Hydrogen bombs are TOO BIG to be worth making

From my conversation with Richard Rhodes, historian and author of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb."

[williamv]

nato generals used to joke that the villages in Germany were only a kiloton or 2 apart in distance.

[poodlescone]

So you are saying an Independence Day mothership is a good target for a hydrogen bomb.

[stephenjacks]

"Tsar Bomba", biggest tested, was 50 Megatons.

[jessa]

You may only use a 100 kiloton bomb but if you have 50 of them you can take out a coast line and not have to waste nuclear energy into space.

[raytribble]

My mother was a Hiroshima survivor and I never met my Japanese grandparents, my 2 uncles and 1 aunt. My mother lived to be 83 and told me about that day when I was 12. I pray no one ever uses another nuclear or thermonuclear device.

[polycarp]

Reminds me of a joke.
Alien1: sir, the humans have nuclear weapons!

Alien 2: so they are intelligent then?

Alien1: not really sir, they are pointing them at each other!

[beezzarro]

This is just a tip to everyone reading: if you want to save time in your life, just do what this guy did to this video and crank the playback speed of lectures and podcasts. No joke, i listen to things like this at x2 speed because we can actually understand words and, by extension, topics at much faster speeds than we can speak them. An hour lecture becomes half an hour. A voice message becomes less than a minute out of my day. Try it.

[northdot]

For clarity sake, when they say 1000 megatons, they are talking about the weight of tnt that would release the same amount of energy, not the weight of the bomb. Can someone back me up on this? I think I'm right but I'm not 100% sure.

[stuartanderws]

The Russian's made the biggest Bomb. The designer could have made it bigger but it frightened him. It was big enough already.

[ThePrimaFacie]

The sped up laugh made the presenter/interviewer sound a little maniacal. Im not saying they are but just a heads up for later sped up shorts. Also out of context someone might wanna be silly with it.

[randycampbell]

Oddly I remember an article in the European Stars&Stripes which covered an incident at a Physics Conference in New York at which a Soviet physicist was removed from the stage and and escorted to the airport to await a flight home. His white board was confiscated with it being mentioned that the reason for all this was because the equation he was writing was essentially how to construct a Gigaton bomb :)

[Delosian]

The atmosphere is 100 kilometres (62 miles) deep, it is called the Karman Line.

[damonedrington]

There’s also the fact that if you have one nuke that’s say, 100 megatons, and two that are 50 megatons, you can get a lot more done with those two at half power, because you can hit two different areas. This is why most nukes cap out around the low megatons even on the higher end. It’s just not worth it to make it bigger, because making a nuke twice as powerful costs much more than twice the price

[justagerman]

Let's casually laugh at the destruction of countless lives in double speed

[patricklemire]

You know it’s crazy when Teller says it’s overkill

[patrickjones]

Another reason is because more small bomb is better for covering terrain on the ground than big one. Ten 10kt bombs strategically placed will cover significantly more area on the ground than one 100kt bomb.

[lemmingsfly]

It’s hard to get people to understand putting an end to this war and preventing Operation Downfall- the invasion of Japan saved millions of lives. There are prices to be paid in war and there is no doubt that even this late in the war these were necessary. The US had plans to drop 12 more nuclear bombs during the invasion.

Another sad thing is that the Japanese aren’t taught about the Pacific War hardly or correctly in school and aren’t aware of their people murdering and raping millions of mostly Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos and suffered brutal defeats on the battlefield and seas for years after a few early victories because the US wasn’t war hungry like the Japanese and hadn’t prepared to fight. It didn’t take long for our Marines to show them how to die for their emperor though. At least they wore uniforms and didn’t hide as civilians and use human shields like how Arabs “fight”.

I’ll leave you with this if you thought Nazis were bad then check out Japan’s unit 731 and prepare for similar horror. Also in China a game that Japanese soldiers played was throwing babies up in the air and trying to catch them on their bayonets. We do not understand the brutality of these people and their brainwashed mindset which is why the nuclear bomb sounds harsh today but in reality they deserved a lot worse then that. They were literally training children and whole families to fight American men with bamboo spears. All for their Emperor. This only scratches the surface of the Pacific War and if you learn more about it you will understand why the US did what it did. There were more then enough reasons including the Japanese murdering our Allies, the Chinese for years before Pearl Harbor started with a sneak attack before declaring war.

[spaceman]

It's generally recognized today that even the Tsar Bomba (50 MT) is much too big to be practical. That's why ICBM warheads are in the 100-400 kt (0.1-0.4 MT) range. For a large spread-out target area, such as the Bos-Wash corridor on the east coast or the San-San corridor on the west coast, it's much more effective to use lower yield multiple warheads than one super large one. That's why ICBMs are MIRV'd these days.

[radioactiveassassin]

True, better to have ten 100 megatons ones, than to have one 1000 megaton bomb

[eboyjim]

Dude these interviews are fantastic. Really genuinely intelligent conversation. No dramatics or assumptions. Just smart, educated people having discussions about things they’re actually informed about. So refreshing.