5:34
This is where we get the top secret project Sundial.
5:37
The bomb to make all other bombs irrelevant.
5:40
The Final Bomb Teller skipped right to the end.
5:44
The end of the nuclear arms race.
5:46
He wanted to build a world destroyer.
5:48
Something so breathtakingly destructive, so incredibly scary,
5:52
that it made no sense to continue playing.
5:55
Almost everything about it is still classified,
5:58
but what we do know about it is terrifying.
6:00
Work on it actually began and tests were planned.
6:04
Sundial wouldn’t be some warhead loaded up onto a bomber
6:07
and dropped on a target.
6:08
No.
6:09
It would be a backyard bomb.
6:11
After all, if a bomb can destroy the world,
6:13
why bother moving it at all?
6:15
No need to bring it close to your enemies,
6:17
you could as well just put it in your backyard.
6:20
Maybe it would have actually been put in the center of the country,
6:22
maybe it would have been put on a remote island
6:24
or stored on a ship,
6:26
we don’t know what the actual plans were.
6:28
But this underlines how insane this weapon was
6:30
and that Teller knew exactly what he was proposing.
6:33
In his mind, the rationale was the ultimate deterrence –
6:36
If you attack us
6:37
or our allies we will destroy the world.
6:40
On a technical level his concept was not even that complicated.
6:44
It was probably some kind of nuclear matryoshka doll.
6:47
The truly breathtaking thing is the idea itself
6:50
and that he actually attempted to make it real.
6:53
From what we know, Sundial would have weighed at least 2000 tons,
6:56
as massive as a 250 meter long cargo train.
7:00
It would explode with the power of at least 10 billion tons of TNT.
7:04
A number so big it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
7:07
So let’s make this a bit more graphic and explode it in Nevada.
7:11
One wild thing about it is that humanity never tested anything remotely like it,
7:15
so this is the best speculation we developed together with experts.
7:19
For a brief moment a fireball of pure energy appears,
7:22
up to 50 kilometres in diameter, larger than the visible horizon.
7:27
It radiates blistering heat at the speed of light.
7:30
Everything within 400 km is instantly set on fire – every tree, house, person.
7:36
The energy would reach much further,
7:38
but the explosion is
7:39
so big that the Earth’s horizon curves away from it.
7:43
The surrounding deserts turn into a field of glass.
7:46
Then comes the blast wave.
7:48
The atmosphere above the explosion is violently shot into space,
7:52
a magnitude 9 earthquake shakes the United States
7:55
while the sound of the blast reverberates around the world.
7:58
North American forests burn,
8:00
adding their soot to the bomb’s radioactive fallout to create toxic death clouds
8:05
that shroud the world like a dark curtain.
8:07
Sundial is like a nuclear war happening all at once.
8:11
But it's more like a giant volcano erupting or an asteroid striking,
8:15
than a nuclear war.
8:15
Sundial would bring about an apocalyptic nuclear winter,
8:19
where global temperatures suddenly drop by 10°C,
8:22
most water sources would be contaminated and crops would fail everywhere.
8:27
Most people in the world would die.
8:29
So uhm.
8:30
Congratulations, you won?
8:33
Good News!
8:34
Wait no, Bad News!
8:37
The good news is that Sundial was never built.
8:40
Most details are still top secret.
8:42
But we know that scientists reacted with horror
8:44
and politicians who were secretly informed responded with disbelief.
8:48
Even the US Military thought this was a bit much.
8:51
In the insane world of nuclear arms, this madness was too much,
8:55
building it considered a crime against humanity.
8:58
And it had other problems too.
9:00
A single apocalypse weapon leaves you no wiggle room.
9:04
Would you press the button
9:05
if enemy soldiers crossed a distant country’s borders
9:07
or attacked one of your distant bases?
9:10
Would you end the world if your rival overthrew a friendly government?
9:13
Can you protect an ally with a bomb that would kill them too?
9:17
The elephant in the room is
9:18
that while Sundial is clearly insane – humanity still kind of did build it.
9:23
At the peak of the cold war humanity had over 70,000 nukes.
9:27
Even today we still have about 12,000 nuclear weapons,
9:31
enough to destroy human civilization.
9:33
Instead of a single world burner,
9:35
the superpowers built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons of all types and sizes.
9:40
Hidden in submarines or waiting in bunkers and silos.
9:44
And this sounds so much more reasonable, doesn’t it?
9:47
But this also makes them a much more credible threat.
9:50
Because if people feel they can risk setting off a smaller nuke,
9:53
they might actually get launched.
9:55
And we don’t know what kind of chain reaction this might trigger.
9:58
So in reality the difference between Sundial
10:01
and what we have today is not even
10:03
that big.
10:04
Humanity didn’t build a doomsday bomb but a doomsday machine.
10:09
Today the world may be on the verge of another nuclear arms race.
10:13
The US is on track to spend a trillion dollars on nuclear modernization programs
10:17
while China is expanding its arsenal
10:19
and might have more than 1000 nuclear weapons ready to be deployed by 2030.
10:24
So far we've escaped the existential threat these weapons pose –
10:28
but if an alien visited earth,
10:30
it might ask us if we are ok and need a hug.
10:33
We should ask ourselves
10:34
as a species if we really want to be ready to destroy ourselves at
10:38
a moment's notice.
10:42
Phew, that was a lot.
10:43
Science is never inherently good or bad.
10:46
It’s up to us to use our sense of curiosity
10:49
and exploration for something positive.
10:51
If you want to impart this spirit onto the kids in your life from
10:54
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10:55
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We like KiwiCo because with their new learning club program they are fostering a
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just like we want to.
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It’s time to reveal our darkest secret.
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but kurzgesagt is not actually run by birbs…
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