The US Accidentally Nuked Itself...Twice - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Brandon Herrera

[@delancestephensmusic]

"Today we're going to be looking at Brandon Herrera" -- me at work every day, as his cameraman

[@m2hmghb]

I can think of a lot worse jobs. I will say though, please be safe 😉

[@IdriveKITTnyc]

A wild Delance appears!

[@PBeringer]

Is there a support fund where we can make donations?

[@MrMango331]

​@@m2hmghb???

[@SuperReviews4you]

Insert the "No! No! No! Wait! Wait! Wait meme.

[@hardnachopuppy]

Never thought id see you react to Brandon Herrera.

[@Juuzo]

@@m420-nd1if bot

[@ankkaproductions5822]

@@m420-nd1ifdemocrats really trying everything huh

[@thetwitchywarlock]

​@@Juuzomore like bait, better to ignore

[@Hurricayne92]

@@thetwitchywarlock What makes it bait?

[@thetwitchywarlock]

@@Hurricayne92 it was a comment saying Brandon was the trump sh00ter.

[@Veemon657]

"found the arm safety switch, it's on arm"" personally if i was that guy bricks would proceed to be shat

[@thedangerbag]

Yeah. Imagine the feeling realising that the bomb you're standing over/around could go off at any second. I feel like I'd hold my breath, irrationally worried that if I breathed too hard I'd set it off or something. Logically, I'd know the initiator is probably toast from the impact with the ground, but am I 100% sure? Nope.

[@truthseeker2321]

@Veemon657- LMFAO ! BIG bricks at that!

[@truthseeker2321]

​@thedangerbag Well, if it went off, you wouldn't feel a thing. Not even for a nanosecond. I would have hated being the guy who had to take it apart and retrieve the plutonium trigger, knowing that one wrong move could possibly kill thousands of people in a second.

[@thedangerbag]

@@truthseeker2321 Yeah, I suppose you make a good point.

[@m2hmghb]

Just an FYI the normal classification length is 50 years. My dad was a crew chief on chrome dome planes, he was stationed in Italy, New York, Louisiana, and Germany. He did a year long tour of duty in Thailand and flew over North Vietnam and South Vietnam in his B52s because the pilots were superstitious when the plane was repaired but he didn't want to fly combat misisons. Funnily enough he was assigned to Thailand for knocking out a wing commander who showed up in civvy attire driving his wife's car onto the flightline where my dad was repairing one of the Alert B52s(meaning fully fueled fully armed with nukes). Colonel demanded entry onto the bomber to do an inspection - him being drunk meant no talking him out of it - dad let him get started on the stairs then cold cocked him with a spanner to the back of the head. Said colonel tried to get him court martialed but my dad was willing to take it to trial and there is no hushing up a court martial like that. So rather then keep him near where the colonel had power a Two Star General offered him a choice of Keflavik in Iceland or U Tapao in Thailand. As he put it he was tired of being frozen so he chose Thailand.

[@Hurricayne92]

So what i took away from that is the incredible level of corruption in the US military

[@greganderson6371]

That’s really cool. My granddad flew B52s, although I never met him because his plane went down when my dad was just a kid.

[@TheIrishTexan]

Broken Arrow isn't even the only specific term for nuclear weapon incidents. There's also the more terrifying "Empty Quiver" for when one just... disappears such as having potentially been stolen. And I'm not sure if there's more, but I know there's been at least one officially declared Empty Quiver incident. And I'm pretty sure they never found it. So someone out there somewhere might just have a nuke in their basement waiting for a bad day to make it everyone else's problem. The little thing that was show explaining what a Broken Arrow is and how many there have been doesn't mention it, but different terms do exist for what exactly happened with the weapon.

[@SeanBZA]

Only good thing about nukes is they have a really short operational life before they need a rebuild. USSR ones were said to need an overhaul every 6 months, so it was debated even recently if any of them would acrually operate at anything close to full power if used. Same for the USA, though there it was closer to 18 months between overhaul, mostly due to the trigger units, very active neutron sources so the prompt critical was going to be really fast, would need replacing, and this meant replacing them from their location in the centre of the unit. Then the whole reprocessing thing, where you have a facility the size of a Borg Cube. Amazing that that Z facility is totally gone, just a footprint left, and nothing of the area is around at all, all removed back to greenfield status.

[@Hurricayne92]

@@SeanBZA If we are being honest a Nuclear weapon that has low efficency just becomes a "dirty bomb" that leaves far larger amounts of radioactive material after detonation.

[@dolphin64575]

Tyler mentioned in another video that there's broken arrow, empty quiver, and bent spear, but I don't remember what it means

[@bower31]

Permissive action link makes that basically impossible if that was the case

[@truthseeker2321]

The empty quiver incident might be the Savanah river H-bomb that was never recovered after the collision of an F-86 Sabre fighter and a B-47 bomber over Georgia in 1957. The bomb had an explosive yield of 5 megatons, and the crew of the bomber insisted that the weapon WAS armed and ready for use, while the Air Force said it wasn't. I remember watching a documentary on this, and despite using Geiger counters to find the bomb, it has never been found. It was stated in the documentary that the water in the Savanah river is naturally radioactive from radium deposits, and it was giving false leads to the Geiger counters.

[@mannymd93]

Tyler’s remarkable change of facial expression change at 12:45 when hearing the payload size is priceless 😂

[@spvillano]

A pair in Georgia, a pair off of Cape May. All, happily corroding into the muck. Plus the pair that nearly made an extremely rude noise... Then, there was the time we made Spain very angry with our nukes... Boy, they were *really* mad over the mess! But then, those didn't stay together, so there was core spew all over the place.

[@Quokkat7]

nuclear double tap is crazy 😂

[@mahpell7173]

I choked when I heard that one

[@MazzieMay]

I think my favorite thing about Tyler’s reactions is that the way he talks is so conversational that even when I don’t get it, I still don’t feel left out

[@Canthus13]

And you should look into Admiral Rickover's career. He was the father of the Nuclear Navy. He actually HATED nuclear anything because of the dangers, so he pushed for it to be as safe as humanly possible. He influenced some of the changes made in the wake of TMI. He's the reason the US Navy has never had a nuclear accident (defined as uncontrolled release of fission products from a damaged reactor). He was a truly remarkable man.

[@spvillano]

Went from agitator to large and in charge after the Thresher and Scorpion were lost. Haven't lost any since his QC programs were implemented in SUBSAFE.

[@weeb3244]

Iirc from my time in nuke school, it was congress who pushed for the intense safety standards, not him (though given how he was, he wouldve thrown them in anyways, cause he thought literally everyone around him was a bumbling idiot (sailors are, he was correct))

[@windhelmguard5295]

in reference to 28:10 how do you split the atom? give it to a soldier and tell him not to break it.

[@kurotoruk]

specifically give it to a *private*

[@spvillano]

@@kurotoruk or a second lieutenant.

[@S1D3W1ND3R015]

​@kurotoruk Like the other guy pointed out. Officers. I trust a lot more privates in my 10 years so far than officers 😂

[@jeffwilson1394]

Pleasantly surprised to see you run an AK Guy video

[@John-ir2zf]

The USSR never actually built the full scale, 100 Mt device. The 59 Mt device was a scaled down version of the 100Mt design. The best lift capacity plane they had at the time couldn't carry the the full weight of the 100Mt device. So they swapped out the u238 tamper for a lead tamper, which reduced the weight to JUST under what the craft could carry, and reduced the overall yield to 59Mt. And surprisingly, made the weapon very "clean" relative to its yield.

[@kstricl]

The change in the sheathing seems to be debated. The author on Wikipedia that wrote the section on this part suggests the weight reduction would only be approximately 1 ton and would not have made that much of an impact on the planes ability to carry the bomb. I myself believe the explanation of this being done to make it possible for the crew to survive; they even dropped it on parachutes, which would increase the time to test altitude so the plane could clear the blast radius. No chutes and full yield likely would have killed the crew, either through exposure or directly by the blast.

[@John-ir2zf]

@kstricl that "1 ton" reduction in weight is nearly 100% unbelievable "wiki guy" nonsense. U238 is nearly twice as dense as lead. Uranium metal has a very high density of 19.1 g/cm3, denser than lead (11.3 g/cm3), but slightly less dense than tungsten and gold (19.3 g/cm3). AN602, "tzar bomba", was just a shade under 30 tons and in most fission/fusion/fission devices, the u238 tamper is a substantial proportion of the total weight of the device. I find it extraordinarily hard to believe changing the tamper to lead would only reduce the weight by 1 ton. And if you notice how the final device falls JUST (59,584.8 lb) under the 30ton weight limit of the craft, it makes clear sense that using the original planned u238 tamper would have put the device well over the lift capacity of their best craft.

[@kstricl]

​@@John-ir2zf Fuel capacity of the TU-95M was 29,100 Gallons. I will use US gallons as info came from a US website. Weight per US gallon of Kerosene (again, assumption, but likely to be close) is 6.68 lbs per gallon. Fuel weight if tanks completely full is 29,100 x 6.68 = 194,388 lbs. The distance to the test range from the airbase measures on google maps at approximately 491 miles. Considering the TU-95 had a max range under normal load out of ~8200 miles, that tells me, they only needed approximately 20% of fuel load to be safe on range (or under 40,000 lbs of fuel.) Looks to me like an extra 3-6,000 lbs would have been no issue. Considering the cited report says the bomber dropped ~0.62 miles in altitude when 71 miles away, that lends credence to the idea that reducing the yield to make the test survivable was more likely than lift capacity of the plane.

[@John-ir2zf]

@kstricl that COULD be the assumption....if you were assuming that the ussr cared about losing 4 or 6 airmen. Considering they tossed 25 mil soliders to their end to beat the Germans, and have a long history of giving zero Fs about their people, the idea that they "scaled down their greatest propaganda piece" to save a few airmen seems far fetched.... And no plane flies with the bare minimum fuel needed to reach a destination and return. Even if they did have extra "overall" weight capacity, from carrying less fuel, that doesn't mean you can replace all that fuel mass with extra ordnance weight. Every extra pound of ordnance would require even more from that cut down fuel supply. it's not a simple trade off, you can't remove 10,000 lbs of fuel, and add 10,000 lbs of ordnance in its place and call it even, because the extra ordnance weight will use even more fuel to carry, from a fuel supply that's diminished.

[@kstricl]

@@John-ir2zf Commercial aircraft fly with minimum fuel all the time (this minimum includes loiter time if they need to wait for traffic or fly to an alternate airfield). Military aircraft frequently take off with far less than a full load of fuel then refuel in air so they can get off the ground with heavier loads. You seem to think there is a hard limit on cargo weight in an aircraft; the limits are available lift and center of gravity. So long as you keep your weights and balances within what the airframe is capable of, you can definitely trade fuel capacity for load. I showed in my comment that you can reduce the total load of fuel by 150k lbs and still have enough range to make the test mission. Since they are quite literally dropping 60k lbs at the end of the flight, they likely returned with a couple hours of loiter time, or range to make a much further airfield. As to the survival factor- Khruschev definitely wanted those men to not only survive, but return in good health for propaganda purposes. Besides, the top Russian brass would've wanted the plane back.

[@shawnsanto3564]

I still remember the line from the movie “Broken Arrow “ - I don’t know what’s more scary? The fact we lost a nuclear weapon or the fact it happens often enough that we have a term for when it happens.

[@tjjordan4207]

Definitely the last one.

[@robertsmith4681]

We really do need to get Tyler on Unsubscribe, Nick and Brandon going at it with a literal nuclear enginerd has hilarity written all over it ...

[@Nate-R89]

That would be fantastic lol

[@miscme6046]

yea they can get tyler, its just if he wants to go on and if we can tell them about it

[@bami2]

AK-235?

[@IdriveKITTnyc]

HLC needs to be there too. The missile tism will go off the charts.

[@DorkwingYT]

Lmfaoo

[@hamaljay]

I've known about these nukes in North Carolina for a long time. You can only classify something for 50 years unless there's a good reason to continue.

[@neekMarieM14]

Not a huge Brandon fan (I enjoy gun meme reviews and the recent cybertruck upgrades) but I respect anyone willing to interact and react politely with his content. Nuclear engineering content aside, you have earned my subscription.

[@richardtrump2544]

Hey Tyler, you editing has improved greatly in this one. Looks very smooth and professional. This topic was all new to me so I learned a lot. Crazy losing nukes...

[@soylentgreenb]

The fusion stage contains plutonium or U-235 or some mix called the spark plug. You do not want to heat the secondary with the primary fission stage. The primary should only compress the secondary and it is a lot eadier to compress something that’s near room temperature instead of compressing a hot plasma. The spark plug fissions and generates the heat and neutrons required to create the tritium and fuse it with deuterium. There were early tests without a spark plug using exotic cryogenic deuterium and tritium etc but these were just physics experiments.

[@khrisbreezy3628]

I visited the actual impact zone in North Carolina last year, the remaining bits were cleaned out from the ground and yes, that is all non-irradiated farmland. Its pretty cool and the sign commemorating the event in the small town was an amusing monument. And I went there cause of Brandon's video, it was very worth the drive! Love the content! Thanks for the insight to your work, its always fun to learn more!

[@38Maelstorm]

I know of one incident where a short guy was trying to reach the top of the mounting for the bomb but accidently released it. It hit, exploded, and caused a literal ground wave, but the explosion wasn't nuclear. It left a crater and nothing grows in the area.

[@takingthescenicroute1610]

18:00 The horrifying part is recovering them from the populated area they crashed in before an opportunistic scrapper comes by and creates a North Carolinian Goiania incident.

[@IAMHyde]

I was a Navy Nuke, and I was operating a nuclear reactor on a submarine when I was 20 years old, so your statement at the end is very much correct 😂😂😂

[@Canthus13]

I grew up military, have tons of military friends, served in the navy, and my kid was in the army. How did I not notice 'See more johnson' air force base...?

[@Merennulli]

I do get frustrated with the "so often we have a term for it". We had the term before it happened and we have a lot of terms for things that haven't happened. If we did wait until something happened to have a term for it, that would be funny. "Mr. President, we've had a broken arrow incident!" "Aww, sorry to hear that. I think there's an archery store in Arlington, we can get you some new ones."

[@Nate-R89]

😂

[@dylandreisbach1986]

Remember only like a year or two ago when a pilot ejected from a fighter jet but accidentally left the AI autopilot on so the military lost a plane flying around on its own? Its crazy what they can get away with and nothing happens after.

[@NeverlostatBSgaming]

Hearing a nuclear engineer coin the term "nuclear double tap" is hilarious to me and is definitely something that needs to be taught

[@Mads-h3l]

Denmark's official policy was no nuclear bombs on Danish territory. However, behind the scenes Danish foreign minister H.C. Hansen OK'ed nuclear weapons on the Thule airbase (Greenland), as long as US kept it secret. Thus America only broke official Danish policy, not actual Danish policy.

[@jackr2287]

14:50 From what it sounds like the fuel leak is in the B-52. Aircraft also are kinda iffy on landing when overweight. The expectation is the fuel carried up will be mostly burned off, instead of landed back down. That's really hard on the structure of the aircraft. You can also dump the fuel into the ocean (it sucks, but it's that or risk a fiery explosion on the runway, and closing the airfield.)

[@Hughjanus454]

What we use now is plutonium fusion MIRVs. Multiple individual reentry vehicles. Like 12 per missile on a submarine with multiple missiles on the sub.

[@bliviont]

You should do a Broken Arrow series where you go through several of the incidents per video! I bet that would be interesting.

[@NightFangFenrir]

Brandon’s voice combined with his very clear and concise delivery would honestly work extremely well as a narrator.

[@jsmunitions1471]

I live in NC and I can say that, no, he's not exaggerating about how close those things going off and how lucky it was that they didn't.

[@SuiLagadema]

This reminded me of the story of a B52 carrying a nuclear missile by accident; where a technician took a look and said "Wait... this is a nuclear missile, not a training one"

[@bower31]

This has happened more than once, or 20 times. It's not really rare

[@tjjordan4207]

That guy should look on the bright side, he can legit say he’s experienced with carrying real nuclear warheads.

[@limabravo6065]

@@SuiLagadema 3 cruise missiles each tipped with a thermonuclear warhead were mistaken for training dummy nukes, installed onto the BUFF's hard point and then left for about 12hrs🧐💩 I was stationed there when it happened and thank sweet baby jesus I was not on duty when it went down.

[@skullknight2008]

“Nuclear Doubletap” needs to be on a t shirt stat! Love it.

[@Hughjanus454]

In government if you're great at your job you'll never get a promotion.

[@cyanidacal0lulz]

“Nuclear double tap?” Lmfaoooo that got me

[@exceedinglycurioable]

Always remember day to day military is managed by 20 some year olds. Wisdom is their strength.

[@p_serdiuk]

The 100 Mt bomb was the original Tsar Bomba, the Soviets downgraded it by replacing the tertiary uranium shell with inert material. It was a layered cake of nuclear and thermonuclear materials.

[@Hughjanus454]

Have you ever heard of the Tybee Island bomb. Im from Georgia its still offshore in the silt.

[@Trippy_Hippy89]

Who ever built that last switch was on point that day.

[@mattilindstrom]

These and other whoopsies with the bomb are thoroughly discussed in a chapter of the book Atomic Accidents by J. Mahaffey. I highly recommend it to everyone interested in civilian and military nuclear related near misses, accidents, and catastrophes.

[@chrisblood7395]

When I was stationed at Seymour Johnson AFB (which is named after a dead Navy test pilot, by the way) in the mid/late 1970s, one of my many fun jobs was "Nuclear/Biological/Chemical Decontamination Team Chief". The Base Commander evidently thought that I was the ideal person to visit that fenced-in little plot of joy, once a month, to check on it. I had a geiger counter, and the key to the gate. In the 3 years I did that job? The geiger counter never read over what it was "supposed" to; and there was never any signs that anybody - but me - had been there. So, I just went out there; did my thing; and filled out my report - because, of course there's paperwork. I put the geiger counter away 'till next month, and carried on doing my many other fun jobs. But, at least it got me out of the office - and away from that base, for an hour or two. Which, in a 24 year career, was the worst place I was ever stationed...

[@Scoots1994]

I got to go down into the Shippingport nuclear power plant's (the first public nuclear power plant online in the US ... I think) containment room when it was being de-comissioned to look like a nice park with 16' tall fences topped with razor wire around it. The funniest part of the tour was the armed forces guard on my way out checking my exposure badges and making sure the bottoms of my feet were checked for radioactive debris on one side of a tape line on the floor before they touched down on the other side of the tape. If my foot touched the wrong side of the tape the whole process would have to be restarted. This is in a facility that hadn't had any fuel in it in 4 years at least, and that had had all of it's piping cut and removed in kind of amazing and stupid fashion. Oh the stories of stupidity of de-commissioning a nuclear power plant in the US.

[@m2hmghb]

Pilots will make the decision to ditch or go down with their plane in order to prevent civilian casualties. It's not a surprise this was in a less populated area. Our ace of aces died when instead of bailing out of his fighter jet during testing he waited to guide it past an elementary school at which point he bailed out - but he was too low for the chute to open. He wasn't the first and wasn't the last to make that decision.

[@omgpotatos9226]

Fun fact: the parachute that deployed, wasn’t to bring the bomb to a safe landing, no. That was an arming step, so that the aircraft that dropped said bomb can get away from the blast radius in time.

[@patrickcameron2266]

There is also one that got dropped off of tybee island Georgia. The plane carrying it had a collision with another aircraft and they dropped it in the water. It had not been found to this day and this happened in the late 60’s.

[@badjuju2721]

I love Brandon's videos and yours too, this is a great crossover video :)

[@spvillano]

Other than the whoopsie with warheads in Greenland, Denmark got *really* mad when they learned of an under ice ICBM base attempt (thankfully, no missiles got installed) that failed due to glacial ice inconveniently moving the tunnels around. What got Denmark mad, other than digging through their glacier like ice eating termites? Oh, that nuclear reactor that powered the base for a while, largely due to repeated hot loop leaks, much contaminated ice left behind. As for the warheads involved in the incidents described, there were no single point safeties, no permissive action link as we know it at the time, a half dozen safety switches and the pit was filled with a neutron poison chain system. One that, once the chain is withdrawn, the core had to be rebuilt with the chain reinstalled. Core detonation was basically possible with single point initiation. It's why we introduced those safeties, given the sheer volume of failures in those safety systems in the described incident. Courtesy of someone buying them a new dictionary with the word safety included in that version. But then, in that era, the motto was "Better dead than red!".

[@Hughjanus454]

Exactly air burst , high altitude would create a emp ,a ground blast kicks up fallout. Medium altitude is the det point. Fallout Usually not as bad as the original ones, due to nearly all the material being used. Basically more efficient just like a car that burns cleaner, mostly due to the fusion process. Plutonium i think they had around 9 failsafes back in the day. Obviously Nevada and bikini atoll is still a little warm.

[@christopherharvell7410]

They probably took it the facility on Shadow Moses Island in the Fox Archipelago.

[@eltreum1]

I have flown out of SJ a couple times lol. My parents were in a B52 squad and later went to Iron Mountain in the cold War through the 80s and talked about the Chrome Dome. They thought WW3 was starting when JFK was shot because they got the stand-by order and finally got to see inside one of the safes in their vault no one opened. Everything is engineered so no one person can physically do anything with things containing sunshine units. They estimate a small percentage of live fired weapons will be duds and not go off because they are extremely over-engineered to not go off unless multiple specific conditions are met and you really really mean it. Some like to make drama about the bombs almost going off but indeed show the fail-safes did their job, multiple times it turns out. The nasty materials are in sealed modular units designed to resist impacts from accidental drops to mitigate spills because the primer nuke is too powerful to care about the casing's extra strength. The military can be dumb sometimes, but they are not completely insane.

[@Argyle117]

Of all the people on this site that I expected you to review, Brandon Herrera was not one, but gladly appreciated.

[@tylerpfledderer9746]

Grandpa Buff definitely resents the nickname. #IYKYK and glad you're here 🫡

[@barry99705]

Heh, I've seen that sign. Was stationed there in 94-95. Shady J is the only Air Force base named after a Navy guy.

[@JohnRandomness105]

Okay, I admit I was clueless about that name. When we're talking megatons, recall that the two bombs that hit Japan were around 20 kilotons. Dr. Strangelove opens with footage of an air refueling. 19:40 Nuclear power plant: nuclear explosion -- how could it ever happen? Radioactivity -- potentially gargantuan because of the amount of nuclear fuel. Thermonuclear weapon: explosion: gargantuan. Radioactivity: far smaller because of the amount of nuclear fuel (such as tritium and uranium). In case one has forgotten: Chernobyl's explosion was non-nuclear. Either a steam explosion because the water got too hot, or a hydrogen-oxygen chemical-reaction explosion. (Pardon my memory.) 22:00 Plutonium? Is plutonium sometimes used in thermonuclear weapons, other than as a trigger? (Forgive my ignorance.) 25:00 As I understand it the initial triggering is two basic fission bombs. The big explosion is a combination of d-t fusion and U238 fission, which continue to drive each other. A couple questions: even if all the safeties were off, would the trigger bombs have exploded? If both exploded, would the timing be right to trigger the fusion reaction and the U238 fission? If the two triggers are off by a microsecond -- maybe even a tenth of a microsecond -- the d-t mix is blown apart harmlessly.

[@conc3rn3d]

Awesome video!

[@JustBigL66]

this video made me subscribe to brandon xD that dude is hilarious. almost p*ssed myself when he said "a slightly used nuke" haha

[@neruneri]

There's a profoundly absurd comedy to the fact that the only reason this didn't turn out to be an unmitigable disaster is because the nukes themselves were so "safe", while the actual planes were not.

[@FUnzzies1]

You gotta get with them for a range day!

[@bullbythehorns808]

15:37 how did he not get you to laugh there? I'm in utter shock. Ur a robot

[@ryanm7832]

Hey, Tyler! Love your content! Just wanted to say, if you haven't already done so, a video on Chernobyl would be interesting from your perspective. I think the show did a great job at explaining things, better than most documentaries, but I was wondering if there's anything you could elaborate on, maybe something they missed? Or do a react to the trial scene, where Legaslov is explaining the chain of destruction/failure that led to the initial blast and subsequent meltdown. Or maybe talk about how we, as humanity, need to keep that containment structure integrally sound, virtually forever; in 2016-2017 a new structure was built, at a cost of around $2 billion, and was designed to last 100 years. But if that containment structure fails, or the heat converter they installed under the core fails and the core melts down into the water table, it could be catastrophic for the world's stability (I use that term loosely... Lol). Could potentially also be a target for terrorists (or incompetent state actors) intending to inflict mass harm. Also, tied in to what TFE said about it, Gorbachev said that the Chernobyl incident was probably the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union (I would say it was quite a bit before that, like, the Bolshevik Revolution). But Chernobyl really showed the world the lengths the Soviets would go through to conceal an extremely dangerous accident/threat to the whole Asian and European, and maybe African, continents (if not the whole world). Just got to the part where you mentioned Chernobyl (gotta stop typing comments before finishing videos). :p Just wanted to ask about the comparison to a nuclear weapon; you said the destruction is incomparable. That's true on an obvious, physical level (visually), but according to Legaslov in the show, it was emitting multiple-Hiroshima-bombs worth of radiation PER HOUR (basically, dozens and dozens of nukes worth of radiation, just none of the explosive effects, outside of the steam explosion). Oh! And can you elaborate on the effects of ionizing radiation? In the show, people suffer from nearly instantaneous (just a few seconds to minutes) radiation "burns" from touching the most radiated debris, like the graphite chunks from the core. People have doubted that portrayal in some youtube comments, but I think, if it was really pumping out 15k roentgen, then the nearly instant wounds manifesting from touching materials from within the core is entirely plausible. Sorry for rambling so much; had a lot of coffee this morning, it's like 20 degrees Fahrenheit in my room (very brisk and stimulating), and I just finished the Chernobyl mini series late last night. :p

[@darkwinter7395]

Yeah... Nuclear Meltdown? You can outrun it. Nuclear Bomb Detonation? Um.... nope, you're not outrunning _that._

[@Flash_Flood44]

Love that you found Brandon. Where you expecting to TFE in it?

[@mgfeedthebeast]

hey tfn! could you make a big debunk video about the things people think are bad about nuclear, like how people are concernd about for example plutonium pruduction by reactors, as a informative video with everything placed together so that the few people who are scared have got one single thing to look at? maybe including some of your other content into it, because we need nuclear for the net zero and we need it soon! i love your content!

[@ericeastmead7770]

that's some Swagg for you Tyler Nuclear Double Tap

[@SeanBZA]

Remember the USSR also has some rather large sites where they dumped nuclear waste, and in true tradition they did not bother to do any containment, instead making the most radioactive lake ( now a dust bowl) on the planet, along with a river system as well. Then of course there is that little Caspian desert/sea island where they conducted biological testing, and simply left everything behind.

[@WJS774]

Yeah, people hate on the US government, and deservedly so, but they often lose track of that even as bad as the US government is, there have been _so much worse._

[@arsenygubkin1222]

That is a crossover i did not expected :D

[@TedSchoenling]

Bleed air is how planes are pressurized and heated.. that isn't uncommon.. EVERY airliner works that way....

[@hamaljay]

Every airliner is engineered to work that way. The accident over Greenland wasn't engineered to catch on fire. But the non-engineer pilots accomplished it anyways.

[@QuantumRealm-]

It WAS the Tsar Bomba that was supposed to have 100 megatons, but they lowered the payload to reduce the fallout. At least that is what Wikipedia states. "In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of 100 Mt (418 PJ) if it had included the uranium-238 tamper which featured in the design but was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout. As only one bomb was built to completion, that capability has never been demonstrated."

[@benmcelwain5301]

Oh, he doesn't know! His next Kurzgesagt reaction should be a banger.

[@its1ofthosedays562]

You reacted to our Next ATF Director. PS he’s also Medal of Honor recipient, and double Purple Heart recipient. 😉

[@marioestrada5328]

13:29 nuclear double tap😂

[@Ghostly_One1]

Zero point energy? The atlantis expedition would like to know your location... 👀

[@KarlAlmquist-j1d]

Broken Arrow is the loss of a nuclear weapon due to known issue with the weapon or weapon delivery system. An Empty Quiver is the more... scary of the two ideas. EQ is the idea that the weapon had been lost, stolen or destroyed; usually due to a terrorist situation. We've had a couple of those, too. This idea means that the movie "Broken Arrow" is more of an "Empty Quiver" situation, but what does Hollywood know?

[@nathnathn]

Not the only time they’ve dropped a bomb by accident. Also for this one i heard the failure to detonate was due to a faulty detonator. I cant remember if it was this one or the other case like it but they were carrying the bombs with cores in, armed, and they didn’t even put the pin in the quick release.

[@toby1248]

The difference between a reactor and a nuke is the 'safety incident' is the whole point of the device. All the safety systems are only there to make sure it doesn't happen at the wrong time. The safety systems weren't defeated, they were deactivated because the bombs were armed.

[@Sword_Boi]

The scary thing is I bet the white house would have assumed it was an enemy attack before the plane crash was reported if both went off.

[@NorthernNorthdude91749]

The government should keep NO secrets. Everything should be revealed.

[@theCidisIn]

What's really scary is they wouldn't have to cover it up, they'd just blame Russia.

[@jeremyschulthess63]

Zero point energy sounds like the ZPM (zero point module) from Stargate SG-1 and its spinoffs.

[@Eliphas_Leary]

Wasn't there a segment of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight about the state of how secure the facilities are where nuclear bombs are kept? Something about the pizza delivery guy getting the pie right into the control room without being checked once...

[@joecrazy9896]

If you're interested in a longer video, I recommend "The Most Painful Death Ever" by the channel Wendigoon. The video is about the 1999 Tokaimura Nuclear Incident, and what happened to a technician named Hisashi Ouchi.

[@steffennilsen2132]

Its been a while since I read about this and I don't think it was mentioned in the video, the airmen parachuting out of the bomber as it broke up watched in horror as one of the bombs deployed its parachute, as it would only do that if its armed. As far as they knew they would be caught in a nuclear blast in a few moments.

[@CybernetonPL]

im literally at a john lennon high school in germany frrrrrrrrrrr

[@GamerValene]

Engine bleed air supplies the pressurization/climate controls. Older aircraft don’t have multiple thermostats to maintain a bleed air temp and usually only had an over temp thermostat to close off the bleed at a certain temperature.

[@jesuizanmich]

26:00 it maybe could contain radioactive contaminants. It depends on which design of nuclear device we are talking about. The fusion stage may have a reflector around it. The tampers can be made of Uranium lined with Beryllium or something else. If the second stage is indeed intact and underground, it could be a big uranium tamper filled with some form of deuterium. Even if it was just beryllium, I'm not sure about growing crops on top of beryllium if it's for consumption. Inhaling beryllium is more dangerous, but I wouldn't want to be the one testing eating it.

[@JohnDoe-p4o]

I mean, I think oppenheimer understood what he was making and what he was making it for but when the consequences of it fully became understood in his mind, that's why he reacted the way he did. Before the first bomb was dropped, the concept of a mega death (100,000 casualties in an instantaneous moment) was purely theoretical, just like the idea of an atomic bomb before he designed one was theoretical. They were just numbers on a chalkboard. Once he created the bomb, it was real, it was tangible, it was palpable. And just like that, the concept of a hundred thousand fatalities in one instant became a reality.

[@zacharyharwell351]

Thinking about "Broken Arrow," a thought occurred: Imagine being the poor bastard in the Pentagon or the President's retinue or what have you, the day is probably kinda boring (comparatively) and you're just plodding along doing whatever and suddenly you get a call or some sort of comm and all you hear are firm but panicked "Broken Arrow!" come through followed by details describing either US Cities or NATO allied countries. THAT'S a rough day right there

[@xlmacro8754]

Yeahhhhh, plaques like that are all over North Carolina. Almost all of them elicit a similar reaction as you had to this one.

[@gabrielharris5446]

I would love a video thats a semi deep dive on zero point energy. its been an object of fascination for me since I read a book called "Revelation" which is a fictional take on the use of zero point energy as a WMD

[@generation-x406]

3.8 megatons would be around 152,000,000 dump trucks full of tnt for a fun comparison.

[@crowsnest8295]

The nuber of nukes that disappeared when the USSR broke up is truly disturbing

[@wmdragonj]

You should do. Count Dankula’s Mad Lad video on the “nuclear Boy Scout”

[@KGTiberius]

@13:35 “nuclear double tap.” 🤣

[@WJS774]

It is pretty crazy. _Every single one_ of the safety mechanisms in those bombs failed that day, in one or the other of them. I suppose it's possible that given the dissimilar impacts, one of the safeties might be designed to be more robust in the event of a high-speed impact and one might have been designed to be more so for a lower speed impact, that wouldn't be quite so bad.

[@danielpalmersheim4252]

Love the phrase 'mach fuck'

[@soylentgreenb]

No. They didn’t have a bigger one than tsar bomba. The bigger one was just tsar bomba with natural or depleted uranium casing. This doubles the yield. D-T Fusion neutrons have a reasonable fission cross section in U-238. This would have increased fission yield from 1.5 MT to 50-ish MT and made the bomb so much dirtier that they used a lead casing instead.

[@lordsqueak]

@27:00 ish Does the F 70 on the plaque stand for "Frag up # 70" ?

[@scmccuiston4052]

Heard recently that a Florida man recovered one and hooked it up to his house and had free power for decades. Idk if true but I wouldn’t be shocked.

[@charlesbartlow8046]

Yeah that happened lol not sure if it was one of these lost bombs. Number of missing nukes i hear is in the +150 range.

[@depluribusunum3128]

Have you not heard of Port Chicago? July 17, 1944. Read the newspaper accounts of the damage caused.