Rising with the cloud are millions of cubic feet of radioactive ash. I mean, it was so big it just blew people’s minds. In seconds, the fireball erupts into a geyser the towers 25 miles into the stratosphere spreading into 100-mile wide mushroom cloud. bill broadĪnd it was 700 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb with a mushroom cloud that just went into the stratosphere. The ball of fire is three miles across as it shatters both land and sea. They put a device on an Island in the South Pacific. The pictures you are about to see have been released by the Department of Defense under presidential order. bill broadĪnd we popped our first one in 1952. Here on a Elugelab Island, the cab or housing for the first hydrogen bomb takes shape after months of preparation. bill broadĪnd they got enormously large compared to Hiroshima. History turns its most ominous page far out in mid-pacific, where in the Enewetak Atoll, the world’s most awesome weapon is readied for detonation. Well, after that, we went into the next chapter of the Cold War, where there was this global race for bigger and better and more terrible weapons. sabrina taverniseĪnother evidence of the enemy’s final inability to wage war. That’s what’s indelibly imprinted on our minds. archived recordingįour square miles of buildings leveled by the first of two small bombs that decided the fate of Japan. The big mushroom cloud over this Japanese city and one over Nagasaki too. The city of Hiroshima lies prostrate after the withering blast which wiped out 53,000 of its population. The one we all remember, was Hiroshima.ġ945 ended World War II. Well, they all grew out of the very first atomic weapons. So how did these smaller ones, in this new world you’re talking about, come to be? bill broad In comparison to all that and to everything we’ve known and thought about publicly for a long time, they are minuscule. They are tiny fractions of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and tiny, tiny little fractions of the super bombs and the city busters that everybody worried about during the Cold War. They’re fundamentally much, much, much, much smaller. How are the nuclear weapons of today different from the ones that we have in our mind? bill broad
OK, different universe, they grew up in parallel. It’s a whole different dark universe that grew up in parallel to this ginormous scary world of mushroom clouds. What we’re talking about now is extremely different. We’ve seen pictures of tests around the globe where these frightening huge things would scare and intimidate everybody into all these unthinkable scenarios. We’re not, although that tends to be the thing that we all conjure up in our minds, these big horrible things. Are we in a new, more dangerous moment in the world? So we wanted to ask you, Bill, what would an attack like this look like? I mean, when I think of nuclear weapons, I think of a mushroom cloud? Is that what we’re talking about? bill broad So this whole week, the Ukrainians are making a lot of military advances in that very area that Putin was talking about.Īnd so everyone, you know I’m in DC here, is talking about this and kind of on edge. And he kind of hinted that he would use his nuclear arsenal. And he said that if it was attacked, he would fight back. And he told us that Putin had effectively declared a chunk of Ukraine Russian territory. So Bill, two weeks ago, we did an episode with our colleague Anton. Today, I talk to my colleague, Bill Broad on what that weapon is, how it works, and what it would mean to deploy it. If Vladimir Putin ever follows through with his threat to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, he’s likely to use a very particular kind of nuclear weapon. sabrina taverniseįrom “The New York Times” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.” Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email with any questions. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. This transcript was created using speech recognition software. Putin has threatened to fire a particular kind of arm in Ukraine. Transcript What Are Tactical Nuclear Weapons, and What if Russia Uses Them? President Vladimir V.
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