Speaker 1: Imagine you are sleeping soundly in your bed. You're in
Speaker 1: North Carolina. It's the dead of winter, January twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one, right, so it's absolutely freezing outside exactly,
Speaker 1: the temperature is hovering right around freezing and above you,
Speaker 1: completely unseen in this pitch black night sky, a United
Speaker 1: States Air Force B fifty two bomber is flying a
Speaker 1: routine patrol.
Speaker 2: And we should clarify a B fifty two is an
Speaker 2: absolute behemoth of an aircraft.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's massive, and it's being piloted by Major Walter Tullock.
Speaker 1: But at roughly ten thousand feet up, something goes catastrophically wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a fuel leak in the right.
Speaker 1: Wing, right, and this leak causes a massive structural failure.
Speaker 1: The wing literally tears.
Speaker 2: Off, just just rips right off in midair.
Speaker 1: Yes, the aircraft spins wildly out of control. Centrifugal force
Speaker 1: just starts tearing the fuselage apart and tumbling out of
Speaker 1: the disintegrating Bombay are two Mark thirty nine hydrogen bombs.
Speaker 2: Which is just terrifying. I mean, for a sense of
Speaker 2: scale for you listening, each of these weapons has a
Speaker 2: yield of four mega times megatons. Yeah, that is roughly
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty times more powerful than the weapon
Speaker 2: dropped on Hiroshima.
Speaker 1: It's almost hard to wrap your head around that kind
Speaker 1: of power.
Speaker 2: It really is. It's a volume of destructive force that
Speaker 2: human biology almost isn't equipped to comprehend. Right, you're talking
Speaker 2: about a thermal flash that would vaporize everything within a
Speaker 2: several mile radius, a shockwave that would flatten cities. And
Speaker 2: these two massive weapons are simply free falling in the
Speaker 2: dark over the American South.
Speaker 1: So both bombs separate from the wreckage, right, they're falling
Speaker 1: to Earth. One of them miraculously deploys its parachute the
Speaker 1: stroke of luck, huge luck. It drifts down, gets tangled
Speaker 1: in some trees and lands completely intact. But the other one, well,
Speaker 1: the other one is the reason we're here today.
Speaker 2: Because it didn't deploy the parachute.
Speaker 1: Nope, it plummeted into a muddy field at nearly seven
Speaker 1: hundred miles per hour. But the truly terrifying part is
Speaker 1: what happened on the way.
Speaker 2: Down the arming sequence.
Speaker 1: Yes, as it fell, it went through almost every single
Speaker 1: step of its complex multi stage arming sequence. The timers
Speaker 1: engaged down timeters two right, exactly the barometrical timeters sensing
Speaker 1: the change in air pressure as it fell triggered perfectly.
Speaker 1: The only thing standing between a quiet winter night and
Speaker 1: a nuclear apocalypse on American soil was a single low
Speaker 1: voltage arm safe switch.
Speaker 2: The sheer mechanical probability of that is I mean, it's hunted.
Speaker 1: It's like skydiving with a parachute made of tissue paper.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We often think of nuclear weapons as these monolithic,
Speaker 2: magical devices, but at their core they're.
Speaker 1: Just machines, just circuits and wires.
Speaker 2: Exactly, electrical circuits, physical switches, chemical explosives, and the Mark
Speaker 2: thirty nine had a very specific sequence required to initiate
Speaker 2: the nuclear core.
Speaker 1: And if that final switch had flipped.
Speaker 2: If that simple arming switch had flipped, and it was
Speaker 2: literally just a small switch designed to be engaged by
Speaker 2: the pilot in the cockpit, the conventional explosives would have fired. Wow,
Speaker 2: it would compress the plutonium in North Carolina would just
Speaker 2: be a crater.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and today we
Speaker 1: are doing a deep dive into the historical record. We're
Speaker 1: pulling the thread on declassified documents to explore ten nuclear
Speaker 1: disasters the government desperately tried to keep.
Speaker 2: Secret because we all know the names Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Speaker 1: Right, those are household names the events that were just
Speaker 1: too massive to hide.
Speaker 2: But today we want to look at the shadows exactly.
Speaker 1: And the most chilling part of the history we're looking
Speaker 1: at today is that, in many cases, governments successfully buried
Speaker 1: these neu apocalypses for decades. I was reading through the
Speaker 1: incident reports for this deep dive, and I kept finding
Speaker 1: myself literally holding my breath.
Speaker 2: Oh, I totally get that. The overarching theme of our
Speaker 2: exploration today really highlights a profound and frankly dangerous disconnect.
Speaker 2: What do you mean, Well, on one hand, you have
Speaker 2: the immense, unforgiving physics of atomic energy, and on the
Speaker 2: other hand, you have the deeply flawed, highly secretive, politically
Speaker 2: motivated human institutions trying to manage it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Humans are messy, very messy.
Speaker 2: Now, it is crucial to state upfront that we are
Speaker 2: examining the raw historical data here. We're not taking political size.
Speaker 1: Ye oh, not at all.
Speaker 2: Whether we are looking at the actions of the United States,
Speaker 2: the United Kingdom, or the Soviet Union. We are simply
Speaker 2: looking at the declassified facts. We want to understand how
Speaker 2: secrecy operates in the high stakes environment of the.
Speaker 1: Cold War, just the raw history. So to you listening
Speaker 1: right now, buckle up. As we navigate through these events,
Speaker 1: I want you to keep one single question in the
Speaker 1: back of your mind.
Speaker 2: It's a big one.
Speaker 1: Why is the immediate knee jerk reflex of authority almost
Speaker 1: always silence?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the real thread we're pulling.
Speaker 1: So let's stay with Goldsboro, North Carolina for a minute,
Speaker 1: because I want to understand the mechanics of this cover up.
Speaker 1: A single low voltage switch save the Eastern Seaboard. How
Speaker 1: do you keep something with steaks that astronomical a secret?
Speaker 2: Well, you keep it a secret by controlling the narrative
Speaker 2: immediately and aggressively.
Speaker 1: And the public knew a plane crash, right.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, the public knew a B fifty two crashed.
Speaker 2: You cannot hide the flaming wreckage of an eight engine
Speaker 2: strategic bomber scattered across.
Speaker 1: The countryside, right, that's impossible.
Speaker 2: But the military isolated the crash site, they classified the
Speaker 2: recovery of the weapons, and actively obscured how close that
Speaker 2: second bomb came to full detonation.
Speaker 1: So they just lied by a mission.
Speaker 2: Essentially, Yes, the true narrative that the bomb had completed
Speaker 2: all but one arming step was hidden in classified vaults
Speaker 2: for over fifty years.
Speaker 1: That is just wild to me.
Speaker 2: But if we look at the psychology of the early
Speaker 2: Cold War era, you start to see the rationale.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we were talking about nineteen sixty one. John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy has just been inaugurated. The tension with the Soviets
Speaker 1: is a total powder keg.
Speaker 2: The world is literally sitting on the cusp of the
Speaker 2: Cuban missile crisis. The concept of mutually assured destruction is
Speaker 2: the only thing keeping a fragile piece.
Speaker 1: So they were terrified of looking weak.
Speaker 2: Precisely from the perspective of the Pentagon and the White House.
Speaker 2: Admitting that you almost neut your own country due to
Speaker 2: a structural flaw achieves two disastrous outcomes.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's the first time?
Speaker 2: Domestically, it incites uncontrollable panic. If citizens believe the military
Speaker 2: cannot safely transport its own weapons, trust in the defense
Speaker 2: apparatus collapses.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would certainly panic if I found out
Speaker 1: a four megatone weapon armed itself by accident over my house.
Speaker 1: I would question the entire concept of our national defense.
Speaker 2: Anyone would.
Speaker 1: I'd be terrified every time I heard a plane fly over,
Speaker 1: But wouldn't. The military also argue that admitting a critical
Speaker 1: flaw in the B fifty two program would embolden the.
Speaker 2: Soviets, and that is the second, perhaps more pressing outcome
Speaker 2: for them. You're engaged in a global theater where projecting
Speaker 2: absolute technological superiority is your primary deterrent.
Speaker 1: Right the whole we have better weapons than you game exactly.
Speaker 2: The Strategic Air Command's entire doctrine was based on maintaining
Speaker 2: a constant, flawless airborne alert. If Moscow realizes your bombers
Speaker 2: are dropping armed weapons on your own soil due to fuel.
Speaker 1: Leaks, it shatters your illusion.
Speaker 2: Of control completely. So the paternalistic instinct of the state
Speaker 2: takes over. The authorities decide that knowing the truth won't
Speaker 2: make the public safer, They convince themselves, it will only
Speaker 2: create instability.
Speaker 1: It is a staggering lack of trust in the citizen ry,
Speaker 1: deciding we just can't handle the truth. It really is,
Speaker 1: and Goldsborough wasn't a one off. It falls under a
Speaker 1: specific military classification called a broken arrow.
Speaker 2: Right, which refers to an accidental event involving nuclear weapons
Speaker 2: that doesn't create a risk of nuclear war.
Speaker 1: And dropping these things from the sky happened way more
Speaker 1: than anyone wants to admit. Let's move forward just five
Speaker 1: years to January seventeenth, nineteen sixty six. We are looking
Speaker 1: at pal Mares, which is a small farming and fishing
Speaker 1: village on the coast of Spain.
Speaker 2: Now, this incident introduces a completely different layer of geopolitical complexity.
Speaker 1: Because it involves a sovereign NATO ally exactly. So here's
Speaker 1: the setup. A USB fifty two bomber is attempting a
Speaker 1: mid air refueling with a KC one th five Strato
Speaker 1: tanker over the Spanish coast.
Speaker 2: This was part of Operation Chrome Dome.
Speaker 1: Right, where the US kept nuclear armed bombers in the
Speaker 1: air twenty four hours a day. Now, mid air refueling
Speaker 1: sounds insane even with modern technology, but doing it in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties with a massive bomber seems incredibly perilous.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's a highly delicate ballet. You have two incredibly
Speaker 2: heavy aircraft flying at hundreds of miles per hour.
Speaker 1: Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Speaker 2: The bomber has to maneuver its receptacle perfectly to catch
Speaker 2: a flying boom lowered by the tanker. It requires perfect visibility,
Speaker 2: perfect air speed matching, flawless communication, and on this.
Speaker 1: Day, the ballet fails. The B fifty two approaches too
Speaker 1: fast it collides with the boom of the tanker.
Speaker 2: A devastating mistake.
Speaker 1: The boom tears off the bomber's left wing. Both planes
Speaker 1: instantly explode in a massive fireball.
Speaker 2: And the BFC two is carrying four hydrogen bombs.
Speaker 1: Four of them, and all four fall onto the Pelomar Spain. Now, thankfully,
Speaker 1: the nuclear cores do not detonate, but two of the
Speaker 1: bombs hit the ground at terminal velocity, and the sheer
Speaker 1: force of the impact causes their conventional explosives to detonate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we need to clarify what that means. The
Speaker 2: conventional explosives. These are the lenses that surround the plutonium core.
Speaker 2: They are highly volatile. Okay, when they detonate without the
Speaker 2: precise timing required for a nuclear yield, they essentially act
Speaker 2: like a dirty bomb.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so they just scatter the radiation exactly.
Speaker 2: They shatter the core and scatter highly radioactive plutonium two
Speaker 2: thirty nine all across the agricultural fields of this Spanish village.
Speaker 1: The military logistics of what happened next absolutely boggle my mind.
Speaker 2: This is a massive undertaking.
Speaker 1: The United States launched a frantic cleanup operation called Camp Wilson.
Speaker 1: Listen to this. They literally scraped up fourteen hundred tons
Speaker 1: of contaminated Spanish top soil and.
Speaker 2: Vegetation, literally scooping up the countryside.
Speaker 1: Yes, they packed it into thousands of specialized steel barrels
Speaker 1: and shipped it across the Atlantic Ocean and back to
Speaker 1: a facility in South Carolina.
Speaker 2: It's hard to even picture that scale.
Speaker 1: My question is, how on earth do you hide an
Speaker 1: operation of that magnitude. You drop four nuclear bombs on
Speaker 1: a foreign country, you roll in in hazmat suits, and
Speaker 1: you scoop up a village's livelihood. How do you keep
Speaker 1: the international press from turning that into a global scandal.
Speaker 2: Well, you manage it through strict alliance leverage and media suppression, meaning.
Speaker 1: They just bullied the press.
Speaker 2: Well, remember the political landscape of Spain In nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 2: Spain was ruled by the Dictator Francisco Franco. Oh, right,
Speaker 2: the Spanish press was heavily censored and state controlled. The
Speaker 2: US military informed the Franco government immediately. I mean, you
Speaker 2: cannot hide a bomber crash from the host nation, right.
Speaker 1: There's flaming debris everywhere.
Speaker 2: But both governments had a vested interest in suppressing the
Speaker 2: severity of the contamination from the Spanish public and the
Speaker 2: wider world.
Speaker 1: Franco wanted to keep American money and military bases right.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the US needed Spanish airspace to maintain its
Speaker 2: deterrence patrol against the Soviets.
Speaker 1: It's a classic background deal. The strategic imperative of keeping
Speaker 1: those bombers airborne overrode the fundamental rights of the Spanish
Speaker 1: citizens to know their land was laced with plutonium.
Speaker 2: Exactly so the US and Spanish governments engaged in this
Speaker 2: highly orchestrated piece of political theater to downplay the danger.
Speaker 1: The swimming incident.
Speaker 2: Yes, the most famous example. The American ambassador anj Your
Speaker 2: Biddleduke and the Spanish minister went to the beach at
Speaker 2: Palomares and swam in the Mediterranean Sea for the cameras.
Speaker 1: That is just deeply cynical.
Speaker 2: Supposedly to prove the area was perfectly safe.
Speaker 1: Ignore the men in hazmat suits bulldozing your tomato fields.
Speaker 1: Look at the ambassador enjoying a lovely swim. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's insulting, but the reality is that they didn't actually
Speaker 1: get all of the plutonium, did they They did not.
Speaker 2: Plutonium two thirty nine is an alpha emitter.
Speaker 1: What does that mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2: It means if it sits on the ground, your skin
Speaker 2: can actually block the radiation, okay, But if it oxidizes
Speaker 2: into dust and the wind blows it and you inhale
Speaker 2: even a microscopic particle into your lungs, it is lethally carcinogenic. God,
Speaker 2: and the cleanup was rushed. Trenches of contaminated material were
Speaker 2: allegedly buried and just forgotten. The full story of the
Speaker 2: remaining contamination was suppressed for decades.
Speaker 1: That is horrifying.
Speaker 2: It wasn't until twenty fifteen, nearly fifty years later, that
Speaker 2: the US and Spain finally signed a new statement of
Speaker 2: intent to finish the cleanup efforts.
Speaker 1: Which proves the initial effort was largely cosmetic performative.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: The secrecy wasn't just about domestic pr It was about
Speaker 1: holding together a military coalition, even if it meant lying
Speaker 1: to the people living at ground zero.
Speaker 2: The alliance mattered more than the local farmers.
Speaker 1: That brings us to an incident that happened much closer
Speaker 1: to home. And honestly, this is the one that gives
Speaker 1: me the most anxiety because of how unresolved it still
Speaker 1: is today.
Speaker 2: Tybee Island.
Speaker 1: Yes, let's step back slightly to February fifth, nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 1: We are off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia.
Speaker 2: A very different kind of broken arrow. This one was
Speaker 2: driven by the immediate survival instincts of an aircrew.
Speaker 1: Right, a USB forty seven Stratajet bomber is flying a
Speaker 1: simulated combat mission. It collides midair with an F eighty
Speaker 1: six fighter Jet.
Speaker 2: Another collision.
Speaker 1: The fighter pilot ejects safely, but the B forty seven
Speaker 1: is severely damaged. The pilot, Major Howard Richardson, is trying
Speaker 1: to stabilize his aircraft to make an emergency landing at
Speaker 1: Hunter Air Force Base.
Speaker 2: So he's got a massive problem, a huge problem.
Speaker 1: The plane is too heavy and the landing speed would
Speaker 1: be far too dangerous with the damage, so he requests
Speaker 1: and receives permission to jettison his payload to save his crew, and.
Speaker 2: That payload is a seventy six hundred pound Mark fifteen
Speaker 2: nuclear bomb.
Speaker 1: He drops it directly into the shallow coastal waters of
Speaker 1: the Wassaw Sound, right near the mouth of the Savannah.
Speaker 2: River, and it has never been seen again.
Speaker 1: Never. The Air Force searched for nearly ten weeks. They
Speaker 1: had navy divers scouring the bottom. They dragged the ocean
Speaker 1: floor with cables. They used sonar, but the environment there
Speaker 1: is tough, the silt and the currents in that area
Speaker 1: are notoriously difficult to navigate.
Speaker 2: They found nothing, zero trace.
Speaker 1: Now this is where the betrayal of public trust really
Speaker 1: becomes a central theme for me. For forty three years,
Speaker 1: the official government line, the story told to the residents
Speaker 1: of Georgia and the American public, was that the weapon
Speaker 1: dropped was simply a training dummy.
Speaker 2: They claimed it contained no nuclear capsule, nothing to worry about.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand and one, declassified military documents finally
Speaker 1: came to light confirming the terrifying truth.
Speaker 2: It was a fully functional, complete nuclear weapon with a
Speaker 2: live plutonium core.
Speaker 1: A live weapon just sitting in the mud subject to
Speaker 1: saltwater corrosion for decades. Yeah, I am struck by the
Speaker 1: sheer audacity of the line. I mean, I have vacationed
Speaker 1: on the Georgia Coast. I've walked those beaches.
Speaker 2: It's a beautiful area.
Speaker 1: It is. Imagine taking your family to Tybee Island, building
Speaker 1: a sand castle, swimming in the surf, and less than
Speaker 1: a few miles away, a fully assembled Mark fifteen thermonuclear
Speaker 1: weapon is just chillin' offshore in the silt. It's a
Speaker 1: very unsettling image, and the government now admits it's real,
Speaker 1: but claims it's safer to just leave it there.
Speaker 2: Well, if we evaluate the government's current stance from a
Speaker 2: purely physical engineering perspective, they do have an argument.
Speaker 1: Okay, what is their argument?
Speaker 2: They argue that the bomb is buried under several feet
Speaker 2: of dense silt. Attempting to excavate it could be extraordinarily dangerous.
Speaker 1: Because of the conventional explosives.
Speaker 2: Yes, the conventional high explosives inside the casing, the materials
Speaker 2: meant to trigger the nuclear reaction. They have been degrading
Speaker 2: in salt water for over sixty years.
Speaker 1: So they might be super unstable.
Speaker 2: Extremely unstable. A salvage operation could accidentally trigger those conventional explosives,
Speaker 2: which would scatter the plutonium core into the local marine.
Speaker 1: Ecosystem, creating a massive ecological disaster.
Speaker 2: Exactly the exact environmental catastrophe they want to avoid. From
Speaker 2: a utilitarian risk assessment standpoint, leaving it undisturbed might actually
Speaker 2: be the mathematically safer option.
Speaker 1: Okay, I understand the phys of leaving it alone, but
Speaker 1: I strongly disagree with the sociology of it.
Speaker 2: Trust factor.
Speaker 1: Yes, the engineering risk entirely misses the point of the
Speaker 1: societal damage. What does it do to the social contract?
Speaker 1: When an administration flat out lies to its citizens for
Speaker 1: forty three years, it destroys it. They didn't come out
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight and say, hey, we lost a
Speaker 1: live bomb, but we believe it's safely buried and here's
Speaker 1: the data to prove it right.
Speaker 2: They chose deception.
Speaker 1: They said it's a dummy. You are foolish for worrying
Speaker 1: about it. When the truth finally leaks out, it validates
Speaker 1: every conspiracy theorist in the country. It deeply damages the
Speaker 1: credibility of.
Speaker 2: The military because if they lied about a nuclear bomb
Speaker 2: sitting off the coast of Georgia for four decades.
Speaker 1: The average citizen naturally asks, what else are they lying
Speaker 1: about right now?
Speaker 2: Exactly? That erosion of trust is incredibly difficult to repair,
Speaker 2: and it is a direct consequence of prioritizing short term
Speaker 2: public relations over long term transparency.
Speaker 1: It's just bad leadership.
Speaker 2: It is now. The events we've discussed so far, these
Speaker 2: broken arrows falling through the sky are essentially accidents of transport.
Speaker 1: Right planes failing crashing.
Speaker 2: They are the result of collisions or severe weather. But
Speaker 2: as we move deeper into the historical record, we find
Speaker 2: that the systemic long term disasters occurred long before these
Speaker 2: bombs ever left the tarmac.
Speaker 1: Yeah, dropping these by accident is terrifying, but the danger
Speaker 1: didn't start in the sky. The sheer act of just
Speaker 1: trying to build these weapons was poisoning people before a
Speaker 1: bomber ever took off.
Speaker 2: The production side is incredibly dark.
Speaker 1: We are moving our focus to the factories of armageddon.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the Rocky Flats plant. This was located
Speaker 1: on a windy plateau just south of Boulder.
Speaker 2: Colorado, practically right next door to the Denver metropolitan.
Speaker 1: Area, which is insane.
Speaker 2: Rocky Flats was a massive, highly secretive US government facility.
Speaker 2: Its primary purpose was to manufacture the plutonium pits or
Speaker 2: triggers for nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: What exactly is a plutonium pit?
Speaker 2: Think of it like the essential great fruit sized core
Speaker 2: that initiates the fission reaction which then ignites the much
Speaker 2: larger fusion reaction in a hydrogen bomb.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's the spark plug for the nuke.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: Now, the declassified reports detail a specific scientific property of
Speaker 1: plutonium that I find absolutely harrowing. Plutonium is pyrophoric.
Speaker 2: Yes, it is explain that for the listener.
Speaker 1: When plutonium is exposed to ambient air and moisture, it
Speaker 1: oxidizes rapidly, and that oxidation process generates intense heat. Okay,
Speaker 1: if it isn't managed perfectly in an inert atmosphere, the
Speaker 1: metal can spontaneously ignite.
Speaker 2: Wait, it literally sets itself on fire.
Speaker 1: It sets itself on fire.
Speaker 2: Let's just pause and absorb the geography of that decision.
Speaker 2: We built a massive industrial factory to machine cut and
Speaker 2: shave a highly radioactive metal that actively wants to spontaneously combust,
Speaker 2: and we built it upwind of Denver Colorado.
Speaker 1: The audacity of the site selection is staggering, but it
Speaker 1: reflect the singular focus of the era.
Speaker 2: They just didn't care.
Speaker 1: They needed a location inland, away from vulnerable coasts, with
Speaker 1: access to water. In a workforce, the environmental risks were
Speaker 1: entirely secondary to the production schedule.
Speaker 2: Predictably, when you machine a metal that catches fire in
Speaker 2: the air, you get fires, frequent fires.
Speaker 1: In September nineteen fifty seven, a major fire broke out
Speaker 1: in one of the plutonium processing buildings at Rocky Flats.
Speaker 1: The fire started in a glove box.
Speaker 2: Those are the seal boxes where technicians handle the material
Speaker 2: using heavy rubber gloves.
Speaker 1: Right, and the fire burned for thirteen solid.
Speaker 2: Hours, a radioactive inferno.
Speaker 1: The intense heat breached the filtration systems. It released a
Speaker 1: massive plume of toxic plutonium particulates directly into the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: catching the wind blowing toward populated areas.
Speaker 2: And the public was not informed, not a word.
Speaker 1: The Colorado State government wasn't even given the true details
Speaker 1: of the contamination.
Speaker 2: It was a massive failure of containment. But instead of
Speaker 2: fundamentally redesigning the facility to prioritize safety, they just rebuilt
Speaker 2: it and kept pushing for higher quotas.
Speaker 1: Which leads directly to the much larger disaster.
Speaker 2: Twelve years later, the nineteen sixty nine fire.
Speaker 1: Right May eleventh, nineteen sixty nine, another fire breaks out
Speaker 1: into a plutonium building, but this time it was infinitely worse.
Speaker 2: The scale was terrifying.
Speaker 1: The fire ignited the massive plexiglass shielding used throughout the facility.
Speaker 1: It raged completely out of control. Firefighters were battling a
Speaker 1: blaze involving hundreds of pounds of plutonium, and it.
Speaker 2: Came dangerously close to a critical vulnerability the storage vault. Yes,
Speaker 2: a massive storage vault in the roof that contained thousands
Speaker 2: of pounds of plutonium.
Speaker 1: Thousands of pounds upwind of Denver.
Speaker 2: If that vault had breached or the roof had completely
Speaker 2: collapsed and allowed the ambient winds to scatter that much
Speaker 2: plutonium two thirty nine over the Denver metro area, what
Speaker 2: would have happened. The resulting contamination would have been apocalyptic.
Speaker 1: We were talking about permanently evacuating millions of people.
Speaker 2: Right Denver would have become an American exclusion zone similar
Speaker 2: to Chernobyl.
Speaker 1: And once again the public was kept entirely in the
Speaker 1: dark about how close they came to losing their city.
Speaker 2: The secrecy was absolute.
Speaker 1: The full extent of the contamination from both the fifty
Speaker 1: seven and sixty nine fires, and the routine leaking of
Speaker 1: contaminated oil into the soil in an area known as
Speaker 1: the nine O three pad, was classified and obscured for decades.
Speaker 2: When you look at the declassified environmental reports from Rocky Flats,
Speaker 2: you see the institutional mindset at play. Safety protocols were
Speaker 2: often viewed by management as frustrating bureaucratic obstacles.
Speaker 1: Just getting in the way of building bombs exactly.
Speaker 2: The underlying philosophy was that American citizens living downwind of
Speaker 2: these plants were an acceptable collateral risk and the broader
Speaker 2: struggle against communism that is sickening. The government decided that
Speaker 2: telling the residents of Dender about the plutonium raining down
Speaker 2: on their lawns would cause political pushback, which might lead
Speaker 2: to congressional hearings.
Speaker 1: Which would slow down the production of weapons.
Speaker 2: They chose silence to protect the quota.
Speaker 1: Which is chilling. But Rocky Flats isn't even the most
Speaker 1: contamatminated site in the American nuclear complex. Woh it was
Speaker 1: not that dark. Honour goes to the Hanford site in
Speaker 1: Washington State. I have spent time in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 1: and the Columbia River is the lifeblood of that entire region.
Speaker 2: It's vital to the ecosystem.
Speaker 1: And Hanford sits right on its banks. This facility has
Speaker 1: a massive historical footprint. It produced the plutonium for the
Speaker 1: fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2: Hanford was the cradle of industrial scale and nuclear production.
Speaker 2: But from its inception in nineteen forty four all the
Speaker 2: way through nineteen seventy one, it operated with the level
Speaker 2: of environmental recklessness that is just it's difficult to fully comprehend.
Speaker 1: Today, Let's talk about the cooling system, because this blew
Speaker 1: my mind. The early reactors at Hanford, like the B reactor,
Speaker 1: were designed with what is called a once through cooling system.
Speaker 2: Right because nuclear fission generates an unbelievable amount of heat.
Speaker 1: To keep the reactors from melting down, they pumped massive
Speaker 1: amounts of cold water directly out of the Columbia River.
Speaker 2: That water flowed right through the reactor core.
Speaker 1: It absorbed the intense heat, but it also absorbed massive
Speaker 1: amounts of radiation, creating highly radioactive isotopes like phosphorus thirty
Speaker 1: two and zinc sixty five, and then instead of treating
Speaker 1: it or containing it in the closed loop, they just
Speaker 1: pumped that boiling, highly radioactive water straight back out into
Speaker 1: the river.
Speaker 2: The volume of contaminated water was staggering. We are talking
Speaker 2: about tens of thousands of gallons per minute, day after day,
Speaker 2: year after year.
Speaker 1: And downstream from Hanford you had communities, Native American tribes
Speaker 1: and major cities that relied entirely on the Columbia River.
Speaker 2: It was their drinking water.
Speaker 1: They used it for municipal drinking water. They used it
Speaker 1: to irrigate the massive agricultural basins of Washington and Oregon.
Speaker 1: They fished the salmon, and.
Speaker 2: Those radioactive isotopes bioaccumulate.
Speaker 1: Right, They bioaccumulated in the algae which was eaten by
Speaker 1: the fish, which were eaten by the people. The radiation
Speaker 1: moved directly into the food chain.
Speaker 2: And what makes Hanford a unique entry in our exploration
Speaker 2: today is the sheer weight of the documentary evidence regarding intent.
Speaker 2: This wasn't a mistake, No, this wasn't a case of
Speaker 2: nineteen forties scientists simply not understanding the long term effects
Speaker 2: of radiation.
Speaker 1: I read the declassified memos, and that is what makes
Speaker 1: me so angry on behalf of anyone who lived in
Speaker 1: that region.
Speaker 2: They knew.
Speaker 1: The government's own internal scientists were fully aware of the
Speaker 1: severe health risks to the downstream populations as early as
Speaker 1: the late nineteen forties.
Speaker 2: They were actively tracking the bioaccumulation in the fish. They
Speaker 2: knew the hazard, and yet.
Speaker 1: The military and the Atomic Energy Commission chose to continue
Speaker 1: pumping radioactive waste into the drinking water for nearly three decades.
Speaker 1: I push back strongly on anyone who claims this was
Speaker 1: just a Cold War necessity.
Speaker 2: It's hard argument to defend.
Speaker 1: At what point does a national security mandate cross the
Speaker 1: line and become an outright crime against your own citizens.
Speaker 2: Your frustration is highly justified, and it points to a
Speaker 2: phenomenon we call bureaucratic inertia.
Speaker 1: Bureaucratic inertia, what does that look like in this context?
Speaker 2: Well, once a system as massive, well funded, and deeply
Speaker 2: in grained in the military industrial complex as Hanford is
Speaker 2: up and running halting, it is viewed by the people
Speaker 2: inside the system as virtually.
Speaker 1: Impossible, like trying to stop a freight train.
Speaker 2: Exactly, admitting the environmental harm would require shutting down the reactors.
Speaker 2: Shutting down the reactors halts plutonium.
Speaker 1: Production, which angers the pentagon.
Speaker 2: Which threatens the funding and prestige of the entire bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: So it is always easier for the individual decision makers
Speaker 2: to just keep the machine running, classify the environmental impact reports,
Speaker 2: and pass the consequences to the next generation.
Speaker 1: They sacrifice the health of their own people to maintain
Speaker 1: the budget and the schedule. Yes, and let's look at
Speaker 1: the financial reality of that choice today. Ignoring environmental reality
Speaker 1: to save time and money in the short term is
Speaker 1: a catastrophic mistake.
Speaker 2: We are paying for it right now.
Speaker 1: The cleanup at the Hanford site, the process of trying
Speaker 1: to stabilize millions of gallons of boiling toxic sludge and
Speaker 1: underground tanks through vitrification, is currently the most expensive environmental
Speaker 1: remediation project in United States history.
Speaker 2: The current estimates put the cost at over fifty billion
Speaker 2: dollars spent so far, and the cleanup is expected to
Speaker 2: take decades more, potentially costing hundreds of billions more.
Speaker 1: The cost of arrogance and secrecy is.
Speaker 2: Astronomical, it's an unpayable debt.
Speaker 1: So at Hanford and Rocky Flats, we are looking at
Speaker 1: massive contamination that was essentially a byproduct of the system
Speaker 1: working exactly as it was designed to right. But what
Speaker 1: happens when these early, highly experimental nuclear production systems actually
Speaker 1: catch fire and fail catastrophically, The panic is different. The
Speaker 1: transition from production by products to catastrophic system failures reveals
Speaker 1: a very different kind of panic within these institutions. Let's
Speaker 1: cross the Atlantic for our next event to the UK.
Speaker 1: October tenth, nineteen fifty seven, we were in Cumbria, located
Speaker 1: in the northwest of England, at the Windscale Nuclear reactor facility.
Speaker 2: This incident remains the United Kingdom's worst ever nuclear disaster,
Speaker 2: and it centers heavily on a specific quirk of early
Speaker 2: reactor physics.
Speaker 1: Let's get into the science of this, because it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: The Windscale piles were built hastily by the British government
Speaker 1: after World War Two to produce plutonium for their own
Speaker 1: atomic bomb program.
Speaker 2: Because the US had cut off sharing nuclear technology.
Speaker 1: Right, the reactor was graphite moderated.
Speaker 2: Let's explain how a graphite moderator works. In a reactor,
Speaker 2: you need to slow down the neutrons emitted by the
Speaker 2: uranium so they can collide with other uranium atoms and
Speaker 2: sustain the chain reaction.
Speaker 1: They're moving too fast otherwise, exactly.
Speaker 2: So at windscale they used massive blocks of graphite to
Speaker 2: slow those neutrons down. But there's a physical side effect
Speaker 2: to bombarding graphite with radiation over time. It was discovered
Speaker 2: by a physicist named Eugene Wigner.
Speaker 1: Known as Wigner energy. Right I found the mechanics of
Speaker 1: Wigner energy fascinating. Basically, as the neutrons smash into the graphite,
Speaker 1: they physically knock the carbon atoms out of their normal
Speaker 1: lattice structure.
Speaker 2: The disrupting the physical structure of the material itself.
Speaker 1: It creates a build up of potential energy within the material.
Speaker 1: Think of it like compressing thousands of tiny coil springs
Speaker 1: into a tight box. If you knock them out of alignment,
Speaker 1: they store physical tension, a very.
Speaker 2: Apt mechanical analogy, and to release that tension safely, the
Speaker 2: operators had to periodically heat the reactor up in a
Speaker 2: controlled manner.
Speaker 1: A process called anneiling.
Speaker 2: Yes, the heat allows the carbon atoms to slip back
Speaker 2: into their proper places, releasing the stored weightener energy safely
Speaker 2: as a gradual increase in temperature.
Speaker 1: But in October nineteen fifty seven, the operators botched the
Speaker 1: annealing process.
Speaker 2: They made a critical error.
Speaker 1: They heated the reactor too quickly. The stored energy released
Speaker 1: all at once, creating a massive spike in temperature.
Speaker 2: And the uranium fuel cartridges essentially caught fire inside the core.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't a quick flash fire. The massive graphite
Speaker 1: core burned completely out of control for three entire days.
Speaker 2: Three days of a burning nuclear reactor. The deputy general manager,
Speaker 2: Tom Tis Tuei, displayed incredible personal heroism during this.
Speaker 1: What did he do?
Speaker 2: He repeatedly suited up and walked directly to the reactor face.
Speaker 2: He was looking through inspection holes at the white hot
Speaker 2: burning core, trying to figure out how to extinguish a
Speaker 2: graphite fire, because if you just spray water on it,
Speaker 2: it might instantly turn into a volatile hydrogen explosion.
Speaker 1: Oh man, So he's staring into a radioactive volcano trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how to put it out exactly. Eventually,
Speaker 1: they starved it of oxygen and carefully applied water, stopping
Speaker 1: the immediate meltdown, but the damage to the atmosphere was
Speaker 1: already done.
Speaker 2: The plume was already.
Speaker 1: Out radioactive material, specifically iodine one thirty one, was forcefully
Speaker 1: ejected from the ventilation stacks. It spread a massive plume
Speaker 1: of radiation across the British countryside and reached deep into
Speaker 1: mainland Europe.
Speaker 2: And how did the British government of Prime Minister Harold
Speaker 2: McMillan respond to this unprecedented crisis.
Speaker 1: By heavily redacting the official report to suppress the true
Speaker 1: cause and the full scale of the disaster.
Speaker 2: Britain was desperate to prove to the United States that
Speaker 2: it was a competent advanced nuclear power. They wanted the
Speaker 2: US to resume sharing weapons technology.
Speaker 1: So they couldn't look foolish.
Speaker 2: Admitting that a fundamental misunderstanding of physics caused their flagship
Speaker 2: reactor to catch fire. It would have humiliated them on
Speaker 2: the global stage.
Speaker 1: But the cover up went far beyond just redacting a
Speaker 1: technical report. And this is the part that makes my
Speaker 1: stomach turn milk. The surrounding agricultural areas in Cumbria were
Speaker 1: heavily contaminated with radioactive iodine. This meant the grass was contaminated.
Speaker 2: That a dairy cows ate the grass.
Speaker 1: And their milk became highly dangerous, particularly to the thyroid
Speaker 1: glands of growing children. We are talking about the milk
Speaker 1: supply from hundreds of surrounding farms.
Speaker 2: It was heavily poisoned.
Speaker 1: The logical humane thing to do would be to seize
Speaker 1: the milk, pour it down the drain, and financially compensate
Speaker 1: the farmers.
Speaker 2: That is the only acceptable public health imperative.
Speaker 1: But the government realized that seizing the milk and it
Speaker 1: admitting it was too radioactive to consume would cause widespread
Speaker 1: national panic.
Speaker 2: So they made a horrific calculation.
Speaker 1: Instead of discarding the poison, they deliberately diluted it. They
Speaker 1: took the heavily contaminated milk from the local farms, transported
Speaker 1: it and mixed it into the national milk supply with
Speaker 1: clean milk from other regions just ready it out. Their
Speaker 1: goal was to lower the overall radiation concentration to what
Speaker 1: they deemed an acceptable level, and then they shipped it
Speaker 1: out to grocery stores for families to drink.
Speaker 2: It is a breathtakingly cynical calculation. You are literally spreading
Speaker 2: a localized toxin across an entire population to hide a
Speaker 2: political failure.
Speaker 1: It is exactly like finding deadly poison in a town well,
Speaker 1: and instead of closing the well, the mayor decides to
Speaker 1: just stir it really thoroughly, so everyone in town gets
Speaker 1: a little bit of poison.
Speaker 2: When you analyze the chilling logic of the Cold War
Speaker 2: state here you see their true priorities, which were to
Speaker 2: the authorities in London, public panic was viewed as a
Speaker 2: far more dangerous immediate threat to national stability than the
Speaker 2: actual physical radiation.
Speaker 1: Because panic is loud and radiation is silent.
Speaker 2: Exactly, panic disrupts the economy, it causes political upheaval, and
Speaker 2: makes the government look weak to its adversaries. Radiation takes
Speaker 2: decades to manifest as thyroid cancer.
Speaker 1: From a purely bureaucratic survival standpoint, diluting the milk solves
Speaker 1: the immediate political problem, even if it creates a horrific,
Speaker 1: untraceable public health crisis down.
Speaker 2: The line, and the full report proving this action wasn't
Speaker 2: declassified until nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1: Thirty one years later, long after anyone who drank that
Speaker 1: milk could do anything about it.
Speaker 2: The arrogance to make that biological choice for millions of
Speaker 2: families without their consent is staggering.
Speaker 1: Now, Windscale was a massive cover up of a large
Speaker 1: scale event, But looking at the historical record, our next
Speaker 1: event is incredibly intimate, highly localized, and frankly, it sounds
Speaker 1: like a psychological thriller.
Speaker 2: The SL one.
Speaker 1: January third, nineteen sixty one the SL one nuclear reactor
Speaker 1: located at the National Reactor Test Station in the desolate,
Speaker 1: freezing planes of Idaho.
Speaker 2: The SL one represents a very different era of nuclear development.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a massive production facility hin relatively yes, it
Speaker 2: was the Argonne Low Power Reactor, a small experimental military
Speaker 2: prototype designed to be deployed to remote, isolated radar stations
Speaker 2: in the Arctic.
Speaker 1: It was essentially a nuclear battery for extreme environments.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So, three military operators were working the night shift. The
Speaker 1: reactor had been shut down for maintenance over the holidays,
Speaker 1: and their job was to reconnect the control rods to
Speaker 1: the automated system to restart it.
Speaker 2: And the SL one design was uniquely unforgiving.
Speaker 1: Explain the design flaw.
Speaker 2: To restart it, an operator had to stand on top
Speaker 2: of the reactive vessel and manually pull the heavy central
Speaker 2: control rod out by just a few inches to hook it.
Speaker 1: Up, stand physically on top of it.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the control rod absorbs neutrons. When you pull
Speaker 2: it out, the fission reaction increases. The fatal flaw of
Speaker 2: the sl one design was that this single central control
Speaker 2: rod controlled an enormous amount of.
Speaker 1: Reactivity, meaning if it comes out too far, if it was.
Speaker 2: Pulled out too far, there were absolutely no secondary failsafes
Speaker 2: to stop the reaction none.
Speaker 1: So the operator, John Burns, was supposed to lift the
Speaker 1: rod four inches, but for reasons we will never truly know,
Speaker 1: the rod was withdrawn nearly twenty inches.
Speaker 2: And the reactor went what physicists call prompt critical.
Speaker 1: Going prompt critical. That means the nuclear chain reaction multiplies
Speaker 1: at an exponential rate so fast.
Speaker 2: That the resulting energy release is virtually instantaneous. It goes
Speaker 2: from a dormant state to a violent thermal explosion in
Speaker 2: a matter of milliseconds.
Speaker 1: The fuel plates melted instantly.
Speaker 2: Instantly vaporizing the surrounding water coolant into high pressure steam.
Speaker 1: And that steam expansion caused a massive water hammer effect.
Speaker 1: The water slammed into the lid of the reactor vessel
Speaker 1: with such force that the entire twenty six thousand pound
Speaker 1: reactor jumped nine feet into the air.
Speaker 2: Twenty six thousand pounds jumped nine feet.
Speaker 1: The three men were killed instantly in a horrific combination
Speaker 1: of physical trauma and massive radiation exposure.
Speaker 2: It was a brutal scene.
Speaker 1: The force of the explosion was so violent that one
Speaker 1: of the operators, Richard Legg, was literally pinned to the
Speaker 1: ceiling of the containment building by a heavy shield plug
Speaker 1: that was ejected from the top of the reactor.
Speaker 2: The rescue teams couldn't even safely approach the bodies for
Speaker 2: days due to the radiation fields.
Speaker 1: They eventually had to bury the men in lead lined caskets,
Speaker 1: which were then completely sealed in concrete. These remain the
Speaker 1: only fatal reactor accidents in United States history.
Speaker 2: It is a profound tragedy on every level, but the
Speaker 2: aftermath is where the culture of secrecy breeds something deeply unsettling.
Speaker 1: The military immediately locked down the facility, sealed all the records,
Speaker 1: and eventually released a brief, sterile official conclusion operator error.
Speaker 2: Just they messed up.
Speaker 1: They placed the blame entirely on the dead men and
Speaker 1: shut the book. But because the truth and the technical
Speaker 1: specifics were locked away in classified vaults, the silence bred
Speaker 1: absolute madness.
Speaker 2: When you remove transparency, conspiracy fills the void exactly.
Speaker 1: Rumors began to swirl through the tight knit military and
Speaker 1: nuclear communities that the explosion wasn't a mechanical accident at all.
Speaker 2: The murder suicide rumor.
Speaker 1: The rumor was that one of the operators had deliberately
Speaker 1: pulled the rod to commit a murder suicide because of
Speaker 1: a bitter romantic jealousy involving a colleague's wife, a nuclear
Speaker 1: love triangle.
Speaker 2: I mean, it sounds absurd, but it gained incredible traction
Speaker 2: whack because the more likely technical explanation that the boron
Speaker 2: strips on the control rod had swollen or corroded, causing
Speaker 2: the rod to stick and burn, simply yanked it too
Speaker 2: hard to free it.
Speaker 1: That truth was buried, so people just made up a
Speaker 1: story to make sense of it. How does a government
Speaker 1: investigation into a reactor explosion turn into a true crime
Speaker 1: sci fi horror story.
Speaker 2: It happens because the very nature of secrecy itself right.
Speaker 1: When authorities seal records and offer incredibly sterile unsatisfying conclusions
Speaker 1: like operator error. For events that are fundamentally violent, chaotic,
Speaker 1: and catastrophic, they create a massive psychological vacuum in the
Speaker 1: public consciousness.
Speaker 2: Operator error just doesn't adequately explain a man pinned to
Speaker 2: a ceiling by a nuclear explosion.
Speaker 1: The human mind of whores a vacuum, especially when trauma
Speaker 1: and mystery are involved. We crave a narrative, We crave
Speaker 1: a reason why something terrible happened, and.
Speaker 2: In the absence of institutional transparency, human beings will naturally
Speaker 2: fill that vacuum with rumors, with projections, and with dramatic narratives.
Speaker 1: The military thought sealing the records would make the story
Speaker 1: go away quietly.
Speaker 2: Instead, the secrecy acted as a fertile incubator for a
Speaker 2: much darker narrative.
Speaker 1: Most modern historians and nuclear engineers believe it was indeed
Speaker 1: just a tragic mechanical flaw combined with human error. Right.
Speaker 2: Yes, a stuck rod that was pulled too.
Speaker 1: Hard, But the fact that the murder suicide rumor existed
Speaker 1: and persisted for decades is a direct indictment of government's
Speaker 1: refusal to beat tree transparent. The cover up didn't hide
Speaker 1: the truth. It just created a much more damaging lie.
Speaker 1: Exactly up to this point in our exploration, the events
Speaker 1: we've discussed that dropped bombs, the factory fires, the localized
Speaker 1: reactor explosions, these were fundamentally accidents.
Speaker 2: There were terrible mistakes exacerbated by secrecy.
Speaker 1: But as we move into the final stage of the
Speaker 1: historical record, we take the darkest turn yet because these
Speaker 1: final events were not accidents. We are now looking at
Speaker 1: populations that were intentionally used or disregarded as living test subjects.
Speaker 2: The transition from accidental exposure to intentional geographic sacrifice highlights
Speaker 2: the ultimate hubris of the nuclear age.
Speaker 1: Let's start on March first, nineteen fifty four, at the
Speaker 1: Bikini Atoll in the Marshall.
Speaker 2: Islands, the Castle Bravo Test.
Speaker 1: The United States is conducting its largest nuclear test ever.
Speaker 1: They are detonating a thermonuclear device, a hydrogen bomb known
Speaker 1: as the Shrimp device.
Speaker 2: Castle Bravo was designed to test a dry fuel thermonu
Speaker 2: clear weapon using lithium deuteride.
Speaker 1: It was meant to be a demonstration of absolute world
Speaker 1: ending power, a clear signal to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: The physicists at Los Alamos predicted a yield of roughly
Speaker 2: six megatons.
Speaker 1: But they got the math wrong, completely wrong, and they
Speaker 1: didn't get it wrong by a small margin. The actual
Speaker 1: explosion was fifteen megatons. It was a thousand times the
Speaker 1: power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshma.
Speaker 2: They underestimated the yield of their own weapon by a
Speaker 2: factor of nearly three.
Speaker 1: The fireball was so massive, so incredibly hot, that it
Speaker 1: literally vaporized a portion of the coral atol or, erasing
Speaker 1: entire small islands from the map and pulling millions of
Speaker 1: tons of irradiated coral sand and water high into the stratosphere.
Speaker 2: The scientific error here is fascinating but also terrifying.
Speaker 1: How did they mess it up that badly?
Speaker 2: Well? They used two isotopes of lithium in the fuel,
Speaker 2: lithium six and lithium seven. They assumed that the lithium
Speaker 2: seven would be inert in the nuclear reaction.
Speaker 1: They thought it would just sit there exactly.
Speaker 2: Instead, the intense neutron bombardment caused the lithium seven to
Speaker 2: absorb a neutron, split apart and produce massive amounts of tritium.
Speaker 1: Which is highly combustible in a fusion reaction.
Speaker 2: Yes, the inert material aggressively fueled a runaway thermal chain reaction.
Speaker 1: They were literally treating the Earth's atmosphere as an experimental laboratory,
Speaker 1: playing with physical forces. They fundamentally did not fully understand.
Speaker 2: It's hubris on an unimaginable scale.
Speaker 1: That is deeply unsettling. But the physics error pales in
Speaker 1: comparison to the moral failure regarding the fallout the human costs. Yes,
Speaker 1: because of the massive, unexpected yield, a colossal cloud of
Speaker 1: highly radioactive ash was blasted into the air, and the
Speaker 1: military meteorologists knew before they pushed the button that the
Speaker 1: high altitude winds were blowing directly toward inhabited.
Speaker 2: Islands, including the wrong slap Atal.
Speaker 1: They checked the weather, they saw the wind was carrying
Speaker 1: the fallout toward human beings, and they made the conscious
Speaker 1: decision to detonate it anyway.
Speaker 2: They prioritized the test schedule over the safety of the
Speaker 2: Marshal Ease people. They did not evacuate Rongja Lap for
Speaker 2: two full days after the explosion.
Speaker 1: Two days while radioactive ash rained down like thick.
Speaker 2: Snow, children not knowing what it was, played in it.
Speaker 1: It contaminated their drinking water. Their food supply, their entire ecosystem.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just the marshal ease people who were hit.
Speaker 2: The Japanese fishing boat yes, the.
Speaker 1: Dago Fukui Maru or the Lucky Dragon number five. It
Speaker 1: was operating roughly eighty miles away outside the official danger zone.
Speaker 2: The crew was completely covered in radioactive ash.
Speaker 1: They suffered acute radiation sickness, their skin burning, their hair
Speaker 1: falling out. One crew member died shortly after.
Speaker 2: I have to ask, if you are a commander and
Speaker 2: you see the wind is blowing poison toward a populated area,
Speaker 2: why in God's name do you push the button?
Speaker 1: You push the button Because of the profound dehumanization inherent
Speaker 1: in the Cold War testing.
Speaker 2: Program, meaning the people didn't matter.
Speaker 1: To them, the test schedule, the massive logistical effort of
Speaker 1: bringing military brands and scientists to the geopolitical message they
Speaker 1: desperately wanted to descend to Moscow. All of these abstract,
Speaker 1: high level strategic concepts were given absolute priority over the concrete,
Speaker 1: flesh and blood lives of the Marshalisee people.
Speaker 2: They just treated them as expendable.
Speaker 1: The indigenous populations were treated at best as an inconvenience
Speaker 1: to the testing schedule, and at worst, as an opportunity.
Speaker 2: What do you mean an opportunity after the exposure?
Speaker 1: The US government set up Project four point one.
Speaker 2: Oh I read about this.
Speaker 1: It was a medical program to study the effects of
Speaker 1: radiation on the Marshalies for decades. They literally gathered data
Speaker 1: from a population they poisoned. That makes me sick. The
Speaker 1: devastating human cost on the people of the Marshall Islands
Speaker 1: is incalculable. Entire generations plagued by thyroid cancers, horrific birth defects,
Speaker 1: and forced permanent relocation from their ancestral homes, and.
Speaker 2: They had to fight for basic care.
Speaker 1: The fact that the marshaliese had to fight the US
Speaker 1: government and courts for decades to secure basic metical care
Speaker 1: and compensation proves that the government knew exactly what it
Speaker 1: was doing and knew that admitting liability would be politically
Speaker 1: and financially costly.
Speaker 2: Secrecy here wasn't about national security. It was a tool
Speaker 2: to evade moral and financial responsibility.
Speaker 1: Evasion of responsibility seems to be a universal tactic, regardless
Speaker 1: of which superpower we examine.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: During the height of the Cold War, the Soviet nuclear
Speaker 1: program was operating at a breakneck desperate pace to match
Speaker 1: the United States, and they.
Speaker 2: Ran into a massive logistical problem what to do with
Speaker 2: the astronomical volume of highly radioactive liquid waste they were
Speaker 2: generating from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
Speaker 1: Because the American sites like Hanford pumped it into rivers
Speaker 1: or underground tanks, the Soviet solution was shockingly rudimentary.
Speaker 2: Just horrifyingly simple.
Speaker 1: They chose a small natural body of water near the
Speaker 1: Mayak Production Association in the Ural Mountains. It was called
Speaker 1: Lake Karace.
Speaker 2: From nineteen fifty one onward, the Soviet government used this
Speaker 2: lake as an open air dumping ground for high level
Speaker 2: radioactive waste.
Speaker 1: No containment vessels, no deep geological storage.
Speaker 2: No safety protocols whatsoever. They literally just ran pipes out
Speaker 2: to the lake and dumped the glowing toxic sledge directly
Speaker 2: into the open water.
Speaker 1: The environmental degradation is almost impossible to overstate. They poured
Speaker 1: so much radioactive material into that specific basin that the
Speaker 1: hydrology of the lake fundamentally changed.
Speaker 2: By the nineteen nineties, when the Soviet Union fell and
Speaker 2: outside scientists finally got access to test the area with decimeters.
Speaker 2: Lake Karajo was deemed the most polluted place on Earth.
Speaker 1: Listen to the statistic from the declassified sources. The radiation
Speaker 1: fields on the shoreline were measured at six hundred runchins
Speaker 1: per hour. If you simply walked up and stood on
Speaker 1: the shore of the lake for one single hour, you
Speaker 1: would receive a lethal fatal dose of radiation one hour.
Speaker 1: The lake was so incredibly radioactive that it could kill
Speaker 1: a human being in less time than it takes to
Speaker 1: sit down and watch an episode of television.
Speaker 2: And of course, the fundamental law of nature is that
Speaker 2: water and the elements it carries never stay in one place. Yeah,
Speaker 2: ecosystems are dynamic.
Speaker 1: Right, Because in nineteen sixty seven the region experienced a severe,
Speaker 1: prolonged drought, the.
Speaker 2: Water levels in Lake Karace dropped drastically.
Speaker 1: Exposing the highly radioactive sediment on the lake bed. The
Speaker 1: wind picked up and blew massive clouds of radioactive dust
Speaker 1: across the surrounding region, heavily irradiating thousands and thousands of
Speaker 1: people across hundreds of square miles.
Speaker 2: And what did the Soviet government do?
Speaker 1: They said absolutely nothing. There were no warnings, no medical interventions,
Speaker 1: no evacuations. They just let the population absorb the fallout.
Speaker 2: And how did Soviet engineering eventually attempt to fix this
Speaker 2: open air radiological weapon they had created.
Speaker 1: This part is almost comical if it wasn't so tragic
Speaker 1: and the nineteen seventies and eighties that their brilliant solution
Speaker 1: was to just start dumping massive hollow concrete blocks and
Speaker 1: dirt into the lake.
Speaker 2: They spent years just filling it in.
Speaker 1: So their solution to a lake that can kill you
Speaker 1: in an hour is to just poor concrete on it.
Speaker 1: It's absurd. The highly radioactive waste is still down there.
Speaker 2: It is entirely still there, slowly leaching into the groundwater
Speaker 2: table that connects to the Teca River and eventually the Arctic.
Speaker 1: Ocean, putting a band aid on a gaping wound.
Speaker 2: What Lake Karace represents is the sheer, unbridled desperation of
Speaker 2: the Soviet nuclear program. They lack the resources, the time,
Speaker 2: and the technological finesse to manage waste properly, so they
Speaker 2: resorted to barbaric environmental dumping.
Speaker 1: It's just reckless.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, this highlights the specific unchecked danger of authoritarian regimes
Speaker 2: operating without any public oversight.
Speaker 1: In a close society where the press is an arm
Speaker 1: of the state and protesting the government can mean imprisonment
Speaker 1: or death, a bureaucracy can create an absolute ecological dead
Speaker 1: zone with zero accountability.
Speaker 2: The state doesn't have to answer to the people living
Speaker 2: near Lake Karchai, so the state simply ignores their.
Speaker 1: Existence, which is a perfect tragic segue to our final
Speaker 1: historical event today, the ultimate example of ignoring your own
Speaker 1: citizens on an industrial scale. We are staying in the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, but moving to the vast, wind swept eastern
Speaker 1: step of Kazakhstan.
Speaker 2: The Polygon.
Speaker 1: Yes, there is a massive, geographically isolated area there that
Speaker 1: the Soviet military simply called the Polygon. This was the
Speaker 1: Semipalatinsk Test Site.
Speaker 2: Semipalatinsk was the absolute epicenter of Soviet nuclear testing. It
Speaker 2: was their equivalent of the Nevada Test Site, but on
Speaker 2: a much more devastating scale regarding the local population.
Speaker 1: For forty straight years, from nineteen forty nine all the
Speaker 1: way to nineteen eighty nine, the Soviet Union conducted an
Speaker 1: unbelievable four hundred and fifty six nuclear tests at the Polygon.
Speaker 2: Four hundred and fifty six.
Speaker 1: And one hundred and sixteen of those were atmospheric tests,
Speaker 1: meaning the bombs were detonated in the open air, above
Speaker 1: ground or just slightly elevated on towers.
Speaker 2: Producing massive, unfiltered radioactive fallout that was carried entirely by
Speaker 2: the prevailing winds.
Speaker 1: And the surrounding area was not an empty, uninhabited desert.
Speaker 1: There were farming communities, villages, and towns scattered all across
Speaker 1: the Kazakhs step nearby, and.
Speaker 2: The Soviet government never told the people of Kazakhstan what
Speaker 2: they were doing.
Speaker 1: They never provided any warnings before a detonation. There were
Speaker 1: no evacuations, There were absolutely no protective measures given to
Speaker 1: the locals. For decades, they just dropped bombs.
Speaker 2: The physical reality of living near the Polygon during those
Speaker 2: forty years is harrowing. It is a study in chronic,
Speaker 2: long term exposure to varying isotopes.
Speaker 1: It is the most heartbreaking part of all the historical
Speaker 1: records we've looked at today. I want you listening right
Speaker 1: now to just picture this.
Speaker 2: Put yourself in their shoes.
Speaker 1: Picture being a young kid in one of these rural villages.
Speaker 1: It's the middle of summer, you are outside playing. Suddenly
Speaker 1: the skylight's up brighter than the sun. The ground shakes violently,
Speaker 1: and then hours later, white flakes start falling from the
Speaker 1: sky radioactive ash. The children, having no idea what is happening,
Speaker 1: run outside, they play in it, They try to catch
Speaker 1: it on their tongues, thinking it's a bizarre, miraculous summer snowstorm.
Speaker 2: Just awful, only to find out decades later that your
Speaker 2: own government, the state that is supposed to protect you,
Speaker 2: was raining highly radioactive nuclear fallout directly onto your community.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: The medical statistics from the region, which were suppressed for decades,
Speaker 1: reflect the depth of that tragedy. The doctors in the
Speaker 1: region were not allowed to diagnose radiation sickness.
Speaker 2: Really, what are they call it?
Speaker 1: They had to code it as vegetative syndrome.
Speaker 2: When the Soviet Union collapsed, the truth came out. Skyrocketing
Speaker 2: rates of rare cancers, horrific spikes in severe birth defects
Speaker 2: that are still affecting third and fourth generations today, elevated
Speaker 2: mortality rates across the board.
Speaker 1: It is estimated that one point five million people were
Speaker 1: directly affected by the fallout from the Polygon, and the
Speaker 1: full scale of this medical atrocity was fiercely classified by
Speaker 1: the state until nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2: When Kazakhstan gained its independence. One of their very first
Speaker 2: acts as a sovereign nation was to permanently shut the
Speaker 2: site down. Good for them, of course, the genetic and
Speaker 2: environmental damage was already written into the DNA of the
Speaker 2: people and the soil of the land.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's permanent.
Speaker 2: It perfectly ties our entire exploration together. Bringing us back
Speaker 2: to the most haunting concept from the historical analysis of
Speaker 2: these events. In the sources, there's a quote that's not
Speaker 2: a disaster that happened, that's a disaster that was chosen.
Speaker 1: A chosen disaster.
Speaker 2: Yes, when we look at the B fifty two over
Speaker 2: Goldborough or the collision over Palomares, we see mechanical systems failing.
Speaker 2: We see accidents exacerbated by a culture of secrecy.
Speaker 1: Right terrible mistakes.
Speaker 2: Well, when we look at the Marshall Islands, Lake Karace,
Speaker 2: and the Polygon and Kazakhstan, we see something much darker.
Speaker 2: We see how the intense paranoid pressure of the Cold
Speaker 2: War arms race fundamentally warped the morality of global superpowers.
Speaker 1: They lost their humanity.
Speaker 2: It led governments across the globe, regardless of their political ideology,
Speaker 2: to view their own citizens and the citizens of the world,
Speaker 2: not as people to be protected, but as expendable data points,
Speaker 2: as acceptable casualties on the massive spreadsheet of national security.
Speaker 1: A spreadsheet where the ultimate cost is measured in generations
Speaker 1: of bone cancer, poisoned rivers, and radioactive lakes. It's a
Speaker 1: staggering reality.
Speaker 2: To confront, it really is.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? As we pull back
Speaker 1: and look at the big picture synthesis of our exploration today,
Speaker 1: we have traced a deeply unsettling thread through history, from
Speaker 1: a single cheap, low voltage switch saving North Carolina from annihilation.
Speaker 2: To the British government deliberately diluting radioactive milk into the
Speaker 2: breakfast glasses of their citizens to avoid a pr nightmare, to.
Speaker 1: The intentional, decades long poisoning of the Kuzak step.
Speaker 2: The through line is incredibly clear, and it is a warning. Authority,
Speaker 2: when faced with the terrifying consequences of its own unchecked
Speaker 2: power and its own failures, will almost always default to silence.
Speaker 1: Because transparency requires accountability, and.
Speaker 2: Accountability is terrifying to a massive bureaucracy. Now we might
Speaker 2: sit here today think well, the Cold War is over.
Speaker 2: The atmosphere, kest bands are in place, the Berlin Wall fell.
Speaker 1: We've learned our lessons, and while the era of open
Speaker 1: air testing is thankfully behind us, the physical legacy of
Speaker 1: that era is very much in the present.
Speaker 2: Literally, we are still spending billions upon billions of dollars
Speaker 2: trying to vitrify the toxic sludge at Hanford. The concrete
Speaker 2: over lake Karace is degrading as we speak.
Speaker 1: And let's not forget the Mark fifteen thermonuclear bomb that
Speaker 1: is right now, at this very second, still sitting in
Speaker 1: the mud in the shallow waters off Tidy Island, Georgia.
Speaker 1: The physical remnants of this secrecy are quite literally buried
Speaker 1: in our backyards.
Speaker 2: Perhaps more importantly, the deeply ingrained institutional habit of government secrecy,
Speaker 2: the instinct to hide, the failure to redact the report,
Speaker 2: to blame the low level operator, to dilute the truth,
Speaker 2: to avoid panic. That instinct hasn't gone anywhere.
Speaker 1: The bureaucracies have just changed their focus exactly, which brings
Speaker 1: me to a final, really provocative thought that I want
Speaker 1: to leave you the listener with. Today. We have spent
Speaker 1: this entire deep dive dissecting the secrets of the nineteen fifties, sixties,
Speaker 1: and seventies the past. We are talking about the documents
Speaker 1: that eventually, after thirty forty or fifty years, finally got declassified.
Speaker 1: The truth clawed its way into the light. But consider
Speaker 1: this historical anomaly that remains.
Speaker 2: Unsolved today, the Valley incident.
Speaker 1: Yes, in September nineteen seventy nine, an American VLLA satellite,
Speaker 1: which was designed specifically to detect nuclear explosions, picked up
Speaker 1: a massive, unmistakable double flash of light over the remote
Speaker 1: Prince Edward Islands in the South Atlantic.
Speaker 2: Ocean, the classic signature of an atmospheric nuclear detonation.
Speaker 1: Exactly, but to this day, nearly fifty years later, no
Speaker 1: nation has ever claimed responsibility for it. The official US
Speaker 1: government panel at the time claimed it was likely a
Speaker 1: micrometeoroid hitting the satellite.
Speaker 2: A conclusion widely dismissed by independent scientists.
Speaker 1: Who believe it was a joint, highly classified nuclear test
Speaker 1: by Israel and South Africa. The raw data remains heavily classified.
Speaker 1: The truth of who detonated a nuclear way been over
Speaker 1: the ocean in nineteen seventy nine is still a locked
Speaker 1: away secret today.
Speaker 2: It proves that the era of massive nuclear secrets didn't
Speaker 2: end in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: It makes you wonder, what are the fifty year secrets
Speaker 1: being created right now today? What are the tatastrophic near misses,
Speaker 1: the environmental cover ups, or the technological disasters happening right
Speaker 1: now that are being quietly stamped, classified, sealed in a
Speaker 1: vault that we won't find out about until we are
Speaker 1: old and gray.
Speaker 2: The technology changes, but the bureaucratic reflex to hide the
Speaker 2: mistakes remains a constant force of human nature.
Speaker 1: And that is where you come in. We want to
Speaker 1: hear from you. We've covered a lot of heavy shocking
Speaker 1: ground today. So which of these hidden disasters shocked you
Speaker 1: the most?
Speaker 2: Was it the single switch in North Carolina.
Speaker 1: The logistics of scraping up palamyras, or the kids playing
Speaker 1: in the fallout at the Polygon? And more importantly, taking
Speaker 1: a look at the world today, do you think governments
Speaker 1: have actually learned their lesson about transparency and public.
Speaker 2: Trust or are we just living in the dark about
Speaker 2: a whole new set of tear verifying secrets.
Speaker 1: We want to know where you stand on this drop
Speaker 1: your thoughts, your theories, and your answers in the comments below.
Speaker 1: We read them all, and we love seeing how you
Speaker 1: connect these threads.
Speaker 2: It's always fascinating to see the analytical perspectives you all
Speaker 2: bring to these complex histories.
Speaker 1: It really is. Thank you so much for joining us
Speaker 1: and exploring the shadows of the atomic age on this
Speaker 1: edition of Thrilling Threads. We promise to bring you more
Speaker 1: mind bending, carefully untangled explorations next time. Until then, keep
Speaker 1: asking questions and keep pulling the threads.