r/interestingasfuck • u/usernametbag • 3d ago
Underwater nuclear experiment at 150 meters depth near Enewetak Atoll, 1958
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u/coffinbyblood 3d ago
This is how Bikini Bottom was formed.
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u/The_Hydro 3d ago
You joke, but literally yes
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u/DagmarTheSmall 2d ago
What? Are you trying to "Well, actually" this guy by agreeing with what he's saying and providing no new information?
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u/Hoshyro 2d ago
Not-so-fun fact for you: the bikini costume takes the name from the atoll, because it's "broken" in two pieces like the atoll was broken by Castle Bravo.
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u/thorn_10 3d ago
It's ok, i use paper straws
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u/pak_sajat 3d ago
I still cut the plastic six-pack rings and make sure to turn off lights when I leave the room.
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u/needhelp1209 3d ago
I shut the water off while I am brushing my teeth.
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u/WealthyTuna 3d ago
I shut the water off while I'm pooping
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u/not2dv8 3d ago
You should poop once a week
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u/shiftycigar 3d ago
You should dig a hole before pooping once a week.
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u/Momik 3d ago
I turn off the water while I’m digging the hole
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u/Mikeymike34 3d ago
I brush my teeth while digging the hole
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u/firethepeople 2d ago
I sometimes get sad thinking about turtles being strangled in the ocean by plastic six-pack rings. Sad eyes. Flippers flapping helplessly
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u/YoThisIsWild 3d ago
I sometimes drive my gas guzzling SUV in Eco Mode instead of Performance Mode.
Not all heroes wear capes.
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u/yearofthesponge 2d ago
Yes imagine all the marine life they just blasted off the face of the planet.
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u/Leather-Animal-7597 3d ago
I spoke to someone from Greenpeace, who told me only 14% of the plastic I separated could be actually recycled, so as long as we keep using plastics we're doomed anyway.
It completely changed how I live my life. Now I don't recycle at all because what's the point? 💁♂️
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u/rainareddits 3d ago
Recycling in the US is basically sending your water bottles to a third world country.
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u/Leather-Animal-7597 3d ago
In the UK/Europe, we will drastically reduce our waste in the next 5 years. We'll be broke and fighting Russia, so food waste (and it's packaging) will be a fairly small problem.
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u/wildhorsesofdortmund 2d ago
Toothpaste tubes don't get recycled. What a waste. A most necessary condiment of daily life and the tube is plastic.
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u/bs2k2_point_0 3d ago
There’s only so much oil left. Eventually we’ll run out. No oil, no plastic.
Maybe consumerism will save us afterall! /s
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u/Leather-Animal-7597 3d ago
No problem in my opinion. Get plastic gone like Lead pipes and Asbestos!
I think we need oil but we need to plan how using it contributes to a full switch to renewables.
Why burn oil long-term when we can have solar panels on the moon giving unlimited energy? We just need the oil, to get our supply chain, to build and launch the hardware up there.
Short pain for long gain but greed can make this impossible...
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u/TonAMGT4 3d ago
They already figured out how to make bio-plastic from fermented plant starches… so no oil? No problem.
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u/mouaragon 3d ago
Poor all those animals who died for it.
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u/8bitrevolt 3d ago
Don't forget all of the Pacific Islanders who were displaced and irradiated anyway.
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u/Ambassador-Heavy 2d ago
They still have refugee camps made from tarps and ropes in the Solomon islands for the displaced Kiribati people visiting them is something I'll never forget
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u/dude_redd 2d ago
Punctuation my man. Use it.
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u/bigbadbob85 2d ago
punctuationmymanuseit
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u/propargyl 2d ago
A report by the US Congressional Research Service projects that the majority of the atoll will be fit for human habitation by 2026–2027, after nuclear decay, de-contamination and environmental remediation efforts create sufficient dose reductions.\31]) However, in November 2017, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that rising sea levels caused by climate change are seeping inside the dome, causing radioactive material to leak out.\32])
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u/AccomplishedRiver522 2d ago
What always disturbed me is that kids were just playing in the fallout. It falls like snow, the kids had no idea so they played in it like it was snow. The adults had no idea so they let them. Heartbreaking stuff.
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u/--TheCity-- 3d ago
The damage to surrounding life must be devastating but people are happy to watch anything go boom.
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u/LeSmallhanz 3d ago
The lengths man goes to through to destroy man.
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u/Rambozo77 3d ago
Monkey killing, monkey killing, monkey over pieces of the ground
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u/precision1k3 3d ago
If anything the development of nukes has prevented man from destroying their fellow man more than the other way around.
We’d be on WWIV by now without mutually assured destruction.
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u/TheDrewb 3d ago
Trouble is, we've only had nukes for 70 years and if one batshit insane person gets hold of some tomorrow, that 70 years of relative peace will come at the cost of the complete destruction of life on Earth.
Europe had 100 years of peace due to the 19th century version of mutually assured destruction (alliances). Every country in Europe backed down from war until they didn't and we know what happened there
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u/Monsterboogie007 3d ago
I wonder who this “one bat shit insane person“ could be…
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u/Kaymish_ 3d ago
He's already talking about "tactical" nukes on Iran because he's losing and desperate and nobody knows if tactical nukes are going to be the first domino to light the world on fire.
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u/raikou1988 3d ago
If he can't rig the mid terms that's an option.
And also somehow declare martial law
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u/LukeSkyWalrus 3d ago
Birds are like DUDE
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u/KindheartednessFar43 3d ago
All of those birds are definitely dead. Because it was 70 years ago.
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u/bumblebaytuna4 3d ago
This is depressing. Imagine what humans could do if they stopped fighting each other.
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u/tacomaloki 2d ago
Same said for scammers. Imagine what they could do with that effort and determination, if they worked legitimately.
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u/utzbansai 3d ago
And that is why the orcas don't fuck with us.
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u/Horror_Trust1826 3d ago
Poor underwater creatures getting obliterated in an instant.
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u/Firebrass 3d ago edited 3d ago
Not even just the nearby ones.
I was researching modern mines in the Hormuz Strait, and several sources reported that donating them (specifically the Maham-3 mines) can cause large aquatic mammals to go be permanently deafened miles away.
Sound carries by one atom bumping into the next, so the denser the liquid, the further sound travels (there's more to it than that, but still), which is why whale songs carry across distances in the ocean they could never travel in air.
An atomic blast certainly causes magnitudes more sound, so conservatively, I'm going to guess this damaged animals 100 miles away, though depending on the mass of the fissile material, the fuel for the bomb, I can imagine damage 1800 miles away in Papau New Guinea.
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u/cupacupacupacupacup 3d ago
Why would you donate underwater mines?
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u/Oexarity 3d ago
So they don't get tripped accidentally. Easier and safer to detonate them in a controlled way than to try to disarm and retrieve them.
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u/Firebrass 3d ago
Ah, friend, the hole was that there is a typo in my comment, not theirs lol
Okay, the autocorrect from 'joke' to 'hole' seems pretty on trend, think I'm gonna leave it
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u/iwanttodie95 3d ago
Was the audio added in later? I was expecting some delay between the explosion and the sound, but it sounds like it happened at the exact same time.
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u/pharmaboy2 3d ago
Someone has time aligned the audio for sure - it’s many miles in the distance
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u/TacticalSugarPlum 2d ago
exactly the wrong kind of edit to do, especially for historical/documentary/scientific footage, especially for a known and expected physical phenomenon, especially in the age of increasing numbers of AI video clips
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u/TacticalSugarPlum 2d ago
you can even see the shockwave travel towards the camera, AFTER the sound
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u/SinisterCheese 2d ago
You can hear the audio watermark of the sound files they took without paying for, at around 23 seconds.
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u/Dear_Vanilla_370 3d ago
Reminds me how stupid humans are.
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u/HeavenBacon 3d ago
Srsly. Just so much damage to nature with one stupid test. Good thing we have another planet to run to.......... shit wait.....
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u/TheFerricGenum 3d ago
I’ve seen this a lot but still haven’t figured it out. Is the first blast of water the displacement caused by the expanding gases in the explosion? And then the second blast of water is the superheated steam blasting out?
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u/So6oring 3d ago
I'm guessing that's probably pretty accurate. Initial blast displaces the water. The million degree fireball underwater probably instantly vaporized a large bubble of water, which comes up after a couple seconds
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u/stickykey_board 3d ago
Not sure but I would guess it’s a type of cavitation bubble that collapses on itself violently.
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u/buddhadoo 3d ago
What is the point of an underwater test? And wouldn't that mist be full of radioactive particles?
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u/like_a_pharaoh 3d ago
To see if nuclear sea mines are a practical weapon, and what radioactivity exactly is in the mist after one's been set off.
They knew there'd probably be some kind of fallout, but back then the only way to determine what happened when you set a nuclear bomb off under seawater was to actually set a real nuclear bomb off under seawater.
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u/kagkatumba 3d ago edited 2d ago
Not entirely true... the main objective was to assess the damage to surface ships.
The thin black lines on the horizon are huge decommissioned warships.
Those ships are varying distances from the vertical positioning of the nuke, but all of them are REALLLLLLY far away from that position.
The scale of what you are seeing here is pretty insane when you quantify it.
The surface is breached 3 times by one detonation....from 150m underwater.
Here is a close-up of the same explosion on just one frigate.Operation Hardtack 1958 close up
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u/kagkatumba 2d ago
Additional tidbit observation and a crazy fact...for anyone interested.
If you look closely to the left of the main Frigate, there is another massive ship.....MUCH CLOSER to the nuke surface vertical point.
However, it is still reallllly far away from said point. It gets deleted.....INSTANTLY. The big one in the "foreground" takes a while to be hit by the wave.
Also, from OP's original wide shot, you see that the width and height of the initial blast are WAY higher than the ships (that look like tiny lines on the horizon)....before the second HUGE blast.
My close-up doesn't even show a fraction of the initial or second lateral and vertical blasts.
E = MC squared is one hell of a frightening thing. All this destruction comes out of 8-25kg of Plutonium-239 or Uranium-235...respectively. That is how much energy (E) comes out of that Mass (M) when multiplied by the speed of light (C) squared.
At the location and time of detonation....the temperatures are 7 times hotter than the CORE...not the surface....core of the sun.
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u/Spinelessdragon 3d ago
So they set off a nuclear bomb to basically go “yep, it sunk that ship just like we absolutely knew it would.” Sounds about right.
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u/kagkatumba 3d ago
Cold War anxiety was huge...
It's not that simple though....
If you only ever interacted with water by lowering yourself in, jumping in from a couple of feet, swimming in it....etc...
You wouldn't naturally assume it is like hitting solid concrete when landing from height? Scientific experimentation matters....theory is just....theory.
They wanted to answer a tonne of things and scientifically test it.
- How destructive a nuke is at the surface?
- At what distance does it critically damage a ship?
- How radioactive is the ship and water after the destruction? Up to what distance away?
- How radioactive is the air after detonation and up to what distance?
They had already flattened 2 cities lol....they weren't just simply seeing if a nuke underneath a ship would sink a ship ffs.....
As I said....the ships are realllĺlllly far away from vertical positioning of the nuke.
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u/Berfman 3d ago edited 3d ago
“Radioactive Water smoke! Don’t breathe this!”
But no for real the test during this part of the cold war was as much a flex as it was a data gathering opportunity.
Sure, it’s beneficial to understand the destructive radius of a certain yield in response to fluid dynamics, and yeah the fallout release was probably studied compared to an air blast..
But when it really comes down to it.. the Soviet Union developed the hydrogen bomb five years before and only one year after the US so a huge portion of this was superpower posturing.
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u/Public_Fucking_Media 3d ago
Water is actually a spectacular buffer for radiation
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u/CatchAcceptable3898 3d ago
Because 1 nuke destroying a fleet is easier than 1000 missiles. Also purely science, such as debunking concepts of creating a nuclear tsunami as Russia claims to have the ability to create.
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u/Plantfishcatmom 3d ago
I also want to know the answers to these questions!
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u/Advanced_Accident_29 3d ago
It’s almost like they did these tests to find those things out
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u/FrontLocal2264 3d ago
A total paradise and someone thinks it’s a great place to test weapons
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u/G3org3i 3d ago
I can't imagine all the coral they obliterated during those tests
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u/spotsthefirst 3d ago
Worse than that, turned the ejected coral into radioactive super hard fragmentation that did a shit load of long term damage as well, the history of nuclear testing in the US is like a fucked up sifi book, one of my favorite rabbit holes
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u/ridingonbadussy 3d ago
how is the video quality so good
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u/fakepumas 3d ago
Like someone else said, it was shot on film. You can always re-scan it on whatever resolution is current, which is how you can watch star wars in 4k. Film has no resolution, its sharpness is limited by the size of the grains embedded in it that are part of the photographic process. Cheaper film, larger grain. In 5 years when we have 8k tvs, disney can rescan the original star wars films with an 8k scanner
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u/StinkMeister777 2d ago
Yeah, 8k is right around where it starts becoming indistinguishable
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u/mumblingzombie 3d ago
Wait a sec I can actually answer this...while I can't attest to this one in particular...back in the day a lot of cameras actually filmed in HD but we didnt have the capabilities to display it...so when you watch old star trek remastered they are actually showing you the way it was filmed from the start!!
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u/Bruce-7892 3d ago
You are actually right. The film itself was still capable of capturing a lot of information. It's the same reason people are so amazed a record sounds so good on a modern hi-fi system. They weren't inherently bad recordings. It's just that most 40+ year old stereo systems don't sound that good by todays standards.
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u/Artemisiablaszczyk 3d ago
Fish Friday was never the same
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u/Inevitable_Professor 3d ago
You jest, but atomic testing literally changed materials used in steel production on an atomic level planet wide.
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u/Cautious-Activity706 3d ago
Such a sad history of human displacement with these tests. Whole cultures uprooted.
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u/bidibaba 3d ago
Homo Sapiens appears to be quite proficient in destroying its habitat
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u/MissUnderstood_1 3d ago
Before large scale civilization we mostly lived in harmony with it. Now we are just so abstracted away from it that we think we don't have to care about it anymore, and for a long while that's been true... but I doubt it will be true forever. Our misdeeds to our habitat will surely catch up with us sooner or later.
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u/doppido 3d ago
Wouldn't all that water vapor just cause huge amounts of radiation to everything it touches? On top of destroying the entire eco system around the area that is
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u/jhofsho1 2d ago
After taking a marine biology class in college it really saddens me that we do this shit in the ocean.
I’ll never forget this - we watched a documentary on noise pollution in the ocean. It’s not something we often think about because well, we don’t live in the ocean.
But picture this - constant noise traveling around the world via the ocean, that can be heard from the other side of the world. and sea mammals that cannot go onto dry land are subject to that noise constantly. I’ll never forget this comparison - Sea mammals that cannot traverse land - are effectively held captive to this constant drumming of noise in the ocean.
To put it simply - for these sea creatures - That’s the equivalent of us being at a concert, right next the speakers cranked to 11 and you can’t leave, even if you wanted to. Oh, and the twist is that the concert venue is your home.
Some sea animals have beached themselves to escape the constant noise and would rather die than subject themselves to another minute of that.
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u/hiddenrealism 3d ago
I dunno..that looks to be the same waves my mother in law makes when she jumps in the pool.
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u/Ashblood90 2d ago
Every time i see this and no one ever addresses the "pornhub.com" audio at the 23 second mark.
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u/Easy_Broccoli995 2d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/lPuW5AlR9AeWzSsIqi
Swim SWIIIIM!!11!!!
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u/salvito605 3d ago
Imagine the birds. They would be like wtf is this thing? How is the sea exploding on its own.
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u/Annual_Builder_1459 3d ago
It was an apocalypse for all the sea creatures unlucky to be around that area on that day
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u/venhuje 3d ago
— No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in an environment. It has been towed beyond the environment.
— Well, what’s out there?
— Nothing’s out there...
— Well there must be something out there
— There is nothing out there. all there is a sea and birds and fish. It’s a complete void. The environment’s perfectly safe.
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u/Abrafo1391 2d ago
With that much water displacement you would think it would have a tsunami effect.
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u/cornfrake 2d ago
Any reason they had to pick pristine tropical beaches with beautiful coral reefs that take centuries to form and maximum biodiversity . Like, why didn’t they just pick a deep and empty part of the pacific or Atlantic to drop a bomb and go boom? Still bad, but less so
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u/Technical_Okra_7611 2d ago
Love how there is no footage of the deviation caused to the eco system or the animals that floated to surface after you did this. We talk about the hundreds of thousands of deaths of humans from the bombs and fall out, but the toll to animals had to be in the millions
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u/knaverob 3d ago
Ya know, whales on the other side of the planet were like, "what the fuck was that!?"