relativistic weapons

A Last Week Tonight segment on the US nuclear arsenal and how poorly it is maintained and secured. It covers weapons accidents, outdated launch protocols and security problems.

Physicist Jean-Pierre Petit gives a long technical commentary on Russia's newly announced weapons, including the Sarmat missile, a nuclear-powered cruise missile and a nuclear MHD-propelled submarine drone.

Slaughterbots is a short sci-fi film in which swarms of cheap autonomous drones are programmed to kill targets by profile. It was made as arms-control advocacy against autonomous weapons.

Part one of Sandia National Labs' first-person documentary on the use control, detonation safety and survivability of US nuclear weapons. It covers nuclear sharing in NATO and how control of use was separated from possession, leading to the always/never problem.

A Kurzgesagt video exploring how advanced civilizations might wage war across light years. It looks at weapons such as relativistic beams and what they would do.

Slaughterbots is a fictional short film, backed by Stuart Russell, depicting swarms of cheap autonomous drones that use facial recognition to assassinate targets. It was made to argue for banning autonomous weapons.

Forgotten Weapons examines the Heckler & Koch G11, a West German experimental rifle built around a caseless cartridge. The video covers the G11K2 and its unusual technology before its cancellation for political and economic reasons.

John Sotos, a physician and former Intel chief medical officer, argues at DEF CON 25 that genetic diseases are exploitable vulnerabilities in the genome. He warns that CRISPR and related tools will make malicious genome hacks and targeted bioweapons feasible.

Harvard Belfer Center lecture by Matthew Bunn explaining how nuclear bombs work, including fission and fusion weapons and which parts of bomb-making are hard. It is part 1 of 2 in the Nuclear 101 series.

Novelist Daniel Suarez warns in a TED talk about autonomous robotic weapons and drones. He argues that taking the decision to kill out of human hands threatens democratic accountability and calls for a ban.

Part two of Herb Sutter's C++ and Beyond 2012 session on atomic weapons, a deep dive into the C++ memory model, atomics, memory ordering, and hardware behavior. It ends with the modern meaning of volatile.

An 8-minute fictional short film, made by campaigners for a ban on autonomous weapons, depicting swarms of cheap AI-guided micro-drones used to kill targeted people. It ends with a call to action against autonomous weapons.

A compilation of the 1977 BBC series The Secret War, a documentary on British scientific and technical efforts in WWII, including radar, German navigation beams and V-weapons. It features interviews with people who were there, including Albert Speer.

Herb Sutter's deep C++ and Beyond 2012 talk on atomics and the C++ memory model, covering why programmers chasing top performance need to understand hardware ordering. This is part one of two.

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

A 1973 NBC News documentary on the US nerve gas arsenal, covering leaks in Okinawa, a Utah test that killed thousands of sheep, and the long-term hazards of storage sites. It won an Emmy.

Tech Ingredients demonstrates how microwaves work and how they affect objects at range, then shows ways to defend against them. It includes a correction about rectifier output frequency.

A 3-minute CGI animated sci-fi short by Dima Fedotov. An automated war system keeps a lone bomber attacking a long-dead city after humanity has been wiped out, until life finds a way to survive.

A dramatized fictional video of micro drones with facial recognition and swarm AI used as autonomous killer weapons. It is a Slaughterbots-style warning about lethal autonomous weapons.

Slaughterbots, a short dystopian film in which swarms of small autonomous drones are programmed to kill targets matching a profile. It opens as a slick product launch before turning into a terror scenario.

The ED-209 boardroom scene from the 1987 film RoboCop, where the enforcement droid malfunctions after giving a man 20 seconds to comply.

Cleared Defense Department footage of Raytheon's Phaser high-power microwave weapon bringing down drones during a 2013 live-fire demonstration at Fort Sill. Raytheon says it has halved the payload size and is offering the system for operational use.

Astrophysicist David Kipping presents the halo drive, a proposed way to propel a starship to a good fraction of light speed by gaining energy from a black hole. The video is based on his peer-reviewed paper and explains why energy is the main obstacle to interstellar flight.

In an 11-minute TED talk, Ralph Langner explains how his team reverse-engineered the Stuxnet worm and worked out that it targeted industrial control systems, with a covert state origin. It is a compact look at cyber-forensics.

Last Day of War is an award-winning CGI animated short by Dima Fedotov in which automated machines keep following orders and prepare a bomber after all humans are dead.

Isao Hashimoto's time-lapse map shows all 2053 nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1998, with each nation getting a blip and a running tally. Each second represents one month.

Scott Manley explains the Cold War experiments in which steel and aluminium spheres, known as Lew Allen's Balls, were placed near nuclear detonations. The spheres survived the fireball, and he walks through what the declassified results show.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song Who's Next, about the spread of nuclear weapons, with a spoken introduction. It is a short musical comedy piece from the Cold War era.

Scott Manley tells the story of a computerized telemetry system built to sit at the heart of a nuclear test device in place of the plutonium pit, designed to transmit data in the microseconds before it was destroyed.

A short Reuters news clip showing declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. It shows the blast and the mushroom cloud.

Alexei Navalny phones an FSB chemical-weapons specialist, posing as a senior official, and gets him to describe the 2020 Novichok poisoning and its cover-up. The video is in Russian; HN commenters point to English subtitles.

Armor expert The Chieftain explains why tanks still have a place on the modern battlefield despite drones and guided weapons. He responds to the 'tank is dead' debate, noting that tanks have been declared dead repeatedly since 1919.

A two-minute clip from the documentary The Fog of War in which Robert McNamara recalls Fidel Castro explaining how close the world came to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A VICE report from 2011 in which Suroosh Alvi revisits the gun markets in Pakistan's tribal areas, a stronghold of the Taliban. It shows weapons being made and sold by hand and a country described as a powder keg.

A short clip of Robert Mueller speaking about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.