Testing the US Military’s Worst Idea

this is the biggest most ambitious most expensive video I've ever made and it's also going to be terrifying we are strapping these giant metal weights to the belly of that helicopter flying it up several kilometers in the sky and then dropping these weights on a sand castle City I mean we need a lot and this is all for a very good reason so let's do it come on [Music] in the late 1950s the United States had a problem the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite Sputnik into orbit around the Earth on the 4th of October 1957. but less well-known is that just over a month earlier they successfully tested the first intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM it could deliver a nuclear warhead from the Soviet Union to cities on the U.S east coast in around 30 minutes facing this threat a researcher at Boeing named Jerry Purnell came up with an idea for a space weapon it could hit any location on Earth in half that time just 15 minutes it could destroy targets buried 30 meters underground like the silos where the Soviet nukes were kept and theoretically it could intercept icbm's mid-flight his concept was to put telephone pole-sized pieces of tungsten in space in orbit so that these pieces of tungsten could drop on a Target basically at any time the idea was within a 15 minute window you would be able to release one of these tungsten rods and have it re-enter the atmosphere and strike a Target in minutes and it would come in so fast you know in orbit things go about eight kilometers per second and as it enters the atmosphere it's going to slow down due to the atmospheric drag but still on impact it's still going to be going like 10 times the speed of sound mach 10 or about three kilometers per second this is Moab which stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast but it's more commonly referred to by its nickname the mother of all bombs it is one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosives on the planet when it detonated it released the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT now just one of these tungsten rods coming in would have the same energy as the largest conventional explosive ever detonated they are not bombs they contain no explosives but the amount of ...