In the 1950s the US began the
top secret project Sundial, most of it is still classified. The goal:
a single nuclear bomb so powerful it would destroy all of human civilization. Conceived in
cold logic from the mind of a genius scientist. Sundial had the energy equivalent of
10 billion tons of TNT. A pyramid of explosives thirteen times taller than the
actual Great Pyramid. Three thousand more than all the bombs dropped during World
War II. If you dropped the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima every minute, it would
take you over 15 months to match Sundial. How was it even possible for us to
achieve this insane level of madness? Everything is Different Forever Let’s set the stage. If you
were 40 in 1945 that means you were you had been born in 1905 – back
then monarchs ruled over much of the world, only 3% of homes in the US had electricity, cities
were dominated by horses, the first experimental planes had just flown. Less than a hundred
thousand soldiers died in war each year. Imagine growing up in this world and
seeing change almost too fast to keep up with. By 1945, 24 million soldiers
and 50 million civilians had died in two world wars. And suddenly
there were TVs, microwaves, jet planes and … nuclear bombs. They kind of
broke the brains of the people alive back then. Overnight, nowhere from the edge of space to
the bottom of the ocean was safe. It's hard for us today to understand the level
of terror this instilled in people. The implications were wild. Without
nuclear weapons it seemed you would stand no chance in future conflicts.
Nations without that power would get trampled by those that did have it,
no matter how big their armies were. There was one brief moment where it could all
have been stopped: In 1946 the US proposed the Baruch Plan and promised to get rid of their
atom bombs, share nuclear technology with the world and set up an international authority
to make sure no-one ever builtds such weapons again. But the military advantage of
nuclear bombs was too great to let go. Just three years later the Soviet
Union detonated their first atom bomb. This caught everyone by complete
surprise. The Soviets were not decades behind American technology
but had just pulled even. Shock turned into fear. And fear makes people
do crazy things.The whole concept of what war was and how it would be won was overturned
in a hot second. In a world where your enemy could fly over your soldiers and vaporise your
cities, the only answer seemed to be a nuclear arsenal that could strike faster and harder.
The nuclear arms race began. In 1946 there were just 9 nuclear bombs in the world. In 1950
the number was 300. In 1960 it would be 20,000. In a way the nuclear arms race was pretty daft.
One superpower would develop a powerful new bomb and detonate it. And then the other side would
build something more powerful and blow it up, and this would continue endlessly. A dirty
and wasteful game of creating more and more horror that seemed totally reasonable at
the time. Superpowers spent trillions to have thousands of the most intelligent people
show off how hard they could destroy humanity. Fear had to be met with much greater horrors,
and one man knew how to make nightmares real. But What if We Destroy Humanity Even HARDER? Edward Teller was a brilliant Hungarian
theoretical physicist. He was among the first people to realize that the fission chain
reaction in uranium could make a bomb. And he helped to build it. But for Teller,
the bombs were not powerful enough. He was ready to pay any price for security.
And to be more secure, to be less afraid, he urged that larger bombs were the
answer. Even in the 1950s this was a pretty hot take and many scientists were
appalled by his ideas. He didn’t care one bit and incessantly lobbied scared politicians
to green light more devastating nuclear weapons. And lucky for him, his timing was just right.
Terrified by the rapid nuclear progress of the Soviet Union, he got a blank cheque from the
military to bring his most destructive fantasy to life. It took him only a few years to
make them a reality: The Hydrogen bomb. A hydrogen bomb is so powerful that it needs
a regular atom bomb just to trigger it. It is basically a nuke, the first stage, next
to a capsule of fusion fuel, the second stage, encased by dense materials like lead.
When the atom bomb is detonated, it releases stupendousungodly amounts of
X-rays that get channelled onto the capsule. The capsule’s surface explodes,
pushing inward and compressing the fusion fuel so violently that for
a brief moment it simulates a star. When this bomb was first tested
in 1952 it instantly erased a pacific island from the map. Two years
later he tested an even bigger nuke, 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
The world recoiled in horror. With weapons this powerful war stopped being about winning and
total human annihilation became very real. Teller celebrated. In just two years
he had enabled the creation of American warheads a hundred times more powerful.
He had stolen the nuclear fire from the gods and awoken cosmic horrors but he
insisted that it was still not enough. His dream was to have a bomb of almost unlimited
power. And once again, his timing was pretty great. When the Soviet Union detonated its own
hydrogen bomb, it sparked a new wave of fear. This is where we get the
top secret project Sundial. The bomb to make all
other bombs irrelevant. The Final Bomb Teller skipped right to the end. The end of the
nuclear arms race. He wanted to build a world destroyer. Something so breathtakingly
destructive, so incredibly scary, that it made no sense to continue playing.
Almost everything about it is still classified, but what we do know about it is terrifying. Work
on it actually began and tests were planned. Sundial wouldn’t be some warhead loaded up onto a
bomber and dropped on a target. No. It would be a backyard bomb. After all, if a bomb can
destroy the world, why bother moving it at all? No need to bring it close to your enemies,
you could as well just put it in your backyard. Maybe it would have actually been
put in the center of the country, maybe it would have been put on a
remote island or stored on a ship, we don’t know what the actual
plans were. But this underlines how insane this weapon was and that Teller knew
exactly what he was proposing. In his mind, the rationale was the ultimate deterrence – If you
attack us or our allies we will destroy the world. On a technical level his concept was not
even that complicated. It was probably some kind of nuclear matryoshka doll. The
truly breathtaking thing is the idea itself and that he actually attempted
to make it real. From what we know, Sundial would have weighed at least 2000 tons,
as massive as a 250 meter long cargo train. It would explode with the power of at least 10
billion tons of TNT. A number so big it doesn’t mean anything anymore. So let’s make this a
bit more graphic and explode it in Nevada. One wild thing about it is that humanity
never tested anything remotely like it, so this is the best speculation we
developed together with experts. For a brief moment a fireball of pure energy
appears, up to 50 kilometres in diameter, larger than the visible horizon. It radiates blistering
heat at the speed of light. Everything within 400 km is instantly set on fire – every tree, house,
person. The energy would reach much further, but the explosion is so big that the Earth’s horizon
curves away from it. The surrounding deserts turn into a field of glass. Then comes the blast wave.
The atmosphere above the explosion is violently shot into space, a magnitude 9 earthquake
shakes the United States while the sound of the blast reverberates around the world. North
American forests burn, adding their soot to the bomb’s radioactive fallout to create toxic death
clouds that shroud the world like a dark curtain. Sundial is like a nuclear war happening all at
once. But it's more like a giant volcano erupting or an asteroid striking, than a nuclear war.
Sundial would bring about an apocalyptic nuclear winter, where global temperatures suddenly drop by
10°C, most water sources would be contaminated and crops would fail everywhere. Most people in the
world would die. So uhm. Congratulations, you won? Good News! Wait no, Bad News! The good news is that Sundial was never
built. Most details are still top secret. But we know that scientists reacted with
horror and politicians who were secretly informed responded with disbelief.
Even the US Military thought this was a bit much. In the insane world of
nuclear arms, this madness was too much, building it considered a crime against
humanity. And it had other problems too. A single apocalypse weapon leaves you no wiggle
room. Would you press the button if enemy soldiers crossed a distant country’s borders or attacked
one of your distant bases? Would you end the world if your rival overthrew a friendly government?
Can you protect an ally with a bomb that would kill them too? The elephant in the room is that
while Sundial is clearly insane – humanity still kind of did build it. At the peak of the
cold war humanity had over 70,000 nukes. Even today we still have about 12,000 nuclear
weapons, enough to destroy human civilization. Instead of a single world burner, the
superpowers built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons of all types and sizes. Hidden
in submarines or waiting in bunkers and silos. And this sounds so much more reasonable,
doesn’t it? But this also makes them a much more credible threat. Because if people feel
they can risk setting off a smaller nuke, they might actually get launched. And we don’t know
what kind of chain reaction this might trigger. So in reality the difference between
Sundial and what we have today is not even that big. Humanity didn’t build a
doomsday bomb but a doomsday machine. Today the world may be on the verge of another
nuclear arms race. The US is on track to spend a trillion dollars on nuclear modernization
programs while China is expanding its arsenal and might have more than 1000 nuclear
weapons ready to be deployed by 2030. So far we've escaped the existential threat these
weapons pose – but if an alien visited earth, it might ask us if we are ok and need
a hug. We should ask ourselves as a species if we really want to be ready to
destroy ourselves at a moment's notice. Phew, that was a lot. Science is never
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