Nuclear Engineer reacts to Kurzgesagt 'What if We Detonated All Nuclear Bombs at Once?'

00:52 Skip Intro

[Zelurpio]

I like how he doesn't pause after every statement, and instead pauses when an actually important statement is made, or when there is more to be said that Kurzgesagt left out.

[PikaPetey]

The "green stuff" is for better visual communication. Im sure youve noticed that big ben tower isnt purple.

[samuels]

The uranium stuff is covered in one of the end scenes of one of the videos, it also explains why some stars and black holes are decorated. The target audience likely wouldn't believe a faint blue glow representing radioactive material, and it would require another 10% of runtime to convince them exactly why it glows blue.

[MrLeroyvanriet]

Amazing videos man, i'm a big kurzgesagt fan but your in depth details make it even better. Keep up the good work!

[petersmythe]

Uranium does tend to glow a nice neon green under UV light though. It has nothing to do with radioactivity or fission. It just turns out it's a fluorescent material. They used to sometimes use it for glow in the dark stuff but it turns out it's a toxic heavy metal several times more dangerous than lead (again, this has nothing to do with its radioactivity).

They also used to make Radium phosphorescent glow paint, but that was not glow in the dark. Rather, it used horrifyingly radioactive material to make paint that glows for millennia without an extermal power source.

This has since been replaced by Tritium, which is also horrifyingly radioactive but the radiation isn't penetrating.

[iKvetch]

Coming to this a bit late, but I enjoyed your reaction to this video.
You were a bit low on the numbers of warheads in the stockpiles at the height of the Cold War...the global peak was in the mid 1980s when the number topped 70k total warheads stockpiled among all nuclear armed nations. The number of deployed warheads was somewhat smaller, but still topped the 25k level between the US and Soviets, , , if that is what you were referring to. ✌

[fabriziobiancucci]

Technically the power of all nuclear weapons would be much larger. The video only consider all bombs as uranium bombs. But hidrogen bombs are much more powerful. For example, the Tsar bomb alone is enough to rebuild 1/3 of Manhatthan. If we detonate the real nuclear bombs that we have, the damage will be far heavier

[jwenting]

big factor not taken into account is that the effects don't scale linearly like this.
Many of the warheads would simply be demolished by the blast rather than add to the explosive yield. The would add a bit to the fallout, but not to the actual destructive effect or the radiation and thermal pulses.
This is why when a target is to be hit by multiple warheads in close proximity they're staggered in time (and usually space) so each warhead arrives after the main blast of the previous one has dissipated.
This isn't just the case with nuclear weapons, obviously, but with conventional explosives as well.

[justgame]

More than anything this video shows the immense power of a large object moving very quickly. Using all the uranium of an entire planet for thermo-nuclear reactions is only just equivalent to getting a big rock and throwing it at the planet. It’s incredible life has survived all the extinction level events it has, especially considering the dinosaurs extinction event wasn’t even the worse, not even close in terms of percentage of the planets biomass killed

[orenjineko]

8:57 That's a cartoon version of the helmet - part of a Power Armor in the Fallout (game) universe.

[zhadoomzx]

Next question to tackle: what if we used up all of the deuterium in earth's oceans to build as many thermonuclear warheads as possible?
My best guess: many many many orders of magnitude more power... probably even enough to gravitationally unbind earths entire mass, blowing the planet into a hot, expanding cloud of plasma, surpassing even the power of the death star from Star Wars.

[Anime_logics]

Yellow uranium would probably would be one of the most cursed things i have ever seen

[akashkrishnat]

I think it was around 70000 bombs at height of cold war, but i maybe wrong

[darkwolfythi]

You are so under rated you need more subs

[Nepomniachtchi_Austin]

I think uranium is erroneously depicted as green just because that's what a huge majority of people associate with radioactive materials. Makes it easier to communicate ideas concerning the topic

[carloy]

If you liked that video you might also like "The Day the Dinosaurs Died – Minute by Minute" by Kurzgesagt. I liked your reaction!

[wuguxiandi]

The comments talking about how the maths is off, should remember that there is almost no eay to successfully detonate 15, 000 warheads without some of them being destroyed before they activate.

[TBomb]

I think we're down to about 13000 now. great move

[izabellafulop]

Oh boy I sure do hope that nothing bad happens to Brazil

[_AcatHat]

I really like your videos, thank you....A little thing about the original that gets to me, he said "decimate" the city's that means get rid of 1 out of 10... What he meant was 💯% of the citys gone