Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Operation Plumbbob

Episode Date: January 30, 2021

In 1957 the United States embarked on its most controversial series of nuclear tests. These tests took place on US soil in the state of Nevada. They detonated 29 devices and tested a wide number of things, including how blasts would damage builds, pigs, and soldiers. They detonated bombs on towers, from balloons, and even underground. And, according to legend, they might have even accidentally launched the first man-made object into space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1957, the United States embarked on its most controversial series of nuclear tests. These took place on U.S. soil in the state of Nevada. They detonated 29 devices and tested a wide number of things, including how blasts would damage buildings, pigs, and soldiers. They detonated bombs on towers, from balloons, and even underground. And according to legend, they may have even accidentally launched the first man-made object into space. Learn more about Operation Plumbob on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Scotty Vest. Every so often, I meet people who think that Scotty Vess only sells. sells vests. Despite the word vest in their name, they sell a lot more than vests. They have a wide selection of clothing including t-shirts, polo shirts, jackets, coats, cartigan sweaters, pants, shorts, skirts, boxers hats, and of course vests. Every item of clothing has extra pockets for

your stuff. I've personally worn scotty vass gear for almost a decade and it has taken me to every continent on earth. You can get 15% off your next order by going to scottyvest.com and using coupon code everything everywhere, all one word at checkout. What made Operation Plumbob so controversial was where the test took place and how they took place. Prior to the 1950s, most of America's nuclear tests took place on remote atolls in the Pacific. They were far away from population centers, and they were mostly about testing the workings of the bombs themselves. Please refer to my episode on the testing they did at Pekini Atoll. While there were obvious benefits to testing in a remote area in the ocean, there were a

lot of drawbacks as well. Not to mention that doing testing in the remote Pacific was extremely expensive. To that end, they created the Nevada Proving Grounds, now known as the Nevada test site. If you've ever driven around Nevada, it is truly some of the most desolate land you're going to find in the continental United States. You could drive for hours on some roads without seeing another person. While the Nevada Proving Grounds was desolate, it actually wasn't that far from the largest population center in the state, Las Vegas. It was only 65 miles. from the Vegas strip. 65 miles is close enough that you could easily see mushroom clouds from the tests that took

place. In fact, when tests were announced, they would have parties in Las Vegas just to watch the blast, and people would come to town just to see it. During one series of tests in 1955 called Operation T-Pot, they created a collection of buildings called Survival Town, or as some people called it, Doom Town. If you've ever seen footage of a building being blown apart from a nuclear blast, that probably came from Operation T-Pot.

Operation Plumbob was a dramatic expansion in nuclear testing. It would double the number of tests from the previous series of tests in Nevada. Operation T-Pot had 14 tests, and Plumbab was scheduled for 29. They conducted tests with over 1,200 pigs to see if they would withstand a nuclear blast. They put some in houses and some behind glass to test how shrapnel would impact them. Some were even dressed in clothes to see how that would protect them. One blast was conducted at 20,000 feet, and five Air Force officers stood under the blast at ground zero to document it. In other tests known as the Desert Rock exercises, 16,000 servicemen from every branch of the military took part.

They were all exposed to nuclear blasts. The explosions caused a burst of light that was so bright that soldiers claimed to be able to see their bones through their skin. As one servicemen who witnessed the explosion said, quote, if there's a hell on earth, it's got. to be that. The nuclear fallout from Operation Plumbob resulted in numerous lawsuits from veterans and civilians who were exposed to the radiation. While the exposure to radiation and the human element was certainly the longest lasting and most important element of Operation Plumbob, it isn't the one that's gotten the most attention. Part of Operation Plumbob was the first underground nuclear detonations ever. The first underground test was called Pascal A. The bomb was

placed down a shaft, drilled 500 feet down into the earth. When it was detonated, the energy released was 50,000 times greater than expected. It unleashed an incredible pillar of fire that came up the hole and shot hundreds of feet into the sky. It was the next underground test, Pascal B, that became legendary. This time, they were going to put a steel cap at the top of the hole to hopefully contain the explosion and not get a repeat of the giant pillar of fire. The steel cap was 900 kilograms or 2,000 pounds, and it was welded in place. One researcher, Dr. Robert Brownlee from the Los Alamos National Labs, thought the cap would be absolutely useless.

He did some quick calculations on the forces which would be exerted on the plate and determined there was no way it would survive. They set up a high-speed camera to film the top of the borehole just to see what would happen. The camera could take a photo every one-one thousandth of a second. What they had inadvertently created with Pascal B was a cannon. If you think about it, what is a cannon or a gun? It's an explosion, usually with black powder, a barrel to focus the explosive force, and a projectile that's propelled by the explosive force. In this case, the explosions came from a nuclear weapon instead of black powder.

The barrel was a shaft drilled into the ground instead of a metal barrel, and the projectile was a 2,000-pound steel cap on the top of the borehole. After they detonated the weapon, the cover on the hole was, not surprisingly, gone. When they went and checked the high-speed film, there was only a single frame where it could be seen, and even that was blurry because it was moving so fast. In the calculations done by Dr. Brownlee, he estimated that the cap would have been propelled at a speed of 150,000 miles per hour, or 240,000 kilometers per hour. That would be six times the escape velocity necessary to leave the gravity of Earth.

A glorified manhole cover was the fastest human object in history. It went faster than even Voyager 1, the first space probe to leave the solar system, and the New Horizon spacecraft which first went to Pluto. It wasn't until NASA's Helios probes in the 1970s, which did a fly-by-the-sun, that we ever made anything that went faster. The test took place several months before Sputnik was launched into orbit. So the question which some have asked is, was a metal hole cover actually the first man-made object in space?

And the answer is, almost certainly, no. A satellite going much slower will burn up in the upper atmosphere, which is much less dense. An extremely un-aerodynamic object, going much faster in an even more dense atmosphere, almost certainly vaporized and did so rather quickly. However, there are some that theorized that the plate might have deformed into a more aerodynamic,

shape and might have actually survived the trip into space. The steel lid has never been found, and it isn't one of the objects which has been tracked in space. After this, they changed how they did underground tests, and they never had an opportunity to create another nuclear cannon. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAla. The associate producer is Thor Thompson. Remember to leave a five-star review to get your review read on the show. They can be left at Apple Podcasts, Podcast, Republic, or wherever you listen to

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