December 4, 2018 • 36 mins
What would you need to build your own nuke?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Daniel, do you ever wish you had a superpower
all the time? I wish I had lots of superpowers.
But you know, science has actually provided us with some real,
honest to God powers that our ancestors might have thought
were superpowers. Not quite yet, but you know, we can
do some pretty amazing stuff. We'll listen to the podcast
episode about teleportation before you decide, but we can do
(00:27):
some pretty amazing stuff, stuff that would have limited to
deities a thousand years ago. You know, things like harnessing
the power of the sun. What do you mean, like
we can create the sun here on Earth. Yeah, absolutely,
we can create miniute your son's here on Earth. Not
recommended to do in your at home kitchen, but it's
something science is capable of. Hi. I'm Jorge and I'm Daniel.
(01:02):
Welcome to Daniel and Jorge explained the Universe our podcast
about the universe and everything in it and everyone in it,
and even about aliens if they are in it. Yea,
even about sons sons s U N and sons s
O N, And we explain it all today on the program.
We are actually talking about harnessing the power of the sun.
(01:23):
Science has distilled the thing that happens inside the sun,
the energy release, and made it available for us here
on Earth with explosive results. That's right. So, if you
are a dictator of your own little country looking to
become a nuclear superpower, this is the podcast for you.
Do they ever going to talk about nuclear weapons and
(01:44):
specifically the nuclear bomb? How does it work? How do
you build one in your garage? Should you build one
in your garage? The answer is no, The answer is
definitely no, one should you? But could you? Maybe? Maybe
this podcast is about the science, not the ethics. I
think we'll touch on both actually, because science is never
(02:04):
free of ethics. It's it's always a complex mixture. So
nuclear bombs is something that people, obviously we're very surprised
to learn about in the mid forties, uh, and then
there was a huge concern with the Cold War up
until the eighties and nineties, but then it sort of
quieted down until a little bit recently. Right, there's been
a lot of talk about rogue nations and the threat
(02:25):
of nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Well,
if you ask the Union of Concerned Scientists, I don't
think they've quieted down at all. There's been a pretty
consistent fear that we would destroy ourselves and kill everybody
on basically since we've got the power to do so. Yeah,
I mean we had in the eighties, the USSR in
the USA had enormous nuclear stockpiles, tens of thousands of
(02:48):
nuclear weapons pointed at each other with hair triggers. And
these days we have fewer, you know, if in the
number of thousands instead of tens of thousands, But still
there's plenty of power there to destroy each other very easy.
Only are you saying scientists have a hard time relaxing
in general, if you know, the more you know about
the state of nuclear weapons, the harder it is to
(03:08):
really relax. Yes, but you know your your point is taken.
The big powers have not yet blown each other up,
and we are worth these days about smaller powers and
nuclear powers and terrorists in North Korea and all these
folks who were developing these capabilities. So it kind of
made us wonder, like, how many people out there actually
know how a nuclear bomb works? And how do you
(03:29):
make one? And would it be a bad idea to
explain to everybody exactly how to build a nuclear bomb? Yeah?
Are we going to get arrested for this podcast or
put on some kind of watch list surveillance. That's right.
And to say we are not telling you everybody anything
that wouldn't know in a physics class anyway. Yes, if
(03:49):
we are going to get arrested for treason, you gotta
lock up every professor out there, Yes, which I bet
some people would like to do. That's right. That was
not a policy suggestion. H m hmmm. So we went
out there and ask people, do you know how a
nuclear bomb works? Yeah? So I think for a moment,
how much do you know about a nuclear weapon? How
does it actually work? If you had to? Could you
(04:11):
build one in your garage? Here's what people had to say.
I'm not sure. Honestly, I do not have no idea
at all. Um, by smashing together particles cool? I'd only
say yes, but I don't know how to say it
in the English Chinese? Uh honevia. So there's a two
(04:33):
kinds of nuclear bomb, right? Yeah? I combon and what
was that called hydridable? Yeah? So it's why is vision? Yeah?
Wha yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah So that's interesting. I feel
like not a lot of people know how nuclear bomb works. Yeah.
Half the people had no idea um, and the other
(04:53):
half had some idea that it was something about the
power of the atom. I like, the guy who only
knew the words in Chinese, keep is so excited to
tell me what he knew. I was like, yeah, tell
me Chinese, that's fine. He definitely knew something about the topic.
But yeah, people generally either didn't know anything or they
knew that it's something to do with the adamant and
they're right. Essentially, the way nuclear bomb works is that
(05:14):
it releases energy stored inside the atom or lots of atoms,
really really rapidly. M m. That's what's called the atomic bomb. Yeah.
The early versions are called atomic bombs. So there's sort
of two categories of nuclear weapons. There's the early ones
that use fission where you split an atom apart. Those
are called atomic bombs, and the later ones that are
called hydrogen bombs or h bombs. Those use fusion where
(05:38):
you squeeze nucleon together. And we'll get into the nitty
gritty of exactly all how that works and why it's interesting.
So there are atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs. They're both
nuclear weapons. Oh, I see, and they weren't using different
methods one of them is fizzy, the other one is fuzzy.
That's exactly right, that's exactly right. One of them split
the atom opened, and the other one squeezes atom together.
(06:00):
And it's sort of surprising. You might be thinking. Hold on,
if splitting atoms open releases energy, how come the opposite
thing of fusing them together also releases energy. Yeah. Well,
before we get into the technical details, you mentioned you
had some personal connection to the Manhattan Project and the
nuclear industry here in the United States. Can you tell
(06:21):
us about that. Yeah, it's not that I've ever built
a nuclear bomb myself. No, certainly not about doctor Manhattan.
I'm not Doctor Manhattan. But I did grow up in
Los Angles, New Mexico, the home of the Manhattan Project,
where in the forties all these scientists got together to
crack this mystery. And you know, the history of this
is fascinating. It was in the late thirties that people
(06:42):
figured out, oh, you can split the atom and release
some huge amounts of energy. I mean, much more energy
than is released when you blow up dynamite or burnt
coal or anything like that. And so immediately, even before
the world was at war, people realized this is the
technology for a new weapon. This could be a devastating
new super happened, and so of course most people know
the story. The US government gathered people together in the
(07:05):
middle of nowhere in New Mexico. They chose Los Almos
because it's a place basically no one would go on purpose,
and so no one would run into it. It wasn't
because if they made a mistake, not that many people
would would die in an active uh you know what.
That's probably an aspect of it also being remote out
in the middle of the desert um. But as a
high schooler, you know, it wasn't much consolation to know
(07:27):
that you were living in a place that that the
government thought was going to be super boring and no
one would want to go to. And they were pretty
much right. There's not a whole lot to do in
Los Almos. And in fact, your parents worked for the
Los Almos National Laboratory, right They worked on nuclear engineering
and physics. That's right. Both of my parents worked for
Los Almos labs where the bombs were developed. What they
work on, I can't tell you, not because I'm being
(07:50):
secretive about it, but because I don't know. Both of
them had Q clearances, they never told you. No, I
never visited their offices. I never talked to them in
any detail about their work. I never heard about it
because it was all behind the clearance fence, the security fence.
It was all top secret. Wow, they saw you as
a threat even then, that's right. They have to go
through a laborate procedures to make sure they were trustworthy.
(08:13):
We're not going to be spies for some enemy nation
or something like that, or blackmail bull So like at
the dinner table, what would you guys talk about, Like
how is work? I can't tell you, don't ask me.
We learned pretty quickly not to ask those questions exactly.
And there was no you know, take your son to
work day or this kind of stuff. And you know,
it's interesting because when I was a kid, I learned
(08:35):
about the history of Los Alamos. And in Los Almos,
they teach you pride. They teach you this is the
place the bomb was developed. This is the location of
a great scientific discovery, and not just that, but that
we should feel pride, national pride, and having developed something
which won the war. Right, people in this town, scientists
and where your parents work, they won the war with
(08:56):
their brains and so this sort of like pride was
really deeply um not moving into the curriculum in life
in Los Almos. It's almost like propaganda. Definitely, it's exactly
like propaganda, because it is propaganda. And it was only
later that I heard about the controversy, like should we
have dropped those bombs and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians?
(09:17):
You know, that turns out to be quite a complex
moral question, you know. And if you're a scientist working
on these weapons, should you be should you be developing
these weapons and then putting them in the hands of
politicians who could use them to kill women and children?
Did you ever talk to your that about that, like
if he ever felt any feelings like that or how
an your thoughts about that? You know. It's interesting is
(09:38):
I didn't ask him about it until I was in
my twenties, you know, like a decade after we lived
in Los Alamos, and I asked him about and he said,
you're the first person to ask me that question, and
that was sort of shocking. Also, like people most almost
don't discuss it very much. His friends didn't ask him,
his family is what the family didn't ask him. I
was a physics student. I knew all about this and
and never asked him until it's finally occurred to me.
(10:00):
And yeah, so I asked him, and he, um, you know,
he's thought about it, he's balanced these things, and he thought, um,
that the nation needed defending, and there are other people
out there developing nuclear weapons, and that we needed to
have our arsenal ready and needed to be a tip
top shape, and we needed to have the same guns
as the enemy had. And you know, this was in
(10:20):
the eighties and nineties, and so the Cold War was
a very recent memory, and it was not ridiculous to
think that the Russia could launch nuclear weapons against us.
So I think he felt some sort of pride that
he was helping the national cause. So like, what was
your high school mascot in your school radiation? That the fallout? Right,
(10:41):
probably the radioactive isotope. No, No, it was nothing so exciting.
We lived in the top of a hill. It was
almost the top of mountains. So are high school mascot
is the hilltoppers? Yeah, not not terribly exciting. Um, But
my reaction to this, this moral quandity, was totally different.
I didn't want to have anything to do with it,
and so want. I had to choose a field of
physics to study, I chose something very far away from
(11:04):
any practical applications, which is, you know, Higgs boson and
dark matter and particle physics. And so it's a selling
point to me that none of my research could ever
have any practical, immediate practical application and therefore probably not
be used to kill any babies. And you know that
helps me sleep at night, not killing babies for my work,
just avoid all responsibility. Yeah, you almost could say I'm
(11:27):
a cartoonist, right have have any of your cartoons ever
killed any babies? Not that I know of. Maybe you
should look into that, wholegs and you should have a
more definitive answer to that question. I feel like this
is a great recruiting of audio for physicists, you know,
looking to avoid responsibility, don't want anything to do with
the real world, like the particles, don't like killing babies.
(11:51):
Go into particle physics. We have killed zero babies to date.
So you're you're tied to sort of the history of
nuclear energy in this country. Yeah, absolutely, And you know,
my parents were supported by the Department of Energy, and
now actually the Department Energy supports my research. So I've
basically been supported by the Department of Energy directly or
indirectly since I was ten um, so I'm pretty totally
(12:15):
closely tied into what I can say. I'm completely morally
insulated from it. I mean, I ate food which was
paid for by the programs which funded nuclear weapons development, etcetera, etcetera.
So my hands are not clean. Yeah, so I feel
this personal connection, and I used to feel this pride,
and now I feel, you know, a lot shame. But
it's definitely more complicated, definitely not happy. When I imagine
all those people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, I'm going about their
(12:38):
day and then being suddenly destroyed by nuclear bombs. It's
definitely complicated how these bombs work. But before we get
into it, let's take a quick break. All right, let's
(13:00):
talk about how exactly a nuclear bomb works. So how
you said there's two kinds. Actually there is fusion and
there is fission bombs, So that's two different kinds of
nuclear bombs. How do they work? That's right? And so
if you are the director of a rogue nation's nuclear
weapons program, this is where you're gonna want to start
taking notes. Okay, So I like how do you choose
which one. It's fascinating because a fusion bomb actually requires
(13:22):
a fission bomb to ignite it. Yeah, but we'll talk
about that in a minute. So you should start with
if you're developing a new technology, you start with fission
because it's easier. All the fusion is much more powerful.
So fission is breaking the nucleus of an atom, and
fusion is putting together the nucleus of an atom. That's
the difference, right, That's right. Fusion is fusing together and
a nucleus, and fission is breaking it apart, exactly, fizzing
(13:45):
it or phisiling it or physicisting it or whatever the
verb is fizzing. Okay, thank you, and um so. But
a nuclear bomb works essentially the same way as another bomb,
and that its goal is released a lot of energy. Right,
So you have to find some stored and ergen and
release it. And you can do that in dynamite with
this stored chemical energy, or something in oil with this
(14:06):
stored stored energy in the gasoline or whatever. But nuclear
energy is much more powerful because it has a lot
more energy stored in it. Because that's all a bomb is,
It's just the release of a lot of energy at
the same time in a small space, right, Exactly, anything
you use for power you can also turn into a bomb.
Just release that energy really really quickly. Right. You can
(14:27):
slowly burn the gasoline in your car, or you can
put it in a vocal bottle and set it on
fire like a Molotov cocktail. It's the same process. It
just happens more rapidly. And if you release all that
energy really quickly, then it creates a shock wave, right,
And that's what's destructive, is creating all this energy release
at once creates this shock wave of heat and air,
and that's what blasts things apart. I see. So, like
(14:48):
the batteries in my phone have a lot of energy
stored in it into it, but there's no reaction that
will cause it to like be released all quickly at
the same time, exactly unless you have the Galaxy notes
seven with Jack. If you have it, please at least
take it back in right. But as far as I'm aware,
there's no nuclear bomb app that which will set your
phone on fire or anything. So where does that energy
(15:09):
come from? And so our interviewees were correct, and that
energy comes from the atom itself. That is, if you
take uranium, for example, and you split it in half,
energy is released. And so that that's the basic idea.
You might wonder all wise, energy released, right, Well, so
uranium breaks into two other things, krypton and barium, and
(15:30):
so those two things are released. And the reason energy
is released is because there's more energy stored in uranium
than in the sum of krypton and barium, and so
when you break it into crypton embarium, there's extra energy
left over. But it's it's kind of weird to grasp
because if I take a stick of wood and I
split it in half, I don't get energy released, that's right.
(15:52):
But imagine you had a stick of wood that was
in two pieces and it was held together by a spring, right,
Then there's stored energy g in that configuration, and when
you break it, that's released. The sprain will sprung out. Yeah,
it'll spring out and will push the two things apart.
For example. So if there's stored energy in the configuration
and you break it, then that energy is released. And
(16:12):
so that's what happens when you break uranium atom. There's
energy stored in the arrangement, right, and then energy is released,
meaning and it that's what it does it that energy
that's stored then pushes the two pieces apart really fast. Yeah,
and it actually sends out neutrons. You get you get
two other smaller atoms and a bunch of neutrons which
fly out. Okay, and the neutrons were actually part of
(16:33):
the original nucleus. Yeah, exactly, part of the uranium nucleus.
You got to start with something which can break into
two smaller pieces and release energy. That's the goal if
you want to do fission, and uranium is great for that.
There are other things that can do it also, plutonium, amersium,
other ones, but uranium is the one which works best. Okay,
(16:55):
why why is it good for? Why is uranium good?
What's special about uranium? Well, it just so happens that
is an isotope of uranium, uranium two thirty five, which
is really unstable, and so it's easier to get it too.
I'm looking for that verb again. Fizz fizz ile vision
eight split, vision eight split. Thank you. It's easier to
get uranium two thirty five to split than uranium two
(17:16):
thirty eight or whatever. Each is, like it's across breaking
apart itself, so it's easy to make it split up exactly,
it's less stable exactly, right. Yeah, and so that's fission.
That's why you always hear uranium and uranium cakes and
uranium enrichment. Exactly, uranium enrichment because the kind of uranium
that you normally find in the ground a uranium mine
(17:38):
is not uranium two thirty five is not the kind
we want for nuclear weapons. That kind is pretty rare.
It's you know, one in I don't know the number,
but one in a zillion atoms of uranium that you
find in the ground is the kind of unique for
nuclear weapons, which is why one of the big obstacles
to making a nuclear weapon is not knowing how to
do it, because this physics is pretty widely known. But
(18:00):
hitting the fuel these that's why, for example, Iran was
working on centrifuges, because they're trying to separate out the
different isotopes uranium to get the one that's good for
the bomb. I believe the numbers zero point Daniel. Wow,
it's like your Siri or Wikipedia or something. Okay, So, yeah,
(18:23):
so uranium is about to split and has a lot
of energy. That's why they use it for fission bombs.
That's right. But there's another key element, which is you
can't just release the energy of one atom. I mean,
you can do that, but it's not very it's not
going to be a very good bomb, right. And what
you need is, as we said, is to release a
lot of energy all at once, and for that you
need not just one atom to go, but a lot
of atoms to go. So for that to happen, you
(18:45):
need to create a chain reaction. So meaning you take
a lot of this enriched uranium, so uranium that has
a lot of this U to thirty five, and you
put it onto this one spot and then you cause
a chain reaction. That's the idea of a bomb, right, yeah, exactly.
And so the neutrons that fly out and carry some
of this leftover energy then bump into other uranium two
(19:07):
five atoms which then phizzle, physicate, physicate, thank you, and um.
And then it goes on and on and on, and
you get more neutrons and more neutrons, and pretty soon
you have a huge number of neutrons flying out, which
create which causes a huge amount of atoms to split
all at the same time, and that's your explosion right there.
(19:28):
In order that to happen, you. You need to have
enough fuel and it needs to be dense enough so
the neutrons bump into the other atoms. So that's called
the critical mass. When you have enough fuel and a
dense enough location, And that's really all you need to
do to start the bomb off. Like a rumor or
like a panic and a crowd. You need enough people
jamp together to really cause a big panic. Yeah, exactly.
For your analogy, you need something to trigger the other thing.
(19:49):
It's like that seen in Stand By Me. You know,
where they're vomiting vomits. Smell causes to other people to vomit,
which costs four of the people to vomit, and pretty
soon everybody, ah yeah that movie. Yeah, but if if
people were not close together, then you wouldn't this reaction
wouldn't catch fire, right Like, it wouldn't catch on. So
you need you need a lot of people together, a
(20:09):
lot of these atoms together to cause this chain reaction. Exactly.
And all you need to do to create a nuclear weapon.
People might be wondering, how do you start it to
like have a pile of uranium and you like light
a match or put a lighter on it or something.
All you need to do is have enough fuel all
put together, and one of the atoms inside it will
be unstable enough to just fall apart on its own
and that will trigger the chain reaction, which it leads
(20:31):
to the explosion. And so the way the nuclear bomb
actually works is you basically have two subcritical masses, like
a chunk uranium here and a chunk uranium there, and
you just slam them together and uh, and then it
goes off. And that's it. So um, for those of
you out there looking to build a nuclear weapon, all
you need to do is get enough uranium two thirty
(20:52):
five and arrange it in two pieces to slam together
in the right concentration, in the right concentration the right purity. Yeah, okay.
And some of the original designs that were like, well,
let's make one of the pieces sort of like a
cup and the other piece sort of like a ball,
and we'll just like drop the ball in the cup. Um,
and and that worked really, So just bringing these two
things together will suddenly cause the reaction to start. Yeah, exactly,
(21:14):
that's all you need to do. So separately, what happens.
Why don't they start separately, Well, they do start separately.
They just don't take off, So you have atoms in
their decaying all the time, but they don't start the
chain reaction because it's not density, just doesn't catch fire. Yeah,
you need to You need essentially to have these two
pieces and have them be dense enough to squeeze them
a little bit. And so what they actually they don't
call it a ball in a cup. They call it
(21:34):
a gun assembly because they basically shoot one piece of
uranium into another and that creates this density. You need
to have the chain reaction. So that's a fission bombs,
that's it's splitting. That's the one that splits atoms. There's
also one that fuses atoms. Yeah, and it's fascinating to me.
It's a totally different process um and that sticking atoms
together can also release energy the same way splitting an
(21:56):
atom can, Right, that's really counterintuitive. Yeah, but the way
it works is you take two pieces of hydrogen, so
the lightest element there is, and you stick them together
and you get helium. And you don't just get helium,
you get extra energy left over. So where did this
energy come from? The energy comes from the configuration of
the helium atom versus the configuration of the hydrogen atom.
(22:20):
What is helium. It's basically just two hydrogen atom stuck together, right,
and so you've got those protons, you got those neutrons
all mixed together. It takes more energy to break helium
apart than it does to break hydrogen atom apart, and
so when you put the helium together, that energy has
to get released somewhere. It's like you've put two hydrogen
(22:40):
atoms into a hole, right, and that you would need
to use energy to take them out again. So when
you put them in that hole, some energy is released.
It's like you drop them in the hole and they
turn a lever which generates some electricity or something. It's
kind of like if you're single, you have to pay
a certa amount of taxes, but if you get married,
then you have to pay maybe a little bit less
of taxes. Right, yeah, exactly right, exactly right. But that
(23:05):
kind of marital fusion doesn't usually cause um weapons of
mass destruction though. Yeah, but it's kind of the same idea.
It's like, separately, um, you have a you make a
certain amount of money, but together, because you're the configuration together,
you have extra money left over. Yeah, and it all
depends on the configuration of the atoms inside. And so
it just so happens that helium takes more energy to
(23:28):
break apart than hydrogen does. And so when you build
helium out of hydrogen, energy is released. Then you could
take that energy and put it back in to break
the helum apart and get your hydrogen back. So it
makes more sense if you think about it the other direction.
Take helium, you need to put energy and to break
it into hydrogen. I see, it's not like uranium, where
(23:49):
if you break it it releases energy. This time it
causts you energy to break helium apart. That's right. Imagine
you know, for example, you have two magnets and they're
stuck together, right. Obviously it takes energy to pull the
two magnets apart, right, So that means that when you
when the two magnets stick together, energy is released. And
that's exactly what happens. So I said that some atoms
(24:09):
cost energy to break apart, and others give you energy
when you break them apart. It's all in the nitty
gritty details of how quantum chromodynamics work. This energy of
the strong nuclear force, various arrangements of protons and neutrons,
are different energy it it's really technical. But the fascinating
thing is that if you fuse atoms together as long
as they're light, anything lighter than iron. If you fuse
(24:30):
them together and an energy is released, anything heavier than iron.
If you split it apart, energy is released, so lighter
than iron, you can fuse heavier than iron you can split.
So iron kind of sits in the middle. Iron iron, Yeah,
iron ironically, And that's why, for example, iron is the
heaviest thing that's made in the sun because the sun
(24:52):
is just a big fusion bomb and it's making heavier
and heavier elements, but it stops at iron because after
iron and cost you energy to bake, make anything bigger.
But if you have something bigger and you break it,
then that gives you the energy back. And that's that's
where the bomb comes from, exactly exactly. So a hydrogen
bomb is like, you gotta stick these two things together, right,
(25:13):
But you know hydrogen is positively charged, So how do
you get two hydrogens to stick together. It's not easy.
You've gotta squeeze them really really hard. That's why the
cost energy. No, that's why dizzy energy. It's complicated because um,
when they're really close together, the strong nuclear force takes over,
and the process we talked about the releases energy takes
over When they're a little further apart. It's the positive
(25:34):
charges that take over. So it's sort of like have
you ever been to um put putt golf? Right, and
you have to get the ball into a hole, But
the hole is at the top of a little hill.
If you get it just right, boom, it'll stick in
the hole and stay there. If you miss a little bit,
the hill will push you away. So getting fusion to
work is a little bit like that. You've gotta squeeze
the hydrogen outs together. If you get them close enough,
(25:54):
they will stick and they will release energy. That's like
the golf ball falling the hole. If you don't get
them close enough, they're just gonna push each other apart. So,
the first atomic bombs that we made were hydrogen bombs
right now. The first ones were fission bombs or uranium,
and then later we made hydrogen bombs. Yeah. And the
(26:14):
only way we could make hydrogen bombs was by setting
off an atomic bomb. Yeah, So you you need to
surround a bunch of hydrogen with nuclear weapons, blow those up, right,
so you set off a fission bomb, which creates enough
energy density to squeeze the hydrogen to cause it to fuse,
which sets off the hydrogen bomb. So hydrogen bomb is
(26:37):
really a two step process. It's first, let's do an
old fashioned atomic bomb, and that's like the ignition switch
for the hydrogen bomb, right, like yesterday's super weapon is
today's ignition switch. And so both of these types of
bombs have are more explosive than say, dynamite, just because
there's more energy inside of the atom then in the
(27:00):
reaction between atoms. That's right. All the other kinds of bombs,
dynamite and and you know, gas bombs, whatever, those are
just releasing the energy and chemical bonds, which is not
a lot compared to the energy stored inside the atom.
And that's because the strong nuclear force is a super
duper strong force, and it just happens that there's a
huge amount of energy stored inside the atom. Okay, so
it sounds sort of simple. So does that mean that
(27:23):
anyone can make a nuclear bomb? It's tricky. You need
to get the materials right. Even for a hydrogen bomb,
which just requires hydrogen, you need to create fusion, which
means creating a vission explosion. So basically the gatekeeper for
creating nuclear weapons is getting the nuclear fuel. These days,
we rely on the fact that uranium is hard to find.
(27:43):
You have to mind it and then you have to
enrich it. And so basically, if you want to build
a nuclear weapon, then you have to get enough uranium
two thirty five. After that, it's not too complicated. Well,
well let's get into it. But first let's take a
quick break. What prevents just anyone from building a bomb
(28:13):
in their backyard, not a whole lot. If you can
get your hands on the fuel, you know, if you
have enough uranium two thirty five or plutonium or some
other material which is good at at splitting, then you
can build a nuclear bomb. It's not too complicated. Their
schematics out there. If you're really into engineering. Um, but
if you want to yeah, um, that part is not secret.
(28:33):
Um you used to be. I mean in the fifties,
this kind this level of information would get you thrown
in jail or executed for treason. Yeah. Probably broadcasting a
podcast about how to make one would probably get your
arrested too. Let's check with legal before we distribute this
podcast anyway, because I'm not so indispending the rest of
my life in jail. But it's really just the limitation
(28:54):
is the fuel, which is why countries like Iran and
North Korea and those folks are building centrifuges. Um, And
the way to stop them is to try to stop
them from getting the material. You know, one of my
favorite stories about geopolitics is the way the Israeli sabotaged
the Iranian centrifugures. How did they do it? They wrote
a computer virus which specifically targeted the people working at
(29:14):
that facility to get them like downloaded and click it
and get it to control the centrifugues. It's pretty slick,
and it got the centrifuges to spin wrong. So, Um,
the difficulty in building a bomb isn't getting the new
ger materials, because I mean, it's kind of a big
effort not just to mind it, find out where it
is minded, and then you have to process it right.
And so to do that you need a lot of
(29:35):
infrastructure and a lot of factory and money. And so
at some point people are going to notice that what
you're doing right. Yeah, it's hard to keep that kind
of stuff secret. There's not that many people in the
world who are good at it, at filtering nuclear materials,
and that technology, I read is actually what has kept
secret a lot, right, Like the technology actually enriched uranium
and what to do it and how to handle it.
(29:57):
That one is not like you can't just find that
on the internet, right, And if somebody developed a new, cheap, fast,
easy way to enrich uranium, we would all be in
trouble because that's really the gatekeeper to lots of people
get nuclear weapons, because you don't need that much. I mean,
you can get a suitcase size bomb that could blow
up a major city if you had the nuclear materials.
If you had it's pretty terrifying. It's hard to find
(30:19):
it in pross it. That's the hopefully the only thing
that's keeping us from going up in a big ball
of fire. That's right exactly. And so you know, you
had to think about the scientists who are working on
this kind of stuff, and you know, how do they
feel about having developed this technology? You know, Jay Robert Oppernheimer,
the guy who led the Manhattan Project, he's famous for
having felt both ways about this when he saw the
(30:40):
first nuclear bomb go off in New Mexico. You know,
he said, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Um.
That's pretty serious stuff, right. Um. I've never created something
so dangerous, but I would wonder about how I would
sleep at night if I created a super weapon. I
had to write an article once about nuclear proliferation in
and what keeps countries from making these bombs and what's
(31:04):
the world order that kind of prevents all this from happening.
And what's kind of interesting is that you can take
uranium and you start to enrich it, and if you
reach a certain point, then that you can use the
uranium for good, Like if it reaches about I think
it's something like when I say five to seven percent
of the uranium to thirty five in it, then that's
the stuff you can use for actually good purposes. You
(31:25):
mean nuclear power, like generating electricity, generating electricity or medical equipment. Um.
But if you leave the machine on longer, if you
keep enriching it, then you get to like nine and
that's the stuff you can use for weapons. So it's
a really tricky balance of like letting people use and
make uranium for good stuff, but then you have to
(31:45):
watch out to see if they keep going and make
it into the bomb type. So it's like that knob
on your dryer where you're like, how dry do you
want your good for society dry? Or evil destructive? Dry? Yeah?
I always choose maximum gry. You always, Yeah, But I
like your anecdote because it tells the story. You know
(32:06):
that not only is nuclear power potentially the source of
superweapons that will eradicate all life on Earth, but also
it's a possible source of energy that we need, you know.
And everybody's familiar with fission as a source of nuclear power.
And you know, a bomb is releasing energy rapidly, but
a batteries, you say, is releasing energy slowly. So you
can also create a chain reaction that and control it
(32:29):
in a way that doesn't run It's not a runaway reaction.
Very gradually releases energy. And so that's what they do
in power plants. And you know when you hear they
have a meltdown, that's because the uranium has gotten too hot,
and it's it's uh, chain reaction is started and uh
and that's not what you want. You don't want to
be blowing up nuclear bombs inside your facility. Yea. And
(32:49):
fusion also has tremendous possibilities for the future because fusion
is much more powerful, huge amount of energy potentially released.
The source of fuel is not this like weird metal
you have to dig up the ground uranium. It's just hydrogen,
which is everywhere. And the best thing is that there's
no radioactive waste fission as a nuclear power source. You
get uranium, it turns into this other radioactive crap which
(33:11):
lasts for ten thousand years, etcetera. What you can do
with it? Well, I think that the cool thing is
that the same reaction that makes this bomb, right, like,
that's happening in the Sun right now, zillions of times. Yeah,
it's just like this continual, simmering giant nuclear bomb. It's
going off constantly. Yeah, that's the whole reason we hear. Like, so,
so the same idea, like this chain reaction that doesn't
(33:32):
have to be this kind of always explosive, you know,
destructive things. I mean, the Sun is just like it's
just they're burning, continually exploding, and so we could have
that on Earth too, right, Like, that's the idea behind
fusion energy is that if we could create a mini
sun basically like a continual mini nuclear explosion, then think
about all the energy we could get from that, that's right,
And that was actually my first science job. My first
(33:55):
science work ever was in in college. I went into
an internship at Los Alamos and worked on their fusion
energy program because I thought this would be a good
application of this kind of research, This would be a
way to help humanity. And it's true, and it's very promising.
And as I was saying before, there's no radio back
to fall out or or or waste. It just produces helium.
(34:15):
The problem is that it's hard to do. You know,
they're working on it. We could do a whole other
podcast about how to build a little sun on Earth
and keep it from turning into a bomb and burning
everybody will that'd be cool. So if they make it work,
it will not just give energy for everybody, but everybody
will get a helium balloon. That's all right, We'll I'll
talk kind of like this, Yeah, exactly, lots of side benefits. No, seriously,
(34:39):
If fusion becomes feasible and accessible, then we're talking about
basically free energy because the cost will just drop very
very quickly. And uh, and that would change society. Right.
If energy is free, then almost everything is possible. If
energy is free, you can make as much drinking water
as you like. Right. If energy is free, you can
build whatever hole as you like, You can make concrete,
(35:01):
you can do all sorts of things. So many problems
would be solved if you could get cheap energy, and
fusion is the way to do it. It's just really
technically tricky. Well, I think the takeaway is that inside
of each and every atom there's just an enormous amount
of energy, and so that can be either very destructive
or very promising to make an incredible future. That's right. Yeah,
(35:22):
and so there are both positive and negative potential energies
for all the scientific research. Well, I hope that through
your mind it fews some ideas in your head together
it's split your view of the world. And jokes aside,
Please do not try to build a nuclear weapon in
your garage. It will not end well. And if you
(35:43):
listen to this podcast, be very careful about what you
Google is always listening. They were listening. Yeah, Well, thank
you so much for joining us, See you next time.
If you still have a question after listening to all
these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
(36:06):
hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or
email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com
Hey, Daniel, do you ever wish you had a superpower
all the time? I wish I had lots of superpowers.
But you know, science has actually provided us with some real,
honest to God powers that our ancestors might have thought
were superpowers. Not quite yet, but you know, we can
do some pretty amazing stuff. We'll listen to the podcast
episode about teleportation before you decide, but we can do
(00:27):
some pretty amazing stuff, stuff that would have limited to
deities a thousand years ago. You know, things like harnessing
the power of the sun. What do you mean, like
we can create the sun here on Earth. Yeah, absolutely,
we can create miniute your son's here on Earth. Not
recommended to do in your at home kitchen, but it's
something science is capable of. Hi. I'm Jorge and I'm Daniel.
(01:02):
Welcome to Daniel and Jorge explained the Universe our podcast
about the universe and everything in it and everyone in it,
and even about aliens if they are in it. Yea,
even about sons sons s U N and sons s
O N, And we explain it all today on the program.
We are actually talking about harnessing the power of the sun.
(01:23):
Science has distilled the thing that happens inside the sun,
the energy release, and made it available for us here
on Earth with explosive results. That's right. So, if you
are a dictator of your own little country looking to
become a nuclear superpower, this is the podcast for you.
Do they ever going to talk about nuclear weapons and
(01:44):
specifically the nuclear bomb? How does it work? How do
you build one in your garage? Should you build one
in your garage? The answer is no, The answer is
definitely no, one should you? But could you? Maybe? Maybe
this podcast is about the science, not the ethics. I
think we'll touch on both actually, because science is never
(02:04):
free of ethics. It's it's always a complex mixture. So
nuclear bombs is something that people, obviously we're very surprised
to learn about in the mid forties, uh, and then
there was a huge concern with the Cold War up
until the eighties and nineties, but then it sort of
quieted down until a little bit recently. Right, there's been
a lot of talk about rogue nations and the threat
(02:25):
of nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Well,
if you ask the Union of Concerned Scientists, I don't
think they've quieted down at all. There's been a pretty
consistent fear that we would destroy ourselves and kill everybody
on basically since we've got the power to do so. Yeah,
I mean we had in the eighties, the USSR in
the USA had enormous nuclear stockpiles, tens of thousands of
(02:48):
nuclear weapons pointed at each other with hair triggers. And
these days we have fewer, you know, if in the
number of thousands instead of tens of thousands, But still
there's plenty of power there to destroy each other very easy.
Only are you saying scientists have a hard time relaxing
in general, if you know, the more you know about
the state of nuclear weapons, the harder it is to
(03:08):
really relax. Yes, but you know your your point is taken.
The big powers have not yet blown each other up,
and we are worth these days about smaller powers and
nuclear powers and terrorists in North Korea and all these
folks who were developing these capabilities. So it kind of
made us wonder, like, how many people out there actually
know how a nuclear bomb works? And how do you
(03:29):
make one? And would it be a bad idea to
explain to everybody exactly how to build a nuclear bomb? Yeah?
Are we going to get arrested for this podcast or
put on some kind of watch list surveillance. That's right.
And to say we are not telling you everybody anything
that wouldn't know in a physics class anyway. Yes, if
(03:49):
we are going to get arrested for treason, you gotta
lock up every professor out there, Yes, which I bet
some people would like to do. That's right. That was
not a policy suggestion. H m hmmm. So we went
out there and ask people, do you know how a
nuclear bomb works? Yeah? So I think for a moment,
how much do you know about a nuclear weapon? How
does it actually work? If you had to? Could you
(04:11):
build one in your garage? Here's what people had to say.
I'm not sure. Honestly, I do not have no idea
at all. Um, by smashing together particles cool? I'd only
say yes, but I don't know how to say it
in the English Chinese? Uh honevia. So there's a two
(04:33):
kinds of nuclear bomb, right? Yeah? I combon and what
was that called hydridable? Yeah? So it's why is vision? Yeah?
Wha yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah So that's interesting. I feel
like not a lot of people know how nuclear bomb works. Yeah.
Half the people had no idea um, and the other
(04:53):
half had some idea that it was something about the
power of the atom. I like, the guy who only
knew the words in Chinese, keep is so excited to
tell me what he knew. I was like, yeah, tell
me Chinese, that's fine. He definitely knew something about the topic.
But yeah, people generally either didn't know anything or they
knew that it's something to do with the adamant and
they're right. Essentially, the way nuclear bomb works is that
(05:14):
it releases energy stored inside the atom or lots of atoms,
really really rapidly. M m. That's what's called the atomic bomb. Yeah.
The early versions are called atomic bombs. So there's sort
of two categories of nuclear weapons. There's the early ones
that use fission where you split an atom apart. Those
are called atomic bombs, and the later ones that are
called hydrogen bombs or h bombs. Those use fusion where
(05:38):
you squeeze nucleon together. And we'll get into the nitty
gritty of exactly all how that works and why it's interesting.
So there are atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs. They're both
nuclear weapons. Oh, I see, and they weren't using different
methods one of them is fizzy, the other one is fuzzy.
That's exactly right, that's exactly right. One of them split
the atom opened, and the other one squeezes atom together.
(06:00):
And it's sort of surprising. You might be thinking. Hold on,
if splitting atoms open releases energy, how come the opposite
thing of fusing them together also releases energy. Yeah. Well,
before we get into the technical details, you mentioned you
had some personal connection to the Manhattan Project and the
nuclear industry here in the United States. Can you tell
(06:21):
us about that. Yeah, it's not that I've ever built
a nuclear bomb myself. No, certainly not about doctor Manhattan.
I'm not Doctor Manhattan. But I did grow up in
Los Angles, New Mexico, the home of the Manhattan Project,
where in the forties all these scientists got together to
crack this mystery. And you know, the history of this
is fascinating. It was in the late thirties that people
(06:42):
figured out, oh, you can split the atom and release
some huge amounts of energy. I mean, much more energy
than is released when you blow up dynamite or burnt
coal or anything like that. And so immediately, even before
the world was at war, people realized this is the
technology for a new weapon. This could be a devastating
new super happened, and so of course most people know
the story. The US government gathered people together in the
(07:05):
middle of nowhere in New Mexico. They chose Los Almos
because it's a place basically no one would go on purpose,
and so no one would run into it. It wasn't
because if they made a mistake, not that many people
would would die in an active uh you know what.
That's probably an aspect of it also being remote out
in the middle of the desert um. But as a
high schooler, you know, it wasn't much consolation to know
(07:27):
that you were living in a place that that the
government thought was going to be super boring and no
one would want to go to. And they were pretty
much right. There's not a whole lot to do in
Los Almos. And in fact, your parents worked for the
Los Almos National Laboratory, right They worked on nuclear engineering
and physics. That's right. Both of my parents worked for
Los Almos labs where the bombs were developed. What they
work on, I can't tell you, not because I'm being
(07:50):
secretive about it, but because I don't know. Both of
them had Q clearances, they never told you. No, I
never visited their offices. I never talked to them in
any detail about their work. I never heard about it
because it was all behind the clearance fence, the security fence.
It was all top secret. Wow, they saw you as
a threat even then, that's right. They have to go
through a laborate procedures to make sure they were trustworthy.
(08:13):
We're not going to be spies for some enemy nation
or something like that, or blackmail bull So like at
the dinner table, what would you guys talk about, Like
how is work? I can't tell you, don't ask me.
We learned pretty quickly not to ask those questions exactly.
And there was no you know, take your son to
work day or this kind of stuff. And you know,
it's interesting because when I was a kid, I learned
(08:35):
about the history of Los Alamos. And in Los Almos,
they teach you pride. They teach you this is the
place the bomb was developed. This is the location of
a great scientific discovery, and not just that, but that
we should feel pride, national pride, and having developed something
which won the war. Right, people in this town, scientists
and where your parents work, they won the war with
(08:56):
their brains and so this sort of like pride was
really deeply um not moving into the curriculum in life
in Los Almos. It's almost like propaganda. Definitely, it's exactly
like propaganda, because it is propaganda. And it was only
later that I heard about the controversy, like should we
have dropped those bombs and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians?
(09:17):
You know, that turns out to be quite a complex
moral question, you know. And if you're a scientist working
on these weapons, should you be should you be developing
these weapons and then putting them in the hands of
politicians who could use them to kill women and children?
Did you ever talk to your that about that, like
if he ever felt any feelings like that or how
an your thoughts about that? You know. It's interesting is
(09:38):
I didn't ask him about it until I was in
my twenties, you know, like a decade after we lived
in Los Alamos, and I asked him about and he said,
you're the first person to ask me that question, and
that was sort of shocking. Also, like people most almost
don't discuss it very much. His friends didn't ask him,
his family is what the family didn't ask him. I
was a physics student. I knew all about this and
and never asked him until it's finally occurred to me.
(10:00):
And yeah, so I asked him, and he, um, you know,
he's thought about it, he's balanced these things, and he thought, um,
that the nation needed defending, and there are other people
out there developing nuclear weapons, and that we needed to
have our arsenal ready and needed to be a tip
top shape, and we needed to have the same guns
as the enemy had. And you know, this was in
(10:20):
the eighties and nineties, and so the Cold War was
a very recent memory, and it was not ridiculous to
think that the Russia could launch nuclear weapons against us.
So I think he felt some sort of pride that
he was helping the national cause. So like, what was
your high school mascot in your school radiation? That the fallout? Right,
(10:41):
probably the radioactive isotope. No, No, it was nothing so exciting.
We lived in the top of a hill. It was
almost the top of mountains. So are high school mascot
is the hilltoppers? Yeah, not not terribly exciting. Um, But
my reaction to this, this moral quandity, was totally different.
I didn't want to have anything to do with it,
and so want. I had to choose a field of
physics to study, I chose something very far away from
(11:04):
any practical applications, which is, you know, Higgs boson and
dark matter and particle physics. And so it's a selling
point to me that none of my research could ever
have any practical, immediate practical application and therefore probably not
be used to kill any babies. And you know that
helps me sleep at night, not killing babies for my work,
just avoid all responsibility. Yeah, you almost could say I'm
(11:27):
a cartoonist, right have have any of your cartoons ever
killed any babies? Not that I know of. Maybe you
should look into that, wholegs and you should have a
more definitive answer to that question. I feel like this
is a great recruiting of audio for physicists, you know,
looking to avoid responsibility, don't want anything to do with
the real world, like the particles, don't like killing babies.
(11:51):
Go into particle physics. We have killed zero babies to date.
So you're you're tied to sort of the history of
nuclear energy in this country. Yeah, absolutely, And you know,
my parents were supported by the Department of Energy, and
now actually the Department Energy supports my research. So I've
basically been supported by the Department of Energy directly or
indirectly since I was ten um, so I'm pretty totally
(12:15):
closely tied into what I can say. I'm completely morally
insulated from it. I mean, I ate food which was
paid for by the programs which funded nuclear weapons development, etcetera, etcetera.
So my hands are not clean. Yeah, so I feel
this personal connection, and I used to feel this pride,
and now I feel, you know, a lot shame. But
it's definitely more complicated, definitely not happy. When I imagine
all those people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, I'm going about their
(12:38):
day and then being suddenly destroyed by nuclear bombs. It's
definitely complicated how these bombs work. But before we get
into it, let's take a quick break. All right, let's
(13:00):
talk about how exactly a nuclear bomb works. So how
you said there's two kinds. Actually there is fusion and
there is fission bombs, So that's two different kinds of
nuclear bombs. How do they work? That's right? And so
if you are the director of a rogue nation's nuclear
weapons program, this is where you're gonna want to start
taking notes. Okay, So I like how do you choose
which one. It's fascinating because a fusion bomb actually requires
(13:22):
a fission bomb to ignite it. Yeah, but we'll talk
about that in a minute. So you should start with
if you're developing a new technology, you start with fission
because it's easier. All the fusion is much more powerful.
So fission is breaking the nucleus of an atom, and
fusion is putting together the nucleus of an atom. That's
the difference, right, That's right. Fusion is fusing together and
a nucleus, and fission is breaking it apart, exactly, fizzing
(13:45):
it or phisiling it or physicisting it or whatever the
verb is fizzing. Okay, thank you, and um so. But
a nuclear bomb works essentially the same way as another bomb,
and that its goal is released a lot of energy. Right,
So you have to find some stored and ergen and
release it. And you can do that in dynamite with
this stored chemical energy, or something in oil with this
(14:06):
stored stored energy in the gasoline or whatever. But nuclear
energy is much more powerful because it has a lot
more energy stored in it. Because that's all a bomb is,
It's just the release of a lot of energy at
the same time in a small space, right, Exactly, anything
you use for power you can also turn into a bomb.
Just release that energy really really quickly. Right. You can
(14:27):
slowly burn the gasoline in your car, or you can
put it in a vocal bottle and set it on
fire like a Molotov cocktail. It's the same process. It
just happens more rapidly. And if you release all that
energy really quickly, then it creates a shock wave, right,
And that's what's destructive, is creating all this energy release
at once creates this shock wave of heat and air,
and that's what blasts things apart. I see. So, like
(14:48):
the batteries in my phone have a lot of energy
stored in it into it, but there's no reaction that
will cause it to like be released all quickly at
the same time, exactly unless you have the Galaxy notes
seven with Jack. If you have it, please at least
take it back in right. But as far as I'm aware,
there's no nuclear bomb app that which will set your
phone on fire or anything. So where does that energy
(15:09):
come from? And so our interviewees were correct, and that
energy comes from the atom itself. That is, if you
take uranium, for example, and you split it in half,
energy is released. And so that that's the basic idea.
You might wonder all wise, energy released, right, Well, so
uranium breaks into two other things, krypton and barium, and
(15:30):
so those two things are released. And the reason energy
is released is because there's more energy stored in uranium
than in the sum of krypton and barium, and so
when you break it into crypton embarium, there's extra energy
left over. But it's it's kind of weird to grasp
because if I take a stick of wood and I
split it in half, I don't get energy released, that's right.
(15:52):
But imagine you had a stick of wood that was
in two pieces and it was held together by a spring, right,
Then there's stored energy g in that configuration, and when
you break it, that's released. The sprain will sprung out. Yeah,
it'll spring out and will push the two things apart.
For example. So if there's stored energy in the configuration
and you break it, then that energy is released. And
(16:12):
so that's what happens when you break uranium atom. There's
energy stored in the arrangement, right, and then energy is released,
meaning and it that's what it does it that energy
that's stored then pushes the two pieces apart really fast. Yeah,
and it actually sends out neutrons. You get you get
two other smaller atoms and a bunch of neutrons which
fly out. Okay, and the neutrons were actually part of
(16:33):
the original nucleus. Yeah, exactly, part of the uranium nucleus.
You got to start with something which can break into
two smaller pieces and release energy. That's the goal if
you want to do fission, and uranium is great for that.
There are other things that can do it also, plutonium, amersium,
other ones, but uranium is the one which works best. Okay,
(16:55):
why why is it good for? Why is uranium good?
What's special about uranium? Well, it just so happens that
is an isotope of uranium, uranium two thirty five, which
is really unstable, and so it's easier to get it too.
I'm looking for that verb again. Fizz fizz ile vision
eight split, vision eight split. Thank you. It's easier to
get uranium two thirty five to split than uranium two
(17:16):
thirty eight or whatever. Each is, like it's across breaking
apart itself, so it's easy to make it split up exactly,
it's less stable exactly, right. Yeah, and so that's fission.
That's why you always hear uranium and uranium cakes and
uranium enrichment. Exactly, uranium enrichment because the kind of uranium
that you normally find in the ground a uranium mine
(17:38):
is not uranium two thirty five is not the kind
we want for nuclear weapons. That kind is pretty rare.
It's you know, one in I don't know the number,
but one in a zillion atoms of uranium that you
find in the ground is the kind of unique for
nuclear weapons, which is why one of the big obstacles
to making a nuclear weapon is not knowing how to
do it, because this physics is pretty widely known. But
(18:00):
hitting the fuel these that's why, for example, Iran was
working on centrifuges, because they're trying to separate out the
different isotopes uranium to get the one that's good for
the bomb. I believe the numbers zero point Daniel. Wow,
it's like your Siri or Wikipedia or something. Okay, So, yeah,
(18:23):
so uranium is about to split and has a lot
of energy. That's why they use it for fission bombs.
That's right. But there's another key element, which is you
can't just release the energy of one atom. I mean,
you can do that, but it's not very it's not
going to be a very good bomb, right. And what
you need is, as we said, is to release a
lot of energy all at once, and for that you
need not just one atom to go, but a lot
of atoms to go. So for that to happen, you
(18:45):
need to create a chain reaction. So meaning you take
a lot of this enriched uranium, so uranium that has
a lot of this U to thirty five, and you
put it onto this one spot and then you cause
a chain reaction. That's the idea of a bomb, right, yeah, exactly.
And so the neutrons that fly out and carry some
of this leftover energy then bump into other uranium two
(19:07):
five atoms which then phizzle, physicate, physicate, thank you, and um.
And then it goes on and on and on, and
you get more neutrons and more neutrons, and pretty soon
you have a huge number of neutrons flying out, which
create which causes a huge amount of atoms to split
all at the same time, and that's your explosion right there.
(19:28):
In order that to happen, you. You need to have
enough fuel and it needs to be dense enough so
the neutrons bump into the other atoms. So that's called
the critical mass. When you have enough fuel and a
dense enough location, And that's really all you need to
do to start the bomb off. Like a rumor or
like a panic and a crowd. You need enough people
jamp together to really cause a big panic. Yeah, exactly.
For your analogy, you need something to trigger the other thing.
(19:49):
It's like that seen in Stand By Me. You know,
where they're vomiting vomits. Smell causes to other people to vomit,
which costs four of the people to vomit, and pretty
soon everybody, ah yeah that movie. Yeah, but if if
people were not close together, then you wouldn't this reaction
wouldn't catch fire, right Like, it wouldn't catch on. So
you need you need a lot of people together, a
(20:09):
lot of these atoms together to cause this chain reaction. Exactly.
And all you need to do to create a nuclear weapon.
People might be wondering, how do you start it to
like have a pile of uranium and you like light
a match or put a lighter on it or something.
All you need to do is have enough fuel all
put together, and one of the atoms inside it will
be unstable enough to just fall apart on its own
and that will trigger the chain reaction, which it leads
(20:31):
to the explosion. And so the way the nuclear bomb
actually works is you basically have two subcritical masses, like
a chunk uranium here and a chunk uranium there, and
you just slam them together and uh, and then it
goes off. And that's it. So um, for those of
you out there looking to build a nuclear weapon, all
you need to do is get enough uranium two thirty
(20:52):
five and arrange it in two pieces to slam together
in the right concentration, in the right concentration the right purity. Yeah, okay.
And some of the original designs that were like, well,
let's make one of the pieces sort of like a
cup and the other piece sort of like a ball,
and we'll just like drop the ball in the cup. Um,
and and that worked really, So just bringing these two
things together will suddenly cause the reaction to start. Yeah, exactly,
(21:14):
that's all you need to do. So separately, what happens.
Why don't they start separately, Well, they do start separately.
They just don't take off, So you have atoms in
their decaying all the time, but they don't start the
chain reaction because it's not density, just doesn't catch fire. Yeah,
you need to You need essentially to have these two
pieces and have them be dense enough to squeeze them
a little bit. And so what they actually they don't
call it a ball in a cup. They call it
(21:34):
a gun assembly because they basically shoot one piece of
uranium into another and that creates this density. You need
to have the chain reaction. So that's a fission bombs,
that's it's splitting. That's the one that splits atoms. There's
also one that fuses atoms. Yeah, and it's fascinating to me.
It's a totally different process um and that sticking atoms
together can also release energy the same way splitting an
(21:56):
atom can, Right, that's really counterintuitive. Yeah, but the way
it works is you take two pieces of hydrogen, so
the lightest element there is, and you stick them together
and you get helium. And you don't just get helium,
you get extra energy left over. So where did this
energy come from? The energy comes from the configuration of
the helium atom versus the configuration of the hydrogen atom.
(22:20):
What is helium. It's basically just two hydrogen atom stuck together, right,
and so you've got those protons, you got those neutrons
all mixed together. It takes more energy to break helium
apart than it does to break hydrogen atom apart, and
so when you put the helium together, that energy has
to get released somewhere. It's like you've put two hydrogen
(22:40):
atoms into a hole, right, and that you would need
to use energy to take them out again. So when
you put them in that hole, some energy is released.
It's like you drop them in the hole and they
turn a lever which generates some electricity or something. It's
kind of like if you're single, you have to pay
a certa amount of taxes, but if you get married,
then you have to pay maybe a little bit less
of taxes. Right, yeah, exactly right, exactly right. But that
(23:05):
kind of marital fusion doesn't usually cause um weapons of
mass destruction though. Yeah, but it's kind of the same idea.
It's like, separately, um, you have a you make a
certain amount of money, but together, because you're the configuration together,
you have extra money left over. Yeah, and it all
depends on the configuration of the atoms inside. And so
it just so happens that helium takes more energy to
(23:28):
break apart than hydrogen does. And so when you build
helium out of hydrogen, energy is released. Then you could
take that energy and put it back in to break
the helum apart and get your hydrogen back. So it
makes more sense if you think about it the other direction.
Take helium, you need to put energy and to break
it into hydrogen. I see, it's not like uranium, where
(23:49):
if you break it it releases energy. This time it
causts you energy to break helium apart. That's right. Imagine
you know, for example, you have two magnets and they're
stuck together, right. Obviously it takes energy to pull the
two magnets apart, right, So that means that when you
when the two magnets stick together, energy is released. And
that's exactly what happens. So I said that some atoms
(24:09):
cost energy to break apart, and others give you energy
when you break them apart. It's all in the nitty
gritty details of how quantum chromodynamics work. This energy of
the strong nuclear force, various arrangements of protons and neutrons,
are different energy it it's really technical. But the fascinating
thing is that if you fuse atoms together as long
as they're light, anything lighter than iron. If you fuse
(24:30):
them together and an energy is released, anything heavier than iron.
If you split it apart, energy is released, so lighter
than iron, you can fuse heavier than iron you can split.
So iron kind of sits in the middle. Iron iron, Yeah,
iron ironically, And that's why, for example, iron is the
heaviest thing that's made in the sun because the sun
(24:52):
is just a big fusion bomb and it's making heavier
and heavier elements, but it stops at iron because after
iron and cost you energy to bake, make anything bigger.
But if you have something bigger and you break it,
then that gives you the energy back. And that's that's
where the bomb comes from, exactly exactly. So a hydrogen
bomb is like, you gotta stick these two things together, right,
(25:13):
But you know hydrogen is positively charged, So how do
you get two hydrogens to stick together. It's not easy.
You've gotta squeeze them really really hard. That's why the
cost energy. No, that's why dizzy energy. It's complicated because um,
when they're really close together, the strong nuclear force takes over,
and the process we talked about the releases energy takes
over When they're a little further apart. It's the positive
(25:34):
charges that take over. So it's sort of like have
you ever been to um put putt golf? Right, and
you have to get the ball into a hole, But
the hole is at the top of a little hill.
If you get it just right, boom, it'll stick in
the hole and stay there. If you miss a little bit,
the hill will push you away. So getting fusion to
work is a little bit like that. You've gotta squeeze
the hydrogen outs together. If you get them close enough,
(25:54):
they will stick and they will release energy. That's like
the golf ball falling the hole. If you don't get
them close enough, they're just gonna push each other apart. So,
the first atomic bombs that we made were hydrogen bombs
right now. The first ones were fission bombs or uranium,
and then later we made hydrogen bombs. Yeah. And the
(26:14):
only way we could make hydrogen bombs was by setting
off an atomic bomb. Yeah, So you you need to
surround a bunch of hydrogen with nuclear weapons, blow those up, right,
so you set off a fission bomb, which creates enough
energy density to squeeze the hydrogen to cause it to fuse,
which sets off the hydrogen bomb. So hydrogen bomb is
(26:37):
really a two step process. It's first, let's do an
old fashioned atomic bomb, and that's like the ignition switch
for the hydrogen bomb, right, like yesterday's super weapon is
today's ignition switch. And so both of these types of
bombs have are more explosive than say, dynamite, just because
there's more energy inside of the atom then in the
(27:00):
reaction between atoms. That's right. All the other kinds of bombs,
dynamite and and you know, gas bombs, whatever, those are
just releasing the energy and chemical bonds, which is not
a lot compared to the energy stored inside the atom.
And that's because the strong nuclear force is a super
duper strong force, and it just happens that there's a
huge amount of energy stored inside the atom. Okay, so
it sounds sort of simple. So does that mean that
(27:23):
anyone can make a nuclear bomb? It's tricky. You need
to get the materials right. Even for a hydrogen bomb,
which just requires hydrogen, you need to create fusion, which
means creating a vission explosion. So basically the gatekeeper for
creating nuclear weapons is getting the nuclear fuel. These days,
we rely on the fact that uranium is hard to find.
(27:43):
You have to mind it and then you have to
enrich it. And so basically, if you want to build
a nuclear weapon, then you have to get enough uranium
two thirty five. After that, it's not too complicated. Well,
well let's get into it. But first let's take a
quick break. What prevents just anyone from building a bomb
(28:13):
in their backyard, not a whole lot. If you can
get your hands on the fuel, you know, if you
have enough uranium two thirty five or plutonium or some
other material which is good at at splitting, then you
can build a nuclear bomb. It's not too complicated. Their
schematics out there. If you're really into engineering. Um, but
if you want to yeah, um, that part is not secret.
(28:33):
Um you used to be. I mean in the fifties,
this kind this level of information would get you thrown
in jail or executed for treason. Yeah. Probably broadcasting a
podcast about how to make one would probably get your
arrested too. Let's check with legal before we distribute this
podcast anyway, because I'm not so indispending the rest of
my life in jail. But it's really just the limitation
(28:54):
is the fuel, which is why countries like Iran and
North Korea and those folks are building centrifuges. Um, And
the way to stop them is to try to stop
them from getting the material. You know, one of my
favorite stories about geopolitics is the way the Israeli sabotaged
the Iranian centrifugures. How did they do it? They wrote
a computer virus which specifically targeted the people working at
(29:14):
that facility to get them like downloaded and click it
and get it to control the centrifugues. It's pretty slick,
and it got the centrifuges to spin wrong. So, Um,
the difficulty in building a bomb isn't getting the new
ger materials, because I mean, it's kind of a big
effort not just to mind it, find out where it
is minded, and then you have to process it right.
And so to do that you need a lot of
(29:35):
infrastructure and a lot of factory and money. And so
at some point people are going to notice that what
you're doing right. Yeah, it's hard to keep that kind
of stuff secret. There's not that many people in the
world who are good at it, at filtering nuclear materials,
and that technology, I read is actually what has kept
secret a lot, right, Like the technology actually enriched uranium
and what to do it and how to handle it.
(29:57):
That one is not like you can't just find that
on the internet, right, And if somebody developed a new, cheap, fast,
easy way to enrich uranium, we would all be in
trouble because that's really the gatekeeper to lots of people
get nuclear weapons, because you don't need that much. I mean,
you can get a suitcase size bomb that could blow
up a major city if you had the nuclear materials.
If you had it's pretty terrifying. It's hard to find
(30:19):
it in pross it. That's the hopefully the only thing
that's keeping us from going up in a big ball
of fire. That's right exactly. And so you know, you
had to think about the scientists who are working on
this kind of stuff, and you know, how do they
feel about having developed this technology? You know, Jay Robert Oppernheimer,
the guy who led the Manhattan Project, he's famous for
having felt both ways about this when he saw the
(30:40):
first nuclear bomb go off in New Mexico. You know,
he said, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Um.
That's pretty serious stuff, right. Um. I've never created something
so dangerous, but I would wonder about how I would
sleep at night if I created a super weapon. I
had to write an article once about nuclear proliferation in
and what keeps countries from making these bombs and what's
(31:04):
the world order that kind of prevents all this from happening.
And what's kind of interesting is that you can take
uranium and you start to enrich it, and if you
reach a certain point, then that you can use the
uranium for good, Like if it reaches about I think
it's something like when I say five to seven percent
of the uranium to thirty five in it, then that's
the stuff you can use for actually good purposes. You
(31:25):
mean nuclear power, like generating electricity, generating electricity or medical equipment. Um.
But if you leave the machine on longer, if you
keep enriching it, then you get to like nine and
that's the stuff you can use for weapons. So it's
a really tricky balance of like letting people use and
make uranium for good stuff, but then you have to
(31:45):
watch out to see if they keep going and make
it into the bomb type. So it's like that knob
on your dryer where you're like, how dry do you
want your good for society dry? Or evil destructive? Dry? Yeah?
I always choose maximum gry. You always, Yeah, But I
like your anecdote because it tells the story. You know
(32:06):
that not only is nuclear power potentially the source of
superweapons that will eradicate all life on Earth, but also
it's a possible source of energy that we need, you know.
And everybody's familiar with fission as a source of nuclear power.
And you know, a bomb is releasing energy rapidly, but
a batteries, you say, is releasing energy slowly. So you
can also create a chain reaction that and control it
(32:29):
in a way that doesn't run It's not a runaway reaction.
Very gradually releases energy. And so that's what they do
in power plants. And you know when you hear they
have a meltdown, that's because the uranium has gotten too hot,
and it's it's uh, chain reaction is started and uh
and that's not what you want. You don't want to
be blowing up nuclear bombs inside your facility. Yea. And
(32:49):
fusion also has tremendous possibilities for the future because fusion
is much more powerful, huge amount of energy potentially released.
The source of fuel is not this like weird metal
you have to dig up the ground uranium. It's just hydrogen,
which is everywhere. And the best thing is that there's
no radioactive waste fission as a nuclear power source. You
get uranium, it turns into this other radioactive crap which
(33:11):
lasts for ten thousand years, etcetera. What you can do
with it? Well, I think that the cool thing is
that the same reaction that makes this bomb, right, like,
that's happening in the Sun right now, zillions of times. Yeah,
it's just like this continual, simmering giant nuclear bomb. It's
going off constantly. Yeah, that's the whole reason we hear. Like, so,
so the same idea, like this chain reaction that doesn't
(33:32):
have to be this kind of always explosive, you know,
destructive things. I mean, the Sun is just like it's
just they're burning, continually exploding, and so we could have
that on Earth too, right, Like, that's the idea behind
fusion energy is that if we could create a mini
sun basically like a continual mini nuclear explosion, then think
about all the energy we could get from that, that's right,
And that was actually my first science job. My first
(33:55):
science work ever was in in college. I went into
an internship at Los Alamos and worked on their fusion
energy program because I thought this would be a good
application of this kind of research, This would be a
way to help humanity. And it's true, and it's very promising.
And as I was saying before, there's no radio back
to fall out or or or waste. It just produces helium.
(34:15):
The problem is that it's hard to do. You know,
they're working on it. We could do a whole other
podcast about how to build a little sun on Earth
and keep it from turning into a bomb and burning
everybody will that'd be cool. So if they make it work,
it will not just give energy for everybody, but everybody
will get a helium balloon. That's all right, We'll I'll
talk kind of like this, Yeah, exactly, lots of side benefits. No, seriously,
(34:39):
If fusion becomes feasible and accessible, then we're talking about
basically free energy because the cost will just drop very
very quickly. And uh, and that would change society. Right.
If energy is free, then almost everything is possible. If
energy is free, you can make as much drinking water
as you like. Right. If energy is free, you can
build whatever hole as you like, You can make concrete,
(35:01):
you can do all sorts of things. So many problems
would be solved if you could get cheap energy, and
fusion is the way to do it. It's just really
technically tricky. Well, I think the takeaway is that inside
of each and every atom there's just an enormous amount
of energy, and so that can be either very destructive
or very promising to make an incredible future. That's right. Yeah,
(35:22):
and so there are both positive and negative potential energies
for all the scientific research. Well, I hope that through
your mind it fews some ideas in your head together
it's split your view of the world. And jokes aside,
Please do not try to build a nuclear weapon in
your garage. It will not end well. And if you
(35:43):
listen to this podcast, be very careful about what you
Google is always listening. They were listening. Yeah, Well, thank
you so much for joining us, See you next time.
If you still have a question after listening to all
these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
(36:06):
hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or
email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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