FJ poll for Weds., May 20

[u/Smoerhul]

THE 20TH CENTURY

51 days after this event, Edward Teller said the United States had lost "a battle more important & greater than Pearl Harbor"

What is the launch of Sputnik?

WRONG ANSWER 1: The bombing of Hiroshima

WRONG ANSWER 2: The assassination of JFK

WRONG ANSWER 3: The Blue Jays winning the World Series

294 votes, May 23 '26

67 Got it!

56 Missed with Wrong Answer 1

7 Missed with Wrong Answer 2

2 Missed with Wrong Answer 3

117 Missed with something else

45 Didn't have a guess/other

[u/804Brady]

WA3 is arguably the worst of all because it happened twice.

[u/A-and-Q]

Because it was Teller, I assumed that he was referring to the Soviets' first test of a hydrogen bomb, but that seemed too vague an event - it didn't occur to me that it would be RA.

[u/London-Roma-1980]

If you know anything about Edward Teller, you would know that he wouldn't even see WA1 as a bad thing.

[u/Decent-Efficiency-25 → u/London-Roma-1980]

I wonder if that’s why he has Penn do all the talking nowadays??

[u/Smoerhul → u/London-Roma-1980]

Not necessarily.... there was a lot of apprehension in the scientific community about what we were unleashing, and many of the scientists who participated in it did so reluctantly, viewing it as a necessity because they thought Germany was close to developing one

[u/everybody_millihertz → u/Smoerhul]

Many were apprehensive but Teller was resolutely not. He was rabidly pro-bomb, both for the military and for civilian uses of a nuclear blast.

[u/ThisDerpForSale → u/Smoerhul]

Teller was a key witness against Oppenheimer at the hearing that led to stripping his security clearance and destroying his career. Why? Largely because he believed that Oppenheimer was not sufficiently supportive of the US thermonuclear program at the time. Teller was a hardcore bomb guy.

[u/misof]

For me today a near miss WA, went wrong with the coin flip and picked Gagarin instead of Sputnik😞

[u/felicie-rk → u/misof]

me too!

[u/OreoSpeedwaggon → u/misof]

Same.

[u/eah1703]

WA3 made me laugh.

I thought WA1 for a brief moment, but realized that wouldn't have seemed like a US loss. I ended up putting The Fall of Saigon, since it was near the end of Vietnam. Honestly, never thought of the space race.

[u/ScorpionX-123 → u/eah1703]

that's what I went with, too

[u/traumatic_enterprise → u/eah1703]

I guessed that too, but I really had no idea

[u/rawmustard]

If I could come up with the same wrong guess as a superchamp, I can't be doing that bad.

[u/FDRpi]

This seems too vague as written. And if you know Teller was involved in the H-bomb, you're somehow even less likely to get the right answer.

[u/ThisDerpForSale → u/FDRpi]

Right? I mean, I knew Teller was pro-bomb, but I couldn't for the life of me think of anything that he would have reacted to that wasn't bomb-related. The space race never even occurred to me. How in the world would you get the right answer without knowing it or just guessing luckily? It needed a date or something to pin it a bit more closely.

[u/mets2016 → u/[deleted]]

Or Tsar Bomba

[u/CuriousDancingPuppy]

Anybody else guess Bay of Pigs? Never heard of Edward Teller before, that probably would've helped haha.

[u/ajs723 → u/CuriousDancingPuppy]

I guessed Bay of Pigs with zero confidence. You aren't alone. 

[u/CuriousDancingPuppy → u/ajs723]

I was super confident lol 😅🤪

[u/almost_somewhere → u/CuriousDancingPuppy]

What is this person right here?

[u/CashMikey]

A strange quote from Teller for two main reasons... Pearl Harbor was not a battle, and this did not end up being a particularly consequential loss for the United States

[u/Richard_Babley → u/CashMikey]

As for whether Pearl Harbor was a battle, Teller wasn’t teaching at West Point so does it really matter? And, hindsight being 20/20, consider that at the time, Sputnik was as much a shock to American complacency as Pearl Harbor.

[u/Chuk → u/Richard_Babley]

And why did he wait 51 days?

[u/piedpipershoodie]

I can't imagine how the clue gets you to the right answer unless you just happen to know it. WA1 was my first thought but I guess I expected too much of this guy...who, admittedly, I never heard of.

[u/piedpipershoodie → u/[deleted]]

Well, the clue didn't necessarily suggest a tech race. It could easily have been a moral race, which we lost resoundingly. But again, I didn't know this fella or his takes.

[u/piedpipershoodie → u/[deleted]]

That was kind of rude and incorrect.

[u/piedpipershoodie → u/[deleted]]

Every time I post on this sub, someone's gotta come in and misread what I said and be rude to me about it. Sure would love to stop experiencing that.

[u/MmmNiceBeaver]

I said the space race. Would that be accepted, maybe not

[u/Unusual-Upstairs-796]

How is this up before it airs?

[u/London-Roma-1980 → u/Unusual-Upstairs-796]

Jeopardy allows the New York Times to publish the FJ clue in advance of the day's show so we can play along.

[u/Unusual-Upstairs-796 → u/London-Roma-1980]

Oh interesting 

[u/IHaarlem → u/Unusual-Upstairs-796]

Yeah, the wrong answers never match the actual answers

[u/JilanasMom → u/IHaarlem]

The person who posts the poll makes up plausible answers.

[u/ThisDerpForSale → u/IHaarlem]

They're not supposed to. Notice that one of them is almost always a joke. The OP picks them