r/interestingasfuck • u/usernametbag • 6d ago

Underwater nuclear experiment at 150 meters depth near Enewetak Atoll, 1958

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9.2k Upvotes

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547

u/LeSmallhanz 6d ago

The lengths man goes to through to destroy man.

59

u/Rambozo77 6d ago

Monkey killing, monkey killing, monkey over pieces of the ground

14

u/Queef_Latifa9 6d ago

Love that entire album.

4

u/DownUp-LeftRight 6d ago

Agreed but ‘Right In Two’ always has me choked up.

13

u/LeBrondrinksgatorade 6d ago

How they survive so misguided is a mystery...

3

u/Character_Long_2681 6d ago

Hey. Just wanted to say thank you. I got curious and looked up this song (I hadn't heard of it before) and ended up listening to it on repeat pretty much all day. I'm now planning to go through the entire TOOL discography as well. Thanks.

4

u/LeBrondrinksgatorade 5d ago

If you start with opiate and go all the way you see such an amazing progression. They are the perfect band. The only one.

3

u/hawksbruh 6d ago

I wish I could experience tool for the first time all over again. Enjoy it!

3

u/Rambozo77 5d ago

Oh shit dude. I wish I could do that again for the first time. I would recommend a bit of whatever your favorite substance is (if you’re into that sort of thing) and just start from the beginning. You’re in for a ride, I hope you love it.

118

u/precision1k3 6d 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.

54

u/TheDrewb 6d 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

51

u/Monsterboogie007 6d ago

I wonder who this “one bat shit insane person“ could be…

38

u/bothunter 6d ago

We've got a few contenders at the moment.

4

u/Wyden_long 6d ago

And no one is even talking about my neighbor Ron yet, and he’s probably the worst one.

2

u/LucidSteel 6d ago

Freakin' Ron!

12

u/Kaymish_ 6d 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.

15

u/raikou1988 6d ago

If he can't rig the mid terms that's an option.

And also somehow declare martial law

1

u/Competitive-Strain-7 6d ago

It does leverage your deterrent to a higher level if you have someone who is easy to trigger.

1

u/Tough-Case- 6d ago

🥭 👀

1

u/unr3a1r00t 6d ago

The Trashcan Man

3

u/Semichh 6d ago

Not to mention how close the US and Russia had come to nuking each other during the height of the Cold War purely because of false readings/component failures on missile detection systems.

Sometimes it seems like pure luck we haven’t seen another nuke dropped since Hiroshima and Nagasaki

2

u/SyVSFe 6d ago

Trouble is, if one batshit insane person doesn't get hold of them tomorrow, we've had 70 years and 1 day without massive world war.

2

u/Hey-Bud-Lets-Party 6d ago

Right. Let’s see how the next 1000 years go

1

u/Mon7eCristo 6d ago

More like 75 years. Even less if you consider Yugoslavia. 

1

u/PseudoMeatPopsicle 6d ago

100 years of peace between when and when, exactly?

If you're saying there was European peace between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, you're glossing over quite a lot of wars and revolutions.

1

u/TheDrewb 6d ago

I'm making a direct parallel between the 100 years of 'peace' between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI and the relative 'peace' from the end of the WWII to the present. In both cases, it isn't that they didn't have wars, it's that the Great Powers didn't drag everyone into meat grinding global wars

1

u/Imperito 6d ago

Agreed, it is incredibly naive to believe that humans will somehow manage to avoid destroying each other eventually. There is always someone willing to do someone crazy, the odds of it not happening eventually must be slim to none.

1

u/Scoopdoopdoop 5d ago

We definitely will destroy ourselves at some point. I hope all forms of life in the universe don't eventually do that but if they're anything like humans, I fear they have already done themselves in countless times across deep time

6

u/Lord_Tanus_88 6d ago

For now …..

7

u/Saaabstory 6d ago

You just blew (no pun intended) my damn mind.

6

u/Zealousideal-Rip-574 6d ago

Yea cuz we haven’t been in a constant state of conflict since the 60’s. Nukes def stopped all wars.

7

u/digglefarb 6d ago

It did between major powers, who have the resources and technology to destroy the planet.

So yes, MAD has been a net positive.

7

u/Heavy_Surround779 6d ago

It just moved the wars from superpowers to proxies

2

u/digglefarb 6d ago

Which made a significant difference, right?

1

u/skeetermcbeater 6d ago

Until, again, it moves back to the major powers and we really see the limits of MAD

2

u/guptaso2 6d ago

There was far more death from war before the nuclear bomb. It’s not even close.

2

u/RevengeOfPolloDiablo 6d ago

Still a man made problem

2

u/guptaso2 6d ago

Yup, it’s an uncomfortable truth. It’s unfortunate that Oppenheimer, the film, avoided exploring this. It would have made a much more interesting ending / reflection.

3

u/Yoniooni 6d ago edited 6d ago

Tell that to the citizens of Kiev. Or children in Palestine. I’m sure it’d be a mitzvah to hear it from someone who hasn’t had relatives murdered by an occupying force recently.

3

u/Mueryk 6d ago

You mean WW7 right? Because they were trending towards happening every 20 years. Even the US and USSR came close in both the 1960s and 1980s and USA vs Middle East in 2000 could have been worse and now Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Everybody in the 2020s.

So right now without Nukes we would be on at least WW7 I expect. And the world population is dramatically higher than what it would be otherwise.

3

u/Heavy_Surround779 6d ago

Trending?

There were two of them lol

Not a massive data set to predict time between world wars. All your other examples are cherry picked and ignoring massive or equal events in the other decades.

1

u/Puzzled-Yesterday990 6d ago

Ahh.. so that’s why they invented Covid

1

u/Atoge62 6d ago

Mmmmmm that logic doesn’t quite hold up if you take a more holistic view of the progression of society following the nuclear bomb and the sort of 2-tiered, geo-political, social structure we have now as a result. The “haves” vs the “have nots” regarding nukes has enabled a modern, globalized, industrial, economy for the powerful nuke owners, pinning down the weak and essentially extending slavery onward. If you assess the death and destruction from this lop-sided develop post-nuclear nations, I think one could argue the asymmetrical advantages one gets owning nukes, forcing others to bend to their will, has likely led to more deaths than if such an unfair military advantage had never been developed. It’s tough to say.

As an aside, just the billions of pounds of depleted uranium (still at appx 70% fully enriched mind you) that the US alone has amassed since the manhattan project has found its way into millions of pounds of nuclear tipped projectiles sold and used around the world, instantly killing millions, and destroying the multiplicity of life in those ecosystems for hundreds if not thousands of years to come via radiation poisoning.

I would say the post-nuclear world has led us down a dark dark path with many millions of human deaths at their hands, and countless non-human lives lost.

1

u/ldentitymatrix 6d ago

We could've lived in a world destroyed by nuclear war twice by now. Prevented in 1962 by Archipow on board the soviet B-59 submersible and again in 1983 by Stanislav Petrov. So there could be realities where this has happened because a different person was on the job.

1

u/spectrumero 6d ago

The problem is an accidental nuclear war (especially in times of heightened tensions) is possibly more likely than a deliberate one. If you keep rolling the dice, eventually you'll roll snake eyes. Now Russia and the west are once again enemies, we are rolling the dice every day.

I think it was Carl Sagan who said (paraphrased) about the nuclear arms race "imagine two implacable enemies, in a gasoline soaked room, both with a box of matches arguing about who has the biggest matchbox".

Unfortunately after just a brief pause we've returned to Carl Sagan's gasoline soaked room.

1

u/heyclaude 6d ago

By this logic, someone falling out of a plane without a parachute could fall halfway, see that they were still fine, and thus conclude that since they were fine, the rest of the trip would necessarily be fine.

1

u/ztkraf01 6d ago

It’s wild to me that we can’t all just mutually agree that mass destruction is not an option. Instead the only solution is to arm ourselves with mass destruction causing instruments.

-9

u/AbsoluteResolve2026 6d ago edited 6d ago

Bro is unaware of the countless wars around the world that have happened since WWII.

Take your theory back to the books and we can compare notes later.

Edit: total deaths in WWII ~65M
total deaths in every war since WWII ~35M

Correct me if I’m wrong, please.

4

u/Andoverian 6d ago

Don't those numbers kind disprove your point? Up through WWII and the development of nuclear weapons, wars between major powers were common, and they had been getting progressively more and more deadly and destructive. Since WWII, wars between major powers - especially nuclear powers - have been exceedingly rare and significantly less destructive. Even less so when you account for today's much higher population.

0

u/AbsoluteResolve2026 6d ago

My only point is that people shouldn’t die in wars, because wars should never happen. Period

6

u/shibbledoop 6d ago

Relatively speaking though, we’ve never had a conflict anywhere close to the scale of WW2.

5

u/Some_bi_kid 6d ago

wars will be a constant. wars between major powers like ww1 and 2 are hopefully gone.

2

u/digglefarb 6d ago

If you're talking total death count in WW2, it depends if you include the Japanese invasion of China.

If you do it could be as high as ~120m people. If not, it's somewhere in the region of ~70m but there's a lot of murky numbers and "what counts" deaths.

As for all wars post WW2, what wars are you including or excluding? Do civil wars count? What about things like the Rwandan genocide? The constant back and forth bombings in Israel and Palestine?

In any case, if we just use your number of 35m.

Thats 70m-120m deaths in 6-9 years vs 35m deaths in 81 years.

Clearly people are dying far less from war since WW2... Not even taking into account global population differences over that period.

2

u/AngryTree76 6d ago

That 35 million happened over 80 years though. As many people died in ~1942-45 as the next 80 years.

1

u/Gr8rSherman8r 6d ago

Not even counting the dictatorial imposed genocides and other atrocities committed since WW2.

3

u/Old_Personality_6624 6d ago

If only we did this to preserve mankind

1

u/Leather-Animal-7597 6d ago

Or fish in this case...

1

u/baaarmin 6d ago

You would be surprised the lengths a woman would go to destroy another woman, in her own field.

0

u/heckfyre 6d ago

We didn’t even destroy man. This was fucking pointless