Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always as Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should not like it or not like it or not. People are like tuning out now. Oh, man, I downloaded the wrong one. I thought this is radio. I thought this is w t F with Martin Marry H. What is that stand for? What the heck? With an F? What the heck? H? I probably shouldn't even say that. We'll find out, Yeah, I guess so. Um if we get censored or get an angry email, that's right. Um, how you doing? Man? Good? Good, I'm glad. I'm well sir. Uh. This is gonna be a good one if you ask me this this point. This goes in with our um nuclear sweet which is pretty extensive by now. Yeah, we've done quite a few steel steal a bomb. Yeah, who won the Cold War? When the Cold War mutual issued destruction? Um? What else have we done? Now? This one that seems like there was one other one Star Wars had some nuke stuff to it. Yeah, we've done some other stuff. So this is part of the nuclear nuclear sweet. Yes, as it were, the very sweet nuclear sweet. Um. And we're talking today about whether or not it's possible to detonate to test to um, it's a full extent apparently I looked that at that's not the term. I think Julia Layton made it up. Term up full extent testing a nuclear bomb. It's full extent, which means not Apparently, you can simulate a nuclear bomb by putting a bunch of T and T together and going kaboom, but there's no radiation. But it's really not quite the same as testing a nuclear weapon by really blowing up the nuclear core, which we used to do a lot, a lot um and most recently there's been a lot of nuclear tests, chuck. A total of two thousand and fifty three nuclear weapons have been exploded on planet Earth, which is a big qualifier. It's crazy, um, But that was only eight countries that did that. Yes, the US had one thousand, thirty two, North Korea, Russia's seven, France two d the UK and China are tied at forty five apiece. India and Pakistan each had to, and then North Korea had to as well, the most recent one to join the FRAY in two thousand six and two thousand nine. I wonder if the UK and China are kind of like do it. I could think China doing it over Oak wouldn't do that. You never know, Okay, well they did it before. Yeah, but those are different days. But of course the U. S A leads the pack in detonating nuclear weapons on planet Earth. Yeah, man by far desert out in the ocean, yeah, underground in the air. I sent Josh a video earlier that Jonathan Strickland if tech Stuff sent me today by chance. I was like, dude, really, yeah, how crazy is it that you sent this? And he didn't respond, but it was a there's a video on the YouTube's of this. Uh, these five Army or Navy guys standing underneath this is one of the aerial detonations of a nuclear bomb. I think they were Air Force and they were the Air Force, and they just stood there and and watched. Basically they stood at ground zero under the hypocenter. It is crazy and like you can see it and hear it happen, and they're just like laughing and carrying on and talking about how awesome it was. Well, there's so there's five of them. Four were volunteers. The only one who wasn't a volunteer was the photographer. They forced him to do it. But yeah, like, you see this light go off and there's no sound, but they like kind of inch and then one guy wearing like old timey nineteen forties sunglasses like looks up and then you can hear the sound. It's pretty crazy. But that was again mentioned. Number two of Radio Lab. That was Robert croll Witch's blog roll, which wonders. He's one of the hosts of Radio Lab of course. Um and that was pretty awesome. And I found another blog of his that we'll talk about later. Did I send it to you? Yes, that was pretty sweet. Yeah. I think it's top the first one even But um So Strickland's involved, the UK has involved Robert croll which has already been mentioned. UM. Basically, this is gonna be a big, sweeping, enormous epic podcast if you ask me. Um So. Part of North Korea spiel after two dozen six, when it became officially a nuclear state was that um a press release that said there was no nuclear fallout from this test, it was totally contained. Well, it's kind of unbelo lievable, you know. I mean, like one of the things you think of with the nuclear weapon is radiation. That's one of the things that's designed to do, is not just wipe out a population with the explosion, but to really plague it for generations, you know. Um, But it turns out that it is possible depending on the type of test you conduct and the conditions and the h if you carry the two, well, then you might be able to conduct a nuclear test that doesn't have any fallout, at least that atmospheric fallout. Is that true? Because I didn't even gather that from this. I thought, well, we'll get into it. No, it can be totally contained. Really, I never drew that conclusion like that they have done it and contained it completely. The Okay, then theoretically it can. I don't know if they if it can. But like there's I saw this awesome article on the BBC that even had an flash slide show, which is the mark of quality, um, that showed how a an underground test could be done. We just give it away. It's the underground test that you can contain the fallout. But how it could contain all the fallout, and that COREA supposedly went to these links to do it, supposedly. So um, well, let's tuck real quick about what happens in a nuclear reaction. Chuckers, Yeah, Um, I guess we should define a couple of things, um, because we're gonna be thrown around some terminology that we might understand, and you might be like, what's an isotope? I forgot chemistry from high school. An isotope is basically a different version of the same element, determined by the number of neutrons. So like, if you've got hydrogen um, just a regular old hydrogen atom doesn't have neutrons. If you add one neutron, it's tertium. If you have two neutrons, it's tritium. But they're all hydrogen. So they're just different versions of that same element. Pretty easy. So fission happens when scientists basically bombard a larger isotope with neutrons and the collision basically is fission, and it produces like an incredible amount of energy because of mass defect. So like if you were to take if you were to write out this formula for a nuclear fission reaction I have, and it was like really accurately measured um all the mass of all the atoms and all these sub atomic particles before and after you're gonna find a mass defect. You can find some missing mass, and that missing mass is the energy, which is awesome if you're have a nuclear reactor, because you're creating like tons and tons of energy, and I guess it's awesome if you want to make the nuclear bomb. Bro it is. What you're talking about is fission. So fishing is like when one of those neutrons is picked up by an atom, that the additional neutron just splits the atom and that releases more neutrons, which forms a chain reaction. Well, it's the key there is that were uses. There's only two. It has to release extra neutrons and there's only two main isotopes that can do this they found out, which is uranium two plutonium two thirty nine. I'm more a plutonium guy, are you really? Um? So they're fissionable, which is kind of an awkward word, right, but it's not suspiciona well, because I mean, how we can split an atom if you want, let's do it right now. But we're just splitting one atom. The point to this is that there has to be a sustainable chain reaction, so that when we split one atom, it causes another atom is splitting another atom to split in another atom is splitting. As these splits are taking place, Um, a huge expansion is undergone. Right, it's growing and supposedly at critical mass, which is like the full sustaining of this chain reaction of nuclear fission among these atoms. Yeah, that's the minimum amount required to create that chain reaction. So the critical mass um the number of neutrons can be doubled eighty times a micro second. A micro second is a millionth of a second, So that means that in one second the number of neutrons can have doubled eighty million times. That's called yeah, something special. Yeah, and that's not eighty million times two. That's the eighty million power I believe, isn't it. It's exponential. Yeah, So it's crazy big, right, you go from something very tiny to kaboom, where all of a sudden, an enormous mushroom cloud. That's right, And how you get that cloud? If you want to bomb, you're gonna have two subcritical. Subcritical means that hasn't reached critical mass. You have two subcritical but fission norble isotopes, and you keep them separate. That's really key. And then you combine them with a traditional explosive and it's all over after that. And remember there's one of these just sitting off the coast of Savanna somewhere a law. That's right, it's just sitting there. And there's like there was dynamite. There's forgot about that. They're not one the same. There's a t NT detonator that's just aging terribly underwater. I thought they found it. No, remember the this x AG Yeah yeah, yeah, offered to locate it for a million bucks very publicly. Well that was a long time ago. We talked about that. Yeah. I think that was the maybe the steal the newke one. That was an early one for sure. Wow. So that's another reason to be scared all over again. Right, So, chuck, um, there's four kinds of nuclear weapons testing, at least four that we've come up with and carried out so far. Yes, there's a high altitude space which I think we wondered like what would happen in the Star Wars episode? Answered right here? Yeah, Um, underground underwater and atmospheric. Let's talk about these all right, Well, let's talk about atmospheric. Let's do this is the one that I said. The YouTube of showed a plane flying and shooting this bomb off. It wasn't like dropped, It was like launched like a rocket and then exploded above these dudes heads where they could see it. Um. Not a good idea. I don't know why they ever thought this is a good idea, even in the middle of a desert. Um, it's gonna fall, It's gonna rain down. What happened upon the ground and whoever is down there is Billy Idol put it, It's going to rain hell from above that idol? Yeah, okay if the rebel yeo was it? Yeah? I don't know all the words of that song. Where where where does that come? I can't remember what is the it's the it's the last rain hell from a bow in the midnight man crop all. It's pretty good, Billy Idol. So the scariest thing about when they do these tests out in the middle of a desert is all they do basically is quote clear the area, Like that's how they prepare the surround owning area for a nuclear fallout. They just clear it as best they can, which usually consists of clearing like one or two micro nations consisting of one or two guys who use like chocolate chip cookie dough is currency. Right, Yeah, I mean, what about all the animals, what about all the vegetation and playing Stop thinking about them, hippie, we're trying to test nukes here. Well, and that's why they do it out like in the middle of the Nevada desert is because they think, you know, like it's barely needing alive out there still. Okay, Yeah, the ground groundhog or no, the prairie dog populations have been decimated because they were reduced by exactly time percent. Did you see the guy that wrote in about that today? He says, by the way, when Josh said fact toy and decimate, he's both of them wrong. And I had the same reply. I was like, buddy, it's not ancient Rome anymore. Look it up. Decimate means a completely different thing, though. Okay, at this actoid All right, so let's talk about um A ground test, the castle bravo test. Well, hold on real quick, the atmospheric test, he said, like you drop it out of a plane. There's other ways you can do it. You can also um launch it via weather balloon, and you can just put it on top of a tall pole. But basically an atmospheric test is anything just above ground. You could also detonate it on top of the ground because it's atmospheric, there's nothing covering it. Right. Um, Between that and say about two fifty miles, that's an atmospheric test. Okay, two I believe so because two or more is typically the high altitude test. How would they do that on the ground though? It's like, get it? Two nine miles up is what I say. I mean they were standing underneath the hypoth drop, two of them on Japan. People were a little more reckless with nuclear weapons back then, all right, so the Castle Bravo test. Yeah, So basically the reason we talk about this is things back then at least they would clear the area for what they thought was gonna happen. But when you miscalculate, uh, and you make an error in your math, bad things can happen, which is what happened in nine at the Bikinia Toll. That's right, and that's uh, that's actually where the bikini swimsuit is named after. That's right. There was nuclear fever around the world and some French designer made the Bikini in honor of nuclear testing in Paradise, and they said, how about some midriff fellas, and the guys went, all right, I love the atomic age. Let's screw up this big test. Yeah. So um. Basically, what they were trying out was a new type of fuel core made of lithium lithium fifteen I believe, And they had not carried the two And we're estimating a six megatime detonation explosion. Yeah, I as low as four. So they were off by almost three times. Yeah. It turned out to be a fifteen megaton explosion, which means that the blast radius, the the area where it's still safe just from the explosion, was expanded tremendously, or should have been expanded tremendously. There was a group of Japanese fishermen on a boat that in English translates the name of which translates to lucky dragon. And they were not so lucky because they were just outside of the blast zone and um of the original blast zone, and all of a sudden, all this stuff starts raining down and like one of them is like sticking at his tongue trying to taste it. It's all nuclear fallout, and uh, the whole boat came down with with sickness. And actually the one fatality from the Castle Bravo test was on that boat. But people, Yeah, there was a lot of like cancer birth effects, second generation birth effect. Yeah, there was a lot of It was a huge screw up, to say the least. I got some stats on that. They produced a four and a half mile wide fireball four and a half miles dude left a crater feet in diameter and two fifty ft deep, and in the end it was a thousand times more powerful than either one of the bombs we dropped on Japan, and it's still the largest nuclear detonation by the United States ever. Yeah, I think Russia topped that, of course. And they basically just put the device out on top of this a toll and like ran away, like setting off a firework or something like that. Yeah, that was pretty nuts, very sad. Um. Shall we go underwater if you're interested in this at all, especially like the Bikinia Tall there's footage in this awesome documentary from called Atomic Cafe. I think I've seen that it's it's it's just like newsreel footage and basically it's like cold war nuclear hysteria and um love and reasons behind hya. But there's a there's a news reel clip of like the King of I can't remember, but the Marshall Islands. Basically the indigenous king um stands up, He's like, we're really excited to evacuate our home for you guys to do nuclear testings, so let's go. And it's really just awkward and staged and it's something else. Or the people all behind him going did he just say what I think he said? Yeah, They're like, what did he say? That actually sucks? Yeah? So, um, it's a good movie. The whole thing is, Yeah, that's a documentary. I think there's a movie called The Atomic Cafe too. That's it. Oh, I didn't think it was a documentary. It's a documentary. It's by two brothers and a friend, a lady friend. Really is there a person on the bicycle on a bike on the cover? There may be. I believe there's definitely a mushroom cloud. I might be thinking of something altogether different. You're thinking of fables of the reconstruction, all right, so now, Mr Zusu, can we go under water? Yes, that's all right. Um, underwater is gonna have less fall out obviously because you're underwater. So that's good. But and you don't see a lot of this. It's hard to get a lot of information on this, but obviously you're gonna destroy any kind of marine life, coral reefs that we've talked about, and basically anything else that it comes into contact with, not to mention fishing villages and basically these these people that depend on fishing to live. Yeah, it's not just the um, it's not just the immediate impacts, which is basically blowing up tons of dolphins and whales and stuff like that. Um, it has a long sustained impact. Like think about it. That just from Fukushima. That's another one in our nuclear suite how nuclear meltdown works. That's right, Fukushima. Um, there's people who like won't touch any kind of seafood from Japan now because they're afraid to fall out. Whether that's correct or not, at the very least in the public opinion. You can't just blow up a nuclear weapon underwater and expect everything to be okay. Well, yeah, and the economic impact that has on the fisherman, of course, it's huge. Uh. And the three eyed fish like the Simpsons, Blinkie was that? Who was? And it blinked on in succession? Right? Yeah, that's pretty funny. Yeah. Um, and you just confirmed that it was a bicycle in the front of the Atomic Cafe, right, yeah, that's Atomic Cafe, all right. I've always wanted to see that, and I never knew it was a documentary. It's very good. I always associated with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes because I think they came out at about the same time and they both seem to have like the same kind of thrilling poster. Okay, shall we go into outer underground or should we say that for last and do outer space? Uh? Well, let's go underground because this is the winner as far as the only way theoretically took taine fully a nuclear blast. But you gotta go down really really really deep, like eight which is a half a mile about feet and for that's that's a bomb of what size? Uh? I don't know, Chuck, Well, Okay, this can put it into into comparison. At least three hundred feet down you could contain a one kiloton bomb. That's kiloton. You gotta remember that Castle Bravo was fifteen mega tons. So yeah, there's some math involved there somewhere, But I imagine eight hundred eight hundred feet you said, um, And supposedly, even though they do point out in this article, you never really know until you do it because it can be unpredictable, obviously in the case of of the Bikini Atoll. But um, it's worst case scenario if it does go above ground, because then it's raining down radioactive soil and lots and lots of radio ative soil. So UM. To to outfit the best case scenario, um, basically, you want to dig this eight D you want to bore an eight hundred hole, and you've hit subtraine in rock like the mantle of the earth at this point, depending on where you are, but most likely you have because you're half a mile into the earth. You put your little nuclear bomb in there. Um. And it says here also that North Korea's it's done something like four to five mega tons. Yeah, Um in in the chamber, which is like the bottom of the hole, and you backfill it with like gravel, gypsum, like this composite of all these different solid materials that are gonna pack that whole solid to absorb the shock wave the blast um. So that means that it can go up, but it's not going to go up very far. What it's gonna do is go out. So you set the thing off and it goes out and down and it actually the blast vaporizes the mantle of the earth around it, which then eventually, after probably a few seconds, cools into molten rock. And after that sits there in stews for a couple of minutes. The um the the whole above it where the it can't support the earth above it any longer, and so it collapses. And then what you have is called a subsistence creator. Subsidence creator cannot be good for the Earth. It's not. But there's YouTube lousy with like underground tests where these creators just form. It's nuts, But that supposedly contains the fallout. Supposedly, that's what I hear, that's what the BBC says. But that's how if you if you're ever interested, that's how you perform an underground nuclear test. If you have a nuclear bomb and an eight D boer. Yeah, that's I mean, that's got to be some high engineering right there to get down there and not have a cave in on itself. And it's not just a hole either. Probably, Hey, Kim jong Ill knew what to pull the stops one. That's right, all right. So now outer space, which is one of the dumbest ideas. Actually they're all pretty dumb if he asked me. But we did it, and so did Russia, and we would um to see basically if we could kill satellites with nuclear bombs in space. Um. One of the problems is it kills a lot of satellites and possibly your own important satellites. So they just discovered the Van Allen Belt of nuclear radiation around the Earth, and they figured out that if they blew up a nuclear bomb in the Van Allen Belt, they could create an electromagnetic pulse that would wipe out satellites. But it wiped out more than two stars, and it actually created that. This is where we hit Robert Krolwitz again, who apparently shares the same interest in nuclear history cold war nuclear history that we do, because this is the second blog of his on this topic. But UM, I would definitely recommend looking this up. It's called um a very scary fireworks show and it's about this um US launch of nuclear weapons into space. It was called Starfish Prime was the operation. It's a pretty cool name. M Starfish Prime PRIMU School. Starfish not so much. I think it's cool. But they were publicizing it was all over the newspapers. It was like, look for a great fireworks is playing the sky and you could see it looked like the Northern lights up in space when this thing was exploded two miles up. Well, the good news there is there's not gonna be any fallout because our atmosphere is going to deflect that. The bad news though, is, like we said, it's not exactly it's not an exact science. You're not sharp shooting, so you can take out all kinds of satellites. And I think there was an electromagnetic pulse that actually can wipe out electrical systems here on Earth, and it did in a big way. Um. And then of course radiation in space, who knows what that means, you know, to like man space flights. Yeah, you don't want that stuff out there, which is strange because I thought there was a lot of radiation already in space from well just solar radiation. Um, there's tons of isotopes up there. Man, I don't even get me started. So is that it underground? Is that our consensus? It seems to be the way to go. How about no more nuclear weapons testing of any kind? That's that's what I'm getting behind. Um Man, there's tons of cool stuff on the internet. Uh. If you want to check out those five crazy guys standing beneath the hypocenter of a new nuclear blast and I think two. Um, you can check out five men agree to stand directly under an exploding nuclear bomb on coral which is blog. Also check out this very scary fireworks display while you're there. Um, I would strongly recommend atomic cafe and radio lab and tech stuff yep. Um. And there's this really cool time laps video of the two thousand and fifty three nuclear nuclear bombs exploded on Earth. Ever um by a Japanese artist named Sayo Hashimoto is a cool name. Um. It's called nuclear Testing dot w m V on YouTube. It's it's worth checking out. Yeah, it's cool. It's it represents them by just little flashes instead Like I thought I was expecting something different, but did you see like it had? Like it looked like an old Atari game, like yeah, it looks sort of like missile Command, but it had the years. As the years tick by, it shows when they were in, when and where they're detonated, and it's funny to see the heyday of when they're going off a lot more and that great cream hey day. Um. And if you want to learn more about nuclear weapons testing, you can type in nuclear weapon radioactive fall out. It'll bring up this, uh, excellent article on how stuff works dot com. And uh, I don't think I said search bars the search bar. And now it's time for listener. Now I'm gonna call this farmer Garrett rights in my favorite farmer. Um. Hi, guys in Jerry, I just want to take this time and say how much I enjoy the show. Without you, I would not know what to do with myself for hours on end. Literally, my friend and I often find ourselves having nerd rampages where we talk endlessly or debate about something you've covered in the show. First started listening when my cousin introduced me to the ten Strange Death podcast, and I was hooked, immediately subscribed, been listening ever since. And without you, I would be working in silence right now. You see, I work on a farm, and most of the farm work has done at night. Where I live. We have to wait for the moisture to be just right before we can work in the fields. So it's two fifty am according to my clock right now, and I'll be heading out to work shortly. So this is from Garrett Massey, and I wrote Garrett back and I was like, dude, what kind of farming are you doing at two fifteen in the morning. I don't know anything about warming and he said we actually our family worked with corn and hay and uh, the reason we get up so early is so there's plenty of moisture in the hay leaves before you rake and bail them. So that's what I've been doing. I started to thirty get home around ten am in the morning. His work day is done. We live in New York, I'm sorry. We live in New Mexico, not New York, very different and it gets really hot and dry here, which is why we have to work at night when it's coolest and most humid. So I learned a little something from that one. And since he brings up New Mexico, that raises an excellent point. Just two days ago is the sixties seventh anniversary of the very first nuclear weapons test, Alma Gordo, New Mexico, the Trinity Test. It's all coming together. Yeah, almost like we planned this stuff out. It's crazy, but we don't. Strickland sending Land. I know, farmer Garrett sending that time time. We're Jerry. Yeah. Well, if you want to send us something that blows our minds, we're always looking for that kind of thing. Um And we're not even stuff to blow your mind, but we're we can appreciate its. Um. You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know, and you can send us a good old fashioned electronic email. Uh to stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how Stuff works dot Com Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always as Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should not like it or not like it or not. People are like tuning out now. Oh, man, I downloaded the wrong one. I thought this is radio. I thought this is w t F with Martin Marry H. What is that stand for? What the heck? With an F? What the heck? H? I probably shouldn't even say that. We'll find out, Yeah, I guess so. Um if we get censored or get an angry email, that's right. Um, how you doing? Man? Good? Good, I'm glad. I'm well sir. Uh. This is gonna be a good one if you ask me this this point. This goes in with our um nuclear sweet which is pretty extensive by now. Yeah, we've done quite a few steel steal a bomb. Yeah, who won the Cold War? When the Cold War mutual issued destruction? Um? What else have we done? Now? This one that seems like there was one other one Star Wars had some nuke stuff to it. Yeah, we've done some other stuff. So this is part of the nuclear nuclear sweet. Yes, as it were, the very sweet nuclear sweet. Um. And we're talking today about whether or not it's possible to detonate to test to um, it's a full extent apparently I looked that at that's not the term. I think Julia Layton made it up. Term up full extent testing a nuclear bomb. It's full extent, which means not Apparently, you can simulate a nuclear bomb by putting a bunch of T and T together and going kaboom, but there's no radiation. But it's really not quite the same as testing a nuclear weapon by really blowing up the nuclear core, which we used to do a lot, a lot um and most recently there's been a lot of nuclear tests, chuck. A total of two thousand and fifty three nuclear weapons have been exploded on planet Earth, which is a big qualifier. It's crazy, um, But that was only eight countries that did that. Yes, the US had one thousand, thirty two, North Korea, Russia's seven, France two d the UK and China are tied at forty five apiece. India and Pakistan each had to, and then North Korea had to as well, the most recent one to join the FRAY in two thousand six and two thousand nine. I wonder if the UK and China are kind of like do it. I could think China doing it over Oak wouldn't do that. You never know, Okay, well they did it before. Yeah, but those are different days. But of course the U. S A leads the pack in detonating nuclear weapons on planet Earth. Yeah, man by far desert out in the ocean, yeah, underground in the air. I sent Josh a video earlier that Jonathan Strickland if tech Stuff sent me today by chance. I was like, dude, really, yeah, how crazy is it that you sent this? And he didn't respond, but it was a there's a video on the YouTube's of this. Uh, these five Army or Navy guys standing underneath this is one of the aerial detonations of a nuclear bomb. I think they were Air Force and they were the Air Force, and they just stood there and and watched. Basically they stood at ground zero under the hypocenter. It is crazy and like you can see it and hear it happen, and they're just like laughing and carrying on and talking about how awesome it was. Well, there's so there's five of them. Four were volunteers. The only one who wasn't a volunteer was the photographer. They forced him to do it. But yeah, like, you see this light go off and there's no sound, but they like kind of inch and then one guy wearing like old timey nineteen forties sunglasses like looks up and then you can hear the sound. It's pretty crazy. But that was again mentioned. Number two of Radio Lab. That was Robert croll Witch's blog roll, which wonders. He's one of the hosts of Radio Lab of course. Um and that was pretty awesome. And I found another blog of his that we'll talk about later. Did I send it to you? Yes, that was pretty sweet. Yeah. I think it's top the first one even But um So Strickland's involved, the UK has involved Robert croll which has already been mentioned. UM. Basically, this is gonna be a big, sweeping, enormous epic podcast if you ask me. Um So. Part of North Korea spiel after two dozen six, when it became officially a nuclear state was that um a press release that said there was no nuclear fallout from this test, it was totally contained. Well, it's kind of unbelo lievable, you know. I mean, like one of the things you think of with the nuclear weapon is radiation. That's one of the things that's designed to do, is not just wipe out a population with the explosion, but to really plague it for generations, you know. Um, But it turns out that it is possible depending on the type of test you conduct and the conditions and the h if you carry the two, well, then you might be able to conduct a nuclear test that doesn't have any fallout, at least that atmospheric fallout. Is that true? Because I didn't even gather that from this. I thought, well, we'll get into it. No, it can be totally contained. Really, I never drew that conclusion like that they have done it and contained it completely. The Okay, then theoretically it can. I don't know if they if it can. But like there's I saw this awesome article on the BBC that even had an flash slide show, which is the mark of quality, um, that showed how a an underground test could be done. We just give it away. It's the underground test that you can contain the fallout. But how it could contain all the fallout, and that COREA supposedly went to these links to do it, supposedly. So um, well, let's tuck real quick about what happens in a nuclear reaction. Chuckers, Yeah, Um, I guess we should define a couple of things, um, because we're gonna be thrown around some terminology that we might understand, and you might be like, what's an isotope? I forgot chemistry from high school. An isotope is basically a different version of the same element, determined by the number of neutrons. So like, if you've got hydrogen um, just a regular old hydrogen atom doesn't have neutrons. If you add one neutron, it's tertium. If you have two neutrons, it's tritium. But they're all hydrogen. So they're just different versions of that same element. Pretty easy. So fission happens when scientists basically bombard a larger isotope with neutrons and the collision basically is fission, and it produces like an incredible amount of energy because of mass defect. So like if you were to take if you were to write out this formula for a nuclear fission reaction I have, and it was like really accurately measured um all the mass of all the atoms and all these sub atomic particles before and after you're gonna find a mass defect. You can find some missing mass, and that missing mass is the energy, which is awesome if you're have a nuclear reactor, because you're creating like tons and tons of energy, and I guess it's awesome if you want to make the nuclear bomb. Bro it is. What you're talking about is fission. So fishing is like when one of those neutrons is picked up by an atom, that the additional neutron just splits the atom and that releases more neutrons, which forms a chain reaction. Well, it's the key there is that were uses. There's only two. It has to release extra neutrons and there's only two main isotopes that can do this they found out, which is uranium two plutonium two thirty nine. I'm more a plutonium guy, are you really? Um? So they're fissionable, which is kind of an awkward word, right, but it's not suspiciona well, because I mean, how we can split an atom if you want, let's do it right now. But we're just splitting one atom. The point to this is that there has to be a sustainable chain reaction, so that when we split one atom, it causes another atom is splitting another atom to split in another atom is splitting. As these splits are taking place, Um, a huge expansion is undergone. Right, it's growing and supposedly at critical mass, which is like the full sustaining of this chain reaction of nuclear fission among these atoms. Yeah, that's the minimum amount required to create that chain reaction. So the critical mass um the number of neutrons can be doubled eighty times a micro second. A micro second is a millionth of a second, So that means that in one second the number of neutrons can have doubled eighty million times. That's called yeah, something special. Yeah, and that's not eighty million times two. That's the eighty million power I believe, isn't it. It's exponential. Yeah, So it's crazy big, right, you go from something very tiny to kaboom, where all of a sudden, an enormous mushroom cloud. That's right, And how you get that cloud? If you want to bomb, you're gonna have two subcritical. Subcritical means that hasn't reached critical mass. You have two subcritical but fission norble isotopes, and you keep them separate. That's really key. And then you combine them with a traditional explosive and it's all over after that. And remember there's one of these just sitting off the coast of Savanna somewhere a law. That's right, it's just sitting there. And there's like there was dynamite. There's forgot about that. They're not one the same. There's a t NT detonator that's just aging terribly underwater. I thought they found it. No, remember the this x AG Yeah yeah, yeah, offered to locate it for a million bucks very publicly. Well that was a long time ago. We talked about that. Yeah. I think that was the maybe the steal the newke one. That was an early one for sure. Wow. So that's another reason to be scared all over again. Right, So, chuck, um, there's four kinds of nuclear weapons testing, at least four that we've come up with and carried out so far. Yes, there's a high altitude space which I think we wondered like what would happen in the Star Wars episode? Answered right here? Yeah, Um, underground underwater and atmospheric. Let's talk about these all right, Well, let's talk about atmospheric. Let's do this is the one that I said. The YouTube of showed a plane flying and shooting this bomb off. It wasn't like dropped, It was like launched like a rocket and then exploded above these dudes heads where they could see it. Um. Not a good idea. I don't know why they ever thought this is a good idea, even in the middle of a desert. Um, it's gonna fall, It's gonna rain down. What happened upon the ground and whoever is down there is Billy Idol put it, It's going to rain hell from above that idol? Yeah, okay if the rebel yeo was it? Yeah? I don't know all the words of that song. Where where where does that come? I can't remember what is the it's the it's the last rain hell from a bow in the midnight man crop all. It's pretty good, Billy Idol. So the scariest thing about when they do these tests out in the middle of a desert is all they do basically is quote clear the area, Like that's how they prepare the surround owning area for a nuclear fallout. They just clear it as best they can, which usually consists of clearing like one or two micro nations consisting of one or two guys who use like chocolate chip cookie dough is currency. Right, Yeah, I mean, what about all the animals, what about all the vegetation and playing Stop thinking about them, hippie, we're trying to test nukes here. Well, and that's why they do it out like in the middle of the Nevada desert is because they think, you know, like it's barely needing alive out there still. Okay, Yeah, the ground groundhog or no, the prairie dog populations have been decimated because they were reduced by exactly time percent. Did you see the guy that wrote in about that today? He says, by the way, when Josh said fact toy and decimate, he's both of them wrong. And I had the same reply. I was like, buddy, it's not ancient Rome anymore. Look it up. Decimate means a completely different thing, though. Okay, at this actoid All right, so let's talk about um A ground test, the castle bravo test. Well, hold on real quick, the atmospheric test, he said, like you drop it out of a plane. There's other ways you can do it. You can also um launch it via weather balloon, and you can just put it on top of a tall pole. But basically an atmospheric test is anything just above ground. You could also detonate it on top of the ground because it's atmospheric, there's nothing covering it. Right. Um, Between that and say about two fifty miles, that's an atmospheric test. Okay, two I believe so because two or more is typically the high altitude test. How would they do that on the ground though? It's like, get it? Two nine miles up is what I say. I mean they were standing underneath the hypoth drop, two of them on Japan. People were a little more reckless with nuclear weapons back then, all right, so the Castle Bravo test. Yeah, So basically the reason we talk about this is things back then at least they would clear the area for what they thought was gonna happen. But when you miscalculate, uh, and you make an error in your math, bad things can happen, which is what happened in nine at the Bikinia Toll. That's right, and that's uh, that's actually where the bikini swimsuit is named after. That's right. There was nuclear fever around the world and some French designer made the Bikini in honor of nuclear testing in Paradise, and they said, how about some midriff fellas, and the guys went, all right, I love the atomic age. Let's screw up this big test. Yeah. So um. Basically, what they were trying out was a new type of fuel core made of lithium lithium fifteen I believe, And they had not carried the two And we're estimating a six megatime detonation explosion. Yeah, I as low as four. So they were off by almost three times. Yeah. It turned out to be a fifteen megaton explosion, which means that the blast radius, the the area where it's still safe just from the explosion, was expanded tremendously, or should have been expanded tremendously. There was a group of Japanese fishermen on a boat that in English translates the name of which translates to lucky dragon. And they were not so lucky because they were just outside of the blast zone and um of the original blast zone, and all of a sudden, all this stuff starts raining down and like one of them is like sticking at his tongue trying to taste it. It's all nuclear fallout, and uh, the whole boat came down with with sickness. And actually the one fatality from the Castle Bravo test was on that boat. But people, Yeah, there was a lot of like cancer birth effects, second generation birth effect. Yeah, there was a lot of It was a huge screw up, to say the least. I got some stats on that. They produced a four and a half mile wide fireball four and a half miles dude left a crater feet in diameter and two fifty ft deep, and in the end it was a thousand times more powerful than either one of the bombs we dropped on Japan, and it's still the largest nuclear detonation by the United States ever. Yeah, I think Russia topped that, of course. And they basically just put the device out on top of this a toll and like ran away, like setting off a firework or something like that. Yeah, that was pretty nuts, very sad. Um. Shall we go underwater if you're interested in this at all, especially like the Bikinia Tall there's footage in this awesome documentary from called Atomic Cafe. I think I've seen that it's it's it's just like newsreel footage and basically it's like cold war nuclear hysteria and um love and reasons behind hya. But there's a there's a news reel clip of like the King of I can't remember, but the Marshall Islands. Basically the indigenous king um stands up, He's like, we're really excited to evacuate our home for you guys to do nuclear testings, so let's go. And it's really just awkward and staged and it's something else. Or the people all behind him going did he just say what I think he said? Yeah, They're like, what did he say? That actually sucks? Yeah? So, um, it's a good movie. The whole thing is, Yeah, that's a documentary. I think there's a movie called The Atomic Cafe too. That's it. Oh, I didn't think it was a documentary. It's a documentary. It's by two brothers and a friend, a lady friend. Really is there a person on the bicycle on a bike on the cover? There may be. I believe there's definitely a mushroom cloud. I might be thinking of something altogether different. You're thinking of fables of the reconstruction, all right, so now, Mr Zusu, can we go under water? Yes, that's all right. Um, underwater is gonna have less fall out obviously because you're underwater. So that's good. But and you don't see a lot of this. It's hard to get a lot of information on this, but obviously you're gonna destroy any kind of marine life, coral reefs that we've talked about, and basically anything else that it comes into contact with, not to mention fishing villages and basically these these people that depend on fishing to live. Yeah, it's not just the um, it's not just the immediate impacts, which is basically blowing up tons of dolphins and whales and stuff like that. Um, it has a long sustained impact. Like think about it. That just from Fukushima. That's another one in our nuclear suite how nuclear meltdown works. That's right, Fukushima. Um, there's people who like won't touch any kind of seafood from Japan now because they're afraid to fall out. Whether that's correct or not, at the very least in the public opinion. You can't just blow up a nuclear weapon underwater and expect everything to be okay. Well, yeah, and the economic impact that has on the fisherman, of course, it's huge. Uh. And the three eyed fish like the Simpsons, Blinkie was that? Who was? And it blinked on in succession? Right? Yeah, that's pretty funny. Yeah. Um, and you just confirmed that it was a bicycle in the front of the Atomic Cafe, right, yeah, that's Atomic Cafe, all right. I've always wanted to see that, and I never knew it was a documentary. It's very good. I always associated with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes because I think they came out at about the same time and they both seem to have like the same kind of thrilling poster. Okay, shall we go into outer underground or should we say that for last and do outer space? Uh? Well, let's go underground because this is the winner as far as the only way theoretically took taine fully a nuclear blast. But you gotta go down really really really deep, like eight which is a half a mile about feet and for that's that's a bomb of what size? Uh? I don't know, Chuck, Well, Okay, this can put it into into comparison. At least three hundred feet down you could contain a one kiloton bomb. That's kiloton. You gotta remember that Castle Bravo was fifteen mega tons. So yeah, there's some math involved there somewhere, But I imagine eight hundred eight hundred feet you said, um, And supposedly, even though they do point out in this article, you never really know until you do it because it can be unpredictable, obviously in the case of of the Bikini Atoll. But um, it's worst case scenario if it does go above ground, because then it's raining down radioactive soil and lots and lots of radio ative soil. So UM. To to outfit the best case scenario, um, basically, you want to dig this eight D you want to bore an eight hundred hole, and you've hit subtraine in rock like the mantle of the earth at this point, depending on where you are, but most likely you have because you're half a mile into the earth. You put your little nuclear bomb in there. Um. And it says here also that North Korea's it's done something like four to five mega tons. Yeah, Um in in the chamber, which is like the bottom of the hole, and you backfill it with like gravel, gypsum, like this composite of all these different solid materials that are gonna pack that whole solid to absorb the shock wave the blast um. So that means that it can go up, but it's not going to go up very far. What it's gonna do is go out. So you set the thing off and it goes out and down and it actually the blast vaporizes the mantle of the earth around it, which then eventually, after probably a few seconds, cools into molten rock. And after that sits there in stews for a couple of minutes. The um the the whole above it where the it can't support the earth above it any longer, and so it collapses. And then what you have is called a subsistence creator. Subsidence creator cannot be good for the Earth. It's not. But there's YouTube lousy with like underground tests where these creators just form. It's nuts, But that supposedly contains the fallout. Supposedly, that's what I hear, that's what the BBC says. But that's how if you if you're ever interested, that's how you perform an underground nuclear test. If you have a nuclear bomb and an eight D boer. Yeah, that's I mean, that's got to be some high engineering right there to get down there and not have a cave in on itself. And it's not just a hole either. Probably, Hey, Kim jong Ill knew what to pull the stops one. That's right, all right. So now outer space, which is one of the dumbest ideas. Actually they're all pretty dumb if he asked me. But we did it, and so did Russia, and we would um to see basically if we could kill satellites with nuclear bombs in space. Um. One of the problems is it kills a lot of satellites and possibly your own important satellites. So they just discovered the Van Allen Belt of nuclear radiation around the Earth, and they figured out that if they blew up a nuclear bomb in the Van Allen Belt, they could create an electromagnetic pulse that would wipe out satellites. But it wiped out more than two stars, and it actually created that. This is where we hit Robert Krolwitz again, who apparently shares the same interest in nuclear history cold war nuclear history that we do, because this is the second blog of his on this topic. But UM, I would definitely recommend looking this up. It's called um a very scary fireworks show and it's about this um US launch of nuclear weapons into space. It was called Starfish Prime was the operation. It's a pretty cool name. M Starfish Prime PRIMU School. Starfish not so much. I think it's cool. But they were publicizing it was all over the newspapers. It was like, look for a great fireworks is playing the sky and you could see it looked like the Northern lights up in space when this thing was exploded two miles up. Well, the good news there is there's not gonna be any fallout because our atmosphere is going to deflect that. The bad news though, is, like we said, it's not exactly it's not an exact science. You're not sharp shooting, so you can take out all kinds of satellites. And I think there was an electromagnetic pulse that actually can wipe out electrical systems here on Earth, and it did in a big way. Um. And then of course radiation in space, who knows what that means, you know, to like man space flights. Yeah, you don't want that stuff out there, which is strange because I thought there was a lot of radiation already in space from well just solar radiation. Um, there's tons of isotopes up there. Man, I don't even get me started. So is that it underground? Is that our consensus? It seems to be the way to go. How about no more nuclear weapons testing of any kind? That's that's what I'm getting behind. Um Man, there's tons of cool stuff on the internet. Uh. If you want to check out those five crazy guys standing beneath the hypocenter of a new nuclear blast and I think two. Um, you can check out five men agree to stand directly under an exploding nuclear bomb on coral which is blog. Also check out this very scary fireworks display while you're there. Um, I would strongly recommend atomic cafe and radio lab and tech stuff yep. Um. And there's this really cool time laps video of the two thousand and fifty three nuclear nuclear bombs exploded on Earth. Ever um by a Japanese artist named Sayo Hashimoto is a cool name. Um. It's called nuclear Testing dot w m V on YouTube. It's it's worth checking out. Yeah, it's cool. It's it represents them by just little flashes instead Like I thought I was expecting something different, but did you see like it had? Like it looked like an old Atari game, like yeah, it looks sort of like missile Command, but it had the years. As the years tick by, it shows when they were in, when and where they're detonated, and it's funny to see the heyday of when they're going off a lot more and that great cream hey day. Um. And if you want to learn more about nuclear weapons testing, you can type in nuclear weapon radioactive fall out. It'll bring up this, uh, excellent article on how stuff works dot com. And uh, I don't think I said search bars the search bar. And now it's time for listener. Now I'm gonna call this farmer Garrett rights in my favorite farmer. Um. Hi, guys in Jerry, I just want to take this time and say how much I enjoy the show. Without you, I would not know what to do with myself for hours on end. Literally, my friend and I often find ourselves having nerd rampages where we talk endlessly or debate about something you've covered in the show. First started listening when my cousin introduced me to the ten Strange Death podcast, and I was hooked, immediately subscribed, been listening ever since. And without you, I would be working in silence right now. You see, I work on a farm, and most of the farm work has done at night. Where I live. We have to wait for the moisture to be just right before we can work in the fields. So it's two fifty am according to my clock right now, and I'll be heading out to work shortly. So this is from Garrett Massey, and I wrote Garrett back and I was like, dude, what kind of farming are you doing at two fifteen in the morning. I don't know anything about warming and he said we actually our family worked with corn and hay and uh, the reason we get up so early is so there's plenty of moisture in the hay leaves before you rake and bail them. So that's what I've been doing. I started to thirty get home around ten am in the morning. His work day is done. We live in New York, I'm sorry. We live in New Mexico, not New York, very different and it gets really hot and dry here, which is why we have to work at night when it's coolest and most humid. So I learned a little something from that one. And since he brings up New Mexico, that raises an excellent point. Just two days ago is the sixties seventh anniversary of the very first nuclear weapons test, Alma Gordo, New Mexico, the Trinity Test. It's all coming together. Yeah, almost like we planned this stuff out. It's crazy, but we don't. Strickland sending Land. I know, farmer Garrett sending that time time. We're Jerry. Yeah. Well, if you want to send us something that blows our minds, we're always looking for that kind of thing. Um And we're not even stuff to blow your mind, but we're we can appreciate its. Um. You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know, and you can send us a good old fashioned electronic email. Uh to stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how Stuff works dot Com Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you