Eric Weinstein

And for that, you need a detonator that is already the atomic weapon of madness from 1945.

And now you're going to just use that as the detonator.

So what you do is you create sort of like a lipstick-like tube.

And you put the detonator fission weapon in the top part of the tube.

And what Stanislav Ulam and Edward Telper figured out was that you could bounce the consequences of that weapon on some geometric pattern and have the reflected waves come down to a rod and compress hydrogen into helium in the second stage.

And the key problem there, as I understand it, is that because you're using an atomic bomb as a detonator, the top part's going to blow apart the tertiary stage.

and therefore it won't work.

But there's one thing that can get there fast enough so that you don't blow up the design before it's ready, and that's light.

And so my understanding is that what you do is that you take the light that comes off of the initial explosion and you focus it with geometry to concentrate it in the tube to create the tertiary stage.

So chemical is the primary, subcritical to critical is the secondary, reflected light to compressing hydrogen to helium is the tertiary.

And that thing was Ivy Mike in November of 52.

And that is the BCAD, my friends, of science.

You know, there's like before Christ and after Christ, and they're just very different.

Before November of 1952, with the test known as IV Mike, the first hydrogen bomb, and the publication in April of 1953, less than six months later, with the double helix giving the structure of DNA, we didn't have the power of the twin nuclei, the nucleus of the atom and the nucleus of the cell.

And then after that, suddenly, we were like gods.

And...

that is the bc ad of human history that's much more important than the birth of christ before that time we didn't have the power of gods and after that time we did and what is the difference between the nuclear weapon as it originally was the detonator and the the second generation the hydrogen bomb etc well there was no point to duck and cover i mean you weren't going to survive this thing it was just at a different scale i mean you're talking about orders of magnitude

bigger bombs than what already caused the emperor to surrender in Japan.

We're just talking inconceivable levels of destruction.

My guess is that one or two devices means that Los Angeles is no more.