How Castle Bravo works! World's biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated |  

tsar bomba was planned to be 100 megatons, but the soviets realised that would be stupid and toned it down to 50

Now compare in 2024 with USA having a 1.21 gigaton design

That's over 1000MT btw

That's what quantum mechanics can do

@@Clancydaenlightened Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... please provide it....

They did? On what dates?

@@TrevorSachkoTsar Bomba is very well known as the largest nuke ever detonated.

They detonated the Tsar Bomba 58 MT dropped from an airplane

@@TrevorSachko en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1962_Soviet_nuclear_tests

Test 219 was just under 25 MT, detonated over Novaya Zemlya. And there were a handful of shots with yields over 16 MT.

Mike was a liquid fuelled behemoth of a contraption, Castle Bravo was the first solid fuel test which vaguely resembled a deliverable bomb.

@@keyss78 And allowed the military that was already planning to build liquid type bombs to discontinue that work.

​@@keyss78 correct

And that's not troublesome?

@@genghisgalahad8465 No? Shooting energy into space isn’t troublesome

he was right in the sense that producing a higher yield is pointless as most of the extra energy is wasted to space so the law of diminishing returns applies as far as a practical weapon is concerned a larger yield won't result in further destruction on the ground so there is no practical purpose making very large warheads.

Not if it’s underwater.

@@jloiben12 It has to pass through the atmosphere, though, right? That would be troublesome to the atmosphere I would think

Totally agree

Thin man used plutonium but they didn’t stick with it

Because it simply doesn’t matter to the layman. Nothing to do with laziness.

or they use that so you comment to argue driving up engagement pushing the video out wider ? shrug

Also castle bravo wasn’t the first thermonuclear weapon. Ivy Mike was the first. Castle bravo was the first lithium deuteride bomb. These creators don’t research squat.

That also is a very popular error that I have tried to correct and have been lambasted for it. The catastrophic fallout had very little to do with the solid lithium-deuteride fuel. Lithium-deuteride simply does not have a complex-enough atomic construction to cause fallout like that. What caused the unexpected high yield and the fallout was the *uranium* tampering shell they constructed around the fusion fuel. The fusion reaction of the Li-D core was more efficient and more powerful than the liquified deuterium used in Ivy-Mike, yes; it managed to cause an even more efficient fission reaction in the uranium shell. Natural uranium cannot undergo fission by conventional-explosive means. However, when you apply the atomic fusion of lithium-deuteride (or even liquid deuterium, as with Ivy Mike), that *IS* enough to cause natural uranium to undergo fission. With as much uranium as they used just to construct the shells of those bombs, it really is no surprise in retrospect that nuclear fission could give off multiple megatons of explosive energy. Now, it's not like this was actually an unknown random factor; the yield of Ivy Mike was also for the most part caused by thermonuclear-boosted *fission:* 73% of that test's yield came from fission of the uranium components used in that bomb. The Castle-Bravo yield was similar: 67% of that yield came from *fission.* Somebody knew this would happen, yet still insisted on carrying on with the use of uranium as tampering material. As a consequence, these weapons were not actually "hydrogen bombs"; they were boosted-fission bombs, like Greenhouse-George or Greenhouse-Item, on steroids. Had they used something more docile to build the tampers, like lead, the Castle-Bravo test and the other Castle tests would have been right on point with the outside estimates of yield. It was the uranium components, not the Li-D components, that made the Bravo test into a runaway nuclear disaster. As a hard lesson learned from that operation, the DoD was then essentially forced to make weapon designs that were more-accurately labeled "hydrogen bombs," designing them with lead tampers instead of uranium. There were a few designs that were deliberately meant to poison (or "salt") regions of land, yes, but that is another topic for another discussion.

​@@aloysiusbelisarius9992 now that you mention lead tampers, I have read that tsar bomb initially was meant to yeld 100 megatons through the use of an uranium tamper, but in order to give the airplane barely enough time to escape they nerfed the bomb down to a half: 50 mt by switching to a lead tamper instead.

@@JustRememberWhoYoureWorkingFor Yes...but there was more to it than just the weight and giving the plane escape time. A 50-megaton *fission* explosion would have rendered northern Europe and over half of Russia uninhabitable. I'm not sure how much Khrushchev grumbled over having to accept the modification, but the oligarchy did acknowledge and accept the change. After all, it was still a very big bang.

Lithium-7 was assumed to be inert, and only the Lithim-6 would contribute to the bomb's energy budget. This is fundamentally the case, but on the scale of a thermonuclear bomb, the energy flux occurs in millionths of a second. This caused the Lithium-7 to breakdown into Helium (Tritium) which also fused.

From the description: "the device remains the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States " the largest by the USA, not the largest period. I am not sure that is even correct, though.

and Bikini Asholl

The actual mechanism of compression is caused by the surface of the tamper vaporizing...this causes an almost perfectly symmetric compression shock which delivers compressive energy thousands of times greater and dozens of times faster than high explosives could. By the time the compression wave reaches the plutonium sparkplug...the lithium deuteride is in a state of maximum density...as the plutonium fissions, the fast neutrons released begins to fission the lithium into tritium and helium-4 ( in the case of Li-7, and Tritium and helium-3 in the case of Li-6.) The newly formed tritium and deuterium, already heated to tens of millions degrees, fuse almost instantly, releasing a flood of high speed neutrons...the first of these neutrons aid in fissioning the rest of the sparkplug, and forming additional tritium...the fusion burn is essentially complete by the time 1 microsecond has lapsed...the dense cloud of energetic neutrons slams into the also very dense uranium-238 tamper causing much of it to fission as well... boosting the energy yield of the bomb by 100% or so (essentially doubles energy output.) The physics of this process is a fascinating balance involving statistics, optimization, and reaction rates.

​@@TyMoore95503 I'd love to see an ultra highspeed video of this reaction. Much easier to visualize these reactions.

Correct, radiation implosion (or better radiation-induced ablation), first developed by Klaus Fuchs (the Russian spy) and John von Neumann, is used, using Uranium as an x-ray "reflector". The plasma created by the foam just makes sure that x-rays can actually freely travel from the primary to the reflector and to the secondary. Fun story, the US bomb program actually forgot how to make the foam and had to reinvent it for refurbishment of old warheads.

The central plutonium rod ("spark plug") is compressed by the lithium deuteride, which is being driven inward by uranium (or lead) cylinder, until the plutonium rod begins to fission. The lithium deuteride being compressed from the outside in and the inside out, in an extremely hot, neutron-rich environment, finally achieves a state in which the deuterium begins to fuse. Soon, there is deuterium, tritium, Li-6 and Li-7, all at extremely high temperatures, and all hell breaks loose.

In 🇺🇸

it was less powerfull because the Tsar Bomb fireball was 4.5 miles in diameter only but the Castle Bravo was 5 miles :)))))

Yep. Now to score some plutonium and depleted uranium. Try Harbor Freight. 🎉

😎

Survived the first two. Killed by a test.

Exactly what I said

@@iitzfizz I didn’t read the comments first my bad

"In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of 100 Mt (418 PJ) if it had included the uranium-238[16] tamper which featured in the design but was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout.[16] As only one bomb was built to completion, that capability has never been demonstrated." It wasn't so much that they scaled it back, they just did not include the uranium-238. The actual, accepted output was 50MT.

😅

I'm thinking of the movie Chain Reaction (Keanu Reeves). Hydrogen power, clean/free energy, except there was an 'agency' who had to keep that under wraps, because if you dump that onto the world markets, economies would crash and from there we'd all be in a world of shit.

It's a man thing they love to exaggerate. Example their height and length. 😏