Ill-Advised Nuclear Testing, Part 3

So now we’ve nuked the surface, we’ve nuked the ocean depths, and we’ve even nuked outer space. And Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to nuke. What’s a superpower to do?

Well, just make bigger nukes, obviously.

Enter, the H-bomb. The hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb is a much fancier lad than the a-bomb that preceded it. The A-bomb is purely a fission device, in which heavy elements are split, releasing colossal amounts of energy. But you can also fuse lighter elements to release energy. The problem is, it’s hard to compress and heat lighter elements enough to ignite fusion. Re-enter the A-bomb, which can provide more than enough heat and compression to ignite a fusion reaction. And then re-enter the A-bomb again, because we’re going to surround the fusion stage of the weapon with a massive amount of unenriched uranium, called the tamper. Unenriched uranium is stable under normal conditions, which is why we can cram so much of it into our thermonuclear device in the first place. But when exposed to the fusion reaction, unenriched uranium completely loses its shit. It kicks off a second round of fission, which in most thermonuclear devices provides the majority of the megaton-range yield.

It’s also much dirtier. While only increasing the yield by three- or four-fold, it multiplies the radioactive byproducts of the bomb by a thousand times. Behind closed doors, the military fucking loved that part, because a single bomb could effectively bring strategic targets to ruin even if strategic assets within those targets survived the initial blast and fireball. Oh and, by strategic targets, I mean cities, factories, and ports. And by strategic assets, I mean the people who live and work in them.

In public, the tone was very different. The official line in the U.S. was that radiation release did not scale with the increasing yield of nuclear weapons. Which, I guess, is technically true. It didn’t scale, because in the H-bomb, radiation growth exceeded yield by several orders of magnitude.

Which brings us back to Bikini Atoll, where we started this wild and wonderful journey. It was early 1954, about a year and a half after the first ever detonation of a thermonuclear device in the Ivy Mike test. The problem with the Ivy Mike H-bomb, however, was that it was literally the size of a building and thus completely impractical for military use. The Castle Bravo test sought to rectify that by detonating a thermonuclear bomb weighing about ten tons. That’s still pretty heavy, but it’s getting into the deliverable range.

The Castle Bravo bomb was expected to yield a blast in the 4 to 8 megaton range, but the designers made a critical error. They assumed that most of the mixture of fusion fuel in the second stage would prove functionally inert, unable to contribute to the nuclear reaction within the millisecond timeframe of the detonation sequence. This was due to the fact that they had never actually tested the fuel's response to high-energy particles, like those released by the first stage. If someone had stopped and said, “You know, maybe instead of assuming the mix will work a particular way, we should put it in a nuclear accelerator and actually test that shit,” then things might have gone differently.

But who has time for that? We’ve got stuff to nuke. Snap to it!

That very same “fuck it, let’s just light it off and see what happens” attitude was also operative on the day of the test, when it was decided they would go ahead with the detonation despite prevailing winds that were veering from north to east, where they could carry fallout over populated islands. The deciding factor, apparently, was that they’d done a lot of work setting up observation instruments around the blast site, and would have to do it all over again if the test was delayed.

Who needs that kind of hassle? Just blow the damn nuke already.

Which they did. And it was a fucking disaster.

Or a stunning success, depending on your perspective. Like, if you were an insane person, as seemed to be the case for many of our military and civilian leaders at the time, you’d call it a big win, because the yield was a full fifteen megatons. At the time, that made it the largest nuclear detonation in history, leaving a crater over a mile wide and 250 feet deep. The fireball was four miles wide and the resultant mushroom cloud seven miles wide. America, fuck yeah.

Even better, it spread a cloud of radiation over five thousand square miles of ocean. I mean, you can neutralize a lot hell of a lot of strategic assets that way.

The test was so successful that indigenous strategic assets had to be evacuated from islands which were rendered uninhabitable by fallout. Five strategic assets on the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru were exposed, resulting in the death of one of those strategic assets. Radioactive contamination from the test was carried by wind and ocean currents all around the Pacific Rim, from the west coast of America to Japan and Australia.

So, it was a rousing success, unless you happen to be afflicted by sanity.

Speaking of sanity and the lack thereof, you know what nuclear weapons would be great for? The construction business.

From that nugget of an idea came 1961’s Operation Plowshare, a proof-of-concept plan to demonstrate the myriad peaceful applications of multi-kiloton nuclear devices. The goal of Plowshare was to develop a toolbox of nuclear earth moving techniques—whose concepts ranged from merely frightening to utter, batshit insanity—and then hand them over to the private sector. Because, really, what damage can the private sector possibly do with nukes that the government hasn’t already?

Techniques developed by Plowshare were to be used to excavate rock and to fracture fossil fuel deposits for collection of their now-radioactive natural gas. If that sounds familiar, it’s basically just frakking, except instead of fracturing the rock with water, you use a nuclear warhead. What could be less controversial?

Similar methods were proposed for leached copper recovery and steam generation. And hey, wouldn’t nuclear devices make strip mining that much more wonderful?

If you’re already floored by this nuclear hubris, you may want to take a moment, because it gets worse from there. A Plowshare subproject codenamed Carryall planned to use twenty-two nuclear bombs to cut through the Bristol Mountains in California. Then a highway and rail line could be constructed across them. Complete, I imagine, with signs instructing motorists to please keep their windows rolled up.

And if you did happen to ride the crazy train through Carryall mountain pass, the next stop would be a nuclear-blasted sea-level link connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to be called the “Pan-Atomic Canal.”

Once those ships transit Central America, though, they’ll need a harbor to dock at. And won’t it be easier to find that harbor if it glows in the dark? Enter project Chariot, which would chain several nuclear bombs to blow open an artificial harbor.

Now that you’ve docked your cargo ship, though, you have to get your goods out to the people. You’d like to use a river barge, but the only river nearby doesn’t connect to the river you need to send your product up. Well shit, man, with nuclear bombs we can make rivers into whatever shape we want. Project Tombigee/Tennessee River would have done just that, combining the aforementioned little rivers into one big river.

But, you ask, what if blowing up all those rivers creates a water shortage? Well, my friend, nuclear bombs have you covered there, too. Plowshare proposed to use nuclear bombs to connect two aquifers for easier water access. In another proposal, Plowshare would create a rubble chimney above porous rock, which would allow rainwater to seep through the rubble and collect in an artificial aquifer. Think of it as a value-add proposition, because your drinking water would be suffused with expensive radioisotopes.

Thankfully, someone finally came to their sense and cancelled the program in 1977, before it could do any major harm. But for the decade and a half in between, someone thought all of this was a good idea.

If I may come back to the present day for a moment before I wrap this up, I’m reminded of a bit of common wisdom that’s become popular over the last decade: "we have to keep nuclear weapons out of the wrong hands." On its face, the statement is indisputable, more a truism than a proposition, but something about it has always bothered me. It wasn’t until I was doing research for this series of articles that I finally realized what it was.

The problem is that it rests upon an unfounded, unspoken premise: that there’s such a thing as the right hands.

I leave you now with a song.

Ill-Advised Nuclear Testing, Part 2

Last time in this series, we talked about Operation Clusterfuck Crossroads. You may remember that the testing was halted after only two nuclear detonations, due to no one having a goddamn clue what they were doing. So, with the testing cut short, one vital question remained unanswered: wouldn’t it be cool to detonate a nuke half a mile underwater?

The answer to that question would have to wait nearly a decade, until memory of Operation Crossroads had faded. And then, finally, the dream of a deep-water nuclear test would be revived in Operation Wigwam. Why Wigwam? Because the atomic bomb was invented too late to contribute to the genocide of Native Americans, but we can still nuke them in spirit.

So in May of 1955, a Mark 90 nuclear device was taken five hundred miles off the coast of San Diego and suspended by cable from a barge. Video from the test can be found here.

5/6th scale model submarines—codenamed “Squaws,” because let’s really rub it in, guys—were deployed to gauge the effect of an underwater detonation on enemy subs. The detonation went largely unnoticed, though it was picked up on seismological instruments across the Pacific and a cargo ship leaving San Francisco radioed in to ask if there’d been an earthquake.

The test was better planned than Crossroads and the personnel better prepared, but they still didn’t exactly have their shit together. One of the observation ships lost power due to damage from the blast, remaining within the danger zone for longer than the test plan called for, and the crew apparently had to shelter in the center of the ship during the four hours it took to make repairs.

The Navy cheerfully reported no dead marine animals observed after the test. This claim was made in the same report in which they claimed 100% of radioactive materials were contained to the ocean, which makes me think they just weren’t looking very hard. In the months following the test, a radioactive fish was detected during spot checks at a cannery on the West Coast, but the Navy blamed it on contamination from a test the previous year—as if that made it better. There was no word, naturally, on how many radioactive fish entered the food supply because they hadn't been spot-checked.

Flush with the afterglow of blowing up the ocean with a nuclear device, the Department of Defense started to wonder what it would be like to blow up the upper atmosphere. And in the spring and summer of 1958, they did exactly that as part of Operation Hardtack.

The high altitude portion of Hardtack, codenamed Newsreel for obvious reasons, was a disaster even on its own terms. In its first high altitude test, codenamed Yucca, a bomb was suspended from a balloon fifteen miles above the surface. The bomb detonated as planned, but the desired data was not acquired because the scientific instruments suspended below it were not turned on at the time of detonation. Well shit man, what do you expect, perfection?

The next test, codenamed Teak, was sent up by rocket and intended to detonate over the Pacific, off the coast of Johnston Island at an altitude of 250,000 feet. Unfortunately, someone must have misplaced a decimal point or confused imperial for metric, because this is what actually happened:

Yeah, you guys might want to put some aloe on that. But hey, third time’s the charm, right? So testing continued according to schedule and the Orange test was conducted at an altitude intermediate to the first two tests. It went better than the first two, but it could only have gone worse if someone accidentally left the warhead under their desk.

In the end, however, I’m sure that plenty of valuable data was gathered from these experiments, as shown by whatever the fuck is going on in this documentary picture of an actual Operation Newsreel researcher:

No, seriously. What the fuck is going on here?

But you know what the upside of fucking up your high altitude nuclear tests is? You get to do them over and blow up even more nukes in the upper atmosphere! For that matter, why stop at the upper atmosphere when it’s finally within our ability to nuke outer space?

This was the genesis of 1962’s Operation Fishbowl.

It is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.
-U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958

Nah, screw that noise, let’s slip the surly bonds of Earth and fuck some shit up. This time there would be none of the screw-ups from Newsreel. This time, we’d dot our i's and cross our t’s, making sure every single facet of the testing was well understood and every contingency planned for.

Shit, nevermind. We just dropped a nuke into the ocean. My bad. Turns out we really weren’t rocket scientists, after all.

The first planned test, codenamed Bluegill, aborted when they just kinda lost track of the test rocket after launch. With no ability to tell which way the thing was going, the rocket was destroyed remotely, preventing a nuclear detonation but raining bits of its nuclear core over a wide area of the Pacific Ocean.

The second planned test, codenamed Starfish, was not quite as successful as Bluegill, which is saying a lot. Starfish’s rocket motor stopped working at about 30,000 feet and also had to be destroyed remotely. Again, raw uranium and plutonium debris from a thermonuclear device rained down into the Pacific Ocean. Some of this contamination fell on Johnston Island. And yes, that's the same Johnston Island above which a nuke was accidentally detonated during Operation Newsreel.

After that, Operation Fishbowl was given some time to dry out and get its shit together. Three weeks later, it was back with a third test called Starfish Prime. Defying all the odds, Starfish Prime actually worked, detonating a 1.4 megaton warhead at an altitude of 250 miles.

 Starfish explosion as seen from Honolulu

Starfish Prime exceeded all expectation, in the sense that it caused more property damage than any of the operational planners had dared to hope for. The ionizing radiation generated by the blast stripped electrons from atoms in the upper atmosphere and sent them screaming down through the Earth’s magnetic field at a significant fraction of the speed of light. This interaction in turn created an electromagnetic pulse over the central Pacific. The pulse damaged the electrical grid in Hawaii and cut the telephone link to and from Kauai.

Worse still, many of those electrons were deflected along Earth's magnetic field lines and created an artificial radiation belt that wrapped around the globe for five years before finally dissipating. The belt destroyed seven satellites, at a time when there weren’t a whole lot satellites in orbit. Among its victims was the just-launched Telstar 1, the world’s first commercial telecommunications satellite.

And if all this talk of electrons reminds you of an aurora, then you’re probably smart enough to conduct a high altitude nuclear trial, at least by the standards of the 1960’s. Possibly too smart, as some sources claim the artificial aurora resulting from Starfish Prime took the researchers by surprise.

 Starfish aurora seen from Maui.

The aurora stretched two thousand miles, spanning the equator and illuminating a third of the Pacific. The most intense aurora effects lasted only a few minutes, but some of them persisted for days, and were bright enough for the New Zealand Air Force to conduct anti-submarine exercises by.

With seven satellite kills in the pipeline and a man-made light show unlike any seen before, Operation Fishbowl was finally back on track. So naturally, they blew up their next rocket on the launch pad after an engine malfunction and sprayed yet more radioactive plutonium across Johnston Island.

That test was going to be Bluegill Prime, and the next one in line was Bluegill Double Prime. Why Bluegill Double Prime? Because you try coming up with enough new names to stay ahead of all our catastrophic launch failures.

Bluegill Double Prime blew up too. It started tumbling shortly after launch and had to be destroyed, showering debris from its nuclear core onto—everybody say it together now—Johnston Island.

Pro tip: do not ever vacation on Johnston Island.

Fourth time’s the charm, though, right? And finally, on Bluegill Triple Prime, the rocket launched and the bomb detonated without a hitch.

I’m sure they got lots of fantastic pictures of angry men staring at rabbits, so it was all worth it.

Ill-Advised Nuclear Testing, Part 1

Nuclear bombs: they’re pretty safe, right? Just make sure you’re standing behind the yellow line when they go off and you should be fine. Who drew the yellow line? Umm... some guy, I think. He had a clipboard and everything, so he must know what he’s doing.

It’s hard to do an article on the most ill-advised nuclear tests of all time, because it’s such a competitive area. You’d like to think that any nuclear testing would occur only after the most careful study and extensive cost-benefit analysis. In reality, however, most nuclear test programs seem to have their genesis with someone saying, “Hey, you know what look cool?”

The tradition of poorly thought out nuclear testing goes back almost to the beginning, in fact, when competing superiority and inferiority complexes in top military brass collided to make Operation Crossroads, also known as the Able-Baker tests. It all began in August 1945, the same month that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Navy and a United States Senator independently proposed that we drop a few nukes on warships.

The Navy wanted to do it so they could prove they still had relevance in the nuclear age. The Army Air Force, by way of their pet Senator, wanted to do it to prove the Navy’s irrelevance in the nuclear age. Both proposals were more or less rigged to produce the desired results.  The Air Force wanted to pack as many ships in as tight as possible with full loads of fuel and ammunition to assure maximum destruction, while the Navy wanted unarmed, unfueled ships spread over a wide area to show how survivable they were.

To understand these political machinations, you have to understand that the Air Force brass, drunk with power after killing something like a million civilians with nuclear and conventional weapons during WWII, were of the opinion that, eh, America didn’t really need a navy anymore. The Air Force’s shiny new nuclear weapons could do anything the Navy could, and better! Shit, I bet if you put floaties on a nuclear bomb, it could have landed troops at Normandy at least as well as the stupid Navy did.

The competing plans eventually compromised, crowding the ships into a small area but loading them with only small amounts of fuel and ammunition.  Scientists who’d worked on the Manhattan project, apparently oblivious to the critical need for the Air Force and the Navy to get into a dick-measuring contest, warned that the entire project was as dangerous as it was pointless. They were, of course, ignored. What the hell did they know about nuclear weapons, anyway?

Amateurs.

The preparations for the test were abysmal. Simulations were conducted using a stick of dynamite and model ships. Many of the test ships being moored at Bikini Atoll had unrepaired damage from the war, which would complicate any later damage analysis. And no pretesting of the effectiveness of planned decontamination techniques was made, so they really had no idea whether they’d be able to decontaminate surviving ships. The man in charge of the tests, Vice Admiral William Blandy, apparently didn’t even realize that ships might survive an atomic blast but still receive a fatal dose of radiation. When someone brought this up, he hastily added test animals to the target vessels. He also didn’t know that the Geiger counters used on site could not detect alpha radiation, and were therefore blind to plutonium contamination.

In short, the whole operation was fucked from the start.

Rare color photo of Admiral Blandy observing the Able-Baker tests.

Nevertheless, in June of 1946 the first bomb was readied for air drop aboard an Air Force B-29. It was armed with the infamous “demon core,” which had already taken the lives of two scientists in separate accidents during the Manhattan Project. In one last act of defiance, no doubt, the bomb missed its target by half a mile and landed well to the edge of the cluster of test ships, sinking only five of them.

Score one for the Navy.

You can find color footage of the Able test here.

Within a day of dropping the bomb, most of the surviving target ships had been boarded for inspection and decontamination. So, yeah, let’s take that point right back. However, in what I’m just going to assume was sheer luck, given the competence level of the people in charge, the Able bomb was air-burst high enough to avoid significant fallout. Most of its fission products dispersed into the atmosphere, where you’re still breathing them today.

News reporters brought in to witness the blast expressed disappointment that the bomb didn’t sink more ships, which just goes to show how quickly human beings get bored with even the most incredible events. This was only a year after the first detonation of an atomic weapon, and the A-bomb was already blasé.

Meh.

So fuck it, we’re putting the next one underwater. Won’t that look awesome?

For the Baker test, a nuclear bomb was suspended by cable from the ocean surface, so that it could detonate underneath the surviving target ships. This was a monumentally poor idea, because no one had a clue how this would affect the blast dynamics. Here’s a little preview, though: it wasn’t for the better.

When Baker went off, it lifted millions of tons of irradiated water and seabed material up to a mile in the air. When it inevitably came back down, this radioactive material expanded into a turbulent cloud of mist which spread outward, engulfing all of the test ships and bathing them in radioactivity. Since Baker was detonated below the surface, nearly all of the fission products and unfissioned plutonium settled into the local environment.

Baker Test. The shadow at the base of the water column is thought to be the battleship Arkansas 

being upended by the blast.

5000 people were sent into that radioactive environment to perform evaluation and decontamination. Fireboats tried to scour contamination off target ships with their hoses, but the process was largely ineffective—partly because they were trying to decontaminate with water pumped from the lagoon, which was now also radioactive. In many cases, this process only created more problems, when radioactive spray from the hoses blew back onto the fireboats and contaminated them too.

Video of the detonation and some of the fireboat cleanup efforts can be found here.

And if you think that’s dumb, you haven’t heard nothing yet, because sailors were actually sent aboard test ships to decontaminate them by hand. With soap and water. These sailors were given no protective equipment. They went to work in their uniforms, scrubbed plutonium-contaminated decks on their hands and knees, and then returned to their ships—dragging the contamination with them to spread it there.

Cleanliness is next to glowiness.

Even worse, the Navy was under the impression that target ships moored at the very edge of the test site could be recrewed and sailed home before being scrapped. Why in the holy hell would anyone want to occupy a ship that’s had an a-bomb dropped on it, and that’s just going to be scrapped anyway? Well, remember that dick-swinging contest between the Air Force and the Navy? The Navy wanted to take its surviving ships back to the mainland and get pictures of them steaming into port, to prove they were still operational after being hit by an atomic blast.

Two ships were thus reoccupied. Their crews promptly received a dangerous dose of radiation and had to be evacuated. The commander of the condemned battleship USS New York even got into a pissing match with the officer in charge of safety, Colonel Stafford Warren, and accused him of taking his Geiger counter readings too close to the deck of the ship. The deck where, you know, people have to walk, so wouldn’t it be a nice little bonus if it wasn't a cancer factory?

Speaking of things that aren't supposed to glow in the dark, guess what the fish in the lagoon started to do. Yup. They started to glow. Not in a visible wavelength, mind you, but let's just say that you could take an x-ray picture of them without actually using x-rays. Because, see, the fish were so radioactive that they now provided their own x-rays. Here's one of the blue tangs (a.k.a. surgeon fish) caught after the test, photographed in both x-ray and visible wavelengths:

At least it has a positive attitude.

The incredibly disturbing fish picture, along with data coming in from off-site tests for plutonium contamination—which were showing positive even when samples were taken deep inside the target ships—finally convinced Vice Admiral Blandy that he’d created a massive clusterfuck and ought to stop before things got even worse. The third detonation in the Crossroads operation was cancelled, all operations at Bikini Atoll were suspended, and most of the surviving test ships were sunk.

No one immediately died from the radioactive contamination of the Crossroads tests, though not for lack of effort on the Navy’s part. The mortality rate among veterans present at Bikini, however, has been higher than that for veterans generally, and 200 premature deaths may be attributable to the Able-Baker tests.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that people were living there? Yeah, Bikini was inhabited prior to the tests. It isn’t now, of course, what with the glow-in-the-dark fish and whatnot. The natives were evacuated to Rongerik Atoll, which then had to be evacuated after it too was contaminated by fallout from the botched Castle Bravo nuclear test in 1954.

So congratulations, Bikinians. You’re honorary nijū hibakusha! Hopefully that thought will help get you through your chemotherapy.

Fun With Broken Arrows

“Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.”
–General Buck Turgidson, Dr. Strangelove

Have you ever lost something important at work? An expensive tool, a critical spreadsheet, or maybe  an entire intern? You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize how badly you screwed up? Just imagine how much worse it would be, if that intern were made of plutonium.

The U.S. military classifies nuclear weapons incidents on a scale that starts small at “Dull Sword,” indicating an event which could have become a nuclear incident under different circumstances. For example, in 1950 the crew of a B-36 Peacemaker bomber that was experiencing engine trouble decided, before bailing out, to drop their Mark 4 nuclear bomb on Canada. Because fuck Canada, right? The bomb was only loaded with a practice nuclear core, however, which made a nuclear detonation impossible.

1950, in fact, witnessed a second Dull Sword event when a B-50 also experienced engine trouble and its crew also decided to drop their Mark 4 nuclear bomb on Canada. Yeah, by 1950 the United States Air Force had already dropped as many nuclear bombs on Canada as it had on Japan. And why the hell not? It’s nothing but snow, hockey, and socialized medicine up there. It’s practically Russia already.

Here you go, Canada. Have two of these on Uncle Sam.

Next in order of severity is a Bent Spear incident, which involves a relatively minor mistake or accident which has only the smallest probability of ending civilization. The most famous of these occurred in 2007 when a B-52 that was supposed to be ferrying unarmed cruise missiles for disposal was accidentally loaded with six live nuclear warheads, each one having a maximum yield of 150 kilotons. That’s a total explosive potential around 50 times larger than the “Little Boy” bomb that killed a hundred thousand people when dropped on Hiroshima. Breaking with tradition, these cruise missiles were not fired at Canada, but were instead delivered to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where someone finally noticed they were live weapons. By then, a full two days had passed since they were improperly removed from their secure bunker. In that time, no one at the site of origin had noticed that six nuclear warheads were missing.

Next comes Empty Quiver, which is the theft, seizure, or other inadvertent loss of a nuclear weapon. Boooooring. Wake me up when we get to…

A Broken Arrow. These are the mack daddies of nuclear weapons incidents. A Broken Arrow is any incident in which there's a risk of detonation or release of fissile warhead material. Since the 1950’s, there have been approximately a gajillion of these incidents. Taken individually, most involved no or fairly low probabilities of accidental nuclear detonation, but put all of them together and it’s a fucking miracle that we haven’t accidentally vaporized a bunch of people.

The first Broken Arrow I’m aware of happened in 1950—a real banner year for nuclear mishaps—when a nuclear-armed B-29 crashed three minutes after takeoff. The nuclear core was aboard but not installed at the time of the crash, so the fissile plutonium merely cooked in the fire until they could put it out. No big.

Not to be outdone by the Americans, a Soviet submarine in 1977 accidentally dropped a nuclear missile into the northern Pacific Ocean. There was a build-up of pressure in the launch tube and they just, you know, accidentally dropped it overboard. Woops.

In fairness to the Soviets, the ocean floor is a popular place for accidentally leaving nuclear weapons. In 1965, the U.S. Navy dropped one off an aircraft carrier while steaming south of Japan. The bomb, the pilot, and the aircraft they were both attached to rolled off an elevator and were never recovered. The loss was not revealed, however, until 1981. Apparently, someone at the Pentagon feared that Japanese people might have strong opinions about nuclear weapons for some strange reason.

God, Japan, you’re such a Canada.

My absolute favorite broken arrow, however, has to be the 1961 crash of a B-52 in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The Air Force, having learned absolutely nothing from the shenanigans back in 1950, had armed the aircraft with two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs—both live, with their plutonium cores fully installed. During a refueling operation off the coast, the tanker crew noticed a fuel leak on the B-52’s right wing. The pilots attempted to make an emergency landing, but the bomber began to break up at around 10,000 feet and the crew ejected, leaving the live bombs in their falling aircraft.

On one of the bombs, three of four safety mechanisms completely failed on the way down and the bomb armed itself for a ground burst. Following its programming to the letter, it deployed its drag chute to slow its descent, activated its detonation triggers, and charged its firing capacitors. When it hit the ground in a muddy field, the trigger mechanism activated, sending an electrical signal to the firing capacitors. If that signal had arrived, the capacitors would have discharged and the bomb would have detonated.

If it had gone off, according to calculations I made using Nukemap, the 3.8 megaton bomb would have created a crater five hundred feet deep. The fireball would have been a mile wide. It would have leveled every building for five miles in every direction. It would have inflicted third degree burns on 100% of exposed persons within twelve miles. The cloud of radioactive fallout would have stretched four hundred miles under moderate wind conditions, reaching as far as Atlanta or Philadelphia depending on wind speed and direction. Something like 20,000 people would have died.

Only an arm/safe switch—the single safety mechanism which worked properly on that bomb—stopped this from happening.

But, you protest, that arm/safe switch couldn’t possibly have malfunctioned, right? It’s surely failsafe, right? Right? RIGHT?! For fuck’s sake, Robyn, that last switch must have been very reliable!

Actually, now that you mention it, do you remember that there were two bombs? On the second bomb, the triggers did not activate, the capacitors did not charge, and the drag chute did not open. Many of its components were never found, but they did recover the arming switch—the same switch that, on the first bomb, was all that stood in the way of a nuclear detonation.

When found, the second bomb’s switch was set to the armed position.

Sleep tight, everyone.

The Proterozoic Eon, Part 5

You may remember that we started our journey through the Proterozoic Eon two and a half billion years ago. After a hell of a lot of Monopoly, we now arrive in the still-Proterozoic of only one billion years ago.

We've come more than half of the way home, watching 1.5 billion years of the Earth's history. The continents have shuffled around a lot, volcanoes have come and gone, and we've suffered a couple devastating meteor impacts.

Life has undergone a few major changes, all on the microscopic level. Cyanobacteria destroyed the environment. Complex cells called eukaryotes evolved, then invented sex. At some point along the way, multicellular organisms evolved—we can't say when with any certainty—but they're not much to look at. In fact, from where we're standing along the Toronto coastline, life still looks pretty much like pond scum.

"You guys had a billion and a half years to evolve, and this is the best you can do?"

Adapted from an image Copyright and CC Martyn Gorman

And if life in the oceans isn't looking all that evolved, life on dry land has gotten absolutely nowhere. The coastlines, rivers, and lakes of Earth are teeming with life, but go any distance inland and it's the same sandy regolith we saw when we got here, with nothing but the odd desert crust to prove that life exists.

Now let’s play a couple more games of Monopoly, which will bring us to an even billion years ago. Something funny is happening now. Remember the supercontinent Columbia, which broke up, just like the Eagles?

Well, it’s getting back together, just like the Eagles. The ocean off the coast of Toronto is narrowing. In fact, you can just about see Montevideo coming over the horizon. Wave! All the major plates are smashing into each other, forming the new supercontinent of Rodinia.

Life has been busy, too. Following up on their recent triumph of sex, they’ve now invented murder.

As with sex, it’s entirely possible that murder existed long before now, but it’s here, at about a billion years ago, that we see the first clear signs of it, in the form of predation. We don’t actually have a fossil of a predator eating its prey this early in history. For that matter, we don’t have a fossil of a predator at all.

But we’re pretty sure predators were around, because we can see what their prey were doing to defend against them. Because this is the era when acritarchs, an umbrella classification encompassing microscopic fossils, started to get spiky¹.

Image from PNAS cover July 2005

Other eukaryotes , around this time, also start evolving mineralized coatings that might have been a defense against predators. And stromatolites, those bulbous formations created by bacterial mats, begin to decline, perhaps because they fell victim to newly evolved predators¹.

From: Bengston. Origins and Early Evolution of Predation. The Paleontological Society Papers 8. pp 289-317

We’re going to play a couple more games of Monopoly to take us to about 800 million years ago. Here, the supercontinent Rodinia is breaking up. Yeah, again. You’re going to have to get used to it, because this shit happens a lot.

In the oceans, more crazy shit is going down. The first armored amoeba have shown up², and there’ll be no hemming and hawing this time, because we know these little bastards are predators. There is some hemming and hawing about how long amoeba have been around, though. These little armored dudes are the first to leave fossils, but amoebas may have been around for a while. They may, indeed, have been the predators we saw signs of two hundred million years earlier.

And there’ll be no hemming and hawing about animal life this time, either, because something has just shown up off the coast and no one with a lick of sense would dare deny that it’s an animal. And here it is, in all its glory. The first animal:

From: The first animals: ca. 760-million-year-old sponge-like fossils from Namibia. South African Journal of Science. Vol. 108 no. 1-2 Pretoria 2012.

Yeah, it’s a sponge. They’re animals, you know. It may seem weird, but they are definitely our ancestors, and the ancestors of every worm, fish, lizard, and human being alive today. They’re multicellular, can reproduce sexually, are made of highly specialized and differentiated cell types, have a primitive immune system, and even primitive muscles. They’re animals, and they’re here to stay.

And they’ve shown up just in time for another ice age. Sucks for them.

This ice age won’t last quite as long as the last one—only a couple hundred million years—but it’s going to be even more severe. Again, the glaciers and pack ice will come and go, because an ice age doesn’t mean that it’s always frozen, all the time. But there will be long periods, lasting from 20 to 60 million years, when most of the planet is covered in a kilometer or more of solid ice. Some of these may even have been more “Snowball Earth” events.

I told you to bring a sweater. It’s not my fault you don’t listen.

Two games of Monopoly later, and the planet is finally warming up again. We’re now at about 600 million years ago, the continental plates are coming together yet again, this time to form the supercontinent Pannotia. And, I’m sad to say, we’re only one Monopoly game away from the end of the Proterozoic Eon.

Here at the end, the oceans are warming up and conditions are ripe for life. The cyanobacterial mats are still here, and they still make up most of the biomass on Earth, but eukaryotes aren’t doing too bad.

Larger life (meaning, larger than a microorganism) from this period is hard to classify, because most species are soft-bodied and live on or above the bacterial mats. They don’t leave great fossils, unlike the hard-bodied trilobites and burrowing worms that will start to show up in force a hundred million years from now. But maybe they look something like this:

Image CC Ryan Somma

We don’t know what most of these animals evolved from, and we don’t know what they evolved into, assuming they even left ancestors to evolve into anything. We’re not even sure when they died out. We think it was at the end of the Proterozoic, but without any clear sign of an extinction event such as a meteor or extreme volcanic activity, it’s possible they survived right into the Cambrian. In the Cambrian, the paucity of bacterial mats may have made fossilization of soft-bodied creatures less likely, and so they may have disappeared from the fossil record despite living on.

What we do know is that they’re here in the last days of the Proterozoic, and there are a freaking lot of them. In modern times, you’ll find them in the fossil record all across the planet, if you know what to look for. They spread, they evolved, they covered the planet with an explosion of complex life.

And then they disappeared.

Sorry to say, but so must I. The old Monopoly board has gotten a little decrepit over the past two billion years, and you can hardly tell St. Clare’s Place from Baltic Avenue anymore. We’ve had fun, but it’s time to go. The Cambrian is coming, and we don’t want to get eaten by an anomalocaridid.

***

If you enjoyed this trip through the Proterozoic Eon, check out my other science articles in the Archives!

Citations and References

1. Bengston. Origins and Early Evolution of Predation. The Paleontological Society Papers 8. pp 289-317.
2. Porter. Testate amoeba in the Neoproterozoic Era: evidence from vase-shaped microfossils in the Chuar Group, Grand Canyon. Paleobiology 26 (3) pp. 360-385.

The Proterozoic Eon, Part 4

It's now 2.1 billion years ago, in the Rhyacian Period of the Proterozoic Eon, and the planet is finally thawing out from the 300 million year ice age triggered by those cyanobacterial bastards.

Things are getting back to normal, here in Toronto. I mean, the land is still a barren desert, devoid of life except for those desert crusts we saw earlier, but at least the coasts are regaining a bit of their sparkle. Let’s take a walk along the beach, shall we?

We can see that the algal mats are back, albeit as a cyanobacteria monoculture and not the beautiful, multicolored ecosystems we saw when we first got here. Ah, but what happens when we look at a water droplet under the cartoon microscope?

With the cartoon microscope (which has lower resolution but better clarity than the regular microscope,) we can see that an incredible development has occurred, probably sometime within the past 400 million years. The cell on the right is a prokaryote. These have been around since before we got to the Proterozoic Eon. The cyanobacteria in those algal mats are all prokaryotes.

But the cell on the left is something new. It's a eukaryote, a more complex cell that's larger, with internal structures (called organelles) specialized to particular tasks. You may be tempted to think of them as more evolved than the prokaryotes, but that's your own eukaryotic biases talking. In this time, the eukaryote is nothing but a curious niche organism. Its complexity and size slows down its reproduction cycle, leaving it unable to keep up with the sleeker, more efficiently growing prokaryotes. And all those specialized organelles? No doubt they can be an advantage, but they're also something else that can go wrong. Consequently, these new eukaryotes are more sensitive to heat, cold, and dessication, meaning they can't live in many of the harsh environments that prokaryotes are fine with. So you won't be seeing any eukaryotes colonizing the land, like prokaryotes have. Not for a very long time.

It may seem strange that these, our ancestors, don't hold a special place on planet Earth, but that's just not how evolution works. Evolution isn't striving for complexity. Rather, complexity is more like a byproduct produced as life gropes into unfilled niches.

In the long, long history of life on Earth, complexity has been punished more often than it's been rewarded. Even in modern times, in the golden age of eukaryotes, simple prokaryotic life is far more prevalent than eukaryotes. Prokayrotes may not be as flashy as eukaryotes, but you don't have to go far to find them. Take a close look at your own body, and you'll find a hundred trillion bacteria living in and on it. That's ten times the number of your own eukaryotic cells. So, even inside our own skins, we're still a niche organism.

But these eukaryotes, back here in the Proterozoic? These eukaryotes are gonna make it. They're going to survive—somehow or other—and evolve into even more specialized forms, and their descendants will in turn branch out to become every plant, animal, and fungus on modern-day Earth.

As we place them back into the water—very, very carefully, mind you—we notice strange formations dotting the bacterial mat below the surface. What the hell are those things?

No, they're not the rude artistic endeavors of the cyanobacteria, although that would fit right into the usual habits of those little bastards. These are collections of cells that seem to be forming a sort of multicellular structure. They may be prokaryote or eukaryote. We're not sure, and we can't check, because the cartoon microscope's batteries are dead.

Now, communal living isn't exactly unknown here. The bacterial mats are communities of cells. If not for those pesky eukaryote biases, we might even consider the mats a multicelluar organism. The bacteria in them do exhibit a kind of ad-hoc specialization, exchanging chemical signals and altering their habits to better support the mat. But they can't form the sort of complex structures that eukaryotic cells are uniquely capable of.

But if these formations are made of eukaryotes, and if they're purposefully growing into those complex structure, that would make them the first organized multicellular structures to appear on Earth¹. In the modern era, there's hot debate on the subject. We could have settled the matter right here and now, of course, if you'd only remembered to turn the lamp off on the cartoon microscope.

Nice one.

Well, that's the most interesting thing that’s going to happen around here for a while, so maybe we should get back to that Monopoly tournament.

Okay, after four more games of Monopoly, we've wiled away 400 million years. It's now 1.9 to 1.8 billion years ago and something interesting is finally about to happen. You might want to cover your ears.

You hear that deafening shockwave, and feel that wave of superheated air that’s vaporizing your skin? Yeah, that’s the Sudbury Basin impact event. It’s a meteor that just hit Ontario, making an impact crater over a hundred and fifty miles across. That’s bigger than the crater made by the meteor that will finish off the dinosaurs in a couple billion years. The Sudbury impact rivals even the largest impact in the geological record, which occurred in what will become Africa while we were playing Monopoly. Remember the ash cloud that choked out the sun for a thousand years while you were busy buying up Baltic Avenue? Yeah, that was what that was.

So, yeah. You should definitely put some aloe on that.

This impact occurred so far back that we can't easily estimate the damage it caused to life on Earth, the way we can with later impacts. We don't know how many species it wiped out, and we're not likely to resolve the matter now, since our flesh has been incinerated and our bones buried beneath layers of ash, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say this impact was nasty. It probably killed the majority of organisms on Earth, and caused the extinction of uncountable species.

So, more Monopoly?

Over our next few games, the archipelagos in the Proterozoic sea are going to drift together. The tectonic plate that we’re buried in will run into a bunch of others, and they’ll fuse together along the margins to form one giant plate called Laurentia, or the North American plate. This isn’t just normal continental drift, mind you. Continental plates bounce off each other all the time. This is the formation of a new, much bigger plate, and it will stick together until the modern era. Most of the big continental plates we have today, in fact, will be fusing together from smaller plates within the next few hundred million years. Then all those plates will come together (without permanently fusing) to form a supercontinent called variously Columbia, Nuna, or Hudsonland.

You can watch it all happen here.

But, much like The Eagles, the supercontinent Columbia is going to split up again over our next few games of Monopoly.

Now it’s 1.2 billion years ago, and sex has just been invented.

WELL IT TOOK LONG ENOUGH, DIDN’T IT?

Well, saying sex has just been invented is a little conceited. Bacteria have been having sex for a long time, probably from the very beginning. But they don’t do it the same way we do. They just kind of shoot genes at each other, and if they’re good genes, they tend to stick around. The kind of sex that involves gametes coming together to make a third distinct organism, the kind of sex you’re most likely to regret, is what’s just been invented.

Well, actually there’s a caveat there, too. Because we don’t know if they just now invented it, but this is the earliest we’ve noticed it in the fossil record. And here it is:

Wait, I don’t think that’s right. Here are the actual pictures of the first known evidence of sex:

From: Butterfield. Bangiomorpha pubescens n. gen., n. sp.: implications

for the evolution of sex, multicellularity, and the Mesoproterozoic/

Neoproterozoic radiation of eukaryotes. Paleobiology v. 26 no. 3 p. 386-404.

Wow, that’s hot. I’m surprised we didn’t have to blur those photographs of primordial sex organs.

Sex is a big deal. Without sex, even multicellular organisms can really only clone themselves, budding off little packets of cells to float away and form a genetically identical organism somewhere else. But with sex, you can blend your genes with someone else’s—preferably someone cool. No, really. That really is one of the primary advantages of sexual reproduction: you can pick someone with awesome genes, which will help carry the slack of your crappy genes. And, while these early multicelled eukaryotes couldn’t exactly pick and choose their partners—it was pretty much down to whoever’s gametes happened to float past—they at least got a partner who was a proven survivor.

Are proterozoic lifeforms ready for sex, though? Or will this entire eon turn into one big cautionary tale? We'll find out next time...

***

If you liked this article, check out the other Proterozoic and general science articles at our handy Archives.

Citations and References

1. El Albani, et al. Large Colonial Organisms with Coordinated Growth in Oxygenated Environments 2.1 Gry ago. Nature 466, 100-104 (01 July 2010)

The Proterozoic Eon, Part 3

 Adapted from an image Copyright and CC Martyn Gorman

Last time in the Proterozoic Eon, we were playing Monopoly to pass an epoch or ten. And it looks like you've just about bankrupted me. Masterful use of Broadway and Park Place. Now just let me check the time… Yup, like a typical game of Monopoly, that one took a hundred million years.

So now it's 2.4 billion years ago, and we're on the beach in Toronto. Let’s take a look around, shall we?

You may remember that I promised you an environmental catastrophe, but you can be forgiven for not seeing it. Looking around here, it seems that the bacterial mats are thicker and greener than ever. The land is a barren wasteland that looks more like Mars than Earth, but it was like that before the disaster. The only big change is that the sea bed and a lot of the shore has turned a cool shade of red. So where's the catastrophe?

The Proterozoic Eon, Part 2

Adapted from an image CC Paul Harrison

When we last left the Proterozoic Eon, it was 2.5 billion years ago and we were finally approaching the shore. It doesn’t look much like a modern beach, does it?

Those rocky protrusions in the tidal zone are stromatolites. They’re a little like coral, in that they're made by microorganisms and grow over centuries. But where corals are complex, multicellular organisms that build calcified structures to protect themselves, these stromatolites are made by simple bacteria—in fact, some of them are the same cyanobacteria that made those terrestrial desert crusts we saw on the way here.

The Proterozoic, Part 1

Imagine yourself on a barren world. The atmospheric pressure is high enough to walk around without a space suit, but there are only trace amounts of oxygen, so you'll have to wear a respirator. Oh and, I’d wear a hat too, since the UV radiation is high enough to kill you within hours. Sorry, I should have told you that before you got here. My bad. You might want to put some aloe on that sunburn.

The landscape is bleak, nothing but desert sands and bedrock scoured clean by unrelenting erosion. You see, there are no plants here to firm up the soil. There isn’t any proper soil, for that matter, because there’s nothing alive to make soil. Soil—the kind of soil we’re familiar with—is bound together with organic matter that doesn't exist here.

Yeah, this place is so barren, it doesn’t even have dirt.

Mail Order

You can buy pretty much anything online, these days, but some things still surprise you.

I draw your attention to Bioreclamation, a company which bills itself as the "complete resource for all biologicals." It's a bold claim, but I think you'll agree that they live up to it, when they deliver fresh human tears directly to your door:

Yes, this is 100% real. If you want to buy some tears from these fine folk, here's the link. You can get your tears from a single "donor," or pool tears from several people. If you want a specific type of tears, like grief tears or onion-chopping  tears, I bet they'll be able to arrange it. But I'm guessing their standard tears come from tragic drifters that nobody will ever miss—drifters who drift no more, because they're now tied up in Bioreclamation's basement, with tubes stapled to their eyeballs.

As always, I do not receive any commission or kickback from the sale of items featured on this blog. That's how you know I'm being honest and objective when I say that you can depend on Bioreclamation for all your fresh human tear needs.

I'll tell you one thing, though, this is sure going to speed up development of my sorrow-powered laser.

Digestive System, Part 10: The Bitter End

Last time, we took a good hard look at the colon. Before we leave, let's take a short romp down a dead-end street called the appendix.

The vermiform appendix (from the Latin for “worm-shaped hanger on”) is a little pocket attached to the cecum. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Rather, it’s just a cul-de-sac off the large intestine, where poo can chill out and forget its worries for a while. You've probably been taught that it's vestigial—a useless waste of tissue, just like male nipples or Dr. Phil.

But is the appendix really purposeless?

Digestive System, Part 9: The Colon

Adapted from an image CC CC Olek Remesz.

The last time we looked at the digestive system, feces was piling up in the cecum. So where’s it going from there?

We’ve already gone over contractions in the colon that serve primarily to mix, but the real movers and shakers in the colonic mobility world are Giant Migrating Contractions. GMCs are real truth in advertising: contractions that cause giant migrations (of poop.) They occur in the small intestines too, to move chyme into the cecum, but in the colon they’re notable for occurring only three times per day, and moving feces a full third of the way through the colon at one go.¹ You’ve probably noticed these from time to time, as a sensation of sudden movement inside your belly. The next time you notice one, make sure to tell the person next to you that your colonic feces has just undergone a Giant Migrating Contraction. If they don’t edge away from you, it’s love.

Digestive System, Part 8: Liver and Cecum

Okay, so by now you've absorbed all those tasty amino acids, sugars, fats, vitamins, and minerals. They've passed through the enterocytes and into the bloodstream (with the exception of some fats and fat-soluble vitamins, which at this point are still wandering around lost in the lymphatic system.) But, now that the bulk of nutrients are in the bloodstream, they must be rushing to the four corners of the body, to be shared equally by your cells and tissues, right?

You’re so ignorant, you disgust me.

Of course they aren't! You can't just give them free rein to wander around wherever they please! There could be terrorists in those nutrients. And what do we do to keep out terrorists? We give them a security screening.

So please remove all shoes and jackets, and place all metal and electronic devices in the tray, because you're in line for the hepatic portal system.

Digestive System, Part 7: The Ileum

The border between the jejunum and the ileum is… not a border. Unlike the organs we've been looking at so far, there is no clear demarcation line between jejunum and ileum. They transition smoothly into each other as we travel down the small intestine, becoming progressively less jejunumy and more ileumy as they go. With no anatomical guidepost to demarcate them, the jejunum is arbitrarily designated as the first 2/5ths of the small intestine (not including the duodenum,) and the ileum is said to make up the last 3/5ths.

The two are not very different. You can have your entire jejunum removed, in fact, with little effect on your health. I mean, I wouldn't recommend super-sizing your meals if you don't have a jejunum, but you can live a basically normal life. Over time, the ileum will even adapt itself, becoming more jejunumy in order to take up the slack.¹

Digestive System: Part 6, The Jejunum

The jejunum is where nutrient uptake really gets going. Up to now, the digestive tract has been obsessed with mashing food up, breaking it down, and purifying it of pathogens, in order to maintain the purity of essence of our precious natural fluids. In the jejunum, digestive juices do continue to work, and there’s some last minute molecular-level destruction happening on the intestinal lining, but the primary focus has shifted from breaking nutrients down to absorbing them safely.

Digestive System, Part 5: The Duodenum

Image CC Olek Remesz

Nutrient digestion kicks into high gear when we reach one of the most lyrically named organs in the human body: the duodenum. Have a listen to the accepted pronunciations, from Wiktionary:



Aren't those lovely? I especially like the second one. Why the duodenum doesn’t appear at least once in every song ever written, I can’t understand. That's going to be a rule when I conquer the world.

Enough of that talk, though. You'll know more than you ever wanted to soon, soon.

When we left off last time, chyme (another of those wonderfully lyrical words, referring to the soupy mixture of chewed food churned up by the stomach) was squirting into the duodenum through the pyloric sphincter. When there's little or no chyme in the stomach, the pyloric sphincter has a semi-relaxed posture—chill but not too chill—which allows stomach contents to drain slowly into the duodenum.