Nuclear Experiments That Could Have Ended The World | Unveiled

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Nuclear Experiments that Could Have Ended the World</h4>

In the pursuit of knowledge, science really knows no bounds. Over the years, decades and centuries, we’ve sharpened our understanding of life, the universe, nature and reality. But, sometimes, there has been massive risk involved, too, and a genuine fear that science could well do more harm than good.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re taking a closer look at nuclear experiments that could have ended the world.

The development of the nuclear bomb surely ranks as one of the most significant (if frightening) chapters in human history. The use of nuclear bombs by America, during World War Two, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a defining and devastating moment. Those massive explosions, those mushroom cloud eruptions, killed upwards of 200,000 people. A ruthless show of force, and a dark two days for our species.

Those weren’t the first atomic explosions ever to take place, however. In the buildup to the bombings of early August 1945, and as part of the infamous Manhattan Project, the US tested and trialed the nuclear bomb, usually in the heart of the desert or over isolated islands in the middle of the ocean. Unsurprisingly, it proved difficult to keep the tests under wraps, given the massive destruction that nuclear bombs brought. But, for the most part, America did manage to do so… to the point that for their first ever nuclear detonation, the rest of the world was left wholly unaware of the possibly immediate apocalypse that some had predicted would happen.

The Trinity Test took place on July 16th, 1945, just before 5:30am, and just three weeks before Hiroshima. It goes down as the first detonation of a nuclear warhead ever to take place on Earth. It happened in the New Mexico desert, lighting up the barren planes like never before, with just over 400 people in attendance - including many of the Manhattan Project’s leading figures, like Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, James Chadwick and Enrico Fermi. It was Fermi, in particular, however, who reportedly raised real concerns about Trinity, in the days before the blast.

Exactly what would happen when a nuke was detonated was, until then, unknown… and Fermi (and some others) feared the worst. Essentially, they worried that an unstoppable chain reaction would be set into motion by the Trinity Test. It was then predicted - by some - that, in the worst case scenario, this reaction could spread through the entirety of Earth’s atmosphere. Igniting the air, melting the land, and boiling the oceans away. One secret explosion in New Mexico, then, could have literally set the world on fire. Obviously, history shows that this isn’t what happened. The massive blast was contained to just the local airspace… but it’s a frightening thought that the Trinity Test even went ahead, when there were such genuinely apocalyptic doubts about what it could cause.

Despite all the dangers, the leveled cities, and the hundreds of thousands of lost lives that the first bombs did cause, however, the mid-twentieth century obsession with nukes didn’t end in 1945. And, in fact, for a while before legislation was drafted to tighten their use, nuclear bombs were put through their paces in a range of situations. 

Post-World War Two, the US nuclear attention switched to a now notorious stretch of the Marshall Islands called Bikini Atoll. More than 100 people had previously called these tiny islands home, but they were swiftly moved out and relocated - all to make way for more radioactive carnage. On July 25th, 1946, the Baker Test saw the first nuclear detonation underwater. A massive bomb was positioned 90 feet below the waves, where it exploded and generated a miles-high tower of water. The blast sent just as much power downwards, though, and ultimately carved a crater into the seafloor, around 30 feet deep and more than 2,000 feet wide. In the immediate aftermath, a monster tsunami was created and a far-reaching radioactive mist settled on everything for miles around. Some of the US Navy’s best ships wound up having to be sunk forever because they had become so contaminated with radiation. 

You might think that testing would stop there, but no. The US and the Soviet Union continued to experiment with underwater nukes, seemingly in the hope of producing a genuine tsunami bomb for potential use against one another. The science behind this is a tricky balancing act, but it’s thought that a weapon (or weapons) triggered at just the right depth, in just the right locations, really could give an aggressor power over the sea… and the ability to guide a deadly tsunami to foreign shores.

Soon, though, even the ocean wasn’t enough, and by the early 1960s attention had moved to high altitude detonations. The US ran a series of nuclear explosions further and further up into the sky, culminating in Starfish Prime - the largest ever nuclear bomb test in actual space. A rocket was launched on July 9th, 1962, carrying another massive nuclear bomb. Sent out from the Johnston Atoll in the mid-Pacific, it took less than 14 minutes to travel to low-earth orbit, 250 miles above the ground, where it was detonated. 

As observed from the ground, the blast lit up the sky for miles around. Whether or not this was expected is up for debate, although there are some reports of pre-planned parties in Hawaii, to watch the dazzling spectacle unfold. What certainly wasn’t expected, however, was the sheer force of an accompanying electromagnetic pulse. As the space bomb blasted outwards, it knocked out multiple early satellites. It caused immediate disruption to communication links nearby, and electricity supplies variously failed across the Pacific, including in Hawaii. 

The sky remained unusually lit up for days afterwards, but there were still longer-term effects than that. High-energy particles generated by the nuke were significant enough that they formed whole new radiation belts twisting around the planet. Again, this hadn’t been expected, and the possible side-effects were unknown. Once more, history suggests that nothing too bad came about as a direct result of Starfish Prime, although it was found that remnants of the blast remained in the Earth’s atmosphere for at least 5 years. 

By this point, then, we were managing to restructure even the most fundamental systems of Earth, all thanks to nuclear testing… and all agreed that this was extremely dangerous. It seemed as though one false (or unintentional) move, and total destruction could become unavoidable. Thankfully, it was right about now that laws were written up to try and limit what was possible. On October 10th, 1963, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was put into effect, which universally banned nuclear tests above ground, in space and underwater. Meanwhile, exactly four years later, on October 10th, 1967, the Outer Space Treaty took effect… which, among other things, further prohibited the use and/or placement of nuclear weapons in space, including on other celestial bodies such as the moon.

Over almost three decades of experimentation, beginning at the height of World War Two and continuing into the depths of the Cold War, nuclear questions, problems, possibilities and fears had shaped so much of our scientific thinking. By the late ‘60s, the global powers appeared to be rowing back. They’d seen what was possible, and realized how total and irreparable the damage could be… but the debate since then has always been whether or not it was too little, too late. And, indeed, the peak for nuclear stockpiles on Earth didn’t come until twenty years later in the mid-‘80s. The ban on testing didn’t slow the accumulation of weapons… so that, even today, there are still enough nukes on the ground to stage a merciless, blistering, unprecedented war within moments.

In this video, we haven’t even focussed on Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, tested by the Soviet Union in 1961. It produced a 40-mile high, 60-mile wide mushroom cloud, visible for more than 600 miles around. It sent seismic waves around the Earth three times, and packed an energy equivalent more than 1,500 times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. 

These incredible events were always much more than isolated incidents, though, and the nuclear testing programs of both the US and the USSR took us all to the very brink of destruction… and sometimes they seemingly gambled with the very future of our world.