In the early 1980s on a cold night about 2 am I was looking up and saw streaks of light high in the sky. A co-worker and I commented that if it was a MIRV, we would know pretty soon. The wait was pretty anti-climatic. It was the around the time President Reagan and the USSR were not on the best of terms. About 3 hours later it was reported that a USSR Satellite had deorbited after launch. At that time I knew that if a nuclear war ever started our first warning would be a bright flash and not the Emergency Broadcast System.
I was a 2nd grade student in the Plattsburg, NY area during the Cuban Missile crisis. Most of our neighbors were Air Force members stationed at the nearby bomber and missile bases. I can remember both the drills hiding under our desks at school, thinking if the roof fell, we would be crushed and the evening of President Kennedy's national address as Air Force carry alls/ Suburbans drove down our street picking up airmen. That was living under the threat of nuclear war. By the 1980's nobody took the Russians as serious threats. Remember, in the United States we had B-52s accidentally dropping hydrogen bombs all over the place and somewhere in Arkansas a mechanic dropped a wrench in a missile silo that caused an explosion and launched the warhead thru an 80 ton blast door.
"if you know how nuclear weapons work, it might help you get over your fear" If you know how nuclear weapons work, they are still super scary. Heck, the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were considered "small" weapons. But if you know enough about bio-weapons, real-life omnicidal people, and what AGIs will be capable of, that stuff can be even scarier!
"Nature hates instability, but nature has found a way to return things to stability" nature seems to *love* instability given how many things in the universe are unstable (oh, you think our solar system is stable? Well, just wait a few billion years). In this case, atomic decay isn't nature's "solution" to instability, it is the very definition of what it means to be unstable. But it's also true that after decaying a certain number of times (often once), a nucleus always ends up stable.
"This electron is going extremely fast so it can cause a lot of problems for you if you get in its way" I find this a funny contrast to the first statement. It reminds me of the scary-sounding comment in the HBO Chernobyl movie about "millions of microscopic bullets": "nanoscopic bullets" would be a good analogy for radiation (they're way smaller than "microscopic") but I heard that natural background radiation hits us with about 20,000 of these bullets every second; our cells can usually repair themselves.
"Basically get a sunburn inside your body" Exactly! Sunlight is ionizing radiation, and I think it would be very instructive to see ionizing sunlight (UVB at high noon hitting a sunbather) measured in µSv/hr (the same unit typically used for nuclear radiation) as a way of calibrating our intuition about how bad a given amount of radiation is, but Google couldn't find me any estimates. Of course, sunlight is concentrated on the skin while other radiation goes inside you. Now, thyroid cancer caused by radioactive iodine has a similar survival rate to skin cancer caused by sunlight. However, other kinds of radiation tend to cause other cancers such as leukemia that are much less treatable, and in case of full-scale nuclear war you can expect a shortage of medical supplies.
"Alpha particles are fairly big" well, they're 1.68 femtometers across, but relatively speaking yeah
"That's one of the reasons alpha particles are so dangerous, they have no electrons" I'd be surprised if this were important. It's moving at 5% the speed of light; if it _had_ electrons, wouldn't they be stripped off during collisions anyhow? Wikipedia says this about RBE (Relative Biological Effectiveness): "Different types of radiation have different biological effectiveness mainly because they transfer their energy to the tissue in different ways. Photons and beta particles have a low linear energy transfer (LET) coefficient, meaning that they ionize atoms in the tissue that are spaced by several hundred nanometers (several tenths of a micrometer) apart, along their path. In contrast, the much more massive alpha particles and neutrons leave a denser trail of ionized atoms in their wake, spaced about one tenth of a nanometer apart (i.e., less than one-thousandth of the typical distance between ionizations for photons and beta particles)." The unstated implication seems to be that cells are much worse at repairing closely-spaced damage. But on second thought, if the alpha particle still had its electrons, maybe damage would be spaced out further?
"It's potentially impossible to separate the 'good' Pu-239 from the 'bad' Pu-240" This, by the way, is the biggest reason why most nuclear power stations are bad for making nuclear-weapon material. We can, do (and should) design reactors to contain their fuel longer than 30 days so that the fuel is sufficiently "poisoned" with Pu-240, 241 and 242. Note also that plutonium is the stuff that makes spent fuel hazardous for 10,000 years. In theory, plutonium can easily be "burned up" in fast-spectrum "waste burner" reactors (e.g. Moltex SSR-W) and I'm not sure why it's taking us so long to build them.
"All of these X-rays and gamma rays start to crush the second device" high-energy light doesn't normally compress anything, let alone "crush", but it exerts a very mild pressure which (apparently) becomes extremely large inside an H-bomb.
"Different ways of measuring radiation - Sievent, Grey, REM, RAD... feel free to perform the conversions if you need to" it's worth mentioning that 1 rem = 10 mSv (and of course 1 Sv = 1000 mSv, same as all other metric units) - if you are aware of this, you hardly need an online tool for conversion. By the way, Bq (Becquerel) is a completely different category of unit, for measuring radiation at its source, which in typical cases isn't absorbed by anyone. (These numbers are often enormous because they represent the total number of decays per second―remember, 20,000 per second absorbed is normal in a "non-radioactive" environment, so stuff we call "radioactive" often gives off much more. In contrast, just 1 Sievert (1000 mSv) is enough to cause [mild] radiation sickness.)
We could also measure radiation in Joules (energy). 1 Sievert is 1 Joule per kilogram, which basically means that if the light from a typical light bulb were ionizing, it could give you enough radiation to get radiation sickness in a matter of minutes, if you were standing close to it. So, dangerous levels of radiation don't necessarily have a lot of energy, our bodies are just easily damaged by it. Our cells can repair most of the damage, but only slowly.
"Worst case, [cells] become cancerous. This is why people with radiation sickness see their hair fall out and have gastric problems." Radiation sickness is not a form of cancer, it's the effect of large-scale cellular damage. Radiation sickness starts within hours of acute exposure, while cancer can occur many years later. A dose of radiation large enough to be *likely* to cause cancer would be directly lethal if the dose were received all at once. So cancers tend to be associated with large doses spread out over a period of years, or, for acute exposure from an atom bomb, a small number of cancer cases in a large population.
"RAD is exposure to radiation, but what you absorb is the REM": Uhh... RAD stands for Radiation Absorbed Dose. RAD is to REM as Gy is to Sv; in both cases the dimensions are the same (Gy and Sv both mean "Joules per second") but Sv and rem are adjusted by "RBE" as mentioned above. Typically, 1 Gy = 1 Sv (and 1 rad = 1 rem) unless alpha particles are involved. So Sv/mSv/rem units are more informative, but similar to Gy/rad in typical cases.
"as much shielding...as you possibly can" And for gods sake close your windows and doors. It seems like a good idea to stuff the cracks with towels/clothes, but doors are thin so don't stay near them long.
Felt like I needed some more Ryan McBeth, so re-watched this, and thought that this could be something to have an awesome colab with Jake Broe—I think I heard he might know a thing or two aboot (🇨🇦, eh) the nukes… maybe one day?…
This is good info. But what it leaves out is the astronomical amount of energy released by a single nuclear bomb. You get the impression that it is survivable if you know the right stuff. A nuke war would be catastrophe beyond our comprehension. A single nuke dropped on one of our cities would result in hundreds of thousands of serious burn victims simultaneously. Nationwide, our hospitals could handle dozens. And that is just those victims far enough away to survive the initial blast.
We are now in about year fifteen of Iran being just weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. We have already played the weapons of mass destruction card.
Why is it assumed that Iran has to build their own bomb? Would it not be more plausible that they could just buy nuclear weapons from North Korea or Pakistan or India or Russia? How is it that the United States built three weapons in 4 years, using some pretty primitive technology, yet Iran hasn't been able to make a weapon since 1979. Something doesn't smell right.
In the early 1980s on a cold night about 2 am I was looking up and saw streaks of light high in the sky. A co-worker and I commented that if it was a MIRV, we would know pretty soon. The wait was pretty anti-climatic. It was the around the time President Reagan and the USSR were not on the best of terms. About 3 hours later it was reported that a USSR Satellite had deorbited after launch. At that time I knew that if a nuclear war ever started our first warning would be a bright flash and not the Emergency Broadcast System.
I was a 2nd grade student in the Plattsburg, NY area during the Cuban Missile crisis. Most of our neighbors were Air Force members stationed at the nearby bomber and missile bases. I can remember both the drills hiding under our desks at school, thinking if the roof fell, we would be crushed and the evening of President Kennedy's national address as Air Force carry alls/ Suburbans drove down our street picking up airmen. That was living under the threat of nuclear war. By the 1980's nobody took the Russians as serious threats. Remember, in the United States we had B-52s accidentally dropping hydrogen bombs all over the place and somewhere in Arkansas a mechanic dropped a wrench in a missile silo that caused an explosion and launched the warhead thru an 80 ton blast door.
I was stationed in Germany in the 80's I remember a senior NCO telling us "don't worry about Ivan, he's passed out in a ditch"
My reaction video (without the video):
"if you know how nuclear weapons work, it might help you get over your fear" If you know how nuclear weapons work, they are still super scary. Heck, the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were considered "small" weapons. But if you know enough about bio-weapons, real-life omnicidal people, and what AGIs will be capable of, that stuff can be even scarier!
"Nature hates instability, but nature has found a way to return things to stability" nature seems to *love* instability given how many things in the universe are unstable (oh, you think our solar system is stable? Well, just wait a few billion years). In this case, atomic decay isn't nature's "solution" to instability, it is the very definition of what it means to be unstable. But it's also true that after decaying a certain number of times (often once), a nucleus always ends up stable.
"This electron is going extremely fast so it can cause a lot of problems for you if you get in its way" I find this a funny contrast to the first statement. It reminds me of the scary-sounding comment in the HBO Chernobyl movie about "millions of microscopic bullets": "nanoscopic bullets" would be a good analogy for radiation (they're way smaller than "microscopic") but I heard that natural background radiation hits us with about 20,000 of these bullets every second; our cells can usually repair themselves.
"Basically get a sunburn inside your body" Exactly! Sunlight is ionizing radiation, and I think it would be very instructive to see ionizing sunlight (UVB at high noon hitting a sunbather) measured in µSv/hr (the same unit typically used for nuclear radiation) as a way of calibrating our intuition about how bad a given amount of radiation is, but Google couldn't find me any estimates. Of course, sunlight is concentrated on the skin while other radiation goes inside you. Now, thyroid cancer caused by radioactive iodine has a similar survival rate to skin cancer caused by sunlight. However, other kinds of radiation tend to cause other cancers such as leukemia that are much less treatable, and in case of full-scale nuclear war you can expect a shortage of medical supplies.
"Alpha particles are fairly big" well, they're 1.68 femtometers across, but relatively speaking yeah
"That's one of the reasons alpha particles are so dangerous, they have no electrons" I'd be surprised if this were important. It's moving at 5% the speed of light; if it _had_ electrons, wouldn't they be stripped off during collisions anyhow? Wikipedia says this about RBE (Relative Biological Effectiveness): "Different types of radiation have different biological effectiveness mainly because they transfer their energy to the tissue in different ways. Photons and beta particles have a low linear energy transfer (LET) coefficient, meaning that they ionize atoms in the tissue that are spaced by several hundred nanometers (several tenths of a micrometer) apart, along their path. In contrast, the much more massive alpha particles and neutrons leave a denser trail of ionized atoms in their wake, spaced about one tenth of a nanometer apart (i.e., less than one-thousandth of the typical distance between ionizations for photons and beta particles)." The unstated implication seems to be that cells are much worse at repairing closely-spaced damage. But on second thought, if the alpha particle still had its electrons, maybe damage would be spaced out further?
"It's potentially impossible to separate the 'good' Pu-239 from the 'bad' Pu-240" This, by the way, is the biggest reason why most nuclear power stations are bad for making nuclear-weapon material. We can, do (and should) design reactors to contain their fuel longer than 30 days so that the fuel is sufficiently "poisoned" with Pu-240, 241 and 242. Note also that plutonium is the stuff that makes spent fuel hazardous for 10,000 years. In theory, plutonium can easily be "burned up" in fast-spectrum "waste burner" reactors (e.g. Moltex SSR-W) and I'm not sure why it's taking us so long to build them.
"All of these X-rays and gamma rays start to crush the second device" high-energy light doesn't normally compress anything, let alone "crush", but it exerts a very mild pressure which (apparently) becomes extremely large inside an H-bomb.
"Different ways of measuring radiation - Sievent, Grey, REM, RAD... feel free to perform the conversions if you need to" it's worth mentioning that 1 rem = 10 mSv (and of course 1 Sv = 1000 mSv, same as all other metric units) - if you are aware of this, you hardly need an online tool for conversion. By the way, Bq (Becquerel) is a completely different category of unit, for measuring radiation at its source, which in typical cases isn't absorbed by anyone. (These numbers are often enormous because they represent the total number of decays per second―remember, 20,000 per second absorbed is normal in a "non-radioactive" environment, so stuff we call "radioactive" often gives off much more. In contrast, just 1 Sievert (1000 mSv) is enough to cause [mild] radiation sickness.)
We could also measure radiation in Joules (energy). 1 Sievert is 1 Joule per kilogram, which basically means that if the light from a typical light bulb were ionizing, it could give you enough radiation to get radiation sickness in a matter of minutes, if you were standing close to it. So, dangerous levels of radiation don't necessarily have a lot of energy, our bodies are just easily damaged by it. Our cells can repair most of the damage, but only slowly.
"Worst case, [cells] become cancerous. This is why people with radiation sickness see their hair fall out and have gastric problems." Radiation sickness is not a form of cancer, it's the effect of large-scale cellular damage. Radiation sickness starts within hours of acute exposure, while cancer can occur many years later. A dose of radiation large enough to be *likely* to cause cancer would be directly lethal if the dose were received all at once. So cancers tend to be associated with large doses spread out over a period of years, or, for acute exposure from an atom bomb, a small number of cancer cases in a large population.
For specific info about cancer risk from radiation, see https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1569508398202515458
"RAD is exposure to radiation, but what you absorb is the REM": Uhh... RAD stands for Radiation Absorbed Dose. RAD is to REM as Gy is to Sv; in both cases the dimensions are the same (Gy and Sv both mean "Joules per second") but Sv and rem are adjusted by "RBE" as mentioned above. Typically, 1 Gy = 1 Sv (and 1 rad = 1 rem) unless alpha particles are involved. So Sv/mSv/rem units are more informative, but similar to Gy/rad in typical cases.
"as much shielding...as you possibly can" And for gods sake close your windows and doors. It seems like a good idea to stuff the cracks with towels/clothes, but doors are thin so don't stay near them long.
Good video, thanks!
Thank you.
Felt like I needed some more Ryan McBeth, so re-watched this, and thought that this could be something to have an awesome colab with Jake Broe—I think I heard he might know a thing or two aboot (🇨🇦, eh) the nukes… maybe one day?…
Maybe you could do something of the minimal affect detonating nuclear devices have in the vacuum of space. Why the reaction is contained etc.
20 years since I got my BS in physics and you definitely explained this better than I can!
Officially that old.
This is good info. But what it leaves out is the astronomical amount of energy released by a single nuclear bomb. You get the impression that it is survivable if you know the right stuff. A nuke war would be catastrophe beyond our comprehension. A single nuke dropped on one of our cities would result in hundreds of thousands of serious burn victims simultaneously. Nationwide, our hospitals could handle dozens. And that is just those victims far enough away to survive the initial blast.
Yeah, if you know the right stuff and you are lucky.
We are now in about year fifteen of Iran being just weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. We have already played the weapons of mass destruction card.
Why is it assumed that Iran has to build their own bomb? Would it not be more plausible that they could just buy nuclear weapons from North Korea or Pakistan or India or Russia? How is it that the United States built three weapons in 4 years, using some pretty primitive technology, yet Iran hasn't been able to make a weapon since 1979. Something doesn't smell right.
That's a good question. I don't think so because no nation wants a nuclear weapon to be traced back to them.