The Power of Nuclear Weapons with Dr. Alex Wellerstein

I’m here today with Dr. Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear weapons and a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He has a Ph.D .in the History of Science from Harvard and was previously an Associate Historian with the American Institute of Physics. Alex is an expert in nuclear weapons, especially how secrecy is used to control nuclear technology. 

Thank you for being here, Alex.

I’m happy to be here. 

I think even if you don’t understand the technology completely, we all know that nuclear bombs are not like other bombs. And in your writing, you’ve called the nuclear bomb a “special bomb.” What do you mean by that and what role does science play in making it “special?” 

The question of [whether] nuclear weapons [are] totally different from everything else or ... just a regular bomb made bigger again—people have been arguing about this since before the atomic bomb was even made when people were still working on it. But at its core, nuclear weapons just have a potential that conventional weapons don’t have. And that ultimately comes down to physics.

Your average conventional chemical weapon like TNT— As a TNT molecule breaks down it releases some energy. It releases about one electron volt or so of energy. You don’t have to know what that is to know that when I tell you that a uranium atom releases 200 million electron volts, you can see that’s a big step up. The consequence of all this is that for a much smaller weapon, a much smaller amount of reacting material, you can get extreme explosive results. 

If you reacted one kilogram of uranium-235 completely, you would get about 20,000 tons of TNT-equivalent worth of explosives. That’s about the size of the Hiroshima bomb. One kg of uranium—you could hold that in your hand! That’s nothing, and to have that destroy entire cities, that changes things. And that’s not even as big as they get. 

So when people say, and when I say, there’s something different, there’s something special, there’s something unusual, that’s what they mean. There’s potential in here that’s thousands of times to millions of times more destructive than anything else out there. 

Very intimidating. So, you’ve created this incredibly interesting interactive nuclear effects simulator called NUKEMAP...

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