Stuff You Should Know - Can you test a nuclear weapon without a fallout?

Episode Date: September 4, 2012

Over the course of human existence, thousands of nuclear weapons have been exploded on Earth and in space. With all of those tests, one can't help but wonder how much fallout has been produced. Learn the tricks of the nuke-testing trade in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Like it or not?

Like it or not. People are like tuning out now. Oh man, I downloaded the wrong one. I thought this was radio. I thought this was WTF with Martin Mary. What is that saying for? What the heck? What the heck? I probably shouldn't even say that. We'll find out. Yeah, I guess so. If we get censored or get an angry email. That's right. How are you doing, man? Good. Good. I'm glad. I'm well, sir. This is going to be a good one if you ask me. This goes in with our nuclear suite, which is pretty extensive by now. Yeah, we've done quite a few. Steele bomb.

Yeah, who won the Cold War? Who won the Cold War? Mutual Osher destruction. MAD. What else have we done? Now this one, it seems like there was one other one. Star Wars had some nuke stuff to it. Yeah. We've done some other stuff too. Yeah, so this is part of the nuclear suite, as it were. Yes, the very sweet nuclear suite. And we're talking today about whether or not it's possible to detonate, to test, to it's a full extent, apparently. I looked it up. This is not the term. I think Julia Layton made it up. Made what term up? Full extent. Oh, really? Testing a nuclear bomb to its full extent, which means not, apparently you can simulate

a nuclear bomb by putting a bunch of TNT together and going kaboom. Yeah. But there's no radiation. Yeah, yeah. But it's really not quite the same as testing a nuclear weapon by really blowing up the nuclear core. Yeah, which we used to do a lot. A lot. And most recently, there's been a lot of nuclear tests, Chuck. A total of 2,053 nuclear weapons have been exploded on planet Earth, which is a big qualifier. That's crazy. But that was only eight countries that did that. Yes, Russia. The US had 1,032. North Korea. Russia, 715. France, 210. Yeah, they did a lot. The UK and China are tied at 45 apiece. India and Pakistan each had two. And then North Korea had two as well. The most recent one to

join the fray in 2006 and 2009. I wonder if the UK and China are kind of like one of us. One more. Just to do it. I could think China doing it over the UK. The UK wouldn't do that. You never know. Oh, okay. Well, they did it before. Yeah, but those were different days. But of course, the USA leads the pack in detonating nuclear weapons on planet Earth. Yeah, man. By far. Desert out in the ocean. Yeah. Underground in the air. Yeah. I sent Josh a video earlier that Jonathan Strickland of Tech Stuff sent me today by chance. I was like, dude, really? Yeah. How crazy is it that you sent this? Yeah. And he didn't respond. But it was a busy man. There's a video on the

YouTubes of these five army or Navy guys standing underneath. This is one of the aerial detonations of a nuclear bomb. I think they're Air Force and they were the Air Force and they just stood there and watched basically. They stood at ground zero under the hypersonic. It is crazy. And like you can see it and hear it happen. And they're just like laughing and carrying on and talking about how awesome it was. Well, so there's five of them. Four were volunteers. The only one who wasn't a volunteer was the photographer. Yeah. They forced him to do it. But yeah, like you see this light go off and there's no sound, but they like kind of flinch. Yeah. And then one guy wearing like old timey 1940s sunglasses like looks up and then you can hear the sound. It's pretty crazy.

But that was again, mention number two of Radio Lab. That was Robert Kroll, which is a blog. Kroll, which wonders. He's one of the hosts of Radio Lab, of course. And that was pretty awesome. Yeah. And I found another blog of his that we'll talk about later that I sent it to you. Yes. That was pretty sweet. Yeah. I think it topped the first one even. But so Strickland's involved. The UK's involved. Robert Kroll, which has already been mentioned. Yeah. Basically, this is going to be a big sweeping, enormous epic podcast, if you ask me. So part of North Korea's spiel after 2006 when it became officially a nuclear state was that a press release that said there was no nuclear fallout from this test. It was

totally contained. I don't believe it. Well, it's kind of unbelievable. Yeah. You know, I mean, like one of the things you think of with the nuclear weapon is radiations. One of the things it's designed to do sure is not just wipe out a population with the explosion, but to really plague it for generations. Yeah. You know, yeah. But it turns out that it is possible, well, depending on the type of test you conduct and the conditions and the if you carry the two well, then you might be able to conduct a nuclear test that doesn't have any fallout, at least atmospheric fallout. Is that true? Because I didn't even gather that from this. I thought, well, we'll get into it. No, it can be totally contained. Oh, really? I never drew

that conclusion, like that they have done it and contained it completely. Okay, then theoretically it can. Okay. I don't know if they if it can, but like there's I saw this awesome article on the BBC that even had a flash slideshow, which is the mark of quality that showed how a an underground test could be done. We just gave it away. It's the underground test that you can contain the fallout, but how it could contain all the fallout. Yeah. And that Korea supposedly went to these links to do it. Supposedly. So well, let's talk real quick about what happens in a nuclear reaction, Chuckers. Yeah. I guess we should define a couple of things. Because we're going to be thrown around some terminology that we might understand. And you

might be like, what's an isotope? I forgot chemistry from high school. An isotope is basically a different version of the same element determined by the number of neutrons. So like if you got hydrogen, just a regular old hydrogen atom doesn't have neutrons. If you add one neutron, it's deuterium. You had two neutrons, it's tritium, but they're all hydrogen. So they're just different versions of that same element. Okay, pretty easy. Sure. So fission happens when scientists basically bombard a larger isotope with neutrons and the collision basically is fission. And it produces like an incredible amount of energy because of mass defect. So like if you were to take, if you were to write out this formula for a nuclear fission reaction. I have.

And it was like really accurately measured all the mass of all the atoms and all these subatomic particles before and after, you're going to find a mass defect. You're going to find some missing mass and that missing mass is the energy, which is awesome if you're, have a nuclear reactor because you're creating like tons and tons of energy. Right. And I guess it's awesome if you want to make a nuclear bomb. Bro, it is. What you're talking about is fission. So fission is like when one of those neutrons is picked up by an atom that additional neutrons just splits the atom. Yeah. And that releases more neutrons, which forms a chain reaction. Well, it's the key there is it reduces, there's only two, it has to release extra neutrons. And there's

only two main isotopes that can do this. Yeah. They found out, which is uranium 235, plutonium 239. I'm more a plutonium guy. Are you really? Yeah. So they're fissionable, which is kind of an awkward word. Right. But it's not just fissionable because I mean, we can split an atom if you want. Let's do it right now. Yeah. But we're just splitting one atom. The point to this is that there has to be a sustainable chain reaction. So when we split one atom, it causes another atom to split and another atom to split and another atom to split. And as these splits are taking place, a huge expansion is undergone. Right. It's growing. And supposedly at critical mass, which is like the full sustaining of this chain reaction of nuclear fission among these atoms.

Yeah, that's the minimum amount required to create that chain reaction. So the critical mass, the number of neutrons can be doubled 80 times a microsecond. A microsecond is a millionth of a second. So that means that in one second, the number of neutrons can have doubled 80 million times. That's called something special. Yeah. And that's not 80 million times two. That's the 80 millionth power, I believe, isn't it? I think so. It's exponential. Yeah. It's crazy big. Right. You go from something very tiny to kaboom, where all of a sudden there's an enormous mushroom cloud. That's right. And how you get that cloud, if you want to bomb, you're going to have two subcritical, subcritical means hasn't reached critical mass. Yeah. You have two subcritical,

but fissionable isotopes, and you keep them separate. That's really key. And then you combine them with a traditional explosive. And it's all over after that. And remember, there's one of these just sitting off the coast of Savannah somewhere lost. That's right. It's just sitting there. And there's like, there was dynamite tears. I forgot about that. They're not one the same. There's a TNT detonator. Yeah. That's just aging terribly underwater. I thought they found it. No. Remember this XCIA agent offered to locate it for a million bucks very publicly. Well, that was a long time ago when we talked about that. Yeah. I think that was the maybe the steel, the nuke one. That was an early one for sure. Wow. So that's another reason to be scared of all over

again. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would

call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset fortune. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. This is what it sounds like inside the box car. I'm journalist in Elm Morton in my podcast city of the rails. I plunge into the dark world of America's railroads searching for my daughter Ruby who ran off to hop trains. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters living outside society off the grid and on the edge. I was in love with a lifestyle on the freedom this community. No one understands who we truly are. The rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood history and the thing we call the American dream. It's the

last vestige of American freedom. Everything about it is extreme. You're either going to die or you could have this incredible rebirth and really understand who you are. Come with me to find out what waits for us in the city of the rails. Listen to city of the rails on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts or city of the rails dot com. Right. So Chuck, there's four kinds of nuclear weapons testing. Yeah. At least four that we've come up with and carried out so far. Yes. There's a high altitude space, which I think we wondered like what would happen in the Star Wars episode. Yeah, answered right here. Yeah. Underground, underwater and atmospheric. Yeah. Let's talk about these. All right. Well, let's talk about

atmospheric. Let's do this is the one that I said the YouTube of showed a plane flying and shooting this bomb off. It wasn't like dropped. It was like launched like a rocket and then exploded above these dudes heads where they could see it. Not a good idea. I don't know why they ever thought this is a good idea. Even in the middle of a desert. It's going to fall. It's going to rain down what happened up on the ground. Yeah. Whoever's down there is Billy. I don't put it. It's going to rain hell from above. Billy Idol. Yeah. Okay. It's the rebel. Yeah. What's it? Yeah. I don't know all the words to that. That's a good song. Where does that come? I can't remember. Is it the chorus or the verse? It's the it's the last rain hell from above. Yeah.

Because in the midnight I hope you cry. It's pretty good Billy Idol. So the scariest thing about when they do these tests out in the middle of the desert is all they do basically is quote clear the area. That's how they prepare the surrounding area for a nuclear fallout. They just clear it as best they can, which usually consists of clearing like one or two micro nations consisting of one or two guys who use like chocolate chip cookie dough as currency. Yeah. I mean, what about all the animals? What about all the vegetation and plants? Stop thinking about them hippie. We're trying to test nukes here. Well, and that's why they do it out in like in the middle of the Nevada desert. Right.

Is because they think you know like it is barely living alive out there. Yeah. Yeah. Still. Okay. Yeah. The ground ground hogger know the prairie dog populations have been decimated because they were reduced by exactly 10%. Did you see the guy that wrote in about that today? No. He says by the way, when Josh said factoid and decimate, he's both of them wrong. And I had the same reply. I was like, buddy, it's not ancient Rome anymore. Look it up. Decimate means a completely different thing now. True that. Okay. As does factoid. All right. So let's talk about a ground test, the Castle Bravo test. Well, hold on real quick. The atmospheric test, you said like the drop it out of a plane. There's other ways you can do it. You can also

launch it via weather balloon. Oh, yeah. Sure. And you can just put it on top of a tall pole. But basically an atmospheric test is anything just above ground. You can also detonate it on top of the ground because it's atmospheric. There's nothing covering it. Right. Between that and say about 250 miles, that's an atmospheric test. Okay. 250. I believe so because 250 miles or more is typically the high altitude test. How would they do that on the ground though? It's like get it 249 miles up is what I say. Yeah. I mean, they were standing underneath the hypocenter. Yeah. They dropped two of them on Japan. Yeah. People were a little more reckless with nuclear weapons back then. All right. So the Castle Bravo test? Yeah. So basically the reason

we talk about this is things back then at least they would clear the area for what they thought was going to happen. Yeah. But when you miscalculate and you make an error in your math, bad things can happen, which is what happened in 1954. At the Bikini Atoll. That's right. And that's that. That's actually where the Bikini swimsuit is named after. That's right. There was nuclear fever around the world and some French designer made the Bikini in honor of nuclear testing in paradise. And they said, how about some midriff fellas? Right. And the guys went, all right. I love the atomic age. Let's screw up this big test. Yeah. So basically what they were trying out was a new type of fuel core made of lithium, lithium-15, I believe. And they had not carried the two

and were estimating a six megaton detonation explosion. Yeah. I saw it was low as four. Okay. So they were off by almost three times. Yeah. It turned out to be a 15 megaton explosion. Yeah. Which means that the blast radius, the area where it's still safe, just from the explosion, was expanded tremendously or should have been expanded tremendously. Oh, yeah. There was a group of Japanese fishermen on a boat that in English translates, the name it was translates to Lucky Dragon. Yeah. They were not so lucky because they were just outside of the blast zone and of the original blast zone. And all of a sudden all this stuff starts raining down and like one of them is like sticking out his tongue trying to taste it. It's all nuclear

fallout. And the whole boat came down with sickness. And actually the one fatality from the Kessel Bravo test was on that boat. Yeah. I can't believe it was just one. But people like that. One direct death. Yeah. There was a lot of like cancer. Sure. Birth defects, second generation birth defects. Yeah. There was a lot of it was a huge screw up. Oh, yeah. To say the least. I got some stats on that. Okay. Let's hear it. They produced a four and a half mile wide fireball, four and a half miles, dude, left a crater 6,500 feet in diameter and 250 feet deep. And in the end, it was a thousand times more powerful than either one of the bombs we dropped on Japan. And it's still the largest nuclear detonation by the United

States ever. Is it really? Yeah. I think Russia topped that, of course. And they basically just put the device out on top of this atoll and like ran away. Yeah. Like setting off a firework or something like that. Yeah, that was pretty nuts. Very sad. Shall we go underwater? Oh, hold on. There's this issue. If you're interested in this at all, especially like the Bikini atoll, there's footage in this awesome documentary from 1982 called Atomic Cafe. Oh, I think I've seen that. It is awesome. It's just like newsreel footage. Basically, it's like Cold War nuclear hysteria and love and reasons behind hysteria. But there's a newsreel clip of like the king of, I can't remember, but the Marshall Islands basically, the indigenous king

stands up and he's like, we're really excited to evacuate our home for you guys to do nuclear testing. So let's go. And it's really just awkward and staged and it's something else. Or the people all behind him going, did he just say what I think he said? Yeah, they're like, what did he say? That actually sucks. Yeah. So it's a good movie. The whole thing. Yeah. That's that documentary? Yeah. I think there's a movie called the Atomic Cafe too. That's it. Oh, I didn't think it was a documentary. It's a documentary. It's by two brothers and a friend, a lady friend. Really? Yeah. Is there a person on the bicycle on a bike on the cover? There may be. I believe there's definitely a mushroom cloud. I might be thinking of something

altogether different. You're thinking of fables of the reconstruction. Oh, you're right. All right. So now, Mr. Issu, can we go underwater? Yes, sir. That's all right. Underwater is going to have less fallout, obviously, because you're underwater. So that's good. But and you don't see a lot of this. It's hard to get a lot of information on this. But obviously, you're going to destroy any kind of marine life, coral reefs that we've talked about, and basically anything else that it comes into contact with, not to mention fishing villages and basically these these people that depend on fishing to live. Right. Yeah, it's not just the it's not just the immediate impacts, which is basically blowing up tons of dolphins and whales and stuff like that. Right. It has a long sustained impact.

Like think about it that just from Fukushima, that's another one in our nuclear suite, how nuclear meltdown works. That's right, of course. Fukushima, there's people who like won't touch any kind of seafood from Japan now, because they're afraid of fallout. Yeah, whether that's correct or not, at the very least, in the public opinion, you can't just blow up a nuclear weapon under water and expect everything to be okay. Well, yeah, and the economic impact it has on the fishermen, of course, is huge. And the three eyed fish, like the Simpsons. Blinky. Was that who was? And it blinked all in succession, right? Yeah, that's pretty funny. Yeah. And you just confirmed that it was a bicycle in the front of the atomic cafe, right? Yeah, that's the atomic

cafe. All right, I've always wanted to see that, and I never knew it was a documentary. It's very good. I was associated with the attack of the killer tomatoes, because I think they came out at about the same time. And they both seem to have like the same kind of thrilling poster. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely

insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. This is what it sounds like inside the box car. I'm journalist Denelle Morton in my podcast City of the Rails. I plunge into the dark world of America's railroads, searching for my daughter Ruby, who ran off to hop trains. I'm just like stuck on this train. God knows where I'm going to end up.

And I jump. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters, living outside society, off the grid and on the edge. I was in love with a lifestyle on the freedom this community. No one understands who we truly are. The rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood, history and the thing we call the American dream. It's the last vestige of American freedom. Everything about it is extreme. You're either going to die or you could have this incredible rebirth and really understand who you are. Come with me to find out what waits for us in the city of the rails. Listen to City of the Rails on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts or cityoftherails.com. Okay,

shall we go into outer underground or should we say that for last and do outer space? Well, let's go underground. Okay, because this is the winner as far as the only way theoretically to contain fully a nuclear blast, but you got to go down really, really, really deep. Like 800 meters deep, which is a half a mile, about 2,600 feet. And for that, that's a bomb of what size? I don't know, Chuck. Well, okay, this can put it into into a comparison at least 300 feet down. You could contain a one kiloton bomb. That's a kiloton. You got to remember the Castle Bravo was 15 megatons. So, yeah, there's some math involved there somewhere, but I imagine 800, 800 feet, you said? 800 meters, 2600 feet. And supposedly, even though they do

point out in this article, you never really know until you do it because it can be unpredictable, obviously, in the case of the bikini at all. But it's worst case scenario if it does go above ground because then it's raining down radioactive soil. And lots and lots of radioactive soil. So, to outfit the best case scenario, basically, you want to dig this 800 meter, you want to bore an 800 meter hole and you've hit subterranean rock, like the mantle of the earth at this point, depending on where you are, but most likely you have because you're half a mile into the earth. You put your little nuclear bomb in there. And it says here also that North Korea has done something like four to five megatons underground. Yeah. In the chamber, which is like

the bottom of the hole, and you backfill it with like gravel, gypsum, like this composite of all these different solid materials that are going to pack that whole solid to absorb the shock wave, the blast. So, that means that it can go up, but it's not going to go up very far. What it's going to do is go out. So, you set the thing off and it goes out and down. And it actually, the blast vaporizes the mantle of the earth around it, which then eventually, after probably a few seconds, cools into molten rock. Yeah. And after that sits there and stews for a couple of minutes, the hole above it, it can't support the earth above it any longer. Sure. And so, it collapses, and then what you have is called a subsistence crater, subsidence crater. That cannot be good

for the earth. It's not, but there's YouTube's lousy with like underground tests where these craters just form. It's nuts. But that supposedly contains the fallout. Supposedly. That's what I hear. That's what the BBC says. Well, we'll see. But that's how, if you're ever interested, that's how you perform an underground nuclear test. If you have a nuclear bomb. And an 800 meter bore. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's got to be some high engineering right there to get down there and not have it cave in on itself. And it's not just a hole either, probably. Hey, Kim Jong-il knew what to pull the stops on. He did. Yeah. That's right. All right. So now outer space, which is one of the dumbest ideas. Actually, they're all pretty dumb if you ask me. But we did it and so

did Russia. And we would to see basically if we could kill satellites with nuclear bombs in space. Right. One of the problems is it kills a lot of satellites and possibly your own imported satellites. So they just discovered the Van Allen belt of nuclear radiation around the earth. And they figured out that if they blew up a nuclear bomb in the Van Allen belt, they could create an electromagnetic pulse that would wipe out satellites. But it wiped out more than just ours. And it actually created that. This is where we hit Robert Kroll, which again, yeah, who apparently shares the same interest in nuclear history, Cold War nuclear history that we do. Because this is the second blog of his on this topic. But I would definitely recommend looking

this up. It's called A Very Scary Firework Show. And it's about this US launch of nuclear weapons into space. It was called Starfish Prime was the operation. It's a pretty cool name. Starfish Prime? Prime is cool. Starfish, not so much. I think it's cool. But they were publicizing it. It was all over the newspapers. It was like look for a great fireworks display in the sky. And you could see it looked like the northern lights up in space when this thing was exploded 250 miles up. Well, the good news there is there's not going to be any fallout because the earth's atmosphere is going to deflect that. The bad news, though, is like we said, it's not exactly, it's not an exact science. You're not sharp shooting. So you can take out all kinds of satellites. And

I think there was an electromagnetic pulse that actually can wipe out electrical systems here on earth. And it did. In a big way. Yeah. And then, of course, radiation in space. Who knows what that means? You know, to like manned space flights. You don't want that stuff out there. Which is strange because I thought there was a lot of radiation already in space. From? Well, just solar radiation. Oh, okay. There's tons of isotopes up there. Man, I don't even get me started. So is that it? Underground? Is that our consensus? It seems to be the way to go. How about no more nuclear weapons testing of any kind? That's that's what I'm getting behind. Me too. Man, there's tons of cool stuff on the internet. If you want to check out those five crazy guys

standing beneath the hypocenter of a nuclear blast in, I think, 1952. Yeah. You can check out five men agree to stand directly under an exploding nuclear bomb on Kroll, which is blog. Also check out this very scary fireworks display while you're there. I would strongly recommend Atomic Cafe. And Radiolab and Tech Stuff. Yeah. And there's this really cool time lapse video of the 2053 nuclear bombs exploded on Earth ever by a Japanese artist named Isayo Hashimoto. It's a cool name. It's called nucleartesting.wmv on YouTube. It's for checking out. Yeah, it's cool. It represents them by just little flashes and stuff. I was expecting something different. But did you see like it had like it looked like an old Atari game? Yeah,

it looks sort of like Missile Command. Yeah. But it had the years as the years tick by. It shows when they were in when and where they're detonated. And it's funny to see the heyday of when they're going off a lot more. It's cray cray in the heyday. And if you want to learn more about nuclear weapons testing, you can type in nuclear weapon radioactive fallout. It'll bring up this excellent article on howstuffworks.com. And I don't think I said search bar. So search bar. And now it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Farmer Garrett writes in. My favorite farmer. Hi guys, and Jerry, I just want to take this time and say how much I enjoy the show. Without you, I would not know what to do with myself for hours on end, literally. My friend and I often find ourselves

having nerd rampages where we talk endlessly or debate about something you've covered in the show. First started listening when my cousin introduced me to the 10 strange deaths podcast and I was hooked. I immediately subscribed been listening ever since. Without you, I would be working in silence right now. You see, I work on a farm. And most of the farm work is done at night. Where I live, we have to wait for the moisture to be just right before we can work in the fields. So it's 250 to 15 a.m. According to my clock right now, and I'll be heading out to work shortly. So this is from Garrett Massey and I wrote Garrett back and I was like, dude, what kind of farming are you doing at 2.15 in the morning? I don't know anything about farming.

And he said, we actually, our family works with corn and hay. And the reason we get up sorely is so there's plenty of moisture in the hay leaves before you rake and bale them. So that's what I've been doing. I started at 2.30, get home around 10 a.m. in the morning. His work day is done. We live in New York, sorry, we live in New Mexico, not New York. Very different. And it gets really hot and dry here, which is why we have to work at night when it's coolest and most humid. So I learned a little something from that one. And since he brings up New Mexico, that raises an excellent point. Just two days ago was the 67th anniversary of the very first nuclear weapons test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Really? The Trinity test. It's all coming together.

Yeah. Almost like we plan this stuff out. It's crazy. But we don't. Strickland sending land. I know. Farmer Garrett sending land. Time. Time. Weird. Jerry. Yeah. Well, if you want to send us something that blows our minds, we're always looking for that kind of thing. And we're not even stuff to blow your mind, but we can appreciate it. That's true. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us a good old fashioned electronic email to stuffpodcast at discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?

The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Here's today's fortnight weather report. iHeartland has been hit by a major blizzard. The snow has turned iHeartland and fortnight into a winter wonderland with new festive games, including a winter themed escape room, a holiday obstacle course, ice skating, hidden holiday gifts and more. Look out for upcoming

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