Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. We've had a technical issue come up
Speaker 1: that disrupted our plans for this week, so Oil and
Speaker 1: Troubled Water Part two won't air until next Tuesday. Instead,
Speaker 1: today's episode is one from the vaults, but an ideal
Speaker 1: re listen given the recent release of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer film,
Speaker 1: The Atomic Scar opens with discussion of Oppenheimer and his
Speaker 1: we knew the world would not be the same statement
Speaker 1: to NBC in nineteen sixty five. We'll be back with
Speaker 1: new content on Wednesday. As always, Thanks for your patience
Speaker 1: and your listenership.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to
Speaker 3: be talking about nuclear weapons testing. Now, this is something
Speaker 3: that has come up on the show a good bit before. Obviously,
Speaker 3: we've had to talk many times about the very real,
Speaker 3: you know, danger, potential civilization level threat, and the real
Speaker 3: human costs of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing. But
Speaker 3: today I wanted to focus on a couple of interesting
Speaker 3: and lesser known environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing, specifically
Speaker 3: something that I came across as it pertains to industrial metals,
Speaker 3: and then we're going to get into some other scientific
Speaker 3: territory as we go on, but quite apart from any
Speaker 3: straightforward chemical effects on the atmosphere, I think it is
Speaker 3: pretty fair to say that the human departure into the
Speaker 3: nuclear weapons testing era in nineteen forty five was really
Speaker 3: sort of a shift to moment for humankind as a species.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I feel like there are very few things
Speaker 1: that have been said. There are very few audio samples,
Speaker 1: certainly that sum it up quite as well or are
Speaker 1: as haunting as those given by Jay Robert Oppenheimer in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five on the television documentary The Decision to
Speaker 1: Drop the Bomb, broadcast as an NBC white Paper. I imagine
Speaker 1: most of you heard this before. I've heard it's sampled
Speaker 1: and used in music, it shows up in comic books, literature.
Speaker 1: In it, the American theoretical physicist and father of the
Speaker 1: atomic bomb, as he sometimes referred shares the following regarding
Speaker 1: the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb at the
Speaker 1: Trinity Test in New Mexico on July sixteenth, nineteen forty five,
Speaker 1: he said, quote, we knew the world would not be
Speaker 1: the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried,
Speaker 1: most people were silent. I remembered the line from the
Speaker 1: Hindu scripture the Bagavad gitaw is trying to persuade the
Speaker 1: prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him,
Speaker 1: takes on his multi armed form and says, now, I
Speaker 1: am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we
Speaker 1: all thought that one way or another.
Speaker 3: It's a difficult thing to imagine working on that kind
Speaker 3: of research in a way, feeling that it is your
Speaker 3: duty or your necessity to aid the Allied cause in
Speaker 3: World War Two, but at the same time knowing that
Speaker 3: you were working on something that would unleash an age
Speaker 3: of terror in human history.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean absolutely, a weapon that would as of
Speaker 1: this recording, has only been used twice in war, which
Speaker 1: on one hand you can say, thankfully has only been
Speaker 1: used twice in war, but at the same hand you
Speaker 1: can say, tragically has been used twice in war. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We'll get into the just the destructive capabilities a bit
Speaker 1: of the bomb as we proceed here, and of course
Speaker 1: we've covered it on the show before. To varying degrees.
Speaker 1: But I want to come back to the quote that
Speaker 1: that Oppenheimer is is deploying here, So if you're not
Speaker 1: familiar with it, Basically, these are these are who the
Speaker 1: figures are in this. You've got Vishnu, one of the
Speaker 1: principal deities of Hinduism. Uh. The Blahabad Gita or the
Speaker 1: Gita as it's sometimes just shortened to, is part of
Speaker 1: the Hindu epic, the Mahabarata. Technically it's book six in that,
Speaker 1: and the prince in question is the hero Arjina, part
Speaker 1: of the Pandava family that wages war against the Kravas.
Speaker 1: That's the big struggle, that's that's key to the Mahabarata. Anyway,
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the Gita, which Oppenheimer is is
Speaker 1: quoting here, Arjina rides his chariot onto the field of
Speaker 1: forthcoming battle between these two families. But he suddenly overcome
Speaker 1: by doubt and depression, as he notes there there on
Speaker 1: the other side, within the ranks of the enemy, he
Speaker 1: recognizes friends, relatives, teachers, and therefore has this just immense
Speaker 1: weight descend upon him. This is a quote from it.
Speaker 1: This is as translated by Edwin Arnold in eighteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: And as as is always the case with translated works
Speaker 1: of literature and poetry, you know the English is going
Speaker 1: to be approximate, and certainly with Hinduism there are many
Speaker 1: cases where particular ideas and phrases don't really have a
Speaker 1: parallel word in English. Anyway, it goes as follows quote. Thus,
Speaker 1: if we slay kinsfolk and friends for love of earthly power,
Speaker 1: a vat, what an evil fault it were better? I
Speaker 1: deem it? If my kinsmen strike to face them, weaponless
Speaker 1: and bear my breast to shaft and spear, then answer
Speaker 1: blow with blow. So speaking in the face of those
Speaker 1: two hosts, Arginus sank upon his chariot seat and let
Speaker 1: fall bow and arrows. Sick at heart, so the prospect
Speaker 1: of the forthcoming bloodshed is just too much for him.
Speaker 1: But what does he do? He turns to his chariot
Speaker 1: tea for council, and luckily his charioteer is the blueskinned Krishna,
Speaker 1: the avatar of the mighty Vishnu, and he gives him
Speaker 1: his council. In fact, he gives him his council for
Speaker 1: eighteen chapters. That's what the Gita is is basically him
Speaker 1: providing all of this philosophical and spiritual advice on what
Speaker 1: it is to have to make these sorts of decisions
Speaker 1: and engage in war and duty and so forth.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of like something like the Book of
Speaker 3: Job in the form we have it now, which you
Speaker 3: have a sort of small framing narrative that mainly contains
Speaker 3: a didactic discourse on theological matters.
Speaker 1: Right now, if you want to like a really good
Speaker 1: breakdown of this episode in the Mahabarata of the Gita,
Speaker 1: and especially as it relates to Oppenheimer in his life,
Speaker 1: there's a wonderful paper that you can find out there
Speaker 1: in full on the Internet from James A. Heiji, a
Speaker 1: professor of history, University of Massachud's Dartmouth. This was a
Speaker 1: nice write up he did for the American Philosophical Society
Speaker 1: in two thousand and He goes into greater depth, but
Speaker 1: he also summarizes Krishna's counsel as follows. He says, look,
Speaker 1: you're a soldier, Argina. You have to fight. Fighting is
Speaker 1: your duty, so you need to do it. He also says, look, Krishna,
Speaker 1: you know this god who I also am is going
Speaker 1: to be the one to determine who lives and who dies.
Speaker 1: It's not your place to mourn or rejoice over human
Speaker 1: loss in this case, you should try to remain unattached
Speaker 1: from the outcome. And then also faith in Krishna is
Speaker 1: going to be what saves your soul, Argina, And this
Speaker 1: is the most important part of the whole scenario. But
Speaker 1: as Argina begins to metaphorically see the light or I
Speaker 1: suppose behold the true nature of the reality he's faced with,
Speaker 1: he asks if he can see Krishna's god like form,
Speaker 1: and this site ultimately seals Arjina's case commitment to do
Speaker 1: his duty. And this occurs in chapter eleven, verse thirty two,
Speaker 1: where where the now cosmically embodied Vishnu speaks to Arjina.
Speaker 1: And what he exactly says to English speaking years is
Speaker 1: going to depend on the translation, but for instance, the
Speaker 1: writer translation has him say death, am I a my
Speaker 1: present task destruction. There's a translation by Arnold that says,
Speaker 1: thou seest me as Time, who kills Time, who brings
Speaker 1: all to doom? The slayer Time, ancient of days, come
Speaker 1: hither to consume. And there's another one I came across
Speaker 1: that I thought was pretty good. I am mighty time,
Speaker 1: the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds.
Speaker 1: And I've always loved this one by jab Van Bettinen quote,
Speaker 1: I am time grown old to destroy the world embarked
Speaker 1: on the course of world annihilation. I am time grown
Speaker 1: Old'll always find that kind of there's something kind of
Speaker 1: perplexing about that phrasing that seems to be fitting this
Speaker 1: all powerful being that is, you know, that has taken
Speaker 1: on his true form to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's something that comes in the fullness of time.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting the way the personification as time further
Speaker 3: serves that purpose of the kind of depersonalization of one's
Speaker 3: role in history. You know, there is a kind of
Speaker 3: like a fate or world path that is executed through
Speaker 3: the passing of time, and what you are is someone
Speaker 3: who plays a role within it, not the shape or
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, Again, it is even in translation as it's
Speaker 1: this really perplexing and beautiful passage. Now, I should stress
Speaker 1: that Oppenheimer was not religiously Hindu, but he was interested
Speaker 1: in Hindu scripture, and clearly he found an association here
Speaker 1: between his role and the creation of the bomb, and
Speaker 1: the idea of duty performed regardless of potential outcome. Now,
Speaker 1: he certainly is bending the text here because in the
Speaker 1: Gita Vishnu slash Krishna is saying, look, I'm the prime
Speaker 1: mover here, I'm the one who destroys you. Just do
Speaker 1: your duty. Oppenheimer seems to be implying the opposite, that
Speaker 1: there perhaps is no all powerful force that bears the
Speaker 1: burden of our deeds, that the burden is instead on
Speaker 1: the shoulders of those involved in the creation of such
Speaker 1: a weapon. You know, when he's saying, you know, now
Speaker 1: I am become death, and that we all felt that
Speaker 1: way one way way or another. I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: he is, he is. He seems he's confronting the personal
Speaker 1: responsibility that seems to be there in the creation of
Speaker 1: such a weapon.
Speaker 3: But so it does seem that there's this this double
Speaker 3: terror in Oppenheimer's mind, like what if we fail? But
Speaker 3: also what if we succeed?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, that's something that Heigea gets into. You know,
Speaker 1: this this idea that there's this immense fear of failure.
Speaker 1: You know, what if we don't develop the bomb as
Speaker 1: we've been tasked with and what will that mean for us?
Speaker 1: But then, yeah, how much mass human death will be
Speaker 1: brought into the world, even on the short term if
Speaker 1: this is successful, without even getting into the way that
Speaker 1: it will change the landscape of not only warfare and
Speaker 1: potential warfare in global security, but just human civilization itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's so many ways you can track the impact
Speaker 3: of the invention of nuclear weapons. Clearly one of them
Speaker 3: is a sort of like world psychological impact. You know,
Speaker 3: there's bomb consciousness in the world now that that sort
Speaker 3: of will always be there unless nuclear weapons are entirely eliminated,
Speaker 3: But even then they would there'd probably still be the
Speaker 3: knowledge that they could be built again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this reminds me of one of Grant Morrison's creations
Speaker 1: for the Doom Patrol comic book, the idea of the
Speaker 1: candle Maker, this embodiment of all of our apprehension surrounding
Speaker 1: nuclear annihilation that takes on this kind of godlike, really
Speaker 1: almost kind of terrifying, Vishnu like appearance in the human psyche.
Speaker 3: Is this the guy who's made of wax?
Speaker 1: It is, and we'll have more to say about him
Speaker 1: in a forthcoming October episode of Stuff to Blow Your mind.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's right, it's almost October.
Speaker 1: It is. But to come back to the part of
Speaker 1: Oppenheimer's quote that is not part of the GETA, we
Speaker 1: knew the world would not be the same, and that
Speaker 1: that is true. It wasn't. It isn't, and you're probably
Speaker 1: aware of most of the reasons why. But in today's episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to look at some of the particular ways
Speaker 1: that it was changed, particularly regarding you know, a few
Speaker 1: environmental scenarios as well as the nature of steel.
Speaker 3: Yes, So getting into these lesser known environmental effects, I
Speaker 3: want to start with the fact that might seem extremely odd,
Speaker 3: which I was reading about in an article published in
Speaker 3: the journal Health Physics in two thousand and seven by
Speaker 3: a health physicist named Timothy P. Lynch, and the articles
Speaker 3: called a historically significant shield for in vivo measurements, And
Speaker 3: the fact goes like this. In Richland, Washington, there is
Speaker 3: a research facility called the in Vivo Radio bio Assay
Speaker 3: and Research Facility. And within this facility there is a
Speaker 3: special room that is surrounded on all sides by thick
Speaker 3: plates of steel that was once part of a World
Speaker 3: War Two era battleship called the USS Indiana. This was
Speaker 3: a battleship that served in the war. It was launched
Speaker 3: in nineteen forty one. It was in a number of
Speaker 3: battles It served extensively in the Pacific theater during the war,
Speaker 3: and then after it was decommissioned, they took steel out
Speaker 3: of the ship to build this room. Why would anybody
Speaker 3: do that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you don't know the answer, it sounds a
Speaker 1: bit mysterious, right all. It sounds like the kind of
Speaker 1: thing Grant Morrison would make up where you're having to
Speaker 1: engage in some sort of magical ritual involving steel from
Speaker 1: old ships.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, it totally sounds like something magical, either
Speaker 3: kind of magical or symbolic thinking of like, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna melt down the statue of the Golden Calf
Speaker 3: for the false idol or king or whatever and turn
Speaker 3: it into something holy.
Speaker 1: I'm going to make a throne out of all the
Speaker 1: swords of those who once opposed my rule.
Speaker 3: Exactly. Yes, it is the iron throne. So this is
Speaker 3: the iron throne of rooms. Now the room is again
Speaker 3: an in vivo radio bioassay detector, and Lynch tells us
Speaker 3: in the paper that quote the detection system is used
Speaker 3: to monitor workers for intakes of fission and activation products.
Speaker 3: So this means that it's used to check workers people
Speaker 3: to see if they have ingested tiny radioactive particles known
Speaker 3: as radionuclides. Radio nuclides consist of atoms that can decay
Speaker 3: into different isotopes and emit radiation as they do so.
Speaker 3: And if you take the into your body, say by
Speaker 3: swallowing them or breathing them in, they can do this
Speaker 3: inside your body and provide internal radiation sources which you
Speaker 3: do not want. They can pose a serious health risk.
Speaker 3: If enough of them accumulate in the body, a large
Speaker 3: dose could cause acute radiation syndrome. Prolonged exposure to even
Speaker 3: smaller doses over time could be a risk for damaging
Speaker 3: DNA and causing cancer. This is to use one example
Speaker 3: why you don't want to consume things that would come
Speaker 3: from a radioactively contaminated area, you know, somewhere around a
Speaker 3: nuclear meltdown. Why would you not want to, say, you know,
Speaker 3: roll around in the dirt near Chernobyl or drink the
Speaker 3: water there. It's because the environment is contaminated with radio nuclides,
Speaker 3: these little particles that you don't want anywhere near your body.
Speaker 3: You do not want them going inside you. So people
Speaker 3: who get tested regularly in this room would include Department
Speaker 3: of Energy workers. But Lynch also mentions that the room
Speaker 3: has been used to test a helicopter pilot and some
Speaker 3: other workers from Chernobyl, as well as children from Chernobyl
Speaker 3: I guess who lived nearby, So this has been in
Speaker 3: use for a long time and it's used to measure
Speaker 3: the radiation coming from living people. So somebody walks into
Speaker 3: the detector room, they get scanned for radio nuclides across
Speaker 3: the length of the body by a counting system that
Speaker 3: Lynch describes as comprised of five coaxial germanium detectors. And
Speaker 3: because the level of radiation emitted by these radio nuclides
Speaker 3: is usually very faint outside the body, you need an
Speaker 3: extremely sensitive detector. And here you hit another problem, which
Speaker 3: is interference from background levels of radiation coming from the
Speaker 3: rest of the world. So you've got cosmic sources, atmospheric sources,
Speaker 3: terrestrial sources. So in order to scan the body properly,
Speaker 3: you need a room with extremely tight radiation shielding and
Speaker 3: this is where the steel comes in. So the counting
Speaker 3: chain here is surrounded by a thin layer of lead
Speaker 3: and then cadmium and then copper. This is what's known
Speaker 3: together as a graded Z shield. And then outside that
Speaker 3: you have thirty solid centimeters of steel that's all pre
Speaker 3: war battleship steel, and this keeps the background radiation within
Speaker 3: the chamber within low minimum detectable activities. But the question remains, Okay,
Speaker 3: so you need thirty centimeters of steel, but why couldn't
Speaker 3: you just build your radiation shield out of any old steel, Like,
Speaker 3: if regular steel is good enough for your car and
Speaker 3: your appliances and your skyscrapers, why would you have to
Speaker 3: harvest the flesh of a decommissioned battleship in order to
Speaker 3: build this thick radiation shield.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Again, it's easy to sort of leap to magical conclusions.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like, well, we live in a we
Speaker 1: live in a sinful world. We have to build our
Speaker 1: sacred vessel out of wood from the garden of Eden,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, the atomic aid just so scarred
Speaker 1: our world that we have to we have to find
Speaker 1: artifacts from before that time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it certainly does feel like that, but no, there
Speaker 3: is actually a very good physical, scientific reason for this,
Speaker 3: and maybe we should take a break and then get
Speaker 3: back into it when we come back.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back.
Speaker 3: So we've been talking about the idea of a radiation
Speaker 3: shielding around a very sensitive radiation detector room. And the
Speaker 3: shielding was made out of steel that was harvested from
Speaker 3: a decommissioned World War II battleship called the USS Indiana.
Speaker 3: So the question is, why would you need to get
Speaker 3: steel from a source like that, Why couldn't you just
Speaker 3: use regular steel. Well, so let's look at how you
Speaker 3: make steel. Steel is of course a mixture of iron
Speaker 3: and carbon and sometimes other additives to create alloys with
Speaker 3: special properties, and crucially for our purposes, the process for
Speaker 3: making steel involves the incorporation of atmospheric gas. I was
Speaker 3: reading about this in an article for Chemistry World by
Speaker 3: Kit Chapman. I think it was also a podcast episode
Speaker 3: of THEIRS talking about how there are two major industrial
Speaker 3: processes for making steel in the modern world. One is
Speaker 3: known as the Bessemer process, and this involves melting the
Speaker 3: iron in a furnace and then removing impurities by blowing
Speaker 3: air through the molten metal. The other is known as
Speaker 3: the Bos process, and this is similar but it uses
Speaker 3: pure oxygen instead of air, but that oxygen is still
Speaker 3: extracted from the atmosphere, and so the problem is that
Speaker 3: either way, the gas you're blowing through the molten iron
Speaker 3: to make your steel comes from the atmosphere, from the air.
Speaker 3: And ever since nuclear weapon tests began in nineteen forty five,
Speaker 3: that has not exactly been regular air.
Speaker 1: It is bomb air, yeah, the gasly truth of it is,
Speaker 1: we find ourselves saying, oh, we need to use air
Speaker 1: in this as like all that the air we breathe,
Speaker 1: that's where we set off a whole lot of nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons and therefore changed it.
Speaker 3: That air is not good enough for our steel, for
Speaker 3: the special steel, at least.
Speaker 1: Just for our breathing and our food and our children
Speaker 1: and so forth.
Speaker 3: Now we'll get a bit more into the history of
Speaker 3: the nuclear testing era in a second here, but in short,
Speaker 3: there was a period of time in the middle of
Speaker 3: the twentieth century when lots of nuclear weapons tests were
Speaker 3: conducted around the world, and these tests seeded the atmosphere
Speaker 3: with radioactive contamination. Now, the levels today are much lower
Speaker 3: than they were, say in the mid nineteen sixties, when
Speaker 3: these tests have been going on for a decade and
Speaker 3: a half, But even today the air still contains some
Speaker 3: radioactive isotopes such as cobalt sixty and others that is
Speaker 3: left over from the hundreds of nuclear detonations that characterize
Speaker 3: the post war period. Now this had many effects, of course,
Speaker 3: the most important of which are probaly like the health
Speaker 3: effects on humans and the effects on wildlife. But another
Speaker 3: one of the effects is that for a long time
Speaker 3: you couldn't make steel via normal processes without it being
Speaker 3: potentially contaminated with radioactive particles. Not so many radioactive particles
Speaker 3: that it would be unsafe for regular use, but enough
Speaker 3: that it would be unsuitable if you were trying to
Speaker 3: make a sensitive instrument. So if you needed to make
Speaker 3: a Geiger counter or shielding for a sensitive radio bioassay chamber,
Speaker 3: So what would you do. Well, it probably wasn't impossible
Speaker 3: to make steel without environmental contaminants from nuclear tests, but
Speaker 3: it would have been expensive and difficult. And another option
Speaker 3: presented itself, which was harvesting steel made before the Trinity
Speaker 3: test in nineteen forty five, and this precious material became
Speaker 3: known in the industry as low background steel. Low background
Speaker 3: because of its low background radiation, and what would be
Speaker 3: a great source of huge quantities of pre bombed steel
Speaker 3: old naval vessels. So, to come back to the Timothy
Speaker 3: Lynch article about the radio bio assay facility in Richland,
Speaker 3: the USS Indiana was again the battleship that was sourced
Speaker 3: was the source here. It was decommissioned on September eleventh,
Speaker 3: nineteen forty seven, and then sold for scrap after it
Speaker 3: was taken off the navy list in June first, nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty two. And as the ship was dismantled, some parts
Speaker 3: were kept for ceremonial purposes, like the main mast and
Speaker 3: a forty millimeter gun were put on display on the
Speaker 3: campus of India University, Bloomington. And I know some of
Speaker 3: its anchors were put on display at various museums and memorials.
Speaker 3: You know, its compasses, wheels and all that went to
Speaker 3: places where you can honor the fallen ships.
Speaker 1: Wow, this really drives home this metaphor of the ship
Speaker 1: is a fallen beast, like the warship is a thing
Speaker 1: that once dead. You know that certain parts are kept
Speaker 1: for like ceremonial purposes or display purposes, magical purposes, and
Speaker 1: yet other things are harvested for the raw meter bone
Speaker 1: of the.
Speaker 3: Creature right, and the raw meter bone would be the steel.
Speaker 3: Here the s made up the bulk of the ship
Speaker 3: was put to low background uses. So in Indiana, VA
Speaker 3: Hospital got sixty five tons of low background steel from
Speaker 3: the Indiana and that was used for their own background
Speaker 3: radiation counting facilities. But then lynch Write's quote. In addition
Speaker 3: to the VA Hospital facility, several large sections of the hull,
Speaker 3: weighing a total of two hundred and ten tons, were
Speaker 3: also fabricated into a room. These applications were probably never
Speaker 3: imagined by the original designers of the Indiana. These sections
Speaker 3: of the hull are still being used for the original
Speaker 3: purpose as a shield, but instead of protecting against artillery
Speaker 3: shells and torpedoes, the new purpose is to shield radiation
Speaker 3: detectors from the background radiations originating from cosmic, atmospheric, man
Speaker 3: made and terrestrial sources. So what was once armour again
Speaker 3: unitions is now armour against the entire universe and its
Speaker 3: radioactive contents. The room was first constructed at the University
Speaker 3: of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City, where it
Speaker 3: was used for many years in radio biology research, and
Speaker 3: then it was finally moved to the Richland facility in
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty eight, and the Indiana was not the only
Speaker 3: battleship that became a source of low background steel. So
Speaker 3: after the Armistice in nineteen eighteen, at the conclusion of
Speaker 3: World War One, the German High Seas Fleet was ordered
Speaker 3: to report to an Allied base known as the Scapa Flow,
Speaker 3: where the naval vessels were supposed to be handed over
Speaker 3: to the British Royal Navy. But the German officers did
Speaker 3: not like that. They had a different idea and they decided,
Speaker 3: sort of as a kind of last middle finger to
Speaker 3: the British, they scuttled their ships in the harbor. They
Speaker 3: sank their own ships on purpose so that the British
Speaker 3: couldn't have them. So now there are all those shipwrecks there.
Speaker 3: In fact, the Scapa Flow is well known for its
Speaker 3: World War One era shipwrecks and has been exploited extensively
Speaker 3: as a source of low background steel. And though it's
Speaker 3: not known for sure, I've read rumors, unconfirmed rumors that
Speaker 3: some early spacecraft may have used low background steel from
Speaker 3: the scap of Flow or other res in radiation detectors.
Speaker 3: Interesting now I mentioned this earlier, but it's worth pointing
Speaker 3: out again that the atmosphere is much less radioactive today
Speaker 3: than it was at the height of nuclear testing in
Speaker 3: the middle of the century. For example, cobalt sixty has
Speaker 3: a half life of about five point three years, and
Speaker 3: there has been a lot less nuclear testing since the
Speaker 3: Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in nineteen sixty three, certainly
Speaker 3: a lot less atmospheric testing. So the atmosphere should be
Speaker 3: reduced to near pre war levels of background contamination within
Speaker 3: a reasonable amount of time, but it took decades. So Robert,
Speaker 3: when reading about this, I came across a comic strip
Speaker 3: I thought you might like. It's one of the XKCD comics,
Speaker 3: and in it they build a time machine. But it
Speaker 3: turns out the time machine requires lead from sunken Roman warships,
Speaker 3: and this is of course hard to come by, so
Speaker 3: they determined they have enough lead for one trip into
Speaker 3: the past, and in this way through time travel, Greek
Speaker 3: Fire is born. It's kind of like the the You know,
Speaker 3: if you could you only had one wish from a genie,
Speaker 3: what do you do, well? You wish for more wishes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, more wishes? Yeah. I love this little comic strip.
Speaker 1: I had not seen it before you shared it with me.
Speaker 1: But it's especially nice because I just started watching some
Speaker 1: nineties episodes of The Outer Limits, and this is the
Speaker 1: kind of sort of Outer limitsy sort of plot. Maybe
Speaker 1: skewed a little bit for comedic purposes, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's the kind of twist you expect in time
Speaker 1: travel fiction. I like it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So if I wasn't totally clear and you didn't
Speaker 3: get they travel back in time and use their future
Speaker 3: weapons on Roman warships, and of course that was the
Speaker 3: legend of Greek Fire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they take like a helicopter with a flamethrower back
Speaker 1: in time and set to light the Roman ships.
Speaker 3: Now, I guess we've made several references to this nuclear
Speaker 3: testing age in the middle of the twentieth century. Of course,
Speaker 3: this began in the nineteen forties. The first one was
Speaker 3: again the Trinity Test by the United States in July
Speaker 3: nineteen forty five. The Soviet Union first performed nuclear weapons
Speaker 3: tests in nineteen forty nine. Tests took place all over
Speaker 3: the place. They were in the upper atmosphere, underground, in
Speaker 3: the ocean, and once several other The majority of the
Speaker 3: tests were by the United States and the Soviet Union,
Speaker 3: but several other countries eventually got involved, and there were
Speaker 3: a lot of bomb tests in the end.
Speaker 1: Yes, so you're probably wondering, well, just how many? So
Speaker 1: I looked around for a good total on this. I
Speaker 1: find that the estimates vary a little bit. I mean
Speaker 1: not a lot. But according to Darryl Kimball, executive director
Speaker 1: of the Arms Control Association, which is a great source
Speaker 1: for the sort of information, this is what they had
Speaker 1: to say in a July twenty twenty report. Quote. Since
Speaker 1: the first nuclear test explosion on July sixteenth, nineteen forty five,
Speaker 1: at least eight nations have detonated two thousand and fifty
Speaker 1: six nuclear test explosions at dozens of test sites, including
Speaker 1: Lopnor in China, the atolls of the Pacific, Nevada, Algeria,
Speaker 1: where France conducted its first nuclear device, Western Australia, where
Speaker 1: the UK exploded nuclear weapons, the South Atlantic Semipalitans in Kazakhstan,
Speaker 1: across Russia, and elsewhere.
Speaker 3: So that's over two thousand nuclear test explosions in total.
Speaker 3: And if you're looking specifically at atmospheric tests alone, which
Speaker 3: are often considered like the worst kind in terms of
Speaker 3: proliferating contaminants into the atmosphere. Of course those would be
Speaker 3: There were definitely more than five hundred atmospheric tests.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you start breaking down the numbers, the US
Speaker 1: conducted most of these with let's see some two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifteen atmospheric tests and eight hundred and fifteen underground tests.
Speaker 1: The USSR slash Russia ranks second with two hundred and
Speaker 1: nineteen atmospheric tests and four hundred and ninety six underground
Speaker 1: test and the remaining ranking goes like this. You got
Speaker 1: France than the UK and China. They're tied UK and
Speaker 1: China with a total of forty five tests each. Then
Speaker 1: you have North Korea, India and Pakistan. The United States
Speaker 1: is of course responsible for the only wartime detonation of
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons as in utilized as weapons against another people.
Speaker 1: Two bombs deployed against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Speaker 1: killing between one hundred and twenty nine thousand and two
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty six thousand people, mostly civilians. Needless to say,
Speaker 1: those were both atmospheric detonations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and of course with each of these tests there
Speaker 3: is going to be more radioactive contamination entering the atmosphere. Now,
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty three, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty
Speaker 3: to ban tests in the atmosphere and underwater, so basically
Speaker 3: it banned all except underground tests. It did not really
Speaker 3: stop nuclear proliferation, but it did massively decrease the dispersal
Speaker 3: of radionuclides into the atmosphere. Now, there's been another perhaps unexpected,
Speaker 3: interesting environmental side effect of the nuclear testing age, which
Speaker 3: is how it has affected atmospheric levels of carbon fourteen
Speaker 3: and the way that this has turned into an unexpected
Speaker 3: number of scientific tools that can be used to study
Speaker 3: the natural world. So, in nature, carbon fourteen is a
Speaker 3: radioactive isotope of carbon that is generated in Earth's atmosphere
Speaker 3: every minute of every day. The Earth is of course
Speaker 3: bombarded by cosmic rays, and cosmic rays are charged particles,
Speaker 3: usually protons and atomic nuclei, which are emitted from high
Speaker 3: energy sources, including the Sun, but also places far away,
Speaker 3: usually traveling near the speed of light. And when one
Speaker 3: of these high energy particles enters the atmosphere, it sometimes
Speaker 3: strikes atoms to generate free neutrons, and a free neutron
Speaker 3: then combines with a regular atom of nitrogen fourteen to
Speaker 3: produce an atom of carbon fourteen, and this carbon fourteen
Speaker 3: then pairs up with oxygen to create carbon fourteen CO two,
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of carbon fourteen in the atmosphere
Speaker 3: is just produced at a steady rate naturally as the
Speaker 3: cosmic rays are coming in, and this carbon fourteen CO
Speaker 3: two gets into everything that ingests atmospheric carbon. So plants
Speaker 3: suck in CO two with a predictable amount of carbon
Speaker 3: fourteen and they use that carbon to make their bodies,
Speaker 3: and then the trees and the grass and the corn
Speaker 3: are all made out of carbon content that is retrieved
Speaker 3: from the air and has a certain amount of carbon
Speaker 3: fourteen in it. So if you do a molecular analysis
Speaker 3: of a plant, you will have a certain proportion of
Speaker 3: carbon fourteen in there, because cause the atmosphere does, about
Speaker 3: one out of every trillion carbon atoms is a carbon
Speaker 3: fourteen atom. But of course it doesn't stop at plants,
Speaker 3: because we also exist in a carbon fourteen generating atmosphere.
Speaker 3: You know, all the chemistry on Earth is sort of interconnected.
Speaker 3: So we eat those plants, and we eat animals that
Speaker 3: eat those plants, so our bodies also have a predictable
Speaker 3: amount of carbon fourteen content. And as I said earlier,
Speaker 3: carbon fourteen is radioactive, which is another way of saying
Speaker 3: it's unstable. It has a known half life, so we
Speaker 3: know that it decays into other isotopes at a regular,
Speaker 3: predictable rate. So if you die and you stop breathing
Speaker 3: and stop eating, the amount of carbon fourteen in your
Speaker 3: body will steadily decrease over the years. And what scientists
Speaker 3: figured out in the twentieth century was that you could
Speaker 3: use the amount of carbon fourteen in a formerly living
Speaker 3: object or an object formerly incorporating a known percentage of
Speaker 3: atmospheric carbon, to see approximately how long it had been
Speaker 3: since that organism stopped ingesting carbon from the environment, in
Speaker 3: other words, when it died. And this has been amazingly
Speaker 3: useful to the historical sciences. This has created the era
Speaker 3: of carbon fourteen dating. It's been enormously useful to archaeologists
Speaker 3: and all kinds of other scientists to analyze and date
Speaker 3: organisms and substances from the past. But nuclear testing, beginning
Speaker 3: in the nineteen forties and especially since the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 3: has introduced new wrinkles into this. It has introduced new
Speaker 3: layers of radiocarbon science, both some complications to the existing
Speaker 3: radiocarbon science and new tools that scientists couldn't have predicted
Speaker 3: at first that they would have. And so next, I
Speaker 3: just wanted to talk a bit about a really, really
Speaker 3: excellent article in The Atlantic by Carl Zimmer. Can we
Speaker 3: say friend of the show? Carl Zimmer? He's a former
Speaker 3: guest of the show, Carl Zimmer.
Speaker 1: Well, let's see, we laid out specific rules for this
Speaker 1: in the past, right if you're on the show once,
Speaker 1: you're a former guest or a previous guest of the show. Okay,
Speaker 1: I think you have to be on two times to
Speaker 1: be a friend of the show, or is it three times?
Speaker 1: I can't remember how that status.
Speaker 3: Side delar, we break. We've been the rules all the time.
Speaker 3: Carl's one of my favorite science writers. He wrote an
Speaker 3: excellent book called She Has Her Mother's Laugh that we
Speaker 3: talked about on the show. And this article is just fantastic.
Speaker 3: But it's called nuclear Tests Marked Life on Earth with
Speaker 3: a radioactive Spike, And this article, of course is worth
Speaker 3: reading on its own. But I wanted to talk about
Speaker 3: a few things that Carl gets into here about some
Speaker 3: of the environmental effects of nuclear testing, specifically relating to
Speaker 3: carbon fourteen.
Speaker 1: So Carl Zimmer, in addition to having been a wonderful
Speaker 1: and just cheerful guest of the show, is just a
Speaker 1: wonderful writer. As always. I want to read just a
Speaker 1: little bit from this article here to set the stage. Quote.
Speaker 1: Carbon fourteen, produced by hydrogen bombs spread over the entire world.
Speaker 1: It worked itself into the atmosphere, the oceans, and practically
Speaker 1: every living thing. As it spread, it exposed secrets. It
Speaker 1: can reveal when we were born. It tracks hidden changes
Speaker 1: to our hearts and brains. It lights up the cryptic
Speaker 1: channels that join the entire biosphere into a single network
Speaker 1: of chemical flux. This man made burst of carbon fourteen
Speaker 1: has been such a revelation that scientists referred to it
Speaker 1: as quote the bomb spike. Only now is the bomb
Speaker 1: spike close to disappearing, But as it vanishes, scientists have
Speaker 1: found a new use for it to track global warming,
Speaker 1: the next self inflicted threat to our survival.
Speaker 3: The part of this that sticks with me the most
Speaker 3: is where he talks about how looking at carbon fourteen
Speaker 3: in the way it penetrates the whole biosphere. Really, it's
Speaker 3: one of those you know, like the brain lights up
Speaker 3: with the sudden realization that, to use a sort of
Speaker 3: stoner cliche, everything's connected. But it really is, like literally
Speaker 3: an scientific way is there is a single sort of
Speaker 3: chemical flux that takes place all throughout this planet.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I keep coming back to this, this basic like this,
Speaker 1: this this sort of you know, arguably hippie notion, this
Speaker 1: everything's connected, We're all one world, one people, et cetera,
Speaker 1: which I know is something that everyone has heard so
Speaker 1: many times that even if you believe in it wholeheartedly,
Speaker 1: it can it can sound a little limp, you know,
Speaker 1: in your ears. And yet like that's I mean, that
Speaker 1: is the reality that drives through in all of this science,
Speaker 1: and it stands in such harsh contrast to the way
Speaker 1: certain individuals in like the political and the military sphere
Speaker 1: view nuclear weapons. The idea that like, you know, certainly
Speaker 1: we can say a head of state using a nuclear
Speaker 1: weapon against a city within their own nation, that would
Speaker 1: be that would be ridiculous, that would be monstrous. But
Speaker 1: it's but but then those you know, people will say, oh,
Speaker 1: but do you use it again to another nation and
Speaker 1: other people that's less monstrous. But no, no, it's all
Speaker 1: interconnected in a scientifically verifiable way. I mean, it's one
Speaker 1: atmosphere at the very base level, without getting into some
Speaker 1: of the other issues we're going to explore, and just
Speaker 1: the basic ethical framework of the choice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it makes me think of that commonly
Speaker 3: sided thing about astronauts very often, you know, seeing the
Speaker 3: Earth from space and then suddenly feeling more of a
Speaker 3: kinship with all of humankind and not feeling nearly as much,
Speaker 3: not feeling the reality of national borders and things like
Speaker 3: that nearly as much anymore. It's funny how easily those
Speaker 3: illusions can be dissolved just by sort of a single
Speaker 3: visual impression or a single realization about, say, how chemistry works,
Speaker 3: that you're suddenly like, oh, wait a minute, you know,
Speaker 3: there's just sort of earth life, and we really need
Speaker 3: to make this work and not create problems that aren't
Speaker 3: necessary to begin with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, those lines on those maps, they really do nothing
Speaker 1: against radioactive particles and certainly concepts such as nuclear fallout
Speaker 1: or a climate change.
Speaker 3: So going into Carl Zimmer's article, as I said, it's
Speaker 3: worth reading the article in full. It's really fantastic. He
Speaker 3: begins by telling the story of the castle Bravo test
Speaker 3: in nineteen fifty four, which is both awe inspiring and
Speaker 3: horrifying and heartbreaking. But later on, when he's getting into
Speaker 3: the scientific history of carbon fourteen, he talks about the
Speaker 3: Chicago physicist Willard Libby, who is a Nobel Prize winning
Speaker 3: or did I say physicist, I think he would be
Speaker 3: called a physical chemist. He was somebody who studied radioactive
Speaker 3: elements and was one of the major developers of carbon
Speaker 3: fourteen dating. And one of the really interesting things that
Speaker 3: Libby does is that Libby ends up comparing measurements of
Speaker 3: methane from say living current sources. Say methane comeing off
Speaker 3: of a sewage plant, so this is going to be
Speaker 3: sewage from things that are currently alive, versus methane coming
Speaker 3: off of fossil fuels like oil that has been there
Speaker 3: for millions of years. And what he showed was that, say,
Speaker 3: the methane coming off of the excrita produced by living
Speaker 3: humans is something close to about the atmospheric level. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: what's coming the methane coming off of fossil fuels, coming
Speaker 3: off of say oil that's been there for millions of years,
Speaker 3: has essentially no carbon fourteen in it right, because it's
Speaker 3: been there for so long that all of the radioactive
Speaker 3: isotopes of carbon have decayed, so it's just got regular
Speaker 3: carbon in it. And there was some other really interesting
Speaker 3: experiments too, but one of the things I wanted to
Speaker 3: focus on was Carl's profiling of the New Zealand physicist
Speaker 3: Ethyl Rafter. So Rafter was picking up on Libby's research
Speaker 3: and he was interested in radiocarbon dating. In its early days,
Speaker 3: he used it to test the bones of extinct birds
Speaker 3: and ancient volcanic eruptions. But he also tried to help
Speaker 3: refine the technique itself by performing measurements of the radio
Speaker 3: carbon in the atmosphere. And he would do this by
Speaker 3: setting out a tray of lye on top of it
Speaker 3: on a hilltop, and the lye would capture CO two
Speaker 3: from the air, and then he would measure the atmospheric
Speaker 3: levels of carbon fourteen or the ratio. Of course, whenever
Speaker 3: we're talking about the levels of carbon fourteen, we're talking
Speaker 3: about the ratio of carbon fourteen to regular carbon. And
Speaker 3: so Rafter would have been doing his research in the
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties and what he expected was that levels of
Speaker 3: radio carbon in the atmosphere would sort of bounce up
Speaker 3: and down, there'd just be sort of a natural fluctuation
Speaker 3: around a baseline. But instead he found an extremely steady trend.
Speaker 3: The level of carbon fourteen was just continually going up.
Speaker 3: And what was the reason. Well, it was the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 3: So to quote from the article, the Castle Bravo test
Speaker 3: and the ones that followed had to be the source.
Speaker 3: They were turning the atmosphere upside down. Instead of cosmic
Speaker 3: rays falling from space, they were sending neutrons up to
Speaker 3: the sky, creating a huge new supply of radiocarbon. In
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty seven, Rafter published as results in the journal Science.
Speaker 3: The implications were immediately clear and astonishing. Man made carbon
Speaker 3: fourteen was spreading across the planet from test sites in
Speaker 3: the Pacific and the Arctic. It was even passing from
Speaker 3: the air into the oceans and trees. And when they checked,
Speaker 3: they found increasing levels of radiocarbon in everything, in tree
Speaker 3: rings in Texas, in snails in Holland, in the lungs
Speaker 3: of recently deceased people from New York, even in the
Speaker 3: blood of living people. There's just extra carbon fourteen in everything.
Speaker 3: And as bomb radiocarbon. So the bomb radiocarbon would be
Speaker 3: would be up in the upper atmosphere, and as it
Speaker 3: settles back down to Earth, it becomes a sort of
Speaker 3: tracerle that can be used as a scientific tool. So
Speaker 3: Carl quotes from somebody named Steve Beauprey, who's an oceanographer
Speaker 3: at Stonybrook University, and he's quoted in the article saying
Speaker 3: that carbon fourteen is inextricably linked to our understanding of
Speaker 3: how water moves. So I thought this was so interesting.
Speaker 3: So in the nineteen seventies, oceanographers found that there was
Speaker 3: bomb radiocarbon that was distributed throughout the top one thousand
Speaker 3: meters of the ocean's water column. So if you go
Speaker 3: down one thousand meters, you're going to find atmospheric radiocarbon
Speaker 3: the elevated levels that you'd get from a bomb. But
Speaker 3: then if you go down below that suddenly not so
Speaker 3: much anymore. And this became a really important piece of
Speaker 3: evidence in estimating the or in establishing that the ocean,
Speaker 3: like the atmosphere, had layers, and that water was primarily
Speaker 3: circulated within rather than between these layers. Carl writes, quote
Speaker 3: the warm relatively fresh water on the surface of the
Speaker 3: ocean glides over the cold, salty depths. These surface currents
Speaker 3: become saltier as they evaporate, and eventually, at a few
Speaker 3: crucial spots on the planet, these streams get so dense
Speaker 3: that they fall to the bottom of the ocean. The
Speaker 3: bomb radiocarbon from Castle Bravo didn't start plunging down into
Speaker 3: the depths of the North Atlantic until the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: when John Clark this character from the Castle Bravo test
Speaker 3: was two decades into retirement. It's still down there where
Speaker 3: it will be carried along the seafloor by bottom hugging
Speaker 3: ocean currents for hundreds of years before it rises to
Speaker 3: the light of day. And he points out also that
Speaker 3: lots of ocean life bears the seal of the bomb spike. Again,
Speaker 3: this is from atmospheric tests, so this is not even
Speaker 3: underwater test. This is atmospheric tests coming down into the ocean.
Speaker 3: Bomb radiocarbon falls into the ocean. It infiltrates everything from
Speaker 3: algae to the rings of calcium carbonate within coral growth,
Speaker 3: and then it forms this kind of slime so quote.
Speaker 3: The living things in the upper reaches of the ocean
Speaker 3: release organic carbon that falls gently to the seafloor, a
Speaker 3: jumble of protoplasmic goo, dolphin droppings, starfish eggs, and all
Speaker 3: manner of detritus that scientists call marine snow. In recent decades,
Speaker 3: that marine snow has become more radioactive. In the article,
Speaker 3: he also profiles a researcher named Mary Gaylord who works
Speaker 3: at the National Ocean Science's Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility, which
Speaker 3: is known as no SAMs for short, and that's at
Speaker 3: the woods Hull, which is where Hooper comes from in Jaws,
Speaker 3: Oh huh. And she measures radiocarbon and everything from bat
Speaker 3: guano to fish eyes. There's a lot about fish eyes
Speaker 3: in this article, which is more interesting than you'd think
Speaker 3: because surprisingly the study of radiocarbon and fish eye lenses
Speaker 3: can tell us a lot like the cores of fish
Speaker 3: eye land lenses have the same levels of carbon fourteen
Speaker 3: as the fish did when they were still egg So
Speaker 3: it's a really good age indicator. And this knowledge was
Speaker 3: used by Danish researchers in twenty sixteen to create an
Speaker 3: aging metric for these cold bottom dwelling animals, the greenland sharks,
Speaker 3: which you might have read about them because they grow
Speaker 3: so old. This helped confirm the discovery that these animals
Speaker 3: could live to be almost four hundred years old. So
Speaker 3: a lot of these are pre bomb sharks. And actually
Speaker 3: this also applies to humans. People born in the early
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties have more radiocarbon in the lenses in their
Speaker 3: eyes than people born before the nuclear testing age, and
Speaker 3: people born in the years since then have less and
Speaker 3: less as time passes since the Partial Test Ban Treaty.
Speaker 3: Bomb radiocarbon can also be used to date human teeth.
Speaker 3: But there's a very sobering fact that's discussed at the
Speaker 3: end of Zimmer's article, which is that the proportion of
Speaker 3: carbon fourteen currently in the atmosphere is actually a bit
Speaker 3: lower than would be predicted by the known nuclear tests
Speaker 3: and the known rate of decay and absorption by the
Speaker 3: Earth and seas. So what makes the difference, Like why
Speaker 3: is there less carbon fourteen than we think there should be?
Speaker 3: And it turns out there's an answer to that. The
Speaker 3: answer is fossil fuels. Remember how I mentioned earlier that
Speaker 3: the methane coming off of oil had basically no carbon
Speaker 3: fourteen in it because the oil is so old. All
Speaker 3: of the carbon fourteen has already decayed. It's gone. So
Speaker 3: as we release carbon from these ancient carbon sources into
Speaker 3: the atmosphere, we're putting a much higher percentage than normal
Speaker 3: of regular carbon up there, which actually dilutes what carbon
Speaker 3: fourteen there is. Carlzember points out that in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 3: which was the year of the Castle Bravo test, humans
Speaker 3: emitted six billion tons of carbon dioxide that year. Quote,
Speaker 3: in twenty eighteen, humans emitted about thirty seven billion tons,
Speaker 3: which is more than six times more as Willard Libby
Speaker 3: first discovered. This fossil fuel has no radiocarbon left. By
Speaker 3: burning it, we are lowering the level of radiocarbon in
Speaker 3: the atmosphere like a bartender watering down the top shelf liquor,
Speaker 3: which is so strange. So the remaining signature of humanity's
Speaker 3: first great sort of civilization level threat technology is being
Speaker 3: diluted by the ever increasing mark of our other one,
Speaker 3: by the second one. Wow, all right, I guess we
Speaker 3: need to take a quick break, but we'll be right
Speaker 3: back with more.
Speaker 1: So I have another example of a specific resulting scientific
Speaker 1: discovery from a nuclear test that I ran across and
Speaker 1: it concerns the test known as Starfish Prime. So this
Speaker 1: was a one point for megaton thermonuclear device launched two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty miles or four hundred kilometers into the
Speaker 1: sky near Johnston A Tall. So it is the largest
Speaker 1: outer space nuclear detonation ever committed. It occurred around eleven
Speaker 1: pm local time, this would be in that region, and
Speaker 1: the thermonuclear sphere burned like a new sun in the
Speaker 1: night sky. And if you look up Starfish Prime online
Speaker 1: you can see photos that were taken from Honolulu, Hawaii
Speaker 1: at the time, and it does look like a sun
Speaker 1: in the sky. Wow. Afterwards, an aura could be seen
Speaker 1: as well for thousands of kilometers. It also resulted, and
Speaker 1: this kind of comes down to one of the key findings.
Speaker 1: It resulted in an electromagnetic pulse or an EMP, something
Speaker 1: that had been suspected by scientists, but this was really
Speaker 1: the proof in the pudding. It ended up disrupting the
Speaker 1: flow of electricity for hundreds of kilometers around it, with
Speaker 1: its most of its disruptions felt in Hawaii itself. It
Speaker 1: also damaged six satellites which ultimately failed, and other failures
Speaker 1: might be link to Starfish Prime. As well, so this
Speaker 1: was ended up being an effect that was far stronger
Speaker 1: than anticipated. Now, now that's all interesting, but obviously a
Speaker 1: test like this expand is going to expand on our
Speaker 1: understanding of the weapon technology being tested. But the side
Speaker 1: effect here is that the CD one oh nine tracers
Speaker 1: released by the detonation allowed scientists to work out some
Speaker 1: of the seasonal mixing rate of polar and tropical air masses.
Speaker 1: So again comes down to the fluid dynamics of in
Speaker 1: our earlier example, the ocean, and here with atmospheric movement.
Speaker 3: This also touches on something that comes up with the
Speaker 3: Castle Bravo test and a number of other tests, you know,
Speaker 3: the Castle Bravo being the hydrogen bomb that turned out
Speaker 3: to be a much bigger explosive yield than was predicted.
Speaker 3: And this is not just a scientific curiosity, and this
Speaker 3: is something that had tragic consequences for real people like
Speaker 3: the people of the wrongolap Atoll, who were pretty nearby
Speaker 3: where the Castle Bravo test was conducted, were affected horribly
Speaker 3: with by like fallout from the test just because it
Speaker 3: was so much bigger than the scientists thought it was
Speaker 3: going to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you see this trend with a number of the
Speaker 1: earlier tests where they don't get quite what they were expecting,
Speaker 1: or you know, it's larger, or it doesn't go off
Speaker 1: exactly the way it was planned. And and indeed, in many
Speaker 1: cases it means people were sickened, people's health suffered because
Speaker 1: of these tests. The environments were tainted by the radiation
Speaker 1: are still tainted in some cases the cases people have
Speaker 1: been dislocated and have not yet been able to return.
Speaker 1: You know, we believe we're calling this episode the atomic scar.
Speaker 1: But a scar, we tend to think of is something
Speaker 1: that is visible but is fully healed. And the thing
Speaker 1: about a lot of these tests is that it's it's
Speaker 1: not so much a scar, but it is like a
Speaker 1: thick scab, and if we are to pick at it again,
Speaker 1: we may bleed. In fact, we may bleed for the
Speaker 1: duration of our lives sort of situations. So so yeah,
Speaker 1: these kind of coming back to what we said earlier about,
Speaker 1: you know, about the world in which we conduct these tests.
Speaker 1: You know, we might think, oh, we're not setting this
Speaker 1: off in the house, We're setting it off in the backyard,
Speaker 1: you know, but but ultimately, you know, the wilds of
Speaker 1: Nevada or some islands you know off the coast of Australia.
Speaker 1: These are these are part of the world we live
Speaker 1: in and it's part of the atmosphere that we all breathe,
Speaker 1: part of the ocean that we all depend on.
Speaker 3: And even underground tests are not without some environmental consequences.
Speaker 3: I mean not nearly as much as say atmospheric or
Speaker 3: underwater test, but underground tests too can can produce leakages.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, on the subject of underwater tests, I was
Speaker 1: reading a little bit more about these and these were
Speaker 1: banned by the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three, but the US, the UK, and the USSR
Speaker 1: managed to conduct a total of nine before that that
Speaker 1: band came into place, and these included shallow detonations to
Speaker 1: see how the weapon would impact ships, as well as
Speaker 1: deep detonations to see how they might be used against
Speaker 1: submarines or how they would impact submarines. The deepest was
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifty five Wigwam test at a depth of
Speaker 1: two thousand feet six hundred and ten meters. Now, an
Speaker 1: author by the name of Sarah Lascal wrote a really
Speaker 1: good article about the US tests for Atlas Obscura pointing
Speaker 1: out that the water is what really made the tests
Speaker 1: more problematic, because instead of spreading radioactive particles through a
Speaker 1: wider atmospheric region, it instead released an immediate radioactive water cloud.
Speaker 1: So the ships used in these tests were highly radiated
Speaker 1: and impossible to clean, so they were just towed out
Speaker 1: to the deep and scuttled. Now Lascal writes that quote,
Speaker 1: the Atomic Energy Commission would not sign off on it
Speaker 1: until it was clear that no one in the United
Speaker 1: States or Mexico was at risk and that the test
Speaker 1: area was relatively free of marine life. But the test
Speaker 1: certainly killed fish in other organisms. I read an account
Speaker 1: by a UK veteran who was of course working with
Speaker 1: some of those UK tests, claims that men were sent
Speaker 1: out in boats to collect dead irradiated fish after the
Speaker 1: test was conducted. And this particular test would have been
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifty two Hurricane test in the Montebello Islands,
Speaker 1: as this was the only UK underwater nuclear test that
Speaker 1: was conducted.
Speaker 3: And of course in a lot of these tests in
Speaker 3: the Pacific Islands and stuff, even when the explosion was
Speaker 3: carried out in the atmosphere, it was still extremely damaging
Speaker 3: to marine life. Like yeah, there's a part in Carl
Speaker 3: Zimmer's article that we were talking about earlier where he
Speaker 3: talks about with the Castle Bravo test in fifty fourte
Speaker 3: within seconds, the fireball had lofted ten million tons of
Speaker 3: pulverized coral reef coated in radioactive material.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, I mean these atmospheric tests were also devastating
Speaker 1: to these areas. One area that frequently comes up is
Speaker 1: Bikini Atoll. This is where the first underwater test was
Speaker 1: conducted Baker, but also you had many other atmospheric tests
Speaker 1: that took place there as well. And what's interesting here
Speaker 1: is that there have been some studies over the past
Speaker 1: decade or so that have really looked at how the
Speaker 1: local environment has bounced back, and indeed it does show
Speaker 1: that nature can be very resistant to even this kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, intense damage. That they say that corals have
Speaker 1: recolonized bomb craters. Other life forms are doing well, even
Speaker 1: if there are some curious mutations like sharks missing their
Speaker 1: second dorsal fin that sort of thing. The general belief
Speaker 1: is that at least with Bikini, that the worst affected
Speaker 1: fish died off decades ago, and today's fish populations are
Speaker 1: only exposed to low radiation levels as they frequently swim
Speaker 1: in and out. Plus, these are also areas that have
Speaker 1: been left alone by humans, they more so than other
Speaker 1: marine areas. Now one should also note that the occupants
Speaker 1: of the area around Bikini Atoll and the Marshall Islands
Speaker 1: were displaced by the test, some one hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: seven people, I believe, and they've never been able to return.
Speaker 1: Their dislocation was supposed to be temporary. But then on
Speaker 1: top of that, children in the Marshall Islands were observed
Speaker 1: to experience thyroid problems long after nuclear tests ended. Now
Speaker 1: we've thus far been talking about nuclear testing, and of
Speaker 1: course beyond that, I think we can hardly talk about
Speaker 1: nuclear testing without at least briefly discussing the prospect of
Speaker 1: nuclear war itself, because that is ultimately what the testing
Speaker 1: is all about. Now you can make the argument that
Speaker 1: ultimately it's about preventing that sort of warfare from taking
Speaker 1: place by making sure you have a terrifying number of
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons in your armament, or the reverse is true,
Speaker 1: that you were to developing these weapons which may potentially
Speaker 1: be used. Any nuclear weapon is a potential holocaust, you know,
Speaker 1: contained within the warhead, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess the advocates of the pro nuclear
Speaker 3: armament theory would say, well, what we did is that
Speaker 3: we did these tests so that we wouldn't have to
Speaker 3: have actual wars, and the tests discouraged, say the United
Speaker 3: States and the Soviet Union from actually ever initiating a real,
Speaker 3: you know, shooting war with each other. Of course, there
Speaker 3: were plenty of proxy conflicts and all that. I mean,
Speaker 3: in a way you can only you know, you can
Speaker 3: never know how sure to be about counterfactuals like that.
Speaker 3: People are saying, well, things would have been worse if
Speaker 3: we hadn't had the nuclear threat looming over us to
Speaker 3: discourage us from going to war. I guess it's hard
Speaker 3: to know whether that's true or not. But I guess
Speaker 3: it's also though, it's just hard to calculate costs and
Speaker 3: benefits when you're thinking about when you know, the potential
Speaker 3: cost is like a civilization ending worldwide calamity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that indeed, you know, to come back to
Speaker 1: the idea of the world changing forever, I mean that
Speaker 1: is one of the frequently touched upon aspects of the
Speaker 1: whole scenario is that it is humanity's ability to truly
Speaker 1: destroy itself and ultimately within a very short period of time. Now,
Speaker 1: I know that this kind of brings us to a
Speaker 1: kind of a dark corner for the end of the podcast,
Speaker 1: And I know a lot of you don't like considering
Speaker 1: such possibilities. I don't like considering such possibilities either. If
Speaker 1: you are troubled by such possibilities, I would urge you
Speaker 1: to consider following a group like the Arms Control Association
Speaker 1: at Armscontrol dot org or any number of other anti
Speaker 1: nuclear weapon or nuclear weapon control or disarmament groups. And
Speaker 1: if you're in a position to use your vote to
Speaker 1: favor candidates political candidates who take nuclear testing and nuclear
Speaker 1: war seriously and are committed to certainly not testing them,
Speaker 1: but even you know, not even raising the question of
Speaker 1: their deployment or questioning why they shouldn't be used and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing, then you should you should do so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, the Cold War may be over, but
Speaker 3: there are still lots and lots of nuclear weapons out there,
Speaker 3: and and fantasizing about nuclear escalation is not a joke.
Speaker 3: It's not it's not something to play around with.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, especially since I think we've touched on some of
Speaker 1: this on the show before. Like the the the the
Speaker 1: barriers between our current world and one of nuclear warfare.
Speaker 1: Those those barriers are not as thick as as sometimes
Speaker 1: we might think they are. Like the safeguards in place
Speaker 1: are are not that robust. We need to do everything
Speaker 1: we can to to to to lessen the possibility that
Speaker 1: such a thing could come to pass, either in a
Speaker 1: large scale, certainly, but even at a quote unquote small scale.
Speaker 1: All right, on that note, we're going to go ahead
Speaker 1: and close it out. In the meantime, we'd of course
Speaker 1: love to hear from you your thoughts about nuclear testing,
Speaker 1: nuclear weaponry, et cetera, or just sort of the overall
Speaker 1: impact on all of this on our world and our
Speaker 1: culture in the many ways the world would not be
Speaker 1: the same. In the meantime, if you want to check
Speaker 1: out other episodes of our show, you can do so
Speaker 1: by finding us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever
Speaker 1: that happens to be. We just asked the U rate,
Speaker 1: review and subscribe.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 3: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 3: with us with feedback on this episode or any other
Speaker 3: to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello.
Speaker 3: You can email us at contact That's Stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Rattator