Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow / No tomorrow, no tomorrow
November 9, 2024 4:56 AM Subscribe
The Most Insane Weapon You Never Heard About - "At the height of the Cold War, a terrifying concept emerged: a bomb so powerful it wouldn't need to be dropped. Known as Project Sundial, this doomsday device would have left a 400-km radius in flames and plunged the world into darkness. It was a bomb that would destroy everything – not a weapon, but an apocalypse. How close did we come to pressing the button?" (previously)
The untold story of the world's biggest nuclear bomb - "Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child's play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, 'the possibility of much bigger bangs.' At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a 'primary' to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons."
also btw...
The untold story of the world's biggest nuclear bomb - "Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child's play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, 'the possibility of much bigger bangs.' At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a 'primary' to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons."
also btw...
- Mankind's strange love of superweapons - "Typical of the breed was German chemist Fritz Haber, who invented and personally promoted the use of poison gas on First World War battlefields. As with his contemporaries in the other belligerents, Haber started out as an idealist who, once hostilities began, quickly harnessed his science in the service of the state. His motto, 'Im Frieden der Menschheit, im Kriege dem Vaterland' (In peace, for mankind; in war, for the fatherland), sets a pattern followed with distressing regularity by other idealistic scientists in subsequent conflicts."[1,2]
- Cobalt: It Makes the Dirtiest of Dirty Bombs - "Calculations made in 1950 hinted that sprinkling one-tenth of an ounce of cobalt-60 on every square mile of earth (admittedly, a lot of cobalt overall) would wipe out the human race, a nuclear version of the cloud that killed the dinosaurs."[3,4,5]
Finally, an idea whose time has come. Detonate, Sundial! Lift us into your glorious light!
posted by mittens at 5:47 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]
posted by mittens at 5:47 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]
Having grown up squarely in the shadow of all of this + living the rest of my life in its moral blast radius, I can say that the deep misanthropy and pessimism (and probably chronic depression) it left behind were more than sufficient w/out ever having to hear of this particular doomsday weapon. Fuck everyone involved.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:59 AM on November 9 [11 favorites]
posted by ryanshepard at 6:59 AM on November 9 [11 favorites]
A cobalt bomb is one of the stories that drives season 2 of Rachel Maddow's Ultra podcast. Highly recommended, even though the bomb itself becomes a bit of a red herring.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:03 AM on November 9
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:03 AM on November 9
Why am I not all that surprised to hear that Edward Teller was the mastermind behind this? I am thoroughly convinced the man was the real Dr. Strangelove.
posted by zooropa at 8:00 AM on November 9 [7 favorites]
posted by zooropa at 8:00 AM on November 9 [7 favorites]
I appreciate that the video illustrated how much the speed of technological change and war broke peoples brains in the 20th century. Grappling with existential questions can easily lead people to nihilism, as if that even NEEDS TO BE SAID, hahahahahahahahaboohoohoohoohoo.
posted by rikschell at 8:16 AM on November 9
posted by rikschell at 8:16 AM on November 9
Oh huh. "Gnomon" and "Sundial". That explains so much about Infocom's Trinity - the central hub of most of the game is a weird little landscape dominated by a sundial at its center.
posted by egypturnash at 8:23 AM on November 9 [8 favorites]
posted by egypturnash at 8:23 AM on November 9 [8 favorites]
The ΑΩ device in Beneath the Planet of the Apes seems to have been inspired by this; it's stationary and, well, does the job.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:04 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:04 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]
The more I read about him, the more I think that Teller was living in constant fear and building and theorizing about bigger boom devices was his means of self soothing. Not a healthy was to go about it, mind.
posted by wierdo at 11:23 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]
posted by wierdo at 11:23 AM on November 9 [3 favorites]
Horrification aside, the production quality of the animated video is very good.
posted by bz at 12:12 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]
posted by bz at 12:12 PM on November 9 [3 favorites]
"The more I read about him, the more I think that Teller was living in constant fear and building and theorizing about bigger boom devices was his means of self soothing."
Pretty much wierdo (I mean that as your name, not an appellation). If you know much about Teller, the overarching fact of his life seems to be loos and fear and fear of experiencing that loss again. As a kid in Hungary is family got slammed pretty hard, and if that wasn't traumatic enough, he ended up with a pronounced fear of Communists in general and the Soviets in particular. THis, as near as I can tell, was the driving mindset of his life.
And of course you don't tell the world gelfin, Premier Kissoff likes his surprises.
posted by Relay at 6:42 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]
Pretty much wierdo (I mean that as your name, not an appellation). If you know much about Teller, the overarching fact of his life seems to be loos and fear and fear of experiencing that loss again. As a kid in Hungary is family got slammed pretty hard, and if that wasn't traumatic enough, he ended up with a pronounced fear of Communists in general and the Soviets in particular. THis, as near as I can tell, was the driving mindset of his life.
And of course you don't tell the world gelfin, Premier Kissoff likes his surprises.
posted by Relay at 6:42 PM on November 9 [2 favorites]
Teller has the reputation of being the 'Father of the H-bomb', but it was actually Ulam who had the idea that made it work — which he described, rather cryptically, as "an iteration of certain arrangements."
Early efforts were going nowhere. Von Neumann was running simulations trying to get one of them to explode when he wrote to Ulam about the effort in progress, saying "icicles are forming".
So I don’t have much faith that Teller's super bomb would have done much, either.
posted by jamjam at 8:32 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]
Early efforts were going nowhere. Von Neumann was running simulations trying to get one of them to explode when he wrote to Ulam about the effort in progress, saying "icicles are forming".
So I don’t have much faith that Teller's super bomb would have done much, either.
posted by jamjam at 8:32 PM on November 9 [1 favorite]
The thing is that Teller-Ulam devices are exceedingly scalable. Other than the manufacture of sufficient fissile material, which was well in hand by the early 60s, the only real limitation on how big of a boom you can make is deliverability.
There is thought to be an even better design (Ripple, if you're interested), but that shit is so deeply classified that it's hard to find much more than a mention of a possibility of greater efficiency in FOIAed documents. Apparently that's how we went from "only" being able to put three warheads on a missile to being able to wedge 12 in the same volume and mass budget.
posted by wierdo at 2:45 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]
There is thought to be an even better design (Ripple, if you're interested), but that shit is so deeply classified that it's hard to find much more than a mention of a possibility of greater efficiency in FOIAed documents. Apparently that's how we went from "only" being able to put three warheads on a missile to being able to wedge 12 in the same volume and mass budget.
posted by wierdo at 2:45 AM on November 10 [2 favorites]
The thing is that Teller-Ulam devices are exceedingly scalable.
Yes, exactly. Once you get the triggering primary right and the x-ray reflectors right, it becomes a fairly direct question of just adding more and more deuterium to the secondary. You could, theoretically, scale it up to any size/yield you'd like, but then you get into the "delivery by oxcart" problem (as Oppenheimer put it).
By the by, if anybody wants to keep up on this sort of thing, I can highly recommend Alex Wallerstein's writings at Restricted Data and Doomsday Machines.
posted by Relay at 1:50 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]
Yes, exactly. Once you get the triggering primary right and the x-ray reflectors right, it becomes a fairly direct question of just adding more and more deuterium to the secondary. You could, theoretically, scale it up to any size/yield you'd like, but then you get into the "delivery by oxcart" problem (as Oppenheimer put it).
By the by, if anybody wants to keep up on this sort of thing, I can highly recommend Alex Wallerstein's writings at Restricted Data and Doomsday Machines.
posted by Relay at 1:50 PM on November 10 [1 favorite]
The video touches on this a little bit, but this almost seems reasonable, compared to what we got. (which isn't to say that disarmament isn't better)
It's just as destructive as the real life US arsenal, cheaper by trillions of dollars, and most importantly, can't be used for a first-strike attack. The only downside is you have to admit up front to everyone that you're designing a weapon to end the world, instead of building one up piecemeal.
posted by dustletter at 2:36 PM on November 11
It's just as destructive as the real life US arsenal, cheaper by trillions of dollars, and most importantly, can't be used for a first-strike attack. The only downside is you have to admit up front to everyone that you're designing a weapon to end the world, instead of building one up piecemeal.
posted by dustletter at 2:36 PM on November 11
I'd guestimate the world's nuclear arsenal looks like 1 gigaton, dustletter, so ten times smaller than Sundial. As time progressed, the bombs have trended smaller, because the larger ones served little purpose.
All total there are like 3,880 nuclear warheads in service, with another 8000+ in various states of long-term storage, including just kept for parts. Assuming B83s do get retired, then the US's largest bombs are the 540 B61, believed to be either 0.3–340 kt or 0.3–400 kt, the 380 W88 reported at 475 kt, and the 340 W87 reported at 300 kt. Afaik these numbers count inactive too, but anyways we've less than half a gigaton from biger bombs.
The US's other bombs are W76 flavors (100 kt or 90 kt or 5–7 kt), W78 (170 kt), and W80 (5 or 150 kt), so they shouldn't boost this number too much. Assuming Russia has similar, then we've like one gigaton globally, but definitely not more than 2 gigatons globally.
Around nuclear disarmament and test bans..
The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity
NIF research lacks power generation potential. NIF exists to support nuclear weapons development and maintenance, like by training American nuclear scientists, and studying materials ala Fogbank.
As a fun aside..
There are approximations in nuclear winter papers for converting megatons detonated into acerage burnned, for computing the hot soot released to estimate the nuclear winter. At this point every year wildfires just in Canada release as much hot soot as a nulcear war of 2 gigatons, meaning nuclear winter papers cooked their models.
In this vein, we're cooking ourselves by like one Sundial bomb every 1.5 days..
Earth is heating at a rate equivalent to five atomic bombs per second
Energy of '25 billion atomic bombs' trapped on Earth in just 50 years
posted by jeffburdges at 5:03 PM on November 11 [1 favorite]
All total there are like 3,880 nuclear warheads in service, with another 8000+ in various states of long-term storage, including just kept for parts. Assuming B83s do get retired, then the US's largest bombs are the 540 B61, believed to be either 0.3–340 kt or 0.3–400 kt, the 380 W88 reported at 475 kt, and the 340 W87 reported at 300 kt. Afaik these numbers count inactive too, but anyways we've less than half a gigaton from biger bombs.
The US's other bombs are W76 flavors (100 kt or 90 kt or 5–7 kt), W78 (170 kt), and W80 (5 or 150 kt), so they shouldn't boost this number too much. Assuming Russia has similar, then we've like one gigaton globally, but definitely not more than 2 gigatons globally.
Around nuclear disarmament and test bans..
The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity
NIF research lacks power generation potential. NIF exists to support nuclear weapons development and maintenance, like by training American nuclear scientists, and studying materials ala Fogbank.
As a fun aside..
There are approximations in nuclear winter papers for converting megatons detonated into acerage burnned, for computing the hot soot released to estimate the nuclear winter. At this point every year wildfires just in Canada release as much hot soot as a nulcear war of 2 gigatons, meaning nuclear winter papers cooked their models.
In this vein, we're cooking ourselves by like one Sundial bomb every 1.5 days..
Earth is heating at a rate equivalent to five atomic bombs per second
Energy of '25 billion atomic bombs' trapped on Earth in just 50 years
posted by jeffburdges at 5:03 PM on November 11 [1 favorite]
Mankind's strange love of superweapons
Only time I don't quibble with "MANkind"
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:59 PM on November 12
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posted by gelfin at 5:33 AM on November 9 [23 favorites]