Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Veritasium "All the Times We Nearly Blew Up the World"

Original Video ‪@veritasium‬ • How Close We've Come t...
Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Veritasium "All the Times We Nearly Blew Up the World"

[@tfolsenuclear]

Thanks so much for watching! If you are interested in my reaction to a nuclear war scenario, please check out: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mYHReWmfgdKmotksi=C2_Zg6vZueofkF4K

[@zayan7083]

Love your vids

[@Zeuskabob1]

Thanks for the link; I was looking for it.

[@nepsoundfont4035]

Play subnautica Also react to cold war part 1 by oversimplified

[@killman369547]

The big hype about hypersonic missiles was due to a new capability that people previously thought impossible. Being able to maneuver in unpredictable ways at those insane speed without immediately disintegrating. Cause a normal ICBM warhead while it is hypersonic coming down through the atmosphere, it doesn't maneuver, it follows a simple ballistic path which makes it easier to shoot down. A maneuvering warhead that can zig and zag and go up and down in unpredictable ways is so much harder to hit. Every time the warhead turns the ABM system has to throw out it's previous intercept calculation and start over.

[@rayives7758]

"Near miss" means "close proximity miss," as opposed to "far miss" or "distant miss," a logical complement that is not actually used.

[@th3phoenix]

“Near miss” makes intuitive sense to me, meaning “a miss, of type ‘near’ as opposed to ‘far’, meaning it was dangerously close to a hit”. The other potential interpretation of ”near miss” that trips some people up, “nearly a miss”, never seemed as intuitive to me. Maybe if it was spelled “near-miss”.

[@qpSubZeroqp]

I'll refer you to George Carlin's take on the matter 😂 kzbin.info/www/bejne/sHWulamKmsiMd68

[@supergatorhator]

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Near miss as in we narrowly avoided a negative outcome. Working in healthcare, we do daily safety huddles, and recently my hospital has started to call near-misses "safety moments", the goal being to have staff stop viewing these events as being acceptable because the negative outcome was avoided. We go over safety moments daily to see where we can make changes to reduce the chance of a "hit" as much as possible.

[@pluggedfinn-bj3hn]

Well, many disasters often happen during routine stuff, because 99% of things we do in any industry are routine. For me the more scary part is that how many disaster could've been avoided if we had listened to engineers repeated warnings. Space Shuttle Challenger that you mentioned as an example is one of such case. Sure, STS launches were routine, but that one really wasn't. There was HUGE publicity around it because of the "teacher in space" thing, it was the coldest weather Space Shuttle was ever launched and the pressures from the "teacher in space" program pushed them to not delay the launch. The problem that caused the disaster was known by engineers for over a decade, and they had asked for redesign and further testing, but NASA had not seen it as too urgent. The O-rings had been deemed effectively non-redundant system, and failures of the primary O-rings had occured on several flights in significantly warmer weather. There was a redesign planned, and it would've took effect about a year from the tragic launch. Before the launch, during the safety assessment teleconference, the engineers did try to convince that the launch was unsafe, but were taken to the side and "had discussion in private with the management", and conceded that there was no proven danger. Yet exactly what they had predicted, happened.

[@kalkuttadrop6371]

Also both Shuttle disaster modes had close call warnings. Discovery in 1984 lost half it's o-ring during the coldest launch ever(aside from Challenger) and was running on thin margins. Atlantis in 1988 suffered serious heat shield damage and the crew didn't think they'd survive re-entry.(more tiles were damaged than Colombia, but less were fully lost and it was in a thicker less exposed spot)

[@aftbit]

On the topic of "near miss" vs "near hit", I recently learned that American English uses "just about" to mean something that barely didn't happen, while British English uses the same words to mean something that barely _did_ happen. For example, "I just about finished my homework in time" might mean in America that you did not complete your homework before it was due, while in Britain it might mean that you completed it just before the deadline.

[@foolishball9155]

American one does not make sense to me

[@Phlarx]

For an American speaker, "just about" is synonymous with "almost", "nearly", or "close to". So "I'm just about there" means "I will be there very soon". "near miss" is a bit different, though, meaning "nearby" rather than "nearly".

[@pedrodepacas-ic1cb]

Aluminium. Friggin' Brits

[@vibaj16]

I don't think so. "I just about finished my homework in time" in America would still mean you did complete it.

[@vibaj16]

@@Phlarx "I just about got there" and "I'm just about there" are different in how "just about" is used. The former means "I got there just in time". The latter means "I'm almost there"

[@MPshadowfiend117]

This is such an entertaining, informative, and inspiring channel. I’m a physics student in UNI and you’re making me want to focus on nuclear energy. So fascinating and important its crazy. Easy Subscription

[@tfolsenuclear]

Wow, your comment made my day! Thanks so much!!

[@MPshadowfiend117]

@@tfolsenuclear of course! Any plans in the future for making lecture-styled videos, where you explain different concepts related to reactors and how they work? I’d happily watch a series based around something of that nature!

[@simpleimprovements8733]

How many people here would take a selfie with a undetonated nuclear bomb if they found one randomly?

[@jairo8746]

James May attempted to ignite a SATAN ICBM with a lighter one time (the missile was just for show but it was hilarious). kzbin.info/www/bejne/bX7KhKCeaNuLl7M

[@killman369547]

Would they know it was a nuke though? Nukes typically don't have any special markings that would distinguish them as nukes. That's one of the many many ways the government protects them.

[@Relkond]

‘Near miss’ - a nearby miss. See also ‘missed by a mile’ which is a miss where only a nuclear weapon makes the ‘miss’ aspect moot. ‘Close only counts in horse-shoes, hand grenades, and a-bombs.

[@filanfyretracker]

I do sometimes chuckle when they brag that modern ICBMs have an accuracy of a few meters. Because in my head I am thinking "Its a nuke, To use NYC as example, if you aim for central park and hit the Bronx or Staten Island it makes no difference because you are using a nuke"

[@terranhealer]

So glad you did this video and I totally agree “near miss” has always tripped me up 😂

[@Tuxfanturnip]

to me a near miss is a miss that is near, there are many far misses in a day but only a few close calls

[@o0alessandro0o]

@@Tuxfanturnip Sure, but if you "nearly missed" it means you hit. It's like "sanctioning": it means to approve - except you place sanctions on people and countries to punish them. So it means two things that are exactly opposite.

[@Tuxfanturnip]

@@o0alessandro0o yeah I'm pretty chuffed about it

[@o0alessandro0o]

@@Tuxfanturnip ...you're a terrible terrible person :P

[@Bergendal_2003]

Things we need to know for each video; - Tyler Folse is a nuclear engineer with a little over 10 years of experience in the commercial nuclear power industry, from engineering, to operations, to emergency response - He doesn't claim to know everything there is nuclear, but he can certainly share some knowledge Got it? You're now a T. Folse Nuclear subscriber and you found this comment :DDDD

[@KevinLyda]

George Carlin has a great rant on "near-miss." He agreed with you!

[@davidg4288]

See "Dr. Strangelove" for the comedy movie version. "How to stop worrying and love the bomb." Who wouldn't love a comedy about nuclear armageddon made in the middle of the cold war?

[@Kenneth_James]

No, the question is how many accidents or lost bombs did the Soviet Union have in that time

[@fledgeking]

Well they left 300+ personal nuclear sources in Georgia alone sooo.....

[@simpleimprovements8733]

Soviet citizen, how many military nuclear close call Accidents have we had Conrad. Joseph Stalin, NO

[@ShadowWasntHere8433]

He wouldn’t say anything, he’d just turn to Beria and the citizen would have an accident

[@CotyTernes]

The public actually know more about what bombs the Soviet Union had than the USA and other countries. This is because the Soviet Union fell, and much of their paperwork was obtained and people with knowledge gave the knowledge. Other countries that still exist still keep more of it secret for national safety.

[@pedrodepacas-ic1cb]

What are you saying "no" to?

[@MatthijsvanDuin]

7:15 For some reason this is often mentioned in the context of nuclear reactions specifically even though it's just as true for chemical reactions. It's a completely general principle that the mass of an object is proportional to its energy*, e.g. if you were to have an enclosed box coated with perfect mirrors on the inside and somehow fill it with a bunch of light, the box would now weigh more. (*) The only caveat is the energy of an object is generally taken to include its kinetic energy which depends on frame of reference while the term "mass" when unqualified is typically used to refer to its rest mass (aka invariant mass), so then E = m c² only holds when E is the object's _rest energy_, i.e. its total energy when measured in the frame of reference where the object is not moving (has zero total momentum). However there is a sense in which E = m c² also holds in a moving frame of reference (relative to the object), in that Newton's second law of motion, F = m · a, is only true if you take m to be the object's _relativistic_ mass, mᵣₑₗ := E / c² where E is the object's total energy (including kinetic energy). An object's momentum is also determined by its relativistic mass rather than its rest mass, p = mᵣₑₗ · v, which is how photons manage to have non-zero momentum despite having zero rest mass (specifically |p| = mᵣₑₗ · c = E / c since a photon always travels at the speed of light).

[@aftbit]

22:50 The proper procedure at the time was to use a different tool, which would securely hold the socket, but the airman forgot the tool in the truck and used a ratchet wrench instead. The military had a major blindspot for human factors at this time.

[@Mr.Sparks.173]

What do you mean people are people and not autonomous robots? - militaries around the world at the time.

[@nathnathn]

21:04 theres the bomb they dropped accidentally next to a city that only didn’t go off because it had a faulty detonator. Theres the salted nuke they accidentally sent to a remote area of mexico that they spent a lot to covertly clean up. The potential places it could of hit included multiple cities.

[@VillaFanDan92]

I always think about the possibility of a catastrophic accident in the North Korean nuclear weapon programme. Expecially given defectors' descriptions of the incredibly poor safety standards of virtually all industry there. Most likely an accident wouldn't cause a war, unless they managed to accidentally attack a neighbour - but there's more potential for an accident that would cause a big human and environmental disaster within their own borders, given that the government would likely be reticent to accept foreign help to deal with the aftermath.

[@nordboya1656]

Yep, same applies to Russia too - except with more risk of geopolitical repercussions. We have seen plenty of incompetence in the Russian military recently, I wonder how well trained and equipped Russian nuke soldiers are...

[@Zeuskabob1]

Sadly, I don't imagine that any nuclear accident in North Korea could cause more loss of life than the other humanitarian issues the regime causes on a yearly basis.

[@Skarnex1337]

​@Zeuskabob1 actually you're right... even if they had a double Chernobyl it would barely make a dent. Sad but true.

[@Skarnex1337]

​@Zeuskabob1 I wonder who would win the chemical toxins or the radioactive ones? My money is on the chemicals based on quantity and duration. sad.

[@JohnDoe-yh8rr]

Im here to see this channel grow

[@nathnathn]

For the titan missile silo incident watch a documentary called “command and control”. They tried to blame the crew they ordered under protest to ignore the open escape hatch and to cut through the seal on the blast doors to get into the silo.

[@barefootalien]

"Which risk do you think is higher?" Right now? Deliberate use. But that's not the normal situation. Have you heard of the multi-decade period during which all of the nuclear launch codes for US silo-based nuclear weapons was "0000000"? On purpose. The logic being that if DC was taken out in a first strike before the President could authorize a retaliation, the guys in the silos should be able to launch... along with some ideas that it'd be marginally faster to just push zero a bunch of times than carefully enter a more complex code. We are profoundly stupid sometimes...

[@Mr.Sparks.173]

I hope one day we'll do away with nuclear weapons, even as unlikely as it would be. Mostly because I don't want humanity's last words to be "oops... OH Shi-"

[@skysight1553]

​@@Mr.Sparks.173probably Will never be, no one wants to destroy theirs only to find The Other guy Still had Some Hidden Away, And Countries Like Pakistan are like Toddlers with a Gun in their Hand, They Don't Want to leave the gun.

[@jamcdonald120]

26:10 "What do you mean you 'Accidentally' Dropped one, but its ok, it didnt go off. Sounds to me like you just missed!"

[@karlharvymarx2650]

For the last 70 or so years, I think a malfunction/accident involving nuclear weapons has been a greater threat than their initial use. MAD is twisted but realistic because even crazy people aren't crazy enough to launch a first strike knowing there will be a massive counter strike in a few minutes. But what if the US and North Korea each had one 10 megaton bomb. Still a bad retaliatory spanking if you use it, but maybe you don't have to be completely insane to use it since your country will be mostly ok. If so, I don't know where the minimum number of nukes threshold is that MAD kicks in but I think it is more than one nuke. However, maybe if you know other countries have disassembled nukes in deep secret bunkers, and those parts can be assembled and used in a day or two, it is still never worth starting a game of Global Thermonuclear Warfare because ultimately both sides get damaged beyond repair albeit at a slower pace, and you get the benefit of a lower risk of high risk accident. Anyway, I knew about some of the accidents in the video, but he did reveal details I didn't know. For instance, the slab over the broken arrow in NC--I always heard it augered in too deep to retrieve. Also didn't know it may have been more ready for action than than it should have been. I saw another show somewhere where they went into details about some of the improvements to the the electronics and other systems after incidents where we nearly blew our hands off, so to speak. Good but probably not good enough considering how monumentally stupid the military's handling of these things have been historically. I don't know to what degree it has been a factor, maybe it is just rumor, but I have heard many times that the fossil fuel industry manufactured much of the FUD and other weapons the anti-nuclear power activists unknowingly used to curtail the use of fission electricity. I suspect that is a missing piece of the puzzle about why people tend to be more afraid of nuclear power plants than thousands of nuclear bombs. Basically oil pulled the same crap on nuclear it is has on green power and any effort to wean ourselves off their teat. I support nuclear safety, but the lawyered-up headless chicken NIMBY thing annoys the crap out of me.

[@rairu4472]

I really wanted to see your reaction to Palomares incident! Love your content! Big fan here from Spain!

[@JoshStLouis314]

FME is the equivalent of FOD (foreign objects and debris) in the electronics industry. You don't want any potentially conductive things connecting to where you don't want voltage present. (People, for example).

[@I_Am_Transcendentem]

"I like nuclear power it is very cool. Like we humans manipulating these tiny particles is so amazing" -my little brother

[@lexinexi-hj7zo]

Its a teller ulam fusion boosted two stage fission device, where the fusion is just there for more neutrons, not yield the fusion yield is only 5%. I has a chemical explosion, fission,fusion,fission,fusion,fission. All these go off before the casing of the bomb is even torn open, so fast.

[@40hup]

Besides the possibility of Accidents and missunderstandings, I see the most dangerous development in the new low yield nuclear weapons (e.g. nuclear bunker busters), because they lower to barrier to use nuclear weapons - but if even a low yield nuclear weapon is used, the situation could easily escalate very quickly and unforseen. If a nuclear weapon is used anywhere, the use of the second, the third and then a multitude becomes exponentially more likely - either as direct response, or in general in conflicts. It is true, it is hard to imagine to get rid of nukes at all, but I can imagine a strict control regime (maybe supernational), that limits the possession for countries with nuclear weapons to one hundred or less with a max yield of 200kt. That number is high enough to ensure a high second strike capability and project deterrent potential to any potential attacker, while it is not high enough to start a (nuclear) war of agression, since there will be several countries with each a hundred warheads against you - and this is true vice versa. So a single (even irrational) attacker knows that he is on the losing end - always. An Alliance of defenders (like NATO, or a new Russia-India-China defense treaty) is always stronger. So even if it would come to such a nuclear war, it would be confined enough for the earth (and humans) to survive in principle - and that is what counts in the longterm. We have to stop the nuclear threat of complete sterilisation of the planet.

[@nordboya1656]

I am not sure that having zero nuclear weapons would not be safer. If you imagine a scenario where there was some kind of multinational agency monitoring for the production of weapons materials/weapon testing etc. then starting up a weapons program would have at least some chance of being detected by other nations right? Of course getting to that state is not realistic but I think it could be safer than a world with limited amounts of nuclear weapons. How many nukes is it "safe enough" for Putin to have control of? MAD assumes that we have rational actors. And of course how safe and well trained and equipped do you think the russian nuke soldiers are? As good as their Navy? I hope they don't have any accidents.

[@halkihaxx5]

There were some lessons learned from the mishaps, no idea if enough. They now use explosives that can't go off from falling on the ground, really should've been that way from the beginning. Also better safeties, or at least that's what they say.

[@kristianfagerstrom7011]

30:50 Accident, that Norway rocket launch? It was communicated to Russia via proper channels well in advance, just not the exact launch time, since weather conditions affect the launch window, but the timeframe for the launch was properly communicated, and yet we almost had a nuclear launch.

[@gonnaenodaethat6198]

so dropped socket would be a Dull Sward incident and when it blew up a bit it became a Broken Arrow

[@madmax2069]

24:36 yeah. I remember the PEPCON disaster

[@BMac420]

Hi Tyler, I think you’re just not framing the term near miss correctly, a near miss would be something close to a hit but misses. Like throwing a rock at a target, a near miss would be the rock missing by a few inches while the opposite would be a far miss where you miss by 10 feet

[@Henoik]

That he didn't talk about the Andøya Rocket Incident is astounding. That's the closest we've ever gotten to a full nuclear war.

[@fullstackdave4117]

As far as the "near miss" with nukes, I think they're talking about "Broken Arrows". This is a an actual term used to describe the accidental firing, launch, detonation or loss of a nuclear weapon. The US has admitted to 32 broken arrows, there are two or three broken arrows where the nukes have not been recovered. One of them is somewhere of the coast of a population center in the US. Another I believe is on the US Canadian border.

[@feldamar2]

Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear power plant. It was the set for the latest 3 stooges movie. The sheer number of things that were just layers of "WTF" and "umm...no? lets Not do that, and you are fired for thinking of doing that."

[@chanahasnomana]

Tbh, the level of incompetence throughout this video shows that these governments were run by morons 😂. How the fuck did a fighter jet with an h bomb just roll off the carrier. That blows my mind because it's so fuckin funny 😂. All of these incidents just remind of me wile e coyote 😂

[@Joeybagofdonuts76]

It's wild to think 3 mile island even happened. Considering that 18 months before the same relief valve and limiting switch failed at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio.

[@ELFanatic]

Near missed means you missed near something. Nearly missed means you didn't miss.

[@Name-ot3xw]

Awhile back there was a nuke left on the tarmac overnight in I want to say Okinawa.

[@stevenverhaegen8729]

Veritasium has a very strange border of the SU on those B52 flight maps... 🤔

[@rcrawford42]

Minor quibble -- just because you're not aware of the military's safety protocols around nuclear weapons doesn't mean they don't exist, or that they're not stricter than civilian reactor protocols. The problem is, during the Cold War nukes got handled A LOT.

[@davidg4288]

Oh, what could possibly go wrong? We're about to find out!

[@davidg4288]

The only rational strategy is: 1. No first use. 2. Guaranteed retaliation. I think we are weak on #1.

[@nbsmith100]

3 am in the morning is also known as the witching hour lol. everything is routine until it isn't.

[@danielcook4712]

I perder maxwell smarts phrase “missed it by that much” (accompanied hand motion)

[@callumw5396]

At 8 minutes 7 seconds you said that it's amazing that it's so much easier to create into a weapon then into energy. I'm surprised that someone with as much experience in the field is surprised that uncontrolled chaos is easier to do than controlled chaos

[@GrantWaller.-hf6jn]

The biggest nuclear power plant is 8 minutes 20 seconds away from you.

[@m2hmghb]

The terms are more that the military wants to be able to say things without people outside that circle knowing what it means. It also helps in planning so in the event it happens each team knows what they are to do. It's basically standardization of the term. Also the terms are from the 50s and 60s - remember what accidents happened then? The movement of nuclear weapons today is by convoy if on the road - a minimum of 6 federal armored cars surrounding an armored 18 wheeler with a gunship escort. As for the weapons themselves - the guards had strict authority to shoot to kill if there was a perimeter breach. No warning shots, no less lethal, just dead. We're not talking the base perimeter - but the secure perimeter around the storage facility.

[@ryhol5417]

Can I get your soundbite on “the feasibility of fusion power as a marketable technology” . Are we still 20-50 years away dude?

[@jwenting]

the Soviet SSB that sank in the Pacific was a diesel powered boat, carrying 3 nuclear tipped ballistic missiles with a single warhead each. The A-4 near Japan was physically incapable of carrying more than a single nuclear weapon, it could carry 1 on the fuselage centerline, and some fuel tanks under the wings. The Norwegian rocket incident was a failure of Soviet/Russian communications. The launch had been announced and communicated to the Russians, but for some reason the message hadn't reached the duty officers in the early warning control room. Nuclear weapons have kept the peace for almost 80 years. Without them we would have had WW3 decades ago, probably involving the large scale use of chemical and biological weapons. They're also never going to go away. Even were the major powers to create a treaty "banning" them, that doesn't mean other countries can't make them. And we all know how well the Soviets (and now Russians) and the Chinese have been when it comes to complying with treaties banning chemical and biological weapons.

[@Zeuskabob1]

Love that you just ignored the conventional bomb in the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear device. It's so many orders of magnitude smaller than the nuclear portion that it's comparable to the cannon in earlier designs. "Fascinating how it's so much easier to make fusion into a weapon than to make it in a sustainable power source" Not really. It's always easier to blow something up than to efficiently extract the energy from it. It's definitely surprising how many decades have passed without a viable fusion power source, considering that we've managed decent fission power so much earlier.

[@FixitFrank]

I wonder if near miss came from "near, miss". like item was close but missed? I hear it as "near, miss" but I dont know why.

[@TAPriceCTR]

How to turn a clean nuke into a dirty bomb.

[@FreddieStarWars]

great video as always

[@spazzey0]

Imagine how many broken arrows remain classified because their core components havent become obsolete yet.

[@wilhelm_iron2359]

My grandfather flew Chromdomes in B52s as a mechanic. He was stationed out of Austin, Texas for a number of years. Its where he met my grandmother

[@jeanwonnacott2718]

A dog of mine loved to dig up rocks in water. Any water. If I had known....I woulda stopped him!! 😂

[@aethertoast4320]

The thing about the dropped bombs in North Carolina that scared them about the devices being armed is that all the devices were properly set, but the fall had jiggled the devices into being armed when they shouldn't be & how easily that happened.

[@pyro1047]

IIRC the bombs had 3 failsafes, and in one bomb 2 of them armed in the drop. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we always have multiple redundancies; as many as we can. If they'd only had 2 that area would be nothing but a smoking crater and probably made us shit ourselves and launch during the confusion. They didn't go "oh, so we were right and 3 is enough", they went "HOLY SHIT, DID YOU SEE HOW CLOSE THAT WAS?!?

[@Name-ot3xw]

Everyone focuses on the mechanic's wrong tool in the Arkansas one, but tend to gloss over the bit where if the control center followed procedure they may have been able to prevent the explosion. But I'm also not going to sit here and call them cowards for running away from the leaking toxic and explosive missile. Just that running away all but doomed the team that had to go in and try to manually throw the vent switches though.

[@Thesnakerox]

Out of curiosity, even though you mainly work in nuclear power it seems you also know a fair amount about nuclear weapons--how much of that knowledge was taught in your education and/or training? I.e are you also taught things about nuclear weapons when studying to work in nuclear power?

[@larrybremer4930]

I would speculate a few select students at any university could handle the design, engineering, physics, and fabrication expertise needed to build a nuclear weapon. The real obstacle is the exotic materials needed since they are highly controlled, or you need to have massive infrastructure such as enrichment plants, breeder reactors, etc. to produce those materials. That is the true obstacle and why non-proliferation efforts mostly focus certain machinery used to perform those enrichment functions since their only use is uranium enrichment to make weapons grade fuels. That is why you cant just rip off some nuclear plants fuel rods and make a bomb. Reactor fuel is not nearly enriched enough to use as a weapon because such enrichment is expensive, and not necessary for a commercial power station.

[@diamondflaw]

Would an orphan source be the civilian (less explosive) equivalent to a broken arrow?

[@GrantWaller.-hf6jn]

You could make a dirty bomb out of it. More likely the junk yard radiation in Brazil

[@MrMikeV00]

8:30 thats because you rely on rupture of containment vessel for a bomb. Bit of a difference.

[@killman369547]

I agree. The nuclear weapons genie is out of the bottle and it ain't going back in. We just gotta live with it now and do our best not to blow ourselves up.

[@somethingsomething404]

Link to the mentioned videos would be appreciated and help your channel grow.

[@bigfishoutofwater3135]

I think escalatory retaliation to a misinterpreted accident is likely the highest risk.

[@TheRPGamer7]

Hey man if you get a chance would you be able to take a look at "Power of the People: The Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant"?

[@keesmills2019]

I think the biggest risk to allout disaster is human error due to a pile-up of inattention or slackening of the perception of the dangers.

[@jayytee8062]

Veritasium is an exaggerator.

[@dieseldave2273]

Near miss didn't make sense to me for a while. It makes sense if you force it to. Lol. It's not saying you nearly missed. It's saying you were near it,but missed it. So the word near is a reference to distance, as apposed to being synonymous for almost.

[@TheRealHoltzy]

Nukes don't scare me anywhere near as much as antimatter bombs

[@robertk1701]

Bent spear. Never thought about the possibility of an aircraft accidentally carrying a nuke instead of a conventional explosive. Just imagining planning a surgical strike and, whoops, there goes the neighborhood, and the one next to it, and the rest of the city, and the surrounding countryside. Got the target though.

[@mitkokatrandviev9912]

New video yay!

[@baalzhamon8491]

thing is though, in a full out nuclear exchange, and the resulting fallout... you would basically lose all high-tech progress. It would take humanity hundreds of years to recover from an event like that, if ever. Yes, humanity would most likely not end, but would we ever bounce back... I'm not so sure about that tbh...

[@Nilboggen]

Seems like both you and Veritasium miss how important that bomb being one switch away from exploding was in North Carolina when they were trying to dig it out of the ground with shovels... I'm sure the flash flood didn't help but once you realize that if someone hits that one remaining switch with a shovel you could set off a thermonuclear explosion it makes covering it with a concrete pad perfectly sensible. ;-)

[@larrybremer4930]

That arm switch is one of many safeties. While it should not have been in an armed position it only served to make it "less safe". Read up on permissive action links to see how it take multiple steps through strong and weak links to enable a weapon. There are sensors to detect environment as well as tampering and damage that are meant to disable the capability of the weapon so simply hitting it with a shovel would do nothing but leave a mark on the bomb casing. Remember it just fell to the ground from over 30,000 feet so a little shovel impact is nothing by comparison.

[@Nilboggen]

@@larrybremer4930 From what I read and was told it was one switch away specifically the "unclosed high-voltage switch". It was a freak occurrence for the armed switch to be flipped as they had little covers over the switches and it wasn't supposed to be able to flip itself even in such an event as the crash of the airplane. They did disassemble the casing and remove the core prior to burying it. And I don't think there are as many sensors on a 1961 bomb as you seem to think.

[@darthkarl99]

@@larrybremer4930 That incident was one of several that resulted in the development of modern arm and disarm systems for nukes.

[@Metametheus]

Near miss... probably more like near incidents. Last i checked you don't miss the Earth with a missile.

[@somethingsomething404]

I couldn’t imagine being the guy who has to hit that button, I’d drink myself to death if I ever had to make that call. What if he was wrong?

[@jimmydcricket5893]

Catch 22, need to set some more off as a reminder why we shouldn't set some more off.

[@monkerud2108]

no because near hit is what it is not, while near miss is what it is, if you almost hit the target when shooting a gun, you missed but maybe it was close, a near miss. its not close to being a miss, its a close miss.

[@Merennulli]

I hate that he claims "having a term for" is a result of frequency. We've never had an empty quiver incident but we have a term for that as you mentioned. I don't know what went into these particular names, but in general you come up with these kinds of codenames as part of contingency planning. They aren't usually reactionary like colloquial names are. It's also slightly misstated. I know at least one of the broken arrow incidents was an empty shell with no warhead. I believe it was the training aircraft he mentioned. That isn't one of the 6 never recovered. 4 were never recovered from a submarine which is still actively monitored by the US Navy, and 2 were cores being transported over Libya. The latter 2 are the only ones from the US that no one knows where they are. You mentioned securing tools. You might be surprised how many times astronauts have lost their tools on spacewalks. Another one of the scary stories, albeit one that is officially denied, was the required installation of activation code devices on warheads. That as a "preparedness" loophole were all ordered set to "00000000". Depending on who you believe, our arsenal code was worse than the code for Emperor Scroob's luggage in Spaceballs.

[@arbayer2]

Personal take on the "Broken Arrow" discussion at ~12:00: It's weird. Never operated in the NF field myself (rather as an IT in comms/IW). There's a whole crapton of instructions, regulations and procedures for proper handling of material and generally they're upheld by competent leaders. Lord knows there's enough official policy. Communication and consistency are problems. There's also a weird phenomenon of morale impacting adherence to stricture given the heavily isolated, often sleep-deprived and malnourished authoritarian operational environment (especially at sea) and all the garden-variety bad leadership tactics by those above and around you kneecapping efficiency for individual careers'/ego's sake - and a sense of nihilism to improve things when the effort may neither be recognized as having taken from your limited resources or even be allowed to happen if it excludes the micromanagement of those leaders - often resulting in negligence. Needless to say, the machine keeps running but it's kind of a wonder as to how it does with the chaos involved sometimes. The repercussions (legal, safety, economic, motivational), personal dedication to keeping the fire of ire out of the shop, and the philosophical risks of the job itself greatly help motivate along with whatever sense of duty to the job comes from maturity and/or prior experience. But we're human, we're imperfect, and people-powered machines often malfunction, with sometimes sobering results. It's a lot to process, and I'm reassured by our human capacity to have prevented some of the worst of it thus far. You just have to hold fast, focus on what you can do, and how you can create breadcrumbs for your shipmates to follow as a form of steering towards responsibility without leaving them to reinvent the wheel at an unpredictable, perhaps unmanageable time. Sometimes when that attempt at process improvement fails to happen at the right time things like this happen. The case of the USS Forestal is a good example. John McCain nearly died that day, and many others did. But, through that came the Farrier Firefighting School I attended when I hit my first command. We also have FOD (Foreign Object Debris) walkdown procedures aboard carriers to prevent FOD damage. A suggestion for content: the Plainly Difficult channel.

[@Tom-ec4pl]

From 1945 to 1963, 524 weapons detonated in the atmosphere. Didn't affect us though.

[@johnisabella5148]

The weapons have been flying since the 50s and not a single fusion fusion explosion,

[@Sans-fl4pe]

Reupload?

[@RyanSallee]

I know that you mentioned nuclear winter. I'd like to discuss nuclear winter being essentially junk science. The models are absolutely biased towards their agenda (de nuclearization), but in a real-life event (First Gulf War) has proven the models to represent the effects of fires after a nuclear explosion wildly inaccurate. During the First Gulf War, essentially half of Kuwait and Southern Iraq were on fire with the inordinate amount of oil wells set ablaze via sabotage. Under these models, there should have been some cooling due to the massive amount of soot that exceeded the amount of burning material used for the models. Very little climatogically happened. Some of the nuclear winter scientists are back with updated alarmist science. This doesn't negate the fact nuclear war is terrifying: Cities leveled, societal breakdowns, et al.

[@trickvro]

It's so sad to me that we're so good at talking ourselves out of using nuclear power, even if it could help avert our climate crisis-and also really good at rationalizing the use of nuclear weapons. I wish we lived in a world where the opposite was true.

[@b0ark1ng21]

I love your videos, I always wanted to know a experts opinions on the videos I watch.

[@stevenverhaegen8729]

Reminds me of 'The Day the Fish Came Out' 🤪

[@Nerdnumberone]

Since nuclear weapons are unlikely to be used anytime soon, babysitting the nukes is not really a prestigious position in the military. You don't want your best people sitting on the sidelines. The unfortunate result is that a lot of the people in charge of keeping the nukes safe are not the most disciplined or ambitious.

[@AB-80X]

Have you ever read the book titled "Atomic Accidents - A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima " written by Dr. James Mahaffey? A must-read for any nuclear buff. You might know that name. James Mahaffey holds a bachelor of science in physics and master of science and doctoral degrees in nuclear engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. This book is NOT some kind of anti-nuclear rant as so many others. Jim Mahaffey is very much pro nuclear power and a man who has lived in that world more than most. Chapter 8 in that book is interesting. According to Mahaffey there is now 65 documented cases of Broken Arrows. Again, he is not an anti-nuclear nutter, it is a very professional and matter-of-fact read - and quite fun I might add, the man has good sense of very dark humour. I'm very sure you'd enjoy it.

[@worawatli8952]

I agree that getting rid of all nuclear weapon isn't good idea, we shouldn't get to arm race again, but it really could be kept for explosive uses that conventional explosive can't deliver, they still have peaceful use, but we just hope we don't have to use it.

[@vladdracula2643]

Sir I fundamentally disagree with your assertion on the phrase "near miss". I put to you that the phrase you suggest means it was nearly a miss meaning a hit, when in fact it was a miss but only nearly as in missing a target by a millimeter vs a kilometer. Thus the phrase passes linguistic muster.

[@viscache1]

TJ’s Rules of Global Disaster: Every action is routine…and then it’s not.

[@greenman360]

It's so absurd watching this old news footage. It looks like a parody. Thousands of people are at major risk of radiological poisoning of some kind or another and they're all like "lol did you stub your toe on the bomb by chance lmao xD" Insanity.

[@Mikitsubizunizu]

All disasters happen during maintenance, therefore we should just never do maintenance /s 😂

[@christhorney]

what do you mean they not gona tell us? they do tell us, what do you think the nuclear subs are doing 24/7? its much safer having nukes deployed in subs than planes flying around 24/7, the maintenace costs on the planes and the risk if it crashes is too high now they will only fly nukes when its needed because the subs are the deterance

[@DeltaGammaKilo]

speaking of acronyms and FME...you know why they call it "OSHA"? Because the last thing you hear before a reportable incident is "OH SHI-"

[@Nauda999]

@31:41 "without countries engaged in a massive arms ways race" Russia revealed it's new ICBM Sarmat 2, and also nuclear powered cruise missile Burevestnik. The arms race is back, baby! And you have rights to bear arms.

[@gonnaenodaethat6198]

1:00- if you think it's is weird to say near-miss then don't realize how people will say "I COULD care less" rather then "I Couldn't care less". it happens way to often, makes no sense, and always causes me to cringe hard x.x

[@pilsplease7561]

Actually nuclear weapons are being built we havent dismantled any its about 100k right now

[@ninjasiren]

"No one knows how many times the Soviets had these, so sleep well tonight"