Fallout’s Mini Nukes Really Exist 

Hello vault dwellers! Thanks for watching. I *can* fast travel when enemies are nearby, because my show. Here's the test footage of the DC in action if you're curious: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xHiihPD7bLM.html See you in footnotes! -- KH

I know nothing about nuclear physics, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that you can’t fast travel when an enemy is nearby.

5:50 "You cannot fast travel with enemies nearby"

4/10 loading screen was unrealistically fast

Actually, both US and USSR also made a range of nuclear cannon shells with calibers of 155mm and 152mm respectively. They ranged in power from 0.07KT for W48 to about 2-2.5KT for W82 and the Soviet 3VB3. These, especially the Soviet one, are actually the size of the mini nuke in Fallout series. Or at the very least a lot closer to it.

Science..science never changes Wait. No it totally does, all the time

oh...oh my... that sponsor did not age well...

I feel like that Fallout takes place in an alternate universe in where either the uranium and plutonium they have access to puts out or radiates significantly weaker radiation, or through either passive genetics, genetic experimentation, or evolution Humans process and can handle radiation very differently than they do in the real world. For example: One dose of 5 Sieverts of radiation will kill you, but in the fallout universe there are many that survived close to ground zero blast areas and lived under heavy radioactive fallout for years and years and years... By all accounts, all human life should be dead, but in the Fallout universe many of those surviving humans became Ghouls, and some Humans appear to not have been overtly affected by the global fallout hardly at all.

Oh wow, Bethesda couldn't even give him proper fabric and gave him canvas just like the bags.

Ironically you can get hurt or irradiated by using the mini nuke because it cant always launch it far enough away. If you read the lore you find the launcher never made it out of prototype because it couldn't get enough distance.

This sponsor didn't age well but Todd gave Kyle money so I'm happy

4:40 How dare that guy insult your luscious hair!

5:48 You cannot fast travel when enemies are nearby. Even if it's funny.

Hi all! It's been a while. I'd like to remark that the critical mass of plutonium can be as low as 6.2kg when high explosives are used to compress it to over twice its density. It should yield about 12 to 15kT per kg, but small nuclear devices are incredibly inefficient and dirty. Less than 1% of the nuclear material undergoes fission. This means that 99% of the plutonium or uranium is just vaporised and dispersed into the environment. Every small nuclear device is a 'dirty bomb'.

Nuclear launch detected. Wait wrong game.

5:26 "I'm just taking my pet nuke for a walk." The Expanse has nukes about that size, and one of the characters got stuck with one that had a broken timer, leaving him with only the dead-man's-switch. He still needed to explore his situation, which resulted in the line above coming over the radio.

Kyle’s so smart he found out how to fast travel with enemies nearby #Likeaboss

Hey Kyle do you know the F.U.N song? F is for Fire that burns down the whole town. U is for Uranium......... Bombs. N is for No survivors!

When did they add Thor to Fallout?

3:33 Is it just me, or does that actually look like an eye?

"I'm not dropping those papers... I might need them!"

So Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (first printing back in 1959) has a section in the first chapter that deals with what is essentially small nukes. I went and got the book off my shelf and (main character having just launched a pair of rockets at a group of buildings) reads as such: "As I hit, the Y-rack on my shoulder launched two small H.E. bombs a couple of hundred yards each way to my right and left flanks but I never saw what they did as just then my first rocket hit - that unmistakable (if you've ever seen one) brilliance of an atomic explosion. It was just a peewee, of course, less then two kilotons nominal yield, with tamper and implosion squeeze to produce results from a less-then-critical mass - but then who wants to be bunk mates with a cosmic catastrophe? It was enough to clean off that hilltop and make everybody in the city take shelter against the fallout." Based on the kiloton size and other details listed, where would these bombs get placed on the scale you listed? Would it even produce the results desired at that size? The buildings being fired at are not given an actual size, merely "- a lovely big group of what looked like public buildings on a hill." and are located miles away from the main character who has been equipped and trained on how to deal with being too close or looking at such a blast directly. There's nothing else listed in that section about these bombs and without skimming through the entire book again I don't remember any other mention of any atomics during it.

This video was cool, Fallout 76.... not so much.

Kyle: 5:52 Fallout: "Can not fast travel while enemies are nearby"

36 Deathclaws disliked the video.

Aw, not one Metal Gear Solid 3 reference.

Dearest Kyle! I'm warning you! You use either only metric units or only imperial units. Please do not use one in one scene and the other at the next scene! You shall obey this unwritten codex or there will be unforeseen consequences! Love from City 17!

Thank Interplay for having done all of this research back in the 90's, laying the foundation for this video today.

Definitely one of the most interesting episodes I've watched in a long time. Highly informative and entertaining. This man deserves a subscription.

Loved the Fallout loading screen lol

'Physics, Physics Never Changes' You Sure About That? You gonna have to meet my friend SCP-536

I love all the editing and visual effects for this video. You (Because Science) did an excellent job, along with providing something educational, too.

Nuclear bomb: Bringing atoms close enough together until something bad happens.

Iiiiii don't want to set the wooooorld. On fireeeeee!

@3:12 big missed opportunity to add a “+1 cap” in the top left corner.

Mini nukes: I'm about to destroy this man's whole career! RadAway: I'm gonna stop you right there

Very interesting. I had discovered the Davy Crocket's existence while poking around the Fall Out wiki. I am surprised and gratified at the level of detail that you went into about the weapon, and the side by side comparison was most impressive and convincing. Keep up the good work!

Changed your hair? Did it start to fall out? :D

Hey Kyle, nice hair, but you can't fast travel when enemies are nearby, because Bethesda!

6:00 “You cannot fast travel while enemies are nearby.”

I've heard a lot about the davey crocket but I appreciate the level of detail you go into

Hello Kyle! Amazing video as always! I would have loved if you talked about isotopes with low critical mass, such as californium or neptnium, which even thought they are hard to come by, requiring some form residue processing and controled nuclear reactions, are still quite amazing due to the fact that spheres made with these elements may go over criticality with less than 10 cm of diameter, maybe just as little as 7 centimeters (roughly 2,75 inches for imperial guys). Exotic isotopes also make good power sources for thermoelectric generators, another quite interesting fact, and also very likely to be a common power generation method in advanced nuclear scenarios :)

You cannot fast travel when enemies are nearby

Holy shit, the auto-subtitles are practically flawless! It even got the science words right! Your accent is perfect, apparently. Usually I get frustrated when people just have auto-subs, since it usually gets stuff impossibly garbled at least a few times per video... but dang, this is awesome! I can actually understand what you're saying! The content is wonderful, but I am blown away by the sub quality. I'm sorry, this wasn't super on-topic, but I just wanted to thank you for speaking in such a clear American accent and thank the autosub people for getting closer to a good program.

This has been one of my favorite videos Kyle! Super awesome, but a real scare at the same time. Thanks!

Nice costume it's like you just came back from trick or treating and started filming

I just watched a video on Shoddy cast about mini nukes. Great job Kyle. It's good to see your channel growing.

Two interesting things about the Davy Crockett weapon system: the explosion doesn't create a mushroom cloud, and the direct radiation danger zone range is greater than for heat or blast (the reverse is true for larger yield devices).

The Davey Crockett was made off the recoilless rifle. And was the basis of a first strike and siege weapon. Designed to launch, eliminate forces, and the fallout would clear out within 2-3 days… making it the ideal First Strike/Siege weapon and a precursor to an invasion.

Haven't watched the video yet, but I predict it's about the M-388 atomic round (used by the insane M-28/M-29 Davy Crockett weapon system).

two things, first you can't fast travel when enemies are close. Second during the testing footage of the Davy Crockett they look awfully close, like too close.

I just realized He writes backwards

"They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard."

Great vid, love the voice overs. The military also made, and deployed in action, tactical Air to Air missiles like sidewinders. Blew my mind when I learned they actually had those. The idea was since the Russians were so far behind us and Rocket Tech at the time the main fear wasn't intercontinental missiles, but was flocks of atomic bombers coming across the Arctic. And similar to our air campaign during ww2 through their sheer numbers some would make it through to bomb us. Hence the need, they thought, to have the ability for one fighter interceptor to take out massive quantities of Russian bombers.

Ok so I’m being SUPER nit-picky however you used the term “critical” in referring to what happens when a uranium (u-235) atom splits and release app. 2.5 neutrons further causing more fissions... WELLLLL, not 100% true. In a nuclear reactor going “critical” refers to a constant power output. So even though each uranium atom release more then 1 neutron per fission, not all neutrons go on to cause more fissions as you described in your branching diagram. If power output is rising the term is called “Super critical.” That is the number of fissions occurring in the next generation is higher then the previous. Sorry for the long comment. LOVE THE SERIES!!!!

For those that love fallout and want a new fallout game now, check out New California for New Vegas. It will give you a good amount of fallout goodness until the next fallout games, like Fallout Miami, Fallout Cascadia, Fallout Frontier, and Fallout 4: New Vegas.

A franchise built by the power of the atom, and destroyed through hubris.

Ok I love this episode and it has me asking all kinds of questions in my head. First off I imagine a mini nuke would be pretty cost inefficient compared to conventional weapons. I wonder how much it would cost a unit compared to say an equivalent mortar or shoulder fired weapon. Saying that though I also acknowledge that it is not about the money or feasibility it's about the science, oh yes that yummy yummy science. Also I went to compare its yield to conventional armaments and no surprise the yield of even a small nuclear load dwarfs anything conventional. The next equivalent bang comes from the MOAB at 22,000 lbs of tnt. Which uses 9.35 tons of high explosives not counting the bomb casing. A bit big in other words. Although reading about yields brought me to an interesting article on good ole Wikipedia about TNT equivalent which goes all the way from one food calorie up to two black holes colliding that released 5.5x10^47 joules of energy. Also rad is rad, okay I'm done.

Just pause that and think about the fact that _CARS_ in the Fallout Universe (mostly Fallout3) produced _the very same explosion_ when shot with a few bullets (even 200+ years later!). I bet that made for some fun police chases back before the war, eh?

They must be giving them a considerable amount for him to put on a mask and that costume... interesting.

"phisics never changes"... floating yaoguai: hi

So they called it M42... The Answer... for any apocalyptic problem.

funny, everyone forgets the complexity of compression fission bombs, if detonators are not absolutely precisely placed, fission does not occur, it just makes a conventional explosion and throws radioactive cack everywhere. I once calculated the failure rate and realized just how many on the law of averages would be duds. still even duds would make a radioactive mess, perhaps even causing cherenkov effect meltdowns like the elephant foot of chernobyl.

"Physics... Physics never changes" pure gold

Thanks for dumbing things down so plebs like me can understand kyle 🙌

Hi Kyle, great episode as always. I have a question, where the Russian suitcase nukes smaller the Davy Crockett? They would not look like the mini nuke from Fallout but that’s just semantics.

This episode was great!! Funny and informative. You generally do a good job but today was quire good.

In the 80s I ran a Top Secret/SI role-playing game. The secret weapon utilized was the "Californium Bullet", a fission micro-nuke that is an atomic explosive round bullet. Each bullet cost the agency a quarter of a million dollars (80s price) and basically had the boom of a howitzer artillery shell. The bullet's Californium core was "atomically frozen" (not decaying) until the bullet was fired. I made it so that the explosion turned its radioactivity into mostly conventional explosive power. So, Because Science, did I come close to making it realistic in what that tiny a-bomb would be like?

While this may be accurate as in a explosion sense, it is not the same in a size and useability sense. During President George E. Bush's campaign he wanted a weapon capable of destroying bunkers and the ground beneath them. This was the first creation of nuclear weapons since the cold war and is still used by U.S. forces today. It's size can be comparable to that of a shoulder mounted RPG. And again, while it's destructive power was only around a third of that caused by the "Fatman" and it significantly less fallout, the portability and design are far more similar.

I love doing fat man rocket jumps =D 'I come in pieces!'

I saw a vid a while back talking about the mini-nukes not being big enough to contain a large quantity of material to reach critical mass (and, subsequently, go boom) but it did say that the explosion (ignoring the mushroom cloud (just artistic)) was only the size of 2 grenades. So filling a metal rugby ball with high explosives and some radioactive ooze should work just as well, right?

Hey hi hello Kyle! Love the show and love this episode. So you talked about the distance a person would need to be from a nuclear blast to stand a chance of surviving it. Well, there is the whole thing with Vault Boy's "rule of thumb". Opposably, if your thumb can cover the mushroom cloud with your arm outstretched, you're far enough away to survive. But it turns out this is a gross oversimplification of the truth, since the wind has a lot to do with where the fallout goes, and it also appears the "rule" was only ever applied in real life to non-radioactive hazmat incidents. Still, is there a better way to estimate your chance of surviving a nuclear blast in the field, assuming you don't know the _actual_ distance to ground zero? Or is the best advice to just run away regardless of how far you are? Also, do you have any ideas about how the Enclave would have gotten the NASA crawler-transporter to the Capitol Wasteland in FO3's _Broken Steel_ DLC? That thing weighs six million pounds and burns a gallon of diesel to travel 35 feet in 12 seconds, so even with enough fuel and a flat enough road, it would take multiple weeks and dozens of refuels to move it from Cape Canaveral. This has bothered me for a long time, and I'm wondering if you might have some insight.

How sensitive to impact shock are nukes, anyway? Is it one of those movie-tropes that everyone buys into or are these things like an old farm truck you can dump into an irrigation ditch and come out fine?

A fusion reaction actually gives less energy per cycle(hydrogen to ditrium to tritium and finally helium) than what a fission reaction liberates but the energy to mass ratio is where fusion shines since a fusion cycle has 8 amu (not quit shure about this) and all fission reaction neading atoms of at least 200 amu of mass and whith the energy of the fusion being 4 times less than that of fission bringing the same mass of hydrogen and uranium and letting each do his respective reaction the energy output of the fusion will be way bigger that that of the fission but we can not use it right now to produce energy because we can not controll it but we can controll fission If this doesn’t get me to footnotes i don’t know what will

I understand there were designs for micro nuclear weapons down to hand grenades or small cannon shells using californium as the fissile material

I appreciate the “super critical” pun at the beginning lol

Hello Kyle, great video! How far can a person launch a 12 pound mini nuke from a shoulder mounted launcher without recoil powerful enough to throw the shooter backwards? It seems to me like the game is pretty generous.

Russia talkin' Shit America not havin' it... *Country Roads Intensifies*

The look you presumably gave yourself at the end was hilarious.

The Air 2 genie missile is a Nuclear missile to be mounted of fighter jets because it was a nuclear Air-to-Air missile or though more accurately it’s a rocket because it is unguided.

How exactly do you split atoms? I've never been able to grasp it

Is it possible to reverse radiation or remove it, what I mean is have we discovered a way to make an area impacted by nuclear radiation habitable again in a short amount of time? (half-lives are very long, much longer than I can live...I think)

One of my first sergeants in the Army reserves was at two atomic tests maneuvering after the blast. I have instructions in an NCO handbook how to arm the Davy Crockett warhead and set the height of burst timer.

The production quality of this video was singlehandedly higher than the entirety of Fallout 76

6:12 I do some research and Davy crockett have yield between 10 to 20 tons tnt,not 10.000 to 20.000 lbs tnt.

Hey Kyle Great episode as always :) Your 'over encumbered' jokes, I was wondering, physically how many guns could one person carry and still be mobile? I mean, if you strip everything off a character in Fallout and load them with nothing but guns, once you are weighed down to moving slowly, would you even be able to draw and use a gun effectively? Take Care and Be Well

Love your videos. Can I know how the drawing effects are created?

[You are unable to fast travel when enemies are nearby]

Okay so an interesting point, even the biggest fusion weapons, (except for Tsar Bomba, which was a special case) produce most of their energy output in... fission?! How does this work? Well, ya see when you enrich uranium for making plutonium, you end up with a bunch of barely radioactive uranium that's just not at all suitable for using in a bomb. It's called 'DU' or DPU' for Depleted Uranium. But it has several useful properties: It's really really hard, really really dense, it makes a great heat shield, and most importantly, it can still fission and release energy. It just doesn't sustain a reaction well, it tends to trap all the neutrons that break it into smaller atoms and not emit large quantities of them. So for a big multistage weapon, you get the following: First of all, they 'prime' the fission core by squirting lithium deturide powder into the center of the hollow sphere of plutonium. They can also use tritium but it doesn't have as much of a shelf life. then the chemical explosives surrounding the core detonated. Now the core is actually 'levitated' inside a near-vacuum 'pit' in the center and the explosives slam down onto a shell of beryllium and something being used as a neutron source. Something with a 5-10 year half life. Beryllium is a neutron reflector, it helps contain the neutrons and bounce them back and forth through the plutonium, you see. The vacuum just gives the explosion a little more oomph when it slams into the plutonium sphere. The core for the Trinity test was roughly the size of a tennis ball. It was compressed to roughly the size of a walnut by the explosion. We do a much better job now. So the neutron source fissions first and scatters neutrons around, which then start hitting plutonium which fissions at just the right rate, not too slow and not too fast, to generate a big big boom. As it heats up and compresses the interior, the primer 'fuel' inside the core can't fuse, it's not compressed enough, but it will reach energy states that let it throw off a lot more neutrons. At this point the physics is how long can you push/hold the core together while getting repeated doublings of output. At some point the core starts coming apart because it just can't handle the energy. Now we're ready to make the fusion explosion happen! Using various methods that are mostly classified, the energy is directed to slam into the outside of a cylinder of fusion primed material, and buried down the middle is a rod shaped fissile core called a 'spark plug'. The most direct energy from the warhead that just detonated is able to set off the spark plug, and about 60 percent of the energy bouncing off the inner casing, neutron reflectors, x-ray reflectors, etc are compressing the outside of the lithium deturide core. It gets hotter than the Sun. No really, a fusion bomb is hotter than the Sun. There's a real simple reason for that; fusion needs a level of temperature and pressure to occur. We can't, even in a nuclear bomb, reach the pressure that fusing core of the Sun generates. We can get a decent fraction, but we're still short. But, for the purposes of the 'energy needed to cause fusion' you can substitute heat for pressure. So we make the bomb hotter than the Sun Fusion bombs release a massive amount of neutrons. They're just sloppy with them. They go all over the place. Now if you want a really really big bomb, like the Tsar Bomba was, you can use this fusion bomb to trigger ANOTHER fusion bomb. The Tsar Bomba had iirc 8. But at some point, faster than you can blink since the whole process started, the pressure and temperature are dropping as the bomb loses cohesion. In fact it's so fast that if they triggered the bomb on your eyelids beginning to descend, you would not have closed them yet. However, they came up with one, last, gasp for generating energy. The final fission cycle. Remember Depleted Uranium. That's what the case is made out of. And millions of free neutrons are streaming through it right now. Enough that the final fission stage increases the power output of the bomb one, final time, between 1.5-3.5 times depending on design. The material can't sustain an explosion, if you stuck this stuff in the core, it would simply make a radioactive mess at a sub kiloton yield. But out here, it still improves things, splitting and releasing energy. The Tsar Bomba replaced that tamper with lead. Lead won't fission, though it will do the other job of helping hold the expanding plasma together a little longer, roughly halving the design yield but also making it one of the cleanest weapons ever detonated. The problem with a bomb like the Crockett's was that it's very very compact and lightweight, and as such a lot of the tricks they use for improving yields (levitated pits, high mass tampers, tritium priming) were not usable at that scale, so it was really, really dirty. Add to that the fact that if you want a dirtier bomb (more fallout) you detonate it at or near the ground so it sucks dirt into the cloud to attach radioactive particles to, and it wasn't a realistically usable weapon. Sure it was deployed but they'd have been crazy to use em.

Also if Antman shrunk a nuke would it have a larger energy out put or a smaller energy output. Nice job on the Episode!!!

The curse of Fallout 76 killed Project Alpha and only Kyle survived. Muuh Haa Haa !

Fun video, Kyle. I enjoy learning about nuclear physics. I was wondering if perhaps you could answer two similar questions for me. Why is it that when Superman is exposed to a nuclear explosion, he looks almost like a skeleton? Stars generate lethal doses of gamma rays and x-rays. Temperature shouldn't be an issue, either. The blast wave shouldn't be the cause for Superman's deathly look, either. Then there's Wolverine. Mass has to come from somewhere. Even if Wolverine's skeleton could withstand the nuclear explosion, how does he regenerate mass? Then there is the problem of memory. Wolverine shouldn't be able to recall events and should be as helpless as a newborn.

*TOP 10 OVERPOWERED ANIME WEAPONS*

Physics doesn't change... Look at laser weapons in the fallout universe, they have recoil.

LOL with the encumbrance!!

(3:13) For those confused about the "size of a bus" comparison, thinking that both Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs dropped during WW2 by the US, were the size of cars, he's talking about _fusion_ bombs here. The WW2 weapons were _fission_ devices. The first fusion bombs were thermonuclear in nature (they used a fission explosion to ignite a secondary fusion reaction) and were, indeed, the size of a bus (at least initially).

Fallout related question, In a world where almost everything is powered by nuclear energy would shooting a car cause it to detonate?

Finally an episode to do with the sponsor thanks producers.

just notice hes always looking around everytime he goes to the next screen probably to check for the NUKES

Kyle, did you know that when the Vault Boy is giving a thumbs up he's actually using his thumb to judge if he is far enough away from the blast so he won't get hit with rads. If you hold your arm out in front of you and put your thumb up, you can tell if you are far enough away from the explosion by seeing if your thumb can cover up the mushroom cloud.