Tsar Bomba documentary - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 05:30:17 pm
content: I'm almost certain that most if not all forum members know about the Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded.There are a few video snippets here and there, but this 40 minute documentary is the best I've seen.There is a lot of Soviet-era electronics instrumentation porn. That in itself makes the documentary worth watching.https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2386&v=nbC7BxXtOlo&feature=emb_logo

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 05:53:10 pm
content: This makes me feel a little ill to watch..They made a technical mistake and the yield turned out to be much higher than they had expected.High enough to eject air into space at higher than the escape velocity of Earth's gravity, Ive read elsewhere.I am seeing some footage was recently declassified by Russia. Is this it, do you know?We made a similar mistake at one of our test detomations in the South Pacific. The calculations were off and the bomb yield turned out to be much stronger than expected.Two little warnings to humanity from Nature.We should heed them!

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 06:53:31 pm
content: Quote from: cdev on August 26, 2020, 05:53:10 pmActually, the so-called "Tsar Bomba" was designed for a yield of 100 MT, but "dialled back" for the test to 50 MT.The US test you refer to is Castle Bravo, which yielded 2.5 times the predicted due to unforeseen interactions in the dry fuel. It was unchartered territory back then. The fallout was so bad that it made thousands of square miles uninhabitable.Horrid stuff.

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 07:06:49 pm
content: That and the poor sailors of the Lucky Dragon fishing boat.Or shall we call it the Unlucky Dragon?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daigo_Fukury%C5%AB_Maru

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2020, 09:48:42 pm
content: If youre exposed to a lot of gamma radiation, the effect is to make your cells just fall apart, people's skin liquefies and sloughs off, their hair all falls out.it must be really horrible. The stories of atom bomb survivors are truly heartbreaking. At least one person actually survived both atomic explosions.A number of antioxidants significantly improve the chances of lab animals surviving of a given dose of gamma radiation. But the direct physical effects of the blast probably kill far more people.We now realize that allmost nobody in major cities would survive because of the firestorm.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2020, 11:47:14 am
content: Hey Schmitt Trigger. You are obviously having a bad case of hysteresis by associating pornography with electronic instrumentation. The Soviet Union, for all its woes was not into pornography, unlike the USA. In some eastern bloc countries like Yugoslavia, you could buy Playboy magazine legally if you could afford it, but that was pretty much it behind the iron curtain.Porno has nothing to do with nuclear bombs which are deadly serious and are still one of the biggest threats to humanity. There are only nine rogue states with nuclear weapons:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons. Two of these countries, the USA and the Soviet Union have come damned close to using them on a few occasions. Only one has used the atomic bomb twice on innocent civilians.Go watch the movie FailSafe (1964), and you won't be thinking about porno for a while.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2020, 01:03:19 pm
content: I have visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1970's I did extensive research and wrote about the atomic bomb attacks. At the Nagasaki Peace Park, most major countries (Australia included) provided substantial and meaningful memorials to peace. The USA memorial is a noted exception. The Nagasaki Peace Statue, would have to be the one of the most outstanding pieces of "sculpture" ever created.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki_Peace_ParkWe should not be relishing in such lethal bombs or admiring the WOW factor in these bombs, but should instead be shaming those countries that harbour these weapons of mass destruction. COVID-19 sucks for sure, but it would pale into insignificance compared to a nuclear winter.

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2020, 08:41:39 pm
content: VK3DRB, please chill out. By "porn" I did not mean pornography in the sense of depraved human sexuality.Rather, it was a tongue in cheek reference to the term when there are images galore of a topic in which one is very keenly interested.Something that I borrowed from the term "ruin porn".Similar to:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins_photographyRead the very first paragraph.During the Cuba Missile crisis, I lived within the radius of the missile's range. My mother and my aunts would cry all day long. Made a lasting impression on a 6 year old child.I have also visited Hiroshima, precisely because I wanted to experience it personally.I have also visited the Trinity site in New Mexico.Perhaps the term that I used to describe my interest in Soviet era technology was incorrectly employed.Or perhaps you have a bias, and read malicious intent on a simple sentence.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 03, 2020, 02:51:28 pm
content: It was tongue-in-cheek about you not thinking about porno for a while.I did see the entire documentary and other supporting material. You might have lived within the radius of this threat as a kid, but today we ALL live within striking distance of submarines with nuclear missiles in them. We also lived in fear. In the 1970's it was the Cold War, and the French nuclear testing in the Pacific which culminated in the French government launching a terrorist attack in New Zealand in 1985. If India and Pakistan go to an all out war using their nukes, we will all enter a nuclear winter. Maybe some will survive. But if the two of the biggest hoarders of these WMD's - the US and Russia - go to war, we might as all well say goodnight Irene. Forget about a vaccine.Today we have FAR better communications between adversaries, so this alone could reduce the risk of a deliberate attack. And whilst hoarding nukes has definitely caused detente, it is more likely a software bug, a hardware bug, a hacker, a miscalculation, or an inadvertent bad decision will trigger WWIII. It has almost happened a few times. Remember what caused the Chernobyl disaster.https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/One of my favourite Twilight Zone episodes is The Shelter (episode 68, first aired in the US on 29th September 1961) that dramatised what happens to civilisation when it is directly threatened by a nuclear attack. It serves as a warning, as does Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove and The Day After.

author: Tadas
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 04, 2020, 12:01:07 pm
content: Quote from: VK3DRB on September 03, 2020, 02:51:28 pmI'd add the docu-dramaThreadsto this list (can be watched @archive.org). One of the darkest/gloomiest creations I've ever seen.

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 04, 2020, 05:25:08 pm
content: Dr. Strangelove. An absolute favorite of mine."Gentlemen, please! No fighting, this is the War Room!"

author: chris_leyson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 04, 2020, 08:27:11 pm
content: Thanks schmitt trigger, interesting documentary, and yes, the early 1960s instrumentation was fascinating and all done with valves.Anyway going off topic, after a 10 year hiatus I've started reverse engineering a WWII MK45 proximity fuze again. I don't know why anyone would bother doing a teardown of a WWII proximity fuze but a grainy photograph of a sectioned view in a text book doesn't do the engineering any justice, so I think that is one of the reasons why I started in the first place. I know they helped kill Japanese and German infantrymen in their thousands and that is always at the back of my mind every time I sketch out another piece. Attached is a view of an incomplete oscillator triode assembly and you can see the mouse trap spring that kept the single wire tungsten filament in tension. It's much better to document this stuff in 3D, but why when John Hopkins University still have the original drawings archived somewhere.

author: Canis Dirus Leidy
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 30, 2020, 06:15:38 pm
content: Educational film at similar topic: "Control test of the long-range missile R-5M with a nuclear charge."

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 02:07:18 pm
content: Fascinating! СпасибоWish I could understand Russian.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2020, 01:08:20 pm
content: Quote from: Tadas on September 04, 2020, 12:01:07 pmThanks for the link. I watch the film. You are right - very gloomy. Similar to The Day After. All the countries that stockpile nukes pose a massive risk to us all. There should be a pact by the people in every country that ensures the leaders of any nation that uses nukes on populations are then immediately executed along with all of their immediate family members. There also needs to be a deadline for all countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons.

author: S. Petrukhin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2020, 05:36:45 pm
content: Quote from: schmitt trigger on October 03, 2020, 02:07:18 pmI grew up in the USSR. I've watched a lot of these movies. They are very boring, the speaker says primitive phrases, believe me, there is nothing interesting, except slogans and propaganda. This was the peculiarity of the communist system: very few explanations, very few interesting things, few words, a lot of pathos. To understand something, it was necessary to study a lot and dryly on the harsh theory. But now these films seem interesting - nostalgia.And believe me: the USSR never wanted to attack anyone, we did not even have hints in the propaganda about the beginning of the war or any impact on other countries. We went through a terrible war, and the most terrible thing in the USSR was a new war.The former countries of the socialist camp now call us occupiers, but in fact they lived at the expense of the USSR. The Soviet Union never drained the resources of their satellites, and he supplied them with resources and buying their useless products. Because of this, to a large extent, life in the USSR was not rich - our allies cost us dearly.

author: S. Petrukhin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2020, 05:44:35 pm
content: Quote from: schmitt trigger on October 03, 2020, 02:07:18 pmYou can also enable subtitles with translation on YouTube

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2020, 06:07:34 pm
content: Quote from: S. Petrukhin on October 04, 2020, 05:36:45 pmIt seem certainly to be an educational video for military personnel. It makes sense to have it use concise to the point language. You would not want the narrator waffling around in this type of videos. This is not a documentary for general public audience.

author: S. Petrukhin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2020, 06:21:26 pm
content: Quote from: Bud on October 04, 2020, 06:07:34 pmThese films are more for political leadership. But in the USSR there were many educational films for schoolchildren and students, they were all about the same. I even know how they were shot and how much they were artificial and ostentatious one of the films the newsreel studio shot about me.The movie for the military looks like this:Believe me, after watching this movie, you will never be able to control Soviet military equipment. You will need a long and deep study of the theory and many years of practice to know everything by heart. We didn't have a detailed and clear explanation of how Dave does it.