NEW VIDEO: What if We Nuke a City?

This was one of my favorite videos because it's now more important than ever for people all around the world to have a deeper understanding of nuclear weapons, their catastrophic and cruel effects, and the current risks they pose. In the U.S., the anti-proliferation discussion has fallen by the wayside since the "end" of the Cold War. Yet, we're still very close to "midnight" , that is, a nuclear weapons exchange between nations and or detonation of a nuclear device in a populated area by rogue factions. This video provided an informative, entertaining, widely-accessible, and non-aversive presentation of the grim effects and aftereffects that the detonation of a nuclear weapon in a city would have on populations and infrastructure. You guys managed to make this horrifying subject enjoyable and entertaining, which is seriously challenging to achieve without scaring most viewers away. Keep up the great work! Investigating the physics and effects of hypothetical explosions is a huge amount of fun, but sometimes a video like this is needed to properly inform people about the real-world risks and impacts! :)

[γδ(αμ)]

too right.

Kate Adams

Thank you! I learned something new today. I would love* an updated version of Threads that took modern tech into account with detail like this. *....well maybe not 'love' because it would be utterly horrifying, but I'd still be intrigued once I'd stopped throwing up.

Thomas Boys

Hello! Eu sou do Brasil, sempre vejo seus vídeos. Esse vídeo me despertou um sentimento contínuo de dever, dever como cidadão de fazer minha parte para que a situação do vídeo nunca mais aconteça! Obrigada pelo seu trabalho conscientizador!

lara croft braçuda

The effects of EMPs tend to be much more highly dramatized than they are correct, especially in fiction. Which is sad, because these over dramatizations miss the *actual* true terror of the problem by popularizing the wrong things. EMPs cause damage by inducing current in circuits where current should not be. In particular, buy creating currents in long, most preferably straight, sections of wire. Antennas, hi-tension wires, and large coils found in transformers are particularly susceptible to these effects. These problems can be mitigated with shielding devices known as Faraday cages, which are basically a metal box that encloses the device. Most of our electronic gadgets today are much more highly shielded than ever before, due to FCC requirements. In particular, modern cellular/smartphones, PC’s, and medical components have enough shielding that for them to be damaged by an EMP, you’d be exposed to lethal doses of other radiation, pretty much making the point moot. Most of our electronics contain rather effective Faraday cages to keep them from emitting electromagnetic interference with all the other devices that we have in our environment. Experiments that have been done on modern equipment have shown that the most common response to a non-fatal (for humans) EMP pulse is that the devices either are not effected, and the second most common is that they just reboot. It is true that there are devices that will be damaged, but for the most part, that’s actually pretty rare. Most dramatizations also neglect the fact that a lot of people work in environments that are (un)fortunately effective Faraday cages as well. You can notice that when you pull into a parking garage and lose radio signal, or are in a metal building and lose your phone signal. No, the real problem caused by an EMP is that the induced currents over long wires will feed into and destroy other components, especially power generators and turbines, as well as transformers. Damage enough of these, and it can take years, even decades to restock the supply, as they are just not commonly stocked, and most of them are custom manufactured. In addition, anything not plugged into a UPS or surge protector is likely to be hit with a massive power spike, either damaging it, or damaging other devices in the immediate area. A large metropolis like New York or Los Angeles would be in immediate, desperate trouble due to this all by itself. Even worse, the EMP would likely create thousands of fires everywhere from arcing in the equipment. And now those fires have to be fought with traffic jams everywhere due to the power being out…

Albert Perrien II

As I mentioned in my earlier comment, the lack of information regarding the EMP effect of a nuclear detonation really undermines this video. Indulge me a moment. Take a look around your room. Maybe you can see a TV. Your games console underneath it. Your laptop or computer on your desk. Your mobile phone. Within the blink of an eye, everyone of these devices is fried. You cannot call for help. You can't text or message anyone. News from the TV or radio is gone. Even if you had special hardened devices, the connecting cables and telecom masts are destroyed. It gets worse. If you have a hearing aid, one of your primary senses is gone. If you had a pacemaker, you're now at a much higher risk of a heart attack. This is why the missed info in the video puzzles me. Even a low yield weapon (which tend to create much more dangerous forms of fallout) can wreck untold havoc, even if the fire and shockwave are more contained- all from the EMP. The film Threads draws its name from the myriad social connections we depend on for our survival. In these much more intimately connected times, where surviving without a phone or internet access is deemed an oddity, we have many more threads to be severed by a nuclear attack.

Thomas Boys

I don't know... Something about this video gave me the feeling that it wasn't as well researched as usual. I had a look online and the numbers I found were different. Then I realised nukes vary in size and specs quite a lot, which wasn't indicated in the video. Then there was the urgent demand for action at the end. While I agree with the spirit, I can't share this with my friends or they'll take away the wrong message and I'll have to clarify the inevitable misunderstandings. The YouTube comments about Hiroshima and Nagasaki saddened me. People watching this will believe that we've already used nukes against one another and moved on. What you depicted has never happened in human history and that's important to point out.

Reno

What was the yield of your hypothetical nuke?

Edward DeCook

It turns out that MAD isn't the right acronym for nuclear war. The better one is SAD, for Self Assured Destruction. Even if a country uses (an impossible) perfect first strike, where all of and only the enemies nukes are destroyed, if more than about 400 nukes go off it stops mattering where they are when they explode, the damage to the biosphere is substantial enough that the whole species dies. That's one of the big reasons the big players agreed to stop making more nukes; they realized they already had 100x more than they need to end the species by themself.

Matt Dunlap

By "lunies", I'm assuming you mean people completely devoid of empathy with psychopathic traits. Such people are not capable of thinking about the consequences of their actions - in other words, they won't care about what happens after their weapon is detonated, so whether you have 5 million nukes or none is irrelevant.

Thomas Boys

I have a few recommendations if, like me, you have a morbid interest in this stuff: Films: * The Day After * Threads (the most grim program I have ever watched) * When The Wind Blows Books: * Nuclear Winter by Owen Greene * A Path Where No Man Thought by Carl Sagan * The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (try to find an old copy as these have a paper computing disk in the back to calculate yields and damage) One other thing - the video left out the effects of the initial electromagnetic pulse. Something of a glaring omission given Kurzgesagt's normally detailed explanations.

Thomas Boys

Haven't seen the video yet, but I imagine it's no different than setting off an EMP attack at a technologically integrated city.

Kevin

Wow. That was absolutely terrifying, and really brings home what would truly happen if we were stupid enough to use nukes. Amazing job, as always.

dirtknight

Go Kurzgesagt!! BBC trending has been tracking a coordinated movement in Russian state controlled media that is attempting to portray nuclear conflict as “not that bad and exaggerated by the west to deny Russia a means to defend itself” meanwhile the giant man-baby trump removes the controls, backs out of the agreements and ratchets the rhetoric. This video reminds us the reality. That there will be no winners. That it will be horrific and the innocent will suffer the most, along with the devastation of the environment and natural world. Once again your contribution is timely, thoughtful and compelling. You’ve had an awesome 2019 - keep it up.

Team Saunders

Pretty unsettling video, given today’s developments

This is like assuming that giving law enforcement guns will stop people from using guns to commit murder, but even if that evidence didn't exist, you can safely assume that anyone crazy enough to set off a nuke has a safe vantage point to do it from, or is happy to suicide bomb. Really, the thing stopping nukes from being made and used by crazy people is surveillance including reasonably advanced radiation detectors, and a general nervousness that even countries who may protect bad actors don't really want nukes to be allowed to just anyone. That said, we have pretty solid proof that the leaders of the world's larges countries are all engaged in criminal enterprises of some sort, so why are we not concerned about THEM having nukes, and even if they are very stable individuals, do we not worry about our poorly maintained, often questionably secured aging nuclear infrastructure, or the few near misses we have had with our own nuclear armament since we began building it 3/4 of a century ago?

Charles Bosse

Off to check out the video, wanted to note that you wrote "off" instead of "of" I think. Not trying to be pedantic, just trying to help catch it early.

Charles Bosse

This episodes great! I really like it. I like that you guys went further beyond just the blast. Seeing how help can't just arrive, and how the effect of a nuke is similar to all those natural disasters put together, shows just how powerful Human Kind is. We're a force to be reckoned with. Hopefully we can use that force in more productive ways, rather than just throwing rocks at each other.

Jacob

Lunies can't shoot nukes if there's no nukes to begin with.

Jacob

Very interesting, nicely done!

Daniel Henderson

Yes, we know what nukes are and what they do. And while I have no objection to the channel telling others what I already know, I do object to factually dubious one sided propaganda made on comission. The flipside to the horror is that it does only take a small group of rich lunies to set off a nuke, and getting rid of your nukes won't stop that. But having nukes will probably stop them if they care at all about counterstrike, and MAD is pretty effective against all the large groups of lunies who already have nukes. Which is another question this video ignored. How many nations, particularly Russia and America, are willing to give up their nukes? Because if just one bad actor is left when everyone else gives up their nukes, then that just makes the consiquences in this video more likely.

ANTIcarrot

Definitely not a question I ever dared to ask xD And the answer is not pretty x_x Nicely done

L4m3ness

Hello I love yur channel so much Keep up the gud work.and great animations BTW.