Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How Does a Nuclear Bomb Work?

Episode Date: December 4, 2018

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, do you ever wish he had a superpower? 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. Jet packs? Not quite yet. But, you know, we can do some pretty amazing stuff. Teleportation? We'll listen to the podcast episode about teleportation before you decide. But we can do some pretty amazing stuff, stuff that we've 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 miniature suns 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. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, our podcast about the universe. And everything in it, and everyone in it, and even about aliens, if they are in it. Yeah, even about Suns. Suns, S-U-N and S-O-N. We explain it all. Today on the program, we are actually talking about harnessing the power of the sun.

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. Today we're going to talk about nuclear weapons, and 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 free of ethics. It's always a complex mixture. So nuclear bombs is something that people obviously were very surprised to learn about in the mid-40s.

And then there was a huge concern with the Cold War up until the 80s and 90s. 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 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 out at all. has been a pretty consistent fear that we would destroy ourselves and kill everybody on Earth. They've always been on edge.

Basically since we got the power to do so. Yeah, I mean, we had, in the 80s, the USSR and the USA had enormous nuclear stockpiles, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, pointed at each other with hair triggers. And these days we have fewer, you know, in the number of thousands instead of tens of thousands,

but still, there's plenty of power there to destroy each other very easily. 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 really relax, yes. But, you know, your point is taken. The big powers have not yet blown each other up.

And we are worried these days about smaller powers, nuclear powers and terrorists and North Korea and all these folks who are 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 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. NSA, we are not telling everybody anything they wouldn't know in a physics class anyway. Yes, yes. If we are going to get arrested for treason, you've got to 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, by the way. So we went out there and asked people, do you know how a nuclear bomb works?

Yeah, so think for a moment. How much do you know about a nuclear weapon? How does it actually work? If you had to, could you build one in your garage? Here's what people had to say. Not sure. Honestly. I do not.

No idea at all? No. Wild guess. By smashing together particles. Cool. I know he's in Chinese, but I don't know how to say it in English. All right. It's in Chinese.

So there is two kinds of nuclear bomb, right? Yeah. Item bomb and what's that how? Hydrogen bomb? Yeah. So it's, one is vision.

Yeah. Why is fusion? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's interesting. I feel like not a lot of people know how a nuclear bomb works. Yeah, half the people had no idea. And the other 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. He was so excited to tell me what he knew. I was like, yeah, tell me in 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 had something to do with the atom. And they're right.

Essentially, the way a nuclear bomb works is that it releases energy stored inside the atom or lots of atoms really, really rapidly. That's what's called the atomic bomb. Yeah, the early versions are called atomic bomb. 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 you squeeze nuclei together. And we'll get into the nitty gritty of exactly how that works and why it's interesting. So they're 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 splits the atom open and the other one squeezes atoms together. And it's sort of surprising you might be thinking, hold on, if splitting the 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 us about that? Yeah, it's not that I've ever built a nuclear bomb myself. No, certainly not. You mean, it's not Dr. Manhattan. I'm not Dr. Manhattan, but I did grow up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the home of the Manhattan Project, where in the 40s, all these scientists got together to crack this mystery. And, you know, the history of this is fascinating. It was in the late 30s that people 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 burn 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 weapon. And so, of course, most people know the story. The U.S. government gathered people together in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. They chose Los Alamos 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 die in an accident. You know what?

that's probably an aspect to it also of being remote out in the middle of the desert. But as a high schooler, you know, it wasn't much consolation to know that you were living in a place 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 Alamos. And in fact, your parents worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, right? They worked on nuclear engineering and physics. That's right. Both of my parents worked for Los Alamos Labs, where the bombs were developed.

What they work on, I can't tell you, not because I'm being seen. secretive about it, but because I don't know. Both of them had queue 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 had to go through elaborate procedures to make sure they were trustworthy. We're not going to be spies for some enemy nation or something like that or blackmailable. So like at the dinner table, what would you guys talk about? Like, how it's work?

I can't tell you. Don't ask me. Yeah, 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 about the history of Los Alamos. And in Los Alamos, 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, at having developed something which won the war. war, right? People in this town, scientists, and where your parents work, they won the war with their brains. And so this sort of like pride was really deeply woven into the curriculum and life in Los Alamos. 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? Wow. 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 putting them in the hands of

politicians who could use them to kill women and children? Did you ever talk to your dad about that? Like, if he ever felt any feelings like that or had any thoughts about that? You know, what's interesting is I didn't ask him about it until I was in my 20s, you know, like a decade after we lived in Los Alamos, and I asked him about it. He said, you're the first person to ask me that question. Wow. That was sort of shocking also. People in Los Alamos don't discuss it very much. His friends didn't ask him.

His family, his old family didn't ask him. I was a physics student. I knew all about this and never asked him until it finally occurred to me. Wow. And yeah, so I asked him. And he, you know, he's thought about it. He's balanced these things. And he thought that the nation needed defending.

And there are other people out there developing nuclear weapons. And 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 the 80s and 90s. And so the Cold War was a very recent memory. And it was not ridiculous to think that Russia could launch nuclear weapons against us. So I think he felt some sort of pride that he was helping the national cause. Wow.

So, like, what was your high school mascot in your school? The atom, Adamie, Tommy the Adam? The fallout, right? Robbie the radioactive isotope. No, no, it was nothing so exciting. We lived in the top of a hill. It's almost the top of a mountain. So our high school mascot is the hilltoppers.

Yeah. Not terribly exciting. But my reaction to this moral quandary was totally different. I didn't want to have anything to do with it. And so when I had to choose a field of physics to study, I chose something very far away from any practical applications, which is, you know, Higgs boson and dark matter and particle physics. And so it was 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 devoid all responsibility. Yeah, you almost could say I'm a cartoonist, right? Have any of your cartoons ever killed any babies? Not that I know of. Maybe you should look into that, Jorge. Geez, I should have a more definitive answer to that question.

I feel like this is a great recruiting audio for physicists, you know? Looking to avoid responsibility. Don't want anything to do with the real world. Go into particle physics. Don't like killing babies. Go into particle physics. We have killed zero babies to date. So you're tied to sort of the history of nuclear energy in this country.

Yeah, absolutely. And my parents were supported by the Department of Energy. And now, actually, the Department of Energy supports my research. So I've basically been supported by the Department of Energy directly or indirectly since I was 10. So I'm pretty closely closely tied into it. I can't say I'm completely morally insulated from it.

I ate food which was paid for by the programs which funded nuclear weapons development, et cetera, et cetera. 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, I'm not shame, but it's definitely more complicated. Definitely not happy when I imagine

all those people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki going about their day and then being suddenly destroyed by nuclear bombs. What's definitely complicated how these bombs work. But before we get into it, let's take a quick break. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Ultra Light, Ultra Powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel Core Ultra processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your

business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snoozing, on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carp, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor

is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? Hot. To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. The explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, you said there's two kinds, actually.

There is fusion and there is fission bombs. So it'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 going to want to start taking notes. Okay. So how do you choose? Which one?

It's fascinating because a fusion bomb actually requires 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, although 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 a nucleus and fission is breaking it apart. Exactly.

Fizzing it or fizziling it or physicisting it or whatever the verb is. Fizzing. Fizzing. Okay, thank you. But a nuclear bomb works essentially the same way as another bomb in that its goal is release a lot of energy. Right. So you have to find some stored energy and release it. And you can do that in dynamite, whether it's stored chemical energy or something in oil,

where this is 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 slowly burn the gasoline in your car or you can put it in a vodka 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 shockwave, right? And that's what's destructive, is creating all this

energy release at once creates this shockwave of heat and air, and that's what blasts things apart. I see. So like the batteries in my phone have a lot of energy stored into it, but there's no reaction that will cause it to be released all quickly at the same time. Exactly. Unless you have the

Galaxy Node 7, which if you have it, please take it back in. Right, but as far as I'm aware, there's no nuclear bomb app, which will set your phone on fire or anything. So where does that energy 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's the basic idea. You might wonder, why is energy released, right? Well, so uranium breaks into two other things, krypton and barium. And 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 krypton and barium, there's extra energy left over.

But 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. But imagine you had a stick of wood that was in two pieces and it was held together by a spring.

Oh, okay. Then there's stored energy in that configuration and when you break it, that's released. The spring will sprung out. Yeah, it will sprung out and it'll 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 so that's what happens when you break a uranium atom.

There's energy stored in the arrangement, right? And then energy is released. Meaning, and that's what it does. That energy that's stored then pushes the two pieces apart really fast. Yeah. And it actually sends out neutrons. Oh. You get two other smaller atoms and a bunch of neutrons, which fly out.

Okay. And the neutrons were actually part of the original nucleus. Yeah, exactly. part of the uranium nucleus. So you've 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.

Okay. And uranium is great for that. There are other things that can do it also, plutonium, emirisium, other ones, but uranium is the one which works best. Okay. Why is it good for... Why is uranium good?

What's special about uranium? Well, it just so happens that there's an isotope of uranium, uranium 235, which is really unstable. And so it's easier to get it to, I'm looking for that verb again, fizz, fizzile, visionate. Split. Fissionate.

Split, thank you. It's easier to get uranium 235 to split than uranium 238 or uranium 236 or whatever. Each is a different configuration. It's right on the cusp of breaking apart itself, so it's easy to make it split up. Exactly. It's less stable. Exactly. 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 at a uranium mine is not uranium 25 is not the kind we want for nuclear weapons that kind is pretty rare it's uh you know one in a i don't know the number but one in a zillion atoms of uranium that you find in the ground is the kind you need 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 getting the fuel yeah that's why for example iran was

working on centrifuges because they're trying to separate out the different isotopes of uranium to get the one that's good for the bomb. I believe the number is 0.72%, Daniel. Wow, it's like you're Siri or Wikipedia or something. Okay, so yeah, 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. Okay. So for that to happen, you 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-235, and you put it on to 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 235

atoms, which then fizzile, physate, split, yes, split, thank you, split. 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 causes a huge amount

of atoms to split all at the same time, and that's your explosion right there. In order for that to happen, he needs to have enough fuel, and it needs be dense enough so the neutrons bump into the other atoms. So that's called the critical mass when you have enough fuel in 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 in a crowd. You need enough people jammed together to really cause a big panic. Yeah, exactly. For your analogy, you need something to trigger the other thing. It's like that scene in Stand By Me you know, where they're vomiting. One guy vomits. The smell causes

two other people to vomit, which costs four other people to vomit and pretty soon, everybody's vomiting. Oh, yeah, yeah, that movie. Yeah, but if people were not close together, then this reaction wouldn't catch fire, right? Like it wouldn't catch on. So you need a lot of people together, a 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?

Do you, 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 leads to the explosion. Wow. And so the way the nuclear bomb actually works is you basically have two subcritical masses, like a chunk of uranium here and a chunk uranium there. I mean, you just slam them together, and then it goes off.

And that's it. So for those of you out there looking to build a nuclear weapon, all you need to do is get enough uranium 235 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. And that worked. Really? So just bringing these two things together will suddenly cause the reaction to start.

Yeah, exactly. 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 there decaying all the time, but they don't start the chain reaction because it's not dense enough. It just doesn't catch fire. Yeah. You need to essentially to have these two. two pieces and have them be dense enough to squeeze them a little bit. And so what they, they actually, they don't call it a ball in a cup.

They call it a gun assembly because they basically shoot one piece of uranium into another. And that creates this density that you need to have the chain reaction. So that's a fission bomb. 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.

And that sticking atoms together can also release energy the same way splitting an atom can, right? That's really counterintuitive. 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. What is helium?

It's basically just two hydrogen atoms stuck together, right? And so you got those protons, you got those neutrons, all mixed together. that 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 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 certain 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 kind of marital fusion doesn't usually cause weapons of mass destruction, though. Yeah, but it's kind of the same idea. It's like separately, you make a certain amount of money, but together, because 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 break apart than hydrogen does. And so when you build helium out of hydrogen, energy is released. And then you could take that energy and put it back in to break the helium apart and get your hydrogen back. Oh, I see. 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 if you break it, it releases energy. This time it costs 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 those two magnets apart, right? So that means that when the two magnets

stick together, energy is released. Okay. And that's exactly what happens. So why is it that some atoms 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 energies. 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 them together, energy is released. Anything heavier than iron, if you split it apart, energy is released. Okay.

So lighter than iron, you can fuse, heavier than iron, you can split. So iron kind of sits in the middle. Iron, iron. Ironically, you can't use iron. And that's why, for example, iron is the heaviest thing that's made in the sun, because the sun is just a big fusion bomb. and it's making heavier and heavier elements but it stops at iron because after iron it costs you energy to make anything bigger

but if you have something bigger and you break it then that gives you the energy back and that's where the bomb comes from exactly exactly so a hydrogen bomb is like you got to stick these two things together right but you know hydrogen is positively charged so how do you get two hydrogen atoms to stick together it's not easy you got to squeeze them really really hard

that's why it costs energy No, that's what it gives you everything. It's complicated because 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 charges that take over. So it's sort of like,

you've ever been to putt 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 got to squeeze the hydrogen atoms together.

If you get them close enough, they will stick and they will release energy. That's like the golf ball falling in the hole. If you don't get them close enough, they're just going to push each other apart. So the first atomic bombs that we made were hydrogen bombs, right? No, the first ones were fission bombs or uranium. Oh, I see. And then later we made hydrogen bombs. Yeah, and the only way we could make hydrogen bombs was by setting off an atomic bomb.

Yeah, so you need to surround a bunch of hydrogen with nuclear weapons, blow those up, right? So you've 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 a hydrogen bomb is 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 are more explosive than, say, dynamite just because there's more energy inside of the atom than in the reaction between atoms. That's right. All the other kinds of bombs, dynamite and gas bombs, whatever, those are just releasing the energy in chemical bonds, which is not a lot compared to the energy stored inside the atom.

And that's because a 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 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 fission 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. You have to mine 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 235. After that, it's not too complicated. Well, let's get into it. But first, let's take a quick break.

Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel core ultra-processors. blazing speed and AI power performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around.

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and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up.

Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. Kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is, back in season two we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

What prevents just anyone from building a bomb in their backyard? Not a whole lot if you can get your hands on the fuel. You know, if you have enough uranium 235 or plutonium or some other material which is good at splitting, then you can build a nuclear bomb. It's not too complicated. There's schematics out there if you're really into engineering. really? But if you want to, yeah, that part is not secret. It used to be. I mean, in the 50s, 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 you arrested too. Let's check with legal before we distribute this podcast anyway, because I'm not so into spending the rest of my life in jail. But it's really just the limitation is the fuel, which is why countries like Iran and North Korea and those folks are building central. 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 Israelis sabotaged the Iranian centrifuges. How did they do it?

They wrote a computer virus which specifically targeted the people working at that facility to get them like download it and click it and get it to control the centrifuges. It's pretty slick. And it got the centrifuges to spin wrong. Wow. So the difficulty in building a bomb is in getting the nuclear materials. Because, I mean, it's kind of a big effort, not just to mine it, find out where it is, mine it, and then you have to process it, right? And so to do that, you need a lot of infrastructure and a lot of factory and money.

And so at some point, people are going to notice 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 is kept secret a lot, right? Like the technology actually enrich uranium and what to do it and how to handle it. that one is not like you can't just find that on the internet that's 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 the material it's pretty terrifying it's hard to find it and process it that's the hopefully the only thing that's keeping us from going up in a big ball of fire that's right Right, exactly. And so, you know, you had to think about the scientists who were working on this kind of stuff and, you know, how do they feel about having developed this technology? You know, Jay Robert Oppenheimer, the guy who led the Manhattan Project, he's famous for having felt both ways about this. When he saw the first nuclear bomb go off in New Mexico, you know, he said, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. That's pretty serious stuff, right?

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 and what keeps countries from making these bombs and what's 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 that uranium for good. Like if it reaches about, I think it's something like, I'm going to say, 5 to 7% of the uranium 235 in it, then that's the stuff you can use for actually good purposes. You mean nuclear power, like generating electricity? Generating electricity or medical equipment. But if you leave the machine on longer, if you keep enriching it, then you get to like 90%

and that's the stuff you can use for weapons. So it's a really tricky balance of letting people use and make uranium for good stuff, but then you have to 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 clothes? Good for society dry or evil destructive dry? Yeah, yeah. I always choose maximum dry. You always go for destructive.

Yeah, but I like your anecdote because it tells the story, you know, that not only is nuclear power potentially the source of super weapons that it 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 battery, as you say, is releasing energy rapidly. but a battery, as you say, is releasing energy slowly. So you can also create a chain reaction and control it 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 its chain reaction has started, and that's not what you want. You don't want to be blowing up nuclear bombs inside your facility. Yeah. And fusion also has tremendous. possibilities for the future because fusion is much more powerful, a huge amount of energy potentially released. The source of fuel is not this weird metal you have to dig up in 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 lasts for 10,000 years, et cetera. What are you going to 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. So the same idea, like this chain reaction,

it doesn't have to be this kind of always explosive, you know, destructive thing. I mean, the sun is just like it's just there 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 science work ever was in college. I went and did a 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 radioactive fall out or waste. It just produces helium. The problem is that it's hard to do. They're working on it. We could do a whole other podcast about how to build a little science. on Earth and keep it from turning into a bomb and burning everybody.

Well, that'd be cool. So if they make it work, it'll not just give energy for everybody, but everybody will get a helium balloon. That's right. Well, I'll talk kind of like this for a while. Yeah, exactly. There'll be lots of side benefits. No, seriously, if fusion becomes feasible and accessible,

then we're talking about basically free energy because the cost will just drop very, very quickly. And that would change society, right? Yeah. 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 homes you like. You can make concrete.

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. And so there are both positive and negative potential energies for all the scientific research. Well, I hope that blew your mind. It fuse some ideas in your head together. It 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 listen to this podcast, be very careful about what you Google. The NSA is always listening. They're 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 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 Danielandhorpe.com. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity, with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance.

It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X-1 Carp, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.