The Nuclear Arms Race (And Its Decline) 

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The nuclear arms race was like two men standing in a pool of gasoline, one with four matches, the other with six.

Keeping track of all Simon's channels and topics covered (making sure there is no overlap) should be a MegaProject video on it's own.

2:05 - Chapter 1 - Out of the ashes 2:55 - Chapter 2 - The bomb 4:05 - Chapter 3 - On your marks 5:30 - Chapter 4 - Ideology 6:30 - Chapter 5 - Hydrogen bombs 8:15 - Mid roll ads 9:30 - Chapter 6 - All change 13:00 - Chapter 7 - A mad time 13:40 - Chapter 8 - The cuban missiles crisis 15:25 - Chapter 9 - Calming times 17:00 - Chapter 10 - The end of the race 18:50 - Chapter 11 - Today

To quote the film Crimson Tide "In the nuclear world. The true enemy is war itself." If you haven't seen it yet. I highly recommend it.

I lived through most of The Cold War years. I certainly remember the fear which generated from The Cuban Missile Crisis. I never worried about all-out thermonuclear war between the super-powers. I was concerned with just one nut who gets his hands on just one small-yield nuke. I'm still very much concerned about that. Thank you, Simon Whistler, for this chilling yet informative video. -- A USAF vet

My dad was in the RAF in the late 50s and 60s. He said once there was a screen around a Vulcan Bomber (indicating a nuclear bomb being loaded or unloaded because secrecy). He said he heard a really loud, metallic clang from behind the curtain and a lot of swearing. To quote him on the whole Cuba missile crisis - Fun times :)

All hail Vasili Arkhipov, the unsung hero of the Cuban Missile crisis...

Video 5 of asking for a video on the Pennsylvania T1. The T1 was supposedly the fastest steam locomotive in history and it took over 20 years of development

The fact that we survived the Cold War is a happy accident.

Would a rundown of the events in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" make for a decent Biographics video?

I grew up during the Cold War years. I was practically a toddler when The Bay Of Pigs happened. I was in highschool when the first SALT talks were going on. In my English class we read an article about it.

We really need to just change the name of this channel to “Cold War Projects” already

15:20 and USA agreed to remove missiles from Turkey. The whole crises was about those. US did it first, not USSR (bring nukes close to enemy). USSR was made to keep quiet about the withdrawal of weapons from Turkey. It was worth saying Simon :)

This video feels like a summary of the near-entirety of Megaprojects

Let’s face it. It was bound to happen. We have broken the 4th wall and went full meta talking about the Mega Project that began all Mega Projects.

Am disappointed that Simon didn't remind us you can't hug your kids with Nuclear Arms. Well, more than once.

Looking at world politics nowadays im not convinced the cold war is over

It's as much terrifying as it is fascinating to me that humanity wields the power to extinct itself by the press of a button.

Can you do the Eurofighter Typhoon please?

Awesome video Simon. Thanks for all the combination of knowledge and entertainment your channels bring.

Mega Project suggestions: Benban Solar Park, Aswan High Dam, Bar Lev Line and Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

megaprojects should cover the NASA Crawler sometime

You forgot to mention that America also had to remove their missiles from turkey.

Suggestion: Bruce Nuclear Power Development. Lots of unique/interesting attributes and just a massive facility in Canada.

Well done Son! Well done Simon. I've been following you for a couple of years now, and you just GROW....man!! This, one of your finest posts. Cheers, love, light, peace and humanity.....for all.

Keep these coming ! I love your different channels

The real key to ending the Cuban Missile Crisis was the U.S. agreeing to remove *their* intermediate range nuclear missiles from Turkey; which was not really acknowledged by the U.S. gov't until a few administrations later.

Would be interesting for you to cover SDI (aka Reagan's Star Wars program) in one or more videos (objectively of course).

The fact that nations which share such absolute hatred for one another, like Israel, Pakistan & India, have nuclear weapons - terrifies me.

Simon's other channels are becoming more and more like Business Blaze by the day. I love the commentary.

He didn’t mention the fact that Kennedy also agreed to remove missile silos from Turkey..

Great video as usual!! Keep them coming!

Love your videos so much! You’ve made love history. Especially the Cold War era even greater! Thanks for the great videos for me and my fellow nerds lol.

"The beauty of nuclear weapons is nobody wants to use them first" ~Simon 2021 As much as I hate to say it MAD works, just think of how many people would have died in WWIII and WWIV and so forth.

great learning man. Thank you for knowledge.

Sydney Opera House or Sydney Harbour Bridge for a video suggestion! Plenty of engineering challenges!

Once again the beard of knowledge never fails to impress. Awesome video!

I would love to see a video about the RDS-1 program. You did a Manhattan Project, time for Soviet knock-off video!

I still remember watching ‘The Day After’ and being so terrified afterwards 😕

Great video! I would love to see a comparison series about the Falcon 9 and the Atlas V rockets.

"As the last Soviet soldiers limped out of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was already circling the drain." There is something oddly familiar yet also foreboding about this.

The first time I saw a nuclear weapon I walked up to it and put my hand on it. After a minute the sergeant giving me the tour stepped up next to me and said "everyone does that".

Love the videos like this!

To be accurate the Uranium gun type bomb dropped on Hiroshima was called 'Little Boy' and was quite different from the 'Fat Man' Plutonium implosion bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki. 5:20

Would love a video on the P-51 mustang!!

Very watchable as ever Simon. Ideas - Forth rail bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, Blue Riband winners, Production car race to hit 300mph,

Dresden and Tokyo had similar casualties in one conventional bombing raid.

Hey Simon, you should do a video on Bagger 288. It was the heaviest land vehicle in the world from 1978 until 1995. A perfect mega project!!

I'd love for one of your channels to cover the September 18-19, 1980 accident at Missile Complex 374-7 in Arkansas. The nuclear warhead was blown out of the silo and completely out of the missile compound itself. There are so much more juicy tidbits in this story!

You know what would be a fascinating vídeo, one on RU-vid itself because this website is soo fucking massive it's kinda scary all the infrastructure that has to be in place to keep it running

Do a video about the Chrysler T-1 Nuclear tank!!

I really enjoyed this one, I hope more things like this happen more often (Where we all agree we need to chill out and just go about our lives peacefully)

Great job!

Nicely done.

The song 9:27 is Haendel - Sarabande for those who wondering

Mate, these introductions are getting better and better 💪

I always have the commissioner Gordon line in my head at the end of Batman Begins when he speaks about escalation and I immediately understand how we got to this point

Good video 👍

As someone who experienced the Cuban missile crisis at age 7 and someone who remembers the fear to this day I have to say the reality is that nothing has changed.

Business Blaze is starting to come out in his other channels and it's magnificent. Cheers

Thanks

Nuclear weapons have saved tens of millions of lives ... if not hundreds of millions .... "Nuclear weapons ended the utility of industrialized war". General sir Rupert Smith.

Would be cool if you made a ‘Historics’ channel where you discuss events like Berlin Wall, Molotov Ribbentrop or Assassination of Franz Ferdinand 😁

I grew up in during the Cold War. In grade school, (late 60's) we watched Public Service Civil Defense films once a month telling us what to do if we were attacked by nuclear weapons. They even had a little ditty set to music, "Duck And Cover." That put real fear in the hearts of us 6th graders.

5:23 Fat Man hit Nagasaki, not Hiroshima (picture and broader statement are correct).

Also, overlooking platforms like the MX Peacekeeper, and SS-18, and how that impacted treaty talks is a pretty big omission.

Aye Aye Aye New Episode!!!!

Actually, "Detente" is most usefully defined as "no war, no peace.

Hi there. Was up in Tummel Village on holiday for a few days and drove home via loch lomond..........was really nice but the drive was a wee bit hairy at times. Maybe that could give you an idea for something. Love ur vids m8

Would love to see a video on the Iowa class battleship. Still awesome that all 4 built are still afloat almost 80 years later

Fun fact: the hotline between the USA and USSR was *not* a telephone line, but used teletypes. The idea was that if you had to write your message down, you'd take the time to be clear, concise and avoid heated exchanges.

Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, the most accurate abbreviation i ever heard, the entire idea is just MAD,

"A mad time" ahhh, Simon, I see what you did there!

You kind of forgot a HUGE issue with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Russia putting missiles in Cuba was in retaliation for the US putting missiles in Turkey. The US agreed to remove the missiles, though this was not announced to media.

It would be really cool to do a mega project video about building, maintaining, and the eventual collapse of the USSR. That would be an epic story to hear

Simon should've put as the background music "Hammer to Fall" by Queen since it was basically written about the Cold War. After all, back then we really all were "Just waiting for the Hammer to Fall".

Historians write about the precise point in human history where conflicting politics brewed into chaos and mass destruction long before the first world war and the bitter rivalries fostered between left and right with ordinary people trapped in the middle despite six hundred years of non stop conflict in Europe we never learned. Domination under one single ethos was the golden key.

I wish you had a channel talking about how you do all of the channels you have

I think to distill the Cold War arms buildup to a "penis measuring contest" is overly crass given the context of scientific progression, well documented fears presented by both sides at the time etc. In cases of hindsight it's worth remembering for those at the time a very real "fog of war" existed.

5:20 - Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, not Hiroshima. Otherwise, great work as usual.

My dad use to say all the time, 'Close only counts for horseshoes and hand grenades'. I would also chime in and say 'and nuclear weapons'.

Since you did a video about Air Force One, how about a video about NAOC?

Fun fact, the hotline between Washington and Moscow is not actually a phone. It is basically an text messaging system. This would allow both leaders to consider their words before they were sent.

You left out Vietnam. I have a piece of news that might help this situation. Carnotite is a porous, bright yellow quartz sandstone where the grains are coated with potassium uranyl vanadate, a uranium compound that does not dissolve in water. U-238 decays into thorium 234, a different chemical element that does dissolve in water. It rains. The thorium leaches out of the carnotite and has a half life of 24.1 days, then decays in a four step process into uranium 234. This uranium, once away from the vanadate complex, stays dissolved as long as there is oxygen in the water. If the water runs into an anoxic condition, such as rotting organic matter, it will condense out as uraninite, a hard, refractory mineral that resists further chemical or mechanical attack. Being dense, it is further concentrated in placer deposits. Uranium 234 is a nuclear explosive. So are thorium 230 and protactinium 231. These are found dissolved in water at the bottoms of helium wells. This process is more efficient than the uranium process so it's a danger even though there is less of these materials. Protactinium 231 is the rarest of these materials, but there might (or might not) be just enough protactinium in the world's largest helium well for one bomb. The most unfortunate problem with this is that the material is ridiculously easy to find. It glows in gamma rays in broad daylight and reeks of radon and helium. I"ve turned over a bunch of locations to the Government (U.S. and several others) and they were all painfully obvious. Carnotite is very soft and easily carved by the wind into fantastic, beautiful, much photographed features such as arches and streamlined shapes. This results in loose sand through which water can easily flow. It's something I wish was a joke. But it's not. But this creates an opportunity. The solution to this problem is simple; since it's easy to find even thought it's very rare, find it all and destroy it. All governments ought to embrace this since the country most at risk from this material is the country in which it is located. It's a public menace that threatens everybody. EVERYTHING I know about this is on the open internet for anybody to find. To find out that these are nuclear explosives, look up the neutron cross sections for these materials and compare them to known nuclear explosives. These isotopes are neutron- deficient compared to the other nuclear explosives. Since neutrons are the glue that holds the nucleus together, they are less strongly bound than say, uranium 235 or plutonium 239. Disarmament negotiations are stalled. I believe addressing this problem will get this process off dead center.

How about a video on the Kennecott Utah Copper Mine. It's the largest open pit copper mine in the world!

It was my understanding that Russia NEVER had the upper hand. Not even with sputnik. Our missiles/bombs were always smaller and more advanced. They had Sputnik, but no warhead. They didn't want to sound weak so they lied about keeping up with the US. Sure they had icbms. But the US was so far ahead in numbers and tech we were basically in a race with ourselves.

This is going to be epic

Hey Simon, how ‘bout a video on the Warsaw Radio Mast?

Definitely think the PRR T1, the Orient Express(and all it’s routes), the NYC 20th Century Limited and the PRR Broadway Limited would make good topics and be a more uplifting change from the many interesting military topics. Don’t get me wrong. The military tech is interesting. But it’d be good to mix it up a lil.

Have you done one of these on the neutron bomb?

Whistley boi! The beard is coming on 👍

The SALT Treaty was the equivalent of a modern military removing Flintlock weapons as their main battle rifle sure they have removed Antiquated nuclear devices from their stockpiles but they have not destroyed any of their modern nuclear capabilities

Did you know, "Hello everybody welcome to another episode of Megaprojects" is the third most used phrase on RU-vid after "Like Share and Subscribe" and "This video is Sponsored by Squarespace".

Have you done a video on the Cannikin Project? 😃

Simon would love to see Mega Project on The James Webb Space Telescope.

Great video! Can't have nuclear weapons without its carriers, like the B-36 Peacemaker!

How can someone decide not to watch a video with Simon in it? Is that some sort of super power?

Thank you ,

War may never disappear entirely. But I still hope nuclear weapons will. Their existence is insane in all aspects. No one, however responsible and righteous, should be allowed to possess them.