Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms That Time the U.S. Decided to Nuke Space: Starfish Prime (with Chris Winterbauer & Lizzie Bassett of What Went Wrong) About this episode Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer are film afficianados. This week, they help Ed uncover cinematic treasures that just may be synonomous with a very spooky moment in American hubris; the time we decided to literally NUKE SPACE! Find out what "Dr. Strangelove," "The China Syndrome," and "The Iron Giant" all have in common with today's SNAFU built for Cinemascope.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Operation Fishbowl sounds less like a nuclear testing program and more like something you'd win tickets to see at SeaWorld.
0:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't know which is more depressing.
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0:57 Speaker 04 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.
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1:58 Speaker 00 Welcome to Snafu, the show about history's greatest screw-ups. I'm Ed Helms and today we'll be covering Starfish Prime. This was actually a royally nuclear screw-up in our history. I'm joined today by a dynamic duo. Both are talented artists combining skills of writing, directing, producing, and together they host the critically acclaimed podcast, What Went Wrong?, which you guys have self-described as a bi-weekly podcast exploring movie-making mayhem behind your favorite films. Welcome to Snafu, Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett.
2:37 Speaker 07 Thank you.
2:37 Speaker 01 Thank you so much for having us, Ed. Although we have since gone weekly, we will say now, we need to update our text clearly and we are just gonna start off with just blowing your audience away. They can have twice as much of us as they thought they might get previously, so that's exciting.
2:56 Speaker 00 Do not correct me on my own podcast. How dare you. What are you?
3:00 Speaker 01 If I may. A couple of other mistakes that we should just start off with.
3:06 Speaker 00 Did I say your names correctly?
3:07 Speaker 01 Winterbauer.
3:09 Speaker 00 That's actually an important thing to point out. You guys have a really cool podcast. Tell us a little bit about it.
3:15 Speaker 01 Lizzie?
3:16 Speaker 07 Thank you. Well, yeah, each episode of our podcast dives into the story behind a different movie and the theory is sort of that any movie is a miracle because of how incredibly hard they are to make, even the bad ones. And so we're just exploring, you know, the absolute manic mayhem behind movies, which you two both, I think, know a lot more about from experience than I do.
3:40 Speaker 01 Ed knows a lot more than me.
3:41 Speaker 07 I just research it. Yes. Yes, he does.
3:43 Speaker 01 But I know, Ed, I'm sure you can appreciate, like, I'm sure you would agree, like, nobody goes into a movie hoping they're gonna make a bad movie. Nobody wants to make a bad movie. And in fact, sometimes you think you're making a great movie and it just still doesn't turn out very good. And sometimes you think you're making a terrible movie and somehow it turns out great. And so it's like, it's, I just want, I remember I used to be such an asshole when I would watch movies and think, I would have done this, I would have done that. And then I- And I hit my first test screening and there was that asshole who said, "You should have done this." And I said, "You don't think I know that, sir."
4:15 Speaker 00 Right, right.
4:16 Speaker 01 I couldn't. And so we hope that we can get people to appreciate movies and the people that make them that much more because they're just so hard. They're so hard.
4:25 Speaker 00 I love that. In particular, I love how you're just making such a great point about how humbling the movie making experience is. And it does teach you to appreciate movies in a different way. The more hours and days and weeks and months that you've spent on set, the more you realize like, this is incredible. The amount of cooperation and collaboration and luck that it takes to pull something together. It's just crazy that any movie actually gets made. Well, I'm really excited to dig into today's story because it feels like something out of a movie or that should become a movie. I'm sure screenwriters have been pulling details from this event for plenty of dooms worth of applause over the
5:07 Speaker 00 years. Today's snafu takes us deep into the paranoid void of the Cold War at the point where the space race meets the arms race. So picture this, you're on vacation in Hawaii. Maybe you're having dinner at a beachfront bar in Waikiki. It's a warm July night in 1962. You're listening to a Navy band play some classy dance tunes when suddenly a massive flash lights up the sky. The band goes quiet. A red glow streaks across the sky like someone just opened a zipper to hell. It's not aliens, although that would be a reasonable guess.
5:50 Speaker 00 This is America, baby. That's right. We are literally nuking space in this moment. Apparently during the Cold War, literally nothing was off the table.
6:01 Speaker 07 Is this a Michael Bay movie?
6:08 Speaker 00 It's 1962. Cold War had pushed the US and the Soviet Union into this intense arms race. It turns out it extended far beyond Earth. So scientists were asking really hard questions like, what happens if we set off a nuclear bomb in outer space? Because obviously, if you aren't sure of the answer, the safest and most productive solution is just to do it and nuke it and see what happens. Because that's science. This is, you know, that's, I guess it's like using our entire universe as a guinea pig feels safe to me.
6:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, right. It's a closed system. Let's, let's put some radiation inside of it and see what happens. You know, it's a, we're gonna shake the snow globe with some uranium.
6:50 Speaker 00 We're a resilient species, right?
6:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:53 Speaker 00 We can handle our own, our own fallout.
6:55 Speaker 07 Is there a why here? Like, is there a reason why it would be advantageous to be able to nuke space?
7:01 Speaker 00 It's a great question, Lizzie, and I think that the answer is just, the Cold War brought out terrible judgment in, especially in our sort of military weapons testing apparatus. People got real excited about nuclear capabilities and just wanted to see what they could do. And so, of course, they just go way out over the middle of the Pacific and just start setting off nuclear bombs. I think they just wanted to see if this was, would be an effective weapon. It turns out it kind of is, but in a way that no one quite expected, so.
7:35 Speaker 01 And at this time, too, we're detonating, I mean, I believe we've detonated nukes underwater, we've detonated them underground, we've detonated them at varying altitudes above a theoretical populated area. It's like, what is the maximal effect that we can create by detonating them in these various ways?
7:54 Speaker 00 And just logically, it seems like the higher you go, the greater the impact to Earth.
8:01 Speaker 01 Certainly in terms of fallout, right? You would expect.
8:04 Speaker 00 And so it just seems, the higher you go, the dumber the experiment.
8:08 Speaker 07 Yeah, yeah.
8:10 Speaker 00 We're not there yet.
8:11 Speaker 07 The least effective potentially at what you're trying to do. Like if this is ideally something targeted, the higher you go, the wider swath it covers. Right?
8:19 Speaker 00 That's the logic and, and that's why they did it out over the Pacific without a lot of expectation or knowledge for knowledge about what could happen. Turns out a lot. So ever since World War II, the US and the Soviet Union had been on again, off again, testing nukes. And in the late 50s, the Soviets had decided tests were very much back on. In response, the US launched Operation Fishbowl. It was a series of high altitude nuclear tests using Thor missiles. Fishbowl was part of a larger project, which involved 36 nuclear detonations in the Pacific, all done in 1962 alone. Fishbowl launches had their own maritime themed code names, bluegill, starfish, kingfish, et cetera.
9:05 Speaker 00 Very creative, right?
9:07 Speaker 01 Also, like, I love how anodyne they sound, right?
9:09 Speaker 00 Right.
9:09 Speaker 01 It's this, it's very innocuous. This is not a big starfish, jellyfish.
9:16 Speaker 00 Clownfish.
9:17 Speaker 01 Nuclear megalodon swallows your entire world. Let's not give it a scary name as we're doing this thing.
9:23 Speaker 00 No, you're right.
9:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:24 Speaker 00 Operation Fishbowl sounds less like a nuclear testing program and, and more like something you'd win tickets to see at SeaWorld.
9:33 Speaker 01 I don't know which is more depressing, but yes.
9:36 Speaker 00 I'm curious if, if this is conjuring any Cold War movies for you guys. Do you have a favorite Cold War movie that, that's sort of nuclear oriented?
9:46 Speaker 01 The China Syndrome always comes to mind.
9:47 Speaker 00 Yes.
9:48 Speaker 01 As a favorite of mine.
9:49 Speaker 00 That coffee cup, the little, the tremors in the coffee, in the, right? That's where you first see it?
9:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:56 Speaker 00 Oh, boy, that's so visceral.
9:58 Speaker 01 It's about that, that theoretical China Syndrome and nuclear meltdown could go through the core of the earth to, you know, the antipodal point on the other side of the planet. I always loved that one. And then, um, like War Games was always a big one for me growing up. Lizzie, I'm not sure if there are any that come to mind for you.
10:16 Speaker 07 Definitely. I mean, you know, immediately as soon as you were starting to explain the sort of like race to blow up more and more and bigger and bigger nukes, it immediately makes me think of the doomsday machine and Doctor Strangelove, of course, and.
10:30 Speaker 07 And just, you know, the whole concept there being that you needed to explain the existence of the doomsday machine in order for it to be effective, but they didn't do that. They just built it. And I love the sort of, you know, you're 10 steps ahead and yet also 15 steps behind on that one. That feels applicable. And then I just always, it's not a movie, but man, I loved the Americans.
10:50 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
10:51 Speaker 07 That show is so good and such an interesting exploration of the like mentality behind both the American and Russian sides of the Cold War.
11:00 Speaker 01 And it's interesting, what you're describing is very much the, it is the climax spoilers of the Iron Giant, which the movie ends with a nuclear device being detonated in space because the Iron Giant, as I wept, flies up to meet it and sacrifice himself to protect humans. And that, that movie is very much about like, could a weapon decide that it didn't want to be a weapon, which is a really interesting concept when you have all of these incredible nuclear technologies that could be used for energy and were being used to greater and greater explosive effect.
11:32 Speaker 00 Yeah. Wow. That got deep.
11:35 Speaker 01 Sorry.
11:35 Speaker 00 Well done. No, I love it.
11:36 Speaker 01 Watch The Iron Giant. It's a great movie. Lizzie disagrees.
11:39 Speaker 00 It is. It's classic.
11:40 Speaker 07 I didn't say it wasn't a great movie. I just didn't shed a single tear. So maybe I have no soul.
11:45 Speaker 00 I'm cutting your feed, Lizzie. I'm cutting your feed.
11:47 Speaker 07 Sorry.
11:48 Speaker 00 This to me is very war games also, that one that you brought up. And I think mainly that movie was such a big deal to me as a kid. I saw it on HBO like over and over and over again.
11:59 Speaker 01 Yeah. And like, are these men exploring the frontiers of science? Or are these little boys playing very dangerous games? Like by putting it in that context, it really draws a really stark juxtaposition. That's interesting. And I think forces some compelling thoughts from the audience. I still think that movie is really effective to this day.
12:20 Speaker 00 Let's get into Operation Fishbowl. On June 2nd, the first attempt at a high altitude test failed when the tracking system lost the missile after it fired. The Navy scrambled to destroy it before it could detonate. Thank God they did. In the second test, the Thor missile malfunctioned again, and the warhead once again had to be destroyed mid-flight, showering the Pacific Ocean with plutonium contaminated confetti. Apparently this led to special underwater ordinance disposal teams sweeping the ocean for the next two weeks.
12:54 Speaker 07 It seems like you should stop.
12:56 Speaker 00 Right.
12:56 Speaker 07 Like at that, maybe stop. I don't know.
12:58 Speaker 00 If I'm getting into their heads, they're probably like, well, we haven't learned the thing we set out to learn yet.
13:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:03 Speaker 07 We have learned how to poison the entire Pacific Ocean.
13:07 Speaker 00 We've made a terrible mess or two, but uh,
13:11 Speaker 00 we cleaned it up.
13:12 Speaker 01 There's all this sushi around we can eat, you know?
13:15 Speaker 00 It turns out we have special underwater ordinance disposal teams that we can dispatch at any time.
13:21 Speaker 07 Do you? That's my question.
13:23 Speaker 01 Those are just people. That's just people with a fancy name.
13:27 Speaker 00 But you're right, Lizzie, like, do you actually have that? Or is that something you hastily scrambled together?
13:32 Speaker 07 Yeah. Is it just like a fishing net that you're, you know, casting wide across the ocean?
13:37 Speaker 00 And then you just gave it a very official sounding name.
13:41 Speaker 07 Yeah.
13:41 Speaker 00 If you were like in the army, what would be your enthusiasm level for joining that cleanup crew? If your superior was like, guys, put on your wetsuits.
13:50 Speaker 01 So low, but because, but there has been such incredible bravery from certain, you know, the Fukushima event in Japan and the individuals who like went in knowing they might never, they wouldn't survive, you know, to clean that up. Or the divers in Chernobyl that went through the water system and did survive. Like those people are, you know, heroes and those, those things could have melted down even worse. What's terrible about this in such like a catch 22 way is the pointlessness, like you're saying. The question is, to what end are we even doing this to begin with? And now I'm going to die for my country for an ambiguous test that we're not sure why we're doing. At the end of the day, I think that's the real tricky thing here. I would say no, and I would be court martialed, I'm sure.
14:37 Speaker 00 Does it call to mind any particular or specific film set disasters?
14:42 Speaker 07 It definitely makes me think of The Abyss, because I believe they shot a lot of that inside of an old nuclear reactor. That's what he filled with water in order to get all of those underwater sequences. And because it's James Cameron, he's like strapping concrete blocks to his shoes and going underwater with a camera and, you know, punching his safety diver in the face because he can't get up fast enough. And like it just, that movie sounded like such a nightmare to work on.
15:11 Speaker 01 It also reminds me, you know, the end of Ghostbusters, like all just the marshmallow everywhere. And then they're just like, all right, let's clean it up. Call it a day. You know, that sort of thing.
15:21 Speaker 00 All right, well, so just to be clear, all of these tests that are being conducted, they're not secret. The Joint Task Force conducting the tests warned the public with press releases. On June 20th, one Honolulu headline read, quote, "In blast tonight, maybe dazzling, good view likely." In blast, I guess everyone understood that would be a nuclear blast. And for some reason, they didn't want to say nuclear in the headline? I don't know.
15:49 Speaker 07 Well, I can think of some reasons.
15:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:51 Speaker 07 Why you want to spruce it up a little bit?
15:52 Speaker 01 Let's save on some ink on that one, and blast.
15:56 Speaker 00 It was even reported that the time was set for 11:00 PM and that, quote, "The white fireball is expected to spread across the sky, changing colors as it grows." I mean, that sounds kind of festive. I just...
16:11 Speaker 01 Again, let's give it a positive spin. John Wayne, "Let's go shoot the conqueror" in an old nuclear testing site, and everybody is involved. A lot of folks ended up getting cancer, and it's kind of like, that's another Hollywood tragedy we need to cover at some point. There was not a lot of understanding around the nuclear rate. There's a radiation disposal site that's not very well managed in the San Fernando Valley, over by Woodland Hills, that I didn't know about until I lived there briefly.
16:41 Speaker 00 Spooky.
16:42 Speaker 07 Ed, what did they know about the effects of nuclear testing like this at the time? Like, did they, had enough time passed since, you know, they were actually detonating these bombs, that they understood the long-term health effects on people? Or were they just kind of like, "Ah, blow it up in the sky"?
16:58 Speaker 00 Um, that's a great question. I mean, the first nuclear reactors were built in the 50s, we're in 1962 now. There is a lot still unknown. I covered another nuclear disaster, a reactor meltdown in Canada that Jimmy Carter showed up to help fix when he was a young soldier. And part of that story is how the rescue mission to prevent the reactor from melting down, their judgment was clouded by how little they knew. And that was just a few years before this. Obviously, we're post-World War II, so you know, the horrible effects and fallout
17:37 Speaker 00 from the Japanese detonations of hydrogen bombs were well-known and the radiation fallout and so forth. But the specific dangers at play, I think that they're sort of trying to figure that out with these experiments. This is a weird thing because they're putting these ads in the, or not ads, they're putting the news in the newspaper and encouraging the public to sort of like have fun with the spectacle of unimaginable destructive power. It's almost like pull up a lawn chair and just watch this horrible thing. And I do think that part of that may have been a little bit of a propaganda angle to just sort of be like, hey, don't worry, it's not that big a deal.
18:21 Speaker 00 But it's also, it also reflects a lack of awareness about the actual dangers at play.
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18:57 Speaker 04 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.
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21:03 Speaker 00 So after these early fireworks shows had failed twice, naturally, they tried again. But this time, they just wanted to go even bigger, even higher, and even stronger. So the third test had a new code name, and that is Starfish Prime. On July 9th, at exactly 11:00 PM, a Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile, carrying a 1.4-megaton W-49 thermonuclear warhead, launched from Johnston, Atoll, a remote island in the Pacific. It climbed 250 miles into space and then detonated successfully.
21:43 Speaker 00 Now, that's the same altitude as the orbit of the International Space Station, which I'm only telling, it didn't exist at the time.
21:50 Speaker 07 Okay.
21:50 Speaker 00 I'm just telling you for sort of like a comparison.
21:54 Speaker 07 Thought they were just firing wildly into the sky and there's.
21:57 Speaker 00 I mean, they kind of are, but.
21:59 Speaker 07 Yeah, true.
21:59 Speaker 00 For comparison, airplanes only fly as high as six or eight miles into the atmosphere. We're, we're talking 250 miles up here. So there was no mushroom cloud. There's no shockwave, just a burst of light so bright it could be seen 870 miles away in Hawaii. So they're, they're not even close to Hawaii. They're almost a thousand miles from Hawaii. And yes, the expectant crowds were watching the sky and they got a heck of a show. One newspaper said after the first blinding flash, the spot was haloed in greenish yellow light, which spread out, turning pink and then deep red.
22:41 Speaker 00 What followed was a swirling glowing bubble of plasma that distorted the earth's magnetic field and carved a temporary cavity in the ionosphere.
22:51 Speaker 07 This sounds not, not good.
22:54 Speaker 00 These are big words and I don't know if this is, it's, it like, we'll get into the specifics, but it did already sound scary.
23:04 Speaker 01 Like you said, Ed, it's like, we didn't have a great understanding of how interconnected maybe our world is and we're about to enter things like the hole in the ozone by the eighties and whatnot. And it is interesting, the atmosphere is the only thing maintaining the life on our planet. Let's poke a hole in it. Let's see what happens, you know?
23:24 Speaker 00 The New York Times story the next day described it as a luminous red rim around a fireball created solid walls of heavy color ranging from yellow oranges to deep reds that shimmered for a full 15 minutes, split by white lines that arched north and south, parallel to one another through the reddish glow. So what's happening here is we essentially created an aurora borealis. This is kind of a fun nerdy film thing. I'm sure you know, one of the complaints about the Star Wars movies, especially the early movies. Is the explosions in outer space are not realistic because there's no oxygen in outer space, so you can't have fire in outer space.
24:08 Speaker 00 And so, how did these, you know, big fiery explosions happen? Well, I was sort of wondering the same thing here. So you might be wondering, why an explosion that high would still be so bright and visible when there is no oxygen? The explosion caused a massive burst of charged particles that collided with atmospheric molecules, resulting in an aurora borealis. On top of that, despite the lower oxygen levels, the explosion produced such intense radiation that it excited the surrounding atmosphere, leading to the bright light observed. Another writer called it "the most spectacular far-flung effects of any man-made event in history." And I have to think he's probably right, that's quite accurate.
24:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:54 Speaker 00 You know, if it's something seen a thousand miles away.
24:57 Speaker 01 I think solar flares, I don't know if they were well-understood at this time, but I believe there was a really big one recorded, I don't know if they knew what it was at the time, back in the 19th century. So this would have been like very pre-industrial revolution, pre-electricity. What's interesting, I know we're going to get to this, is I think there's always this big concern that an enormous solar flare could have the same effects, like this enormous radiation event could disrupt electrical systems.
25:25 Speaker 00 For sure.
25:26 Speaker 01 Wireless systems, etc. And so it is interesting, I'm just curious if they knew, was there some thought, oh, is this going to be like a solar flare? Does this experiment confirm some hypothesis we had about, you know what I mean? Like a man-made version of a solar flare? Or is this really like, let's put these lizards in a jar and see what happens?
25:44 Speaker 00 I think that's a very astute, like, question, and I'm not sure how much was understood about the effects of solar flares on electrical components at the time, but it's so much better understood now. That's a very cool question, I'd kind of like to dig into that myself. This created six full minutes of daylight in Hawaii.
26:09 Speaker 00 In the middle of the night.
26:10 Speaker 07 Wow.
26:11 Speaker 00 So, one Navy dance band playing at a beachfront hotel in Waikiki, walked out of their gig to watch the night sky, joined by hotel waiters. If you didn't know this was coming, or even if you did know it was coming, and you're just like on that beach in Waikiki, and you walk out and the sky just starts to glow all these crazy colors.
26:32 Speaker 07 I think it depends on like how, it depends on how much propaganda they've been fed at this point about the importance of nuclear power and like how cool it is that we've got it. Because I do wonder about that. I wonder if this was like, yeah, I'm gonna go sit out in my lawn chair and watch this. Like heck yeah, get the commies. If people were excited, because if you don't totally understand the fallout, literally and figuratively of this, then it might not be as alarming. I mean, it would be weird, for sure.
27:07 Speaker 01 But it's also so biblical, right? I could imagine somebody, let's say you don't know what it is. This is the Star of Bethlehem times a billion, in a sense, right? It, there's something to me, it's, man has created an artificial sun. Not an artificial sun that exists in your living room. An artificial sun that lights up half of the world, right? At this point in time. And it feels apocalyptic, Promethean, you know what I mean? At the same time, I can't, I just, I literally cannot imagine. Because of, because I know what I know now, and I have never seen anything like that before. And, you know, there are certain things I've seen when the LA fires came through last year, you know, the Eaton Canyon fire and whatnot,
27:51 Speaker 01 you know, and seeing that up close. And you see the power of this natural, well, it wasn't started naturally, but you see the power of fire as it rips through a seemingly sturdy neighborhood, you know? And it dwarfs a human, right? And it dwarfs our attempts to stop it. And then you think about this, which is that with human growth hormone injected to it, you know, to an exponential level. And I don't know, I, I could see somebody like weeping about it. I could see somebody feeling utterly hopeless and lost. Like Lizzie said, I could see somebody thinking, wow, we are gonna dominate the like the American empire is going to win.
28:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, right.
28:33 Speaker 01 It would certainly warrant a strong reaction, you know, in any given direction.
28:37 Speaker 00 I'm also, I'm just wondering about populations on some of these remote.
28:41 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
28:42 Speaker 00 Archipelagos and just all around. That's true. That were, that never received any kind of notification and saw this stuff and just must have thought the end of the world was happening.
28:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a god arriving on our planet. It's like, how else could you explain this sort of thing?
28:57 Speaker 00 While it looked incredible, the shockwave of the explosion was, as you might guess, from a massive nuke, pretty devastating. Almost immediately, the explosion triggered a powerful electromagnetic pulse, which sent a power surge through the grid on Oahu. Again, Hawaii is almost 1,000 miles away, but the burst destroyed over 300 streetlights, tripped burglar alarms, and fried the equipment of a telephone company. Here are a few eyewitness accounts from the night collected by the Honolulu Star Advertiser. I love a newspaper that just calls itself an advertiser, by the way. We just sell ads. Oh, there's, we have news, but like mainly we just sell ads.
29:40 Speaker 01 YouTube should learn something from this, let's be honest.
29:42 Speaker 00 Exactly. Anyway, here are actual eyewitness accounts. One 11-year-old was asked what he thought. He said he was both scared and a little let down because he'd been waiting to see a mushroom. He thought he'd see a mushroom cloud. And I'm just like, kid, where are your parents? Another guy, who honestly doesn't seem that different from the 11-year-old, said he had been following along with the news of all the different failed tests, said he was actually a little disappointed and that it didn't quite live up to his expectations. I mean, what do you, what?
30:12 Speaker 01 I would love to see like the army general reading these reviews saying like, let's prep the bigger bomb. Let's do it. Let's show these assholes what we're capable of.
30:21 Speaker 07 You know, that's what I mean. They've been advertising this. Like this has been set up for years at this point. Not this specific thing, but like the idea of nuclear power has become so ubiquitous for these for an 11 year old that he's like, heck yeah, mushroom cloud. Can't wait to go outside 11pm and see it.
30:37 Speaker 00 A reporter embedded with a naval observation team in American Samoa said the men around him were cool as cukes. Most quote, simply stood or sat quietly by their equipment and watched it run, praying that it kept running. I think they're talking about their equipment and not being affected. It was one of the earliest and most dramatic demonstrations of how a high altitude detonation could disrupt electronics over vast distances. Chris, this is the electromagnetic pulse which you brought up at the beginning, EMP as it's also known. It was a warning in bright neon lights about the fragility of our growing technological
31:17 Speaker 00 infrastructure. Does the EMP make an appearance in cinema? I mean, it must.
31:23 Speaker 01 The Matrix is the most obvious example.
31:25 Speaker 00 Of course, the Matrix, they use EMPs to fight the, the.
31:27 Speaker 01 The Swiddies, the machines.
31:29 Speaker 00 Right, of course.
31:30 Speaker 01 There is the book, there's a book, I don't know how well known it's called, it's called One Second After. And it's written by somebody who's long tried, wanted to warn, you know, our government about the effects of an EMP, specifically, I believe detonated somewhere over Kansas, roughly central to the United States, which would effectively blackout most of the country. And a lot of things that people, you know, unless your equipment is very specifically hardened or predate something or is like in a Faraday box or whatever, it's gone. I mean, planes are going down, cell phones don't work. And by the way, it's like you said, Ed, it's fried. They cannot be rebooted. They cannot be restarted.
32:14 Speaker 00 They can't just be turned back on.
32:15 Speaker 01 No, this is not, you know, blow in the cartridge, put the Nintendo 64 back on.
32:19 Speaker 00 Right.
32:20 Speaker 01 It's done. This, again, this was my understanding when I read this book. And that is a much more terrifying outcome. When you really think about it, then a detonation, you know, slightly above the surface in like Chicago, for example, which is the premise of House of Dynamite, which just came out, you know, the Kathryn Bigelow film, because ultimately you see the fragility of our entire system, which is based on electronic infrastructure, you know, not only is our our power grid, all of our information systems, we really don't have, you know, paper-based information system backups for most things at this point in time.
32:54 Speaker 00 Of course.
32:55 Speaker 01 Everything would fall apart, you know, your food system, your refrigeration systems, your medical systems, your utility systems, you'd be back to the Stone Age.
33:05 Speaker 00 This is a little, this is Blade Runner 2, right?
33:08 Speaker 01 Then there was, I believe, a nuclear setback in, or something like that. There was an information dark age in Blade Runner 2049 that they reference, yeah.
33:16 Speaker 00 And they're back to paper.
33:18 Speaker 01 Yes, as a protective measure. And I think in, I believe in Dune, this is, I'm gonna get this wrong, somebody in your audience correct me, I think Frank Herbert, the way he describes their technology in Dune is like a different technological branch than the computerized systems that we used. I don't know if that's because of any sort of reference to EMPs, etc., but it's just, again, it's an example of a different way of, you know, creating information systems than what we've relied on.
33:43 Speaker 00 It's wild to think about. It would set us back to roughly, what, like 1850?
33:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, I actually would think earlier, because we don't have any of the skills that folks had, broadly speaking.
33:59 Speaker 00 That's a, that's a great point. You're right, we don't have, we have to relearn all the, all of our...
34:04 Speaker 01 You'd be going back pre-agricultural, you know, revolution. I think you'd be going basically back to hunter-gatherer in a lot of senses. You'd have, it's funny how you realize how surface your knowledge really is. I could tell you that I vaguely understand solar flares. If anything goes wrong with any piece of equipment in my life, I could not diagnose it.
34:25 Speaker 00 Right, right, of course.
34:26 Speaker 01 I would need to take it to the Geek Squad, and they only know how to, you know... Do X, Y, or Z things and it's we've that's been the benefit of specialization, right, is that you can make advancements on these specific tech trees, but you're very vulnerable if it's disrupted.
34:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
34:42 Speaker 07 That's why we should all go to trade school.
34:44 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah.
34:45 Speaker 00 This is also, this is why EMPs are also a big deal in the survivalist community because
34:52 Speaker 07 Yeah, makes sense.
34:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, that there, there's a lot of obsession about, as you mentioned, Faraday cage protection, having vehicles that are that use no electronics.
35:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, all the push to start cars with computer chips. I mean, like, I think the average vehicle has dozens of computer chips in them by now.
35:09 Speaker 07 Oh, yeah. What could you even get, something from like the early 90s and before?
35:14 Speaker 00 Yes, you'd have to go back to like a purely, even the ignition has to be mechanical and not electrical. So it's a, yeah, it's a wild, and that, yeah, you're going back to the 70s.
35:27 Speaker 01 I worked with a gentleman when I was at Intel years ago, who was kind of a Mormon prepper, and he had a homestead out in Arizona. And he, aside from a wall of guns and a wall of flashlights, he also had a tractor that I believe ran on, like, it was a wood burning engine.
35:46 Speaker 00 What? Yeah. Like a steam engine.
35:48 Speaker 01 Effectively, yeah. And, and that was, you actually, I believe, can see a version of it in the movie Train Dreams, which I also highly recommend. But anyway, he was a hardcore prepper and that was, he had all of these redundancies that did not require any electricity.
36:03 Speaker 00 Wow.
36:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:04 Speaker 00 That's cool. Do you have his number?
36:06 Speaker 01 Uh, you know, he didn't give it out to anybody. I don't know why. He just didn't want to show it up at his squad.
36:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. You have the coordinates of that?
36:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. He's like, what are your skills? And I was like, I can craft a tight 90-minute podcast, sir. And would you let me in?
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38:57 Speaker 00 So the EMP waxing the power grid was bad enough, but the long-term effects were worse. So the military had made sure that all the satellites orbiting Earth in 1962 were safely out of range of the blast. So we're good, right? Well, no, not quite. Because not only was the initial EMP blast way larger than expected. I love that, by the way. They just didn't know how big the explosion would be. The detonation also launched high-energy particles into Earth's magnetic field. It created an artificial radiation belt that spread out from the spot we nuked, and it definitely was not harmless. It became a wave of radiation
39:40 Speaker 00 that caused extensive damage to satellites, American, Canadian, British, and even one Russian satellite, including the first-ever satellite to broadcast a TV signal, Telstar 1. So that satellite's run-in with the new Starfish radiation belt made it just the first victim. The charged particles lasted in our atmosphere for at least 10 years, zapping satellites that passed through it and damaging fully a third of all satellites around the Earth in 1962. I was not familiar with this story before, a few months ago, and was floored by this.
40:16 Speaker 07 Yeah.
40:16 Speaker 00 It just feels like the sort of scientific approach to this kind of experimentation is what a child brings to a bug. And it's like, what happens if I smash it with a hammer? Like, what? Let me just see. And it's just, it's kind of weirdly heartless and thoughtless, but it's like, the curiosity is so powerful, or something.
40:38 Speaker 07 Yeah, this is strange because, you know, we've talked about this quite a lot across this episode, but like... No, they may not have known the exact effects of this. Clearly, they didn't know that a lot of this was gonna happen, but I feel like for sure they knew enough in terms of how powerful these things were, that they should have been more careful than just, "Ah, just shoot it up there. Try it again. Three times, a charm."
41:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:04 Speaker 07 That kind of recklessness with something this powerful does feel crazy. Like, it feels like there was some level of like mass psychosis happening in terms of the arms race, where people were just like, "Yep, good plan. Go right ahead."
41:19 Speaker 01 I think what makes it feel militaristic and not, and candidly like unscientific, is the lack of a hypothesis. And I don't know of this story. I had never heard this either, Ed. Like you said, instead, it's more, "Well, maybe this will do something, and we should probably know what that is in case the Russians also try it." It's a fear-based result as opposed to some sort of aspirational, optimistic, you know, "Let's push the frontier of human knowledge forward in a way that could possibly be beneficial for humanity."
41:54 Speaker 00 Wild. One Navy sailor who told his story was onboard a ship near the launch site, and so obviously a lot closer than Hawaii. He said the crew were given badges to measure their radiation exposure and ordered to do anti-radiation washes off the ship. Years later, he said, "Most of the men he served with onboard had died of, quote, 'weird cancers,'" which is horrible. "The EMP blast that knocked out electronics in Hawaii created a wave of studies about how an electromagnetic pulse could disable electronic systems, from civilian infrastructure to military systems. It was a big moment in realizing that frying power
42:37 Speaker 00 grids with distant explosions might be a useful trick we hadn't thought about before, and also just another thing to be terrified of."
42:51 Speaker 00 On top of all the EMP fallout, there's the orbiting radiation. Not only did the radiation from the explosion slap satellites out of orbit, but it also disrupted Earth's natural zones of trapped, charged particles called the Van Allen Belts. Now, that definitely sounds like a luxury leather emporium, but these belts are like a protective shield around the planet, and altering them created a serious risk for future satellites and astronauts. That September, NASA changed their flight plans because they realized that their astronaut would be killed by residual starfish prime radiation if he flew over 640 kilometers in altitude.
43:34 Speaker 00 So, uh, how wild is that? Like, he had flown through that radiation, it just would have, uh, I mean, I...
43:41 Speaker 01 Well, and also, like, spaceships are hardened against radiation, right? Because when you break through our atmosphere, you're exposed to all the radiation from the sun that is, a lot of it is blocked or deflected, right, by our atmosphere. So then you think about, this astronaut who's in a radiation hardened, to a certain extent, environment, right, would still be killed by this amount of excess radiation sent, you know, lingering in our atmosphere in this moment. It's just, it's not even like he's like naked out there. You know what I mean? Getting hit with this thing. It's just crazy.
44:15 Speaker 00 Obviously, this wasn't just a local issue over a particular spot in the Pacific Ocean. It affected the entire near-Earth environment. The artificial radiation belt slowly faded, but the lesson lingered. Detonating nuclear weapons in space had consequences we didn't understand at the time. Nations around the world, especially the Soviet Union, were watching, of course. Russian radio called the test "a crime" perpetrated by, quote, "American atom maniacs." Uh, I love that term. Sounds like "anamaniacs."
44:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, the "atomaniacs."
44:50 Speaker 00 Which, the "atomaniacs", which, uh, I think we kind of live up to that. We're "atomaniacs."
44:56 Speaker 07 I was gonna say, they're not wrong.
44:58 Speaker 00 No, they're not.
44:59 Speaker 07 On either of those counts, yeah.
45:01 Speaker 00 But even taking all of this into consideration, the test was considered a success. They were like, "Oh, wow, we did so much damage we didn't expect, and we got so much useful data. Look at what we're learning."
45:14 Speaker 01 This is a win. Let's chalk it up to a win. Take the win, guys.
45:18 Speaker 00 In all, between 1958 and 1962, there were eight known nuclear tests in space, four by the US and four by the USSR. But Starfish Prime was the highest, the most powerful and the most consequential. And when US satellites started falling, President Kennedy canceled the next high altitude test, which had been planned to go three times higher.
45:41 Speaker 07 No, you don't need to. You just don't need to. I will be honest, and I'm curious what you guys think about this, but I have absolutely zero desire whatsoever to ever go to space. Like, I don't even understand the desire.
45:55 Speaker 01 Other kids wanted to be astronauts, and I said, "I'm good here." I just was never interested.
46:01 Speaker 00 Really, even as a kid?
46:02 Speaker 01 It terrified me. It always terrified me. The idea of not having an exit is so scary to me.
46:09 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. Well, that's claustrophobia. That's a whole separate thing. Is that what it is?
46:13 Speaker 01 Well, I don't know.
46:14 Speaker 00 That's my issue. I agree.
46:15 Speaker 07 No, I don't like the void.
46:18 Speaker 01 That's the point. Exactly. It's the void. It's that if I... I'm okay in a small space if I know that there's stuff out beyond my small space. But this idea that I'm just out in a vacuum and not tethered to the only habitable rock at this point in time is just existentially crushing to me.
46:37 Speaker 00 So I mentioned that President Kennedy canceled the next high altitude test. Turns out that was just a pause, because they wound up doing at least a few more, what they considered successful high altitude tests later in 1962. Ultimately, these crazy high altitude tests, in combination with the Cuban Missile Crisis, led to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests in space, underwater and in the atmosphere. And in 1967, the Outer Space Treaty followed, banning weapons of mass destruction from Earth's orbit and beyond. Because at the very least, nuking space is a great way to get everyone to agree on a few ground rules.
47:21 Speaker 00 That is our story. It's been fun taking these diversions with you already. And all of this, to me, like, I feel like we've gone to some sort of interesting philosophical places already. But I do want to pick your brains just a little bit more, because the way that... Our governmental and military institutions approached testing of this nature to me feels a lot like the way that we are just lurching blindly into this artificial intelligence era. And of course, that also has reverberations very directly
48:00 Speaker 00 to our business, our industry of filmmaking and television. But in a larger sense, we don't know. We have so many warnings and so many people saying that this could be so catastrophic. And yet, it feels like we're just not taking any steps to mitigate that danger in the same way that they were just like, hey, we got to just do it and see what happens with these high altitude nuclear tests.
48:32 Speaker 07 Well, it's back to Dr. Strangelove, because the whole motivation, to your point about AI, is, well, if we don't do it, someone else is going to do it. And it's more important that, you know, this incredibly powerful technology is in our hands, because we're the good guys and we understand how to navigate this. And that's exactly what Kubrick is making fun of with that movie, because there's so much hubris involved in that, thinking that you can control what is essentially uncontrollable. But that is the path that we're all hurtling down.
49:02 Speaker 01 Well, if I may, my anti-AI screed briefly. I think the cynical difference with AI, it's being sold as an existential conflict. But what's interesting is that, on the one hand, you have somebody like Sam Altman, or, you know, the folks, the CEOs of these companies, or Elon Musk, and they're saying, this is going to be universally beneficial in so many ways. AI is not going to replace your job. It's going to, you know,
49:30 Speaker 00 Liz is not buying it.
49:31 Speaker 01 Right, right. This is, I believe this is so much like an offshoot of their, the Silicon Valley desire for transhumanism. Could this be a stepping stone to uploading my brain? It's effectively a group of men, candidly, who are deeply uncomfortable with the fact that they're going to die at some point in time. And I think that the tragedy with AI right now is there is very little actual evidence that these tools make anybody more productive. You can look at the evidence that's presented for coding tools, like can you generate a great deal of code? The answer is yes. Is that code replicable, widely usable, bug free? No, it's oftentimes created in a way that it doesn't make a lot of sense for this specific application that you're using it. And then it
50:15 Speaker 01 requires more time by the engineer to debug and to defrag this thing that's been created. But because it's been this incredible economic engine, we would be in a recession right now if it were not for AI investment. Like, that is 100% true. And as a result, it is in the best interests of all incumbent parties to pump this as much as possible. But it's effectively just management selling it to management. These are just, the heads of these companies are saying to the heads of other companies, "Your employees could be five times more effective if they were using AI." But the truth is, again, a lot of studies have shown, if you use ChatGPT frequently, cognitive abilities decline very rapidly. It turns out, when you stop thinking for yourself,
50:58 Speaker 01 it's harder for you to think for yourself. And it turns out the brain is a muscle. And it turns out that you actually need to use it frequently. And I think the best thing that a human has is, like, you know, semantic awareness and contextual understanding and judgment. The difference between the nuclear tests, right? Yes, maybe a lot of people were irradiated, and our government has done a poor job of providing recompense for the people who were affected by these, you know, impacts. But the difference is, this nuclear bomb is being detonated inside of every home. And it's just insane that we're not regulating this. I'm not saying there couldn't be good aspects to this technology, but it's incredibly powerful and destructive, and we need to come up, like you said, Ed, with some way of regulating it. But, you know, the Marc Andreessen's of the
51:40 Speaker 01 world have convinced us that that, or Peter Thiel has convinced us that regulation is literally the Antichrist. Anti-AI screed? Done. I apologize. I just find it very frustrating.
51:52 Speaker 00 My headphones are on fire. That was, yeah, my eardrums are burned, scorched, and I love it. I think this is some really...
52:03 Speaker 00 Salient points in there, Chris. I appreciate you going there. There's also within the AI, which, and I think this is related to sort of nuclear research in a way, AI research and rapid development also has this, this almost like a supernatural component to it, where there's this compulsion to be the first contact with this sort of alien, in the case of nuclear energy, an alien energy source, or something so like hitherto completely unknown to humanity, much like you brought up Prometheus earlier
52:44 Speaker 00 in that way that like Prometheus was like that first touch of fire to man, and nuclear energy was the same. And with AI, it's that first contact with this being that we're creating that might be sort of bigger, grander, and more intelligent than all of us. That is so intoxicating that certain people just cannot resist being that first, that one who's gonna get there first.
53:18 Speaker 07 Yeah. Well, I think it comes back to the same thing about, Chris, you and like you and I not really wanting to go to space. Ed, you were kind of asking like, why? And for me, the answer is that there's too much here. Like, there's so much unexplored here, there's so much we don't understand here about people and Earth and everything that I don't, I do not see the appeal necessarily of feeling the need to go out and know what's out there. I don't know that I need to know. And I kind of feel the same way about AI. I don't really need to know what it's capable of and what it can do. And we don't know.
53:52 Speaker 01 And I want to be clear, I do think it's important in any society to have individuals who look at the hill and say, I want to know what's on the other side of that hill.
53:59 Speaker 07 Totally.
53:59 Speaker 01 Because otherwise, you become stagnant and you don't move forward. So, but I do think there is, it cannot simply be a zero sum game of reckless abandon, as we, like you said, Ed, rush headlong into something we don't fully understand, and simply point at the stock market and say, number go up, we're good, as we move forward.
54:22 Speaker 00 So. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap it up. Thank you so much, Chris and Lizzie, for joining me on Snafu. This was a really fun and stimulating chat.
54:33 Speaker 01 Thank you.
54:33 Speaker 07 Thank you so much for having us.
54:35 Speaker 01 I'm about to go dive into Starfish Prime and orbital nuclear explosions for the next couple hours. I'm excited.
54:41 Speaker 00 Feels like maybe we have a movie on our hands.
54:44 Speaker 01 I will say the screenwriter in me thinks, great way to get pesky cell phones out of a script.
54:49 Speaker 07 Yes.
54:49 Speaker 01 EMP, because they are so annoying when you're writing a script. Because the question's always like, why wouldn't they just look this up? Why wouldn't they just call somebody?
54:56 Speaker 00 I'm doing a rom-com.
54:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:57 Speaker 00 And I want them to be more like, but we're just gonna start it with an EMP.
55:02 Speaker 07 EM, perfect for each other.
55:04 Speaker 00 But then like, it's pretty much a straight rom-com from the 80s.
55:08 Speaker 01 Honestly? I'd watch it.
55:12 Speaker 01 Let's make it happen.
55:13 Speaker 00 Me too. All right, guys. Well, thank you so much. Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works.
55:56 Speaker 00 Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson. Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
56:36 Speaker 04 The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.
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