Ivana Hughes

But hydrogen bombs, actually, there's kind of no limit.

Like you could keep making them bigger and bigger and bigger.

Somehow we've stopped making the really big ones.

I think China has...

probably the most powerful, the most high energy hydrogen bombs currently in their arsenals.

I think they have five megaton bombs, hydrogen bombs in their arsenals.

That's more than 300 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.

But then again, if you have a...

A missile that can carry 10 warheads, it almost doesn't matter, you know, how much a single one is.

But just back to radiation.

So basically what you're doing is you're producing this chain reaction of splitting atoms or fusing them.

And in so doing, you produce some radioactive radiation.

radioactive elements that are going to basically be in the environment, both locally, they're going to get, you know, kind of blown up, you know, things get blown up, evaporated, going into the mushroom cloud.

You produce these radioactive isotopes, they're mixed with everything.

Some of that will...

kind of fall back onto the planet locally, some of it will be carried up into the atmosphere, high level stratosphere and so on, and actually become part of the

sort of a global deposition where it goes so high up in the atmosphere, it stays up there.

And then you could also end up having, depending on exactly how far up it goes, you could have it come down with weather events.

So it's raining nuclear isotopes.

It's raining radioactive nuclear isotopes.