Nuclear-weapons physicist Greg Spriggs rates "Oppenheimer" for realism. He explains how accurate Christopher Nolan's recreation of the construction of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos and the subsequent Trinity test was in the movie, starring Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh.
Spriggs has been a nuclear-weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for 20 years. He worked on a special project where he scanned, reanalyzed, and declassified old nuclear test films.
You can find more information about the Livermore National Laboratory at: www.llnl.gov
Spriggs has been a nuclear-weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for 20 years. He worked on a special project where he scanned, reanalyzed, and declassified old nuclear test films.
You can find more information about the Livermore National Laboratory at: www.llnl.gov
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 My name is Greg Spriggs.
00:01 I work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
00:04 Prior to that, I worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Critical Mass Lab.
00:09 Today we're going to be looking at nuclear explosions and trying to judge how realistic
00:14 they are.
00:15 This is a matter of life and death.
00:18 They were trying to hold all the cables in place.
00:20 This was a test.
00:21 They weren't certain that this particular design was going to work.
00:25 And so this was sort of the prototype.
00:27 They didn't go to great lengths to make everything really robust.
00:33 So they were just basically winging it with duct tape to hold things in place.
00:38 And the actual one probably was a little bit more structured and more engineered to be
00:43 a real weapon.
00:44 The reason they suspended the bomb from the tower, they wanted to get it above the ground
00:49 so they could measure the shockwave.
00:51 There was a lot of uncertainty, since it was the first one, there was a lot of uncertainty
00:55 as to whether this would work.
00:57 And if it did work, how much energy would be released.
01:00 And so they needed to be able to film this and they didn't want the shockwave interacting
01:04 with the surface.
01:06 They thought that if they suspended it up high enough that they would kind of suppress
01:10 the amount of nuclear fallout that would occur by all the dirt being lofted.
01:18 They had actually built several shelters for the scientists.
01:24 I think the closest shelter was about five miles away.
01:27 And of course, everybody was wearing goggles.
01:29 When the detonation goes off, it would look very bright, but it would protect their eyes.
01:33 Here are the glasses.
01:34 Very, very dark.
01:36 Right now, I can't see anything.
01:37 It's pitch black in here.
01:39 But if a nuclear detonation went off, I could see it.
01:47 They were all laying down, thinking that the shockwave might get to them.
01:50 And if they were laying down, that it wouldn't be a direct hit.
01:53 You don't want to have a big surface area.
01:55 If the shockwave is coming over, you want to be kind of laying flat.
01:57 There have been situations where we've had tests where the yield was a little bit higher
02:02 than what people thought or the wind blew the bomb a little bit closer to the observers
02:07 that people have actually gotten a little bit of a sunburn.
02:10 I don't think the sunscreen would have helped very much.
02:13 It's basically a heat flux that hits you.
02:16 I guess it would have helped a little bit, but not much.
02:19 For the accuracy of what the weapon looked like and how they hung it from the tower and
02:23 so forth, maybe a seven.
02:24 [BLANK_AUDIO]