Why Submarines Are WAY Scarier Than You Think

and not nuclear power to destroy the human race several times over I need to show you a video that is blowing my mind you have the ocean just sitting there being nice and calm and then this pops out boom it doesn't just pop out it pops out for a second it looks like it's just about to fall back down and then [Music] this is a rocket yes a full-blown rocket that is headed for space oh and I know this kind of looks small it's not small and where is this rocket being launched from are there underwater bases yes they're called submarines once it gets to the surface it flies a thousand kilometers above Earth literally into space it starts looking at the stars to navigate and eventually falls back down to Earth traveling up to like 12 000 kilometers to hit whatever target the people who launched it wanted it to like what have we created with such destructive power it threatened the world a deadly game of stone an undeniable strategic deterrent nuclear warheads that can wipe out countries submarines are cool I just gotta say it there are these massive floating nuclear weapons that could be anywhere at any time that we use for psychological warfare and actual Warfare and spying on people and because of this these giant vessels are actually incredibly stealthy like you could be swimming in the ocean one day minding your own business and right below you there could literally be this massive 48 000 ton metal machine with a couple hundred humans aboard equipped with nuclear warheads that could be launched at a moment's notice and you would have no idea because not being seen is kind of their whole Mo which is nuts because these are some big boys like Russia's typhoon class submarine if you just pluck that out of the water and put it on land somewhere you start to get a scale for how massive this thing is like a floating building yeah these guys are thick and they're cruising around our oceans 250 meters below the surface oh and something we're going to talk about later they literally have nuclear power plants on board giving them basically unlimited energy to make fresh water and oxygen which means they it could be down here in the depths of the ocean for decades that is if there weren't humans aboard that needed to come up to eat food navies around the world who have submarines do everything in their power to ensure that these Subs are quiet and invisible even magnet resistant all in the name of being undetectable and they're always out there right now in this very moment there are tons of these things there are humans on these multi-story buildings that are floating around our oceans with giant weapons in them this is not normal how did we get here why were these things invented there's a lot to understand about submarines there's a lot of angles we have been researching for months and today we are going to show you how we got here what submarines can do and most importantly why one submarine has enough nuclear weapons to essentially end life on the planet as we know it's just one submarine an increase in submarine activity Russian re-arming their Fleet Chinese submarines Iranian submarines they will preserve peace for many years to come boy today's topic is it's so juicy and there is so much to get through um Nick our studio manager is building something for today's topic I want to show you but actually first I want to thank the people who made this possible so thank you better help I've become a massive proponent of therapy I wasn't my whole life it's only a couple years now that I've been in therapy and it has truly changed my life I am not saying that because better help is sponsoring today's video I'm not saying that as an exaggeration I'm saying that truly literally therapy is a life-changing thing regardless of if you have a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety or like me you don't have something clinical but you're just a human who lives in this world and has relationships and fears and stresses therapy can truly give you tools to approach your life in a very different way the big problem here is that finding a therapist can be really difficult it's often a matter of calling and going to waiting rooms and talking to insurance better help changes the game on this they're an online platform where you can go on answer a few questions and then based on your preferences better help matches you with someone in their massive network of over 25 000 therapists oh and if you don't want to talk face to face with your therapist via like a video call you can do text or a chat or a phone call you get to make that decision based on what you need and what your preferences are if the therapist isn't a good fit for you you can easily change and it doesn't cost you anything I think a lot of people don't get therapy because it's incredibly arduous and there's a lot of friction in finding a therapist and scheduling better help solve this and makes therapy more accessible and affordable and again I'm a giant proponent of that there's a link in my description it's betterhelp.com Johnny Harris clicking that link helps support this channel because it also gets you 10 off your first month of better help so you can try it out at a discount and see if it's a good fit for you thank you better help for supporting this video let's go check in on Nick he's building something super cool okay Nick Nick what are you up to oh yeah it's coming together look at this model oh my God that's the ssbn Andrew Jackson Lafayette class as you can see all the pieces are out everywhere and these are the people look at the people oh my God if you look up here in the front these are the bunks these are the Torpedoes okay we will check in with Nick in a moment as that model gets built let me tell you how we got here foreign people have been building boats to try to go underwater for a very long time like look at this old art where you can see Alexander the Great going completely underwater in a big glass Barrel this is like 2000 years ago 1800 years later you have Leonardo da Vinci who was busy literally thinking of anything that could be invented and he sketched up his very own version of an underwater boat this beauty right here was basically like a big mechanical fish oh and this is wild he kept these sketches a secret because he feared quote the evil nature of men who practice assassination at the bottom of the sea like he thought that we might use these underwater boats for war whoops anyway the first known boat to actually navigate underwater was of course built by a Dutch dude Dutch man they're just so good at Water 150 years later over here in what was soon to be the United States George Washington paid for this sucker to be made for his army I mean there could be a whole video about this boat the turtle because it kind of looked like two turtle shells put together so cute the guy in there is just like so cozy they tried to use the turtle in their War for Freedom against the British but it never really did anything useful and then it just sank I mean cool name but it wasn't a super useless submarine but it paved the way 50 years later we have the American Civil War where the Confederate Rebels built a sub that was powered by a bunch of guys manually turning a crank and on board it had a long Spar torpedo don't be fooled though Spar torpedo was just a fancy way of saying a bomb on a 15-foot stick and they actually used it they snuck up on a Yankee ship underneath it with their bomb stick in the middle of the Civil War and blew it up and both sides sank like the submarine sank too like it didn't work I mean it kind of worked but didn't really work anyway I had to mention all of these like early submarines because they kind of laid the groundwork but in the 1800s things get really serious thanks to this guy over here in Germany Rudolph diesel invented an engine that changed everything this new engine mixed pressure and air and fossil fuels that all exploded and made things move this changed a lot of Industries but the Germans were like let's put these in submarines and run them to charge a bunch of batteries that we can use to power the sub while we're underwater it's a lot better than the hand crank and indeed it was but there was one big problem which is that this engine needs air like it needs to be able to pump out the exhaust that it makes and it needs to be able to suck in air to like make energy so you can't actually run your engines underwater so these German Subs as stealthy as they were were still very limited because they could only standard water for like 48 hours max before having to come up and give away their position so that they could get air for their engines this is a problem that will soon be solved but we just need a few Wars first [Music] 1900s we have all these big Empires that are looking for ways to destroy themselves with their new industrial technology and they're getting good at submarines they're loading them up with more and more batteries now they have sonar and radar capabilities so that they can like see underwater and they have radios and encryption devices so they can talk to each other while they're underwater which is everything when you're fighting a war the Germans call these submarines unter sea boats or U-boats and they use them for their new plan of unrestricted submarine warfare which is a sterile way of just saying we feel comfortable sneaking up on civilian boats and sinking them and killing the people without notice because we've decided we are literal villains submarine aim and fire they're deadly Farmers so yeah being used for horrible means but let's be clear this is amazing technology like this is light years ahead of the forefathers of submarines like the turtle or that poorly thought out bomb on a stick thing from the Civil War but they still have the limitation of air they need to come up all the time to get air for their engines no matter how scary and stealthy they could become and sneaking around underwater during these wars they still have to come up to the surface every 48 hours to run their engines and recharge their batteries giving away their sneaky position and becoming way less effective as a war tool this would be like playing Battleship but every few turns you have to flip your board around to show your opponent where you are for a sec they kind of figured this out a little bit when they started to use these two little tubes that allowed them to kind of still be underwater but to like put the tubes up and suck down air from the surface push out exhaust but it's kind of rubbish like having to run your noisy engines every 48 Hours was a huge limitation on how useful these Subs could be well of course the war ends Germany loses and surrenders and some of these U-boats that were just sitting there were divvied up among the winners the U.S the UK and the USSR who discovered that wow the Germans have some amazing submarine tech let's use this Tech to pimp out our own Subs leapfrogging Decades of development and this is where things get juicy and scary [Music] so now you have these two former allies the U.S and the Soviet Union looking at each other with skepticism they both got their hands on this German Tech and they both know that the other got their hands on this German Tech and they both secretly are like we need to get way better than the other at let's go this was a huge priority but it was also weird and hush hush Cold War this begins an era of secretive investment into submarine technology and this is where they level up to blow all of our minds where submarines become the impossibly advanced machines that we know today [Music] changed everything here was that humans had learned to Tinker with atoms breaking them apart to make incredible amounts of energy and they used that energy to blow things up but also to make electricity and crucially nuclear energy didn't require air so it's the 1950s and you got this guy he's a russian-born American Navy guy named Hyman rickover and he was like whoa wait a second you're telling me that you can make electricity but you don't need air light bulbs going off on this guy's head because he's a submarine guy and he's like let's slap these puppies into submarines that would solve all of our needing to come up to the surface every couple of hours problem the US government's like wait sorry what did you say Rick over and rickover's like I said let's put the nuclear power plant inside of the submarine we got to get ahead of the Soviets he got a lot of pushback for this for obvious reasons but he dug his heels in leapfrogging all the bosses till he got to the chief of Navy operations and whispered in his ear his big idea and it totally worked the story of how this went down is insane and rickover was insane and Visionary and I'll leave some reading in the sources for those who want to go down that rabbit hole throwing a lot of discipline here just like breezing over this guy's story but yes it's the 50s and the US government set about trying to put a full-blown nuclear reactor a power plant inside of their Giant floating weapon and they did somehow and it changed everything the arrival of nuclear power has broken those bonds you can go around the world on a core of uranium only slightly larger than a golf ball he may have just as profound an effect on Naval strategy as the airplane has had on War let's see how Nick's doing with his model oh here we go look at this big boy here she is wow [Music] wow I am going to put this model on my desk and look at it every day because it's beautiful and it's like retro which is kind of cool anyway uh let's get back to the story here because the next chapter here is really the chapter that matters most once they got the nuclear reactor onto these Subs everything changed I'm going to show you why so look at this big old submarine it's a sturgeon-class submarine from the 60s to U.S Navy sub and look back here we've got the nuclear reactor it sits back here doing its thing breaking atoms apart which produces an enormous amount of heat that can heat up water that turns this massive propeller and remember that spinning things gives you power electricity boom you're spinning turbines and now you have electricity for your submarine not only does the nuclear reactor not need air to work but it literally creates air after all it's surrounded by H2O so all it needs to do is break the two h's from the O and boom you've got oxygen for your crew to breathe I mean this nuclear reactor was magic move over trees we've got submarines and they use all of this abundant energy to get rid of salt in the water so now the crew has like drinking water and can take showers while they are floating hundreds of meters under the ocean like this is becoming really insane the nuclear reactor solved all the problems remember how diesel submarines had to refuel all the time timing that to come up to the surface to run their engines get rid of their exhaust and suck in the air nuclear submarines could now run underwater without needing to refuel for 20 years oh that is if you don't count having to refuel the humans on board so rickover was right nuclear reactors on submarines changed everything they are now way more useful you can now sneak around the ocean and never give away your position okay so now that we can be underwater for basically ever let's load these suckers up with big weapons [Applause] these suckers are getting huge by like the 70s and 80s I mean here was the German U-Boat remember the one that the thing that like really like pushed it all forward and here is an American Cold War era submarine the Ohio class this thing is massive like zoom in here those are people here's their kitchen here's the reactor back here doing all of its magic and look here's where the crew sleeps oh and what are they sleeping next to what are all these tubes doing here oh these tubes kind of right where the crew is sleeping yeah these tubes are what make the submarine maybe the most important weapon to have ever existed this is where the nukes are [Music] well technically we don't know that this is where the nukes are and any Submariner will vehemently tell you that quote we cannot confirm or deny whether or not the missiles inside of these silos carry nuclear weapons wink wink this is where the nukes are so what started as two superpowers nerding out about German submarine Tech in the 40s turned into an arms race that resulted in both of them figuring out how to power their subs with nuclear reactors and the ability to load up these Subs with 24 rockets that they could launch to the edge of space at any moment carrying multiple nuclear warheads like having nuclear weapons on land ready to fire is pretty cool having them on planes is pretty powerful but you can see both of those things when you have a sub quietly roving around the world's oceans with the ability to carry a bunch of nuclear weapons and to launch them at any point you've just achieved the most powerful advantage in military strategy surprise the panopticon your enemy has no idea where you are but they know you are somewhere in range at all times so they have to act as if you are everywhere a few you button presses away from launching one of these things but this psychological sort of mind game only works if you are never noticed so the next phase of this technological evolution of submarines focuses on silence they start coding their submarines with rubber tiles so that the Sonar doesn't bounce off as well they took these giant propellers that yes are massive bigger than you can imagine and made them impossibly quiet and even on the inside they started taking crazy precautions like all the heavy gear in a submarine is mounted on rubber pads to dampen any vibration that could be detected or heard the cooks even started putting rubber on everything like they're mixing bowls and they're mixing spatulas are all like sound deadening materials so that they don't send out vibration and make noise the submarine force is serious about silence in fact they take pride in calling themselves the silent service and it's kind of a chip on their shoulder because they don't get nearly as much recognition as like these guys do they're just like lurking in the depths of the ocean doing doing like a really important defense thing and no one knows about them because literally that's their job is to never be noticed wow so you have the US and the Soviet Union both with the ability to launch nukes from their submarines and ironically this whole everyone pointing a gun at each other thing actually keeps these great powers from ever fighting a war with each other they were both too afraid of how easy it would be for the other to strike back with their stealthy Subs ensuring the destruction of both sides this is deterrence and it is one of the major forces keeping great powers from going to war with each other it's why the U.S has an entire fleet of Subs with no other Mission than to go into the ocean and just disappear and just sit there silently ready to make good on their threat that if you attack us we are always ready to respond submarines are also really good for spying okay so we know by now that a lot of communication in this world is made possible because of underwater cables it's not just the internet these cables have existed for a very long time and they're just sitting there at the bottom of the ocean connecting the whole world and they're safe because no one has access to them no one's going to go to the very bottom of the ocean oh wait submarines submarines have unique access to these cables so it's the early 1970s and American intelligence agencies team up with the Navy to have them scour the ocean floor looking for Russian communication cables with the idea that they could tap into the cables and listen to them and lo and behold they found one 120 meters below the surface over in this eastern part of Russia they found a cable that connected two Soviet Naval bases and they put a literal tape recorder into the cable and now they are literally listening to Soviets talking to each other about all sorts of military things none of it is encrypted in any way way because no one expected them to dive down and find this cable oh and they were really clever they sort of only Loosely attached it to the cable in case they like needed to pull up the cable for maintenance or something the little device would fall off and no one would ever know that they were being spied on but the tapes that were recording like filled up so divers had to go down and retrieve the recording device and take out the tapes and put in new tapes and they did that like every month and they were like we will never get caught for this but then eventually they did it turns out that an NSA employee got paid 35 000 from the Soviets to tell them about this operation anyway that that would be an amazing movie someone please make that spy movie the fact is that Subs still do a lot of spying they will often have Navy Seals aboard that are ready to dive and do dot dot dot redacted we have no idea like we have literally no idea what they do for obvious reasons there is evidence that the US and UK spy agencies still tap into cables like the undersea fiber optic cables that like govern the internet at and that they do this all the time see Edward snowden's big leak and some deep dive into that I'm not going to go into it but we know that submarines spy we know that countries are always spying on each other this should not be surprising in fact during the research for this video I felt the insatiable desire to dive down the rabbit hole of how submarines spy and I didn't because I'm trying to stay disciplined and I'm trying to tell this story but leave a comment if you want me to make that video and I will consider it because there is a lot more about that topic let's move on [Music] okay so let's get up to speed where are we today with submarines according to the U.S Navy's website the U.S has 71

submarines 53 of them are fast attack subs and 14 are the ballistic missile Subs that sit there and be our deterrent and four are guided missile Subs but then there's other sources that say that there's only 68 submarines I don't know all of this is like classified and we're not supposed to know and no one's supposed to know but we know a lot but not specifics and like I mentioned all of these Subs have very different capabilities fast attack subs for example are optimized for closer attacks they use a lot of cruise missiles which are launched through these big tubes and have jet engines and computer brains for navigation they're way more precise but they can still go pretty far I mean we're talking like 2 400 kilometers away 800 kilometers an hour like they're still very very effective long-term weapons Russia says it launched 26 crew missiles today 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles have hit a Syrian Air Base launching dozens of missiles targeting the Syrian regimes but again the one that like represents the mind-blowing reality of what we humans have invented is this sucker the Ohio class submarine they do have Torpedoes and several other sort of smaller scale weapons but it's these tubes that are carrying missiles which are carrying Warheads that are the big defining Game Changer of this technology so let me just break down the Journey of these Rockets they can hit targets that are upwards of 6 400 kilometers away it's like wider than the entire United States and probably a lot longer but of course the Navy won't tell us these things because it's all classified and they don't just carry like one nuclear warhead they can carry multiple and they're not all just going to one place they actually get dropped at different locations how an unbelievable amount of scientific Ingenuity let me explain it starts at the Boost phase where the missile gets its initial umph gets pushed out of the water up into the air goes up into the sky gets a bunch of momentum and then the engine's cut and the missile just has momentum and it starts to fly just using the laws of physics it's literally at the edge of space we're now in the mid-course phase the missile then just starts casually looking at the stars to calibrate its position and then making little micro adjustments to make sure that it is perfectly on course for its Target and this is where we need to talk about Warheads no not not those these little cones that aren't that little are Warheads the most powerful weapons humans have ever created these missiles can have up to 12 of these cone-shaped Warheads they're just hanging out on the front tip of this rocket eventually this missile reaches its highest point and starts to come down at this phase the missile starts spitting out the WarHeads just at the right time just at the right velocity and as they re-enter Earth's atmosphere they start hurtling towards their targets as far as 1500 kilometers apart so like roughly the distance between Iceland and Norway and then when they get where they were programmed to go I mean you know what happens oh but that happens potentially 12 times from this one rocket each one of these explosions being roughly six times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II okay so that was one missile this submarine can hold 24 missiles like what have we created luckily since World War II no one has had to use nuclear weapons in any conflict we've had a lot of threats lately but luckily they just remain a deterrent force and not an actual thing that we use hopefully it stays that way and yes several countries have the ability to load these things onto their floating weapons called submarines that are lurking in the depths of the ocean at all times spying and just sitting there okay so that's submarines well no that's like a teaspoon of submarines this topic could go on forever I mean seriously I was this was a painful story to do because there was so much I had to leave on the table I have a feeling that I'm gonna be making a few more videos about submarines soon but let's just remember what we've learned here we humans have invented something pretty wild something that should be impossible the ability for a bunch of us to live underwater in these floating buildings for months at a time we load these things up with enough Firepower to turn entire countries to dust all in the name of never having to use them that is the Paradox of modern conflict and yet the thing I'm taking away from having spent a lot of time thinking about submarines is that humans can kind of do whatever they put their minds to making power out of nuclear fission and putting that into an underwater weapon like what shooting Rockets into space having them look at the stars and then land wherever they want to humans did this we did it because of fear and skepticism and conflict we did this to get ahead to be more powerful but we did this and that in some weird way gives me hope that someday when the best Minds aren't directed to the priorities of power and conflict we humans will continue to make magic happen magic that helps more and more people live better lives making impossible things possible [Music] thank you for watching my video on submarines what you're not looking at right now is all the props we have that were just sort of like in the background blurred out but they're super cool look at this this model of the USS West Virginia you can see the little silos up here for the nukes all these guys what I didn't tell you is that my father-in-law is actually the captain of a submarine one of the ssbns so I had some major Insider info that I've been learning about for literally a decade and that helped spur this video on I am getting more and more excited about the community we're building Over The Newsroom The Newsroom is what we call our patreon it just sounds way cooler to call The Newsroom we have a community of people that we ask for feedback on things for advice on things we have live streams I just did a live stream with the community it was really cool you also get an extra video every month it's a behind the scenes Vlog of how we make what we make here in the studio you meet the people the team you see the processes you see the shenanigans it's a good time and you also get the fuzzy feeling that you are supporting independent journalism here on YouTube so go check that out patreon.com Johnny Harris we have Luts and presets which help you color your videos and photos we have a lot more videos if you're new around here uh subscribe to the channel because we publish publish a lot lately like as the team has grown we just published tons of videos now which is fun and and we have that's all we have I've reached the end of what we have to give to you and now I am done telling you what I can give to you what can you give to me okay bye thank you everyone [Music]

2023-01-27 11:25

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