Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Kyle Hill 'The Castle Bravo Disaster - A Second Hiroshima'

Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Kyle Hill "The Castle Bravo Disaster - A Second Hiroshima"

[AlexMDHUN]

These early H-Bomb designs weren't "clean" as most of their energy came from fast fission of the natural or depleted uranium "tamper" which surrounds the fusion fuel. This was not the first time the scientists thought something would be inert just to turn out that it wasn't. In the case of the uranium tamper the U-238 was thought to be mostly "inert" (just like the case of fission bombs). But as it turned out the high energy neutrons from fusion turn U-238 to be one of the most reactive elements in a fusion bomb. By the time the Castle test series was conducted this fact was known since Ivy Mike, which was predicted to be 1-4Mt, exploded with 10.7Mt-s, around 6Mt-s coming from fast fission. In its crater new elements (Es, Fm where detected) and new more stable isotopes of trans-uranium elements were found which could not be synthetized in labs at that time (Pu-244, Cm-247). This was due to the R-process. In the Bravo event 5Mt-s came from fusion and 10Mt-s was from fast fission. In terms of fallout Castle Bravo was not a "Second Hiroshima" rather than 3-4 Chernobyl accidents before that power plant was even built. Later "clean" thermonuclear weapon designs replaced the uranium tamper with lead. This was the case of the Tsar-bomb and Redwing Navajo.

[caerdwyn]

My father participated in that test as a naval pilot flying a plane full of scientists and instruments.
He died while still in his 40's in the early 70s, when I was very young, having had numerous cancers including lung, kidney, thyroid, CRC, leukemia and melanoma.

[TheTransporter]

The crazy part is the fission primary is compressed, reacts and initiates the fusion secondary BEFORE the high explosives destroy the bomb casing and the hohlraum. c > detonation wave

[thetowndrunk]

Absolutely love this channel. I think you’re doing great things to push nuclear forward. It is the most viable alternative to fossil that we have. Just have to get past the unfounded fear

[Doktor_Apokalypse]

The two-piece swimwear for women got its name from this after the designer, Louis Réard, said that the impact of the design would be "as explosive as the nuclear tests at bikini." and the name stuck.

[Rob_Fordd]

IIRC there was just one Tsar Bomb. It could have been calibrated to explode with 100 megatons, but as you stated that would create an inescapable blast radius. Thus it was set to 50 megatons so the bomber could escape.

[Marco-cgfb]

I've been waiting for you to react to this video, such a crazy incident. You've quickly become one of, if not my favourite channel, full of information presented in an informative yet engaging way. Watching you speak about the nuclear industry has funny enough driven my ambition to strive for work in the same field, hopefully in the foreseeable future, albeit in Europe :D

[patheddles]

I can't cite a source offhand, but my understanding of the Tsar Bomba design and yield:
- Original design yield 100Mt (there was no second test planned)
- Guy in charge of the development, Andrei Sakharov, decided that 100Mt was too big
- Therefore, fairly late in development, half of the uranium tamper was swapped out for lead. Hence 'only' 50Mt yield.

Also yeah, gotta agree that there was no hiding the Castle Bravo explosion. USSR would have already know when and where and roughly how powerful it was, and their nuclear scientists definitely would have at least known that it was way too powerful for a simple fission bomb. The forced disclosure from the US government probably just saved the Soviet scientists a bunch of extra work figuring out exactly what design the US had used.

[dannyboi]

Just for the record, the spongebob thing is just a coincidence. Spongbob started off as a comic called the interedtidle zone. It was eventually turned into spongbob a few years later. The radiation theory has been debunked on multiple occasions

[RMJTOOLS]

Back in the early ‘80’s I was working as a young aircraft mechanic. I worked with an old timer who was in the Air Force at the time of this test and was based in Kwajalein in support of the transport aircraft. He told me there was a lot of dignitaries watching the event on bleachers. The bomb exploded then shortly after the ignition all the dignitaries were hustled to the planes which got ready to take off. My friend and the support staff were told to wait in the Quonset huts.

[ItsCryptcal]

Love the Kyle Hill reactions! Keep it up!

[FSAPOJake]

If you want to really put this explosion to scale - the fission bomb used in the Upshot-Knothole Climax test was identical to the fission stage used in the Shrimp (AKA the Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb). You look at that test footage and you see this absolutely massive 61-kiloton blast (roughly 3x Fat Man). That intense amount of energy was used just to kickstart the fusion reaction in the Shrimp and barely contributed to the total explosive yield (about 1/246th the total energy output of the device).

We never needed bombs this big. We set this thing off just to show off to the Soviets and the Chinese. That's it. The Soviets participated in just as much "showing off" as we did, if not more.

[BipolarBLKSheep]

Has Kyle ever commented on these videos? Has he ever reached out to you directly? I'm just curious what his opinion/reaction to these is. I quite enjoy the extra information you provide over these great videos. :)

[lavalamp]

You have to feel sorry for the Bikini islanders, they were told they needed to move but could return soon. By 1948 they were on the verge of starvation and evacuated again to a different island 200 miles away. To this day they cannot return to their home on Bikini island, it is still too contaminated with radiation so they are effectively nuclear refugees. The American government outright lied to them to get them to move off their island home for those nuclear tests, they were told they would soon be able to return. Castle Romeo - the second of the Castle series of tests which were conducted in 1954, it had a yield of 11 megatons. Castle Yankee - the second-strongest of the Castle bombs, it was conducted on May 4, 1954 and had a yield of 13.5 megatons. Four days after its detonation, a fallout from it reached Mexico City, which was 7, 100 miles away. The real victims of these tests, the Bikini islanders, are still paying the price today.

[John_Ridley]

I remember as a kid in the 70s reading an old issue of Popular Mechanics I found in my dad's shelves. One was from the year before they set off this test, and there was speculation that a hydrogen fusion bomb could set of a chain reaction of hydrogen fusion in the atmosphere and blow up the planet.
Of course, Pop Mech has all kinds of crazy stuff in it from time to time - they also ran a story about what kind of animal we would find on various planets, including rhino like things living on Venus.
I'd rate it up there with the people who were super concerned that LHC was going to create black holes and destroy the earth.

[DavidRichardson]

Do not take my word for it, but I suspect they called Castle Bravo "a second Hiroshima" not because of the detonation itself, not the mechanism or the specifics of its location for detonation, but because of how its effects came out of nowhere and affected Far Eastern islanders (namely the Japanese) the most.

I agree that as far as the detonation itself goes, Nagasaki would be a more accurate "second Hiroshima, " but due to the somewhat altered specifics for its bomb, along with the quite different terrain Nagasaki was located in that provided quite a few pockets of protection from the blast, Nagasaki ended up being much less devastated than Hiroshima. Yes, it was still devastated, and the deaths resulting from it were as tragic as those from Hiroshima, but as far as the overall outcome goes, when compared to Hiroshima, Nagasaki got off lightly (again, I am not downplaying what happened - I am only speaking comparatively). There is also the fact that Hiroshima was the first announcement ever - to Japan, the American public, and of course the entire world - that nuclear weapons now exist, so there was something of an advance warning for Nagasaki, not in that it would be targeted (it was not even the primary target, but a backup in case the actual primary target was unreachable), but that if there was one nuke, which was used over Hiroshima, there could very well already be another and that it may very well be used too.

In quite a few ways, Castle Bravo is more of a "second Hiroshima" than Nagasaki, from it being the first of its kind, the uncertainty over the actual effects of it (as you probably knew long before movies like Oppenheimer, some feared that the first nuclear bomb detonated would be powerful enough to ignite the whole atmosphere), the sheer terror that many of those involved in the detonation felt over it, and as I mentioned at the start, how it affected Far Eastern Islanders most of all, particularly in the realm of radiation sickness and fallout.

So yeah, I do not blame them at all for calling Castle Bravo a "second Hiroshima." Of course, as I also said at the start, I suspect this, meaning that I can really only speculate on this, as unlike with you, nuclear physics/engineering is not my background (it is microbiology and chemistry), so again, do not take my word on this. This is simply my take after having had to learn a lot more about customer service and public relations (some of it the hard way) for some of the positions I have held.

[Deutritium]

The crazy part is that Bravo and Ivy Mike weren’t the only two surface detonations at Bikini and Enewetak. All Castle series shots were either exploded in shot cabs on the islands themselves or onboard barges that were moored in place off the coasts of the islands inside the lagoon. More tests like this were done in Operations Redwing and Hardtack I. The reason being for better controlled conditions for diagnostics and data analysis collection. It’s hard to do that when dropping a bomb from an aircraft. Even though by the mid-fifties we already had aircraft-deliverable hydrogen bombs and thus could have avoided massive fallout contamination, we still chose the dirtier method of testing them on the surface for the reasons already mentioned.

[johncgibson]

4:50 makes sense to have a safety margin of 10000% when you are doing a fission bomb as a primer inside a canister of that is hard to calculate its strength under untested scenario.

[limabravo]

No, thermonuclear weapons don't utilize fission in only their primary, the fusion stage has a plutonium spark plug at its center and if a U238 tamper around the fusion fuel is used, it can add up to 50% of the reactions energy

[Merennulli]

Spongebob was created by a marine science teacher who was working in animation and wanted to incorporate what he knew. Several core elements were based on the Gulf of Mexico, including the secondary character Sandy, a squirrel from Texas. It uses the modern Caribbean pirate stereotype for several elements, has a nearby town that pans out to show the Gulf of Mexico quite clearly, and several of Bikini Bottom's features are clear references to then-recently studied things in the Gulf. And they went to Atlantis.

They do go to the Marianas Trench and the Great Barrier Reef, but they also go to Atlantis (mythical, but definitely either Mediterranean or Atlantic) and clearly Mediterranean locations as well. So they play a little loose with where things are, but it's primarily in the Gulf of Mexico, not the Bikini Atoll.

The notion that it's the result of radiation from this test AND the notion that it's below Bikini atoll are related fan theories. The voice actor for Spongebob, Tom Kenny, was asked by fans about that theory and "confirmed" Bikini Atoll while he "denied" they were mutants from the radiation. He's not the writer so it's probably not Bikini Atoll, but even if you assume he's right, then he still denied the nuclear test angle.

So, no, Spongebob is not the US reaction to the nuclear tests.