Ep. 283: We Need To Talk About Operation Fishbowl: When The US Nuked Outer Space (Multiple Times)

Hey, welcome back to Well That's Interesting. The I Can't Believe We Did That But I Also Can Edition. Today is episode 283. We need to talk about Operation Fishbowl when the US nuked outer space multiple times.

my friends. Would you look at the date? In just two short days, what's frequently referred to as the Great Experiment will throw its 250th birthday bash celebrating a government and a country whose odds of succeeding, to be honest, were not that great at the time of its founding. By the 1770s, republics and democracies

were historically rare and were expected to fail if attempted because they're based on enlightenment ideals, flowery things such as self-governance, individual liberty, and equality. Rather than what the world has seen time and time again, countries rule by monarchy or force. As reported by Thomas Cohen's in the Ohio Capitol Journal, when

asked whether this new thing called the United States and its federal constitution of 1787 a tried and true monarchy or a wacky republic, Ben Franklin famously answered, a republic, if you can keep it. Quote, Franklin's point was that establishing a republic on paper was easy, and preserving

it was the hard part. In some, subversion can come from adversaries abroad or very much from within. A successful subversion is when the experiment comes to an end, because this laboratory of democracy, this experiment, was never meant to end.

It was meant to be incomplete but always moving forward, requiring the continuous update of laws and our participation. So we are a country of spectacular failures and unexpected triumphs. We are also a country that adores blowing shit up.

And guess what? I have a history lesson that combines all three of these themes. My friends. In this special ad-free episode, as the title suggests, we are going to talk about Operation

Fishbowl, a series of high-altitude nuclear tests in 1962 carried out by the United States, as a part of the larger Operation Dominic, a nuclear test program and a series of 31 nuclear tests. We will run through a number of these explosions or shots as they are called.

We will learn why. In the holy hell we set off nuclear bombs at the edge of space to begin with. We will learn how well it went. And most often, how well it didn't.

And we will witness the effects of these shots, including not only what happened to the sky and the nearby islands of Hawaii, but what international laws came from it. Yeah, there's a lot. In the meantime, hi.

I'm Jill Chacha. And if this is your first time listening, welcome to the flock, my founding business goose. To begin, I'm gonna need you to close your eyes,

breathe in, clear your mind, and to fill that now vacant space with what the National Humanity Center and History.com call a profound pervasive anxiety,

driven by the dual threats of nuclear annihilation communist subversion. That anxiety I speak of is of course what was planted inside the mind of every American beginning roughly around 1947. What was dubbed the Cold War was not only a tit for tat escalation of Doomsday devices

between the US and Soviet Union but was also characterized by the daily fear of quote, nuclear attacks, panic over communist infiltration at home, and and the need for intense social conformity, all of which influenced daily life, popular culture, and politics." And my cat provided some helpful sound effects there, and good thing that's all over with and all we have to do today is imagine.

So let that anxiety wash over you as I tell you the tale of one of those tit for tatts. So please, join me will you on August 30th 1961, when the USSR told the world, you know what, this whole three year moratorium on nuclear testing that we all agree to, it's boring.

And we're gonna go ahead and start developing new toys. Needless to say, with that sudden announcement, the military men here in the US clutched their pearls and responded in classic American fashion, impulsively and hoping for the best.

In just four short months, the country responded with an umbrella project called Operation Dominic. A series of 31 nuclear test explosions all to take place in 1962. 12 short months. And if you're thinking to yourself, oh by golly, they plan this in four months?

That's some quick planning of extremely complex operations. I hope they know what they're doing. If you thought that, you're right to ask. Let's just say, thankfully, pencils have erasers because as we're about to learn, one

project under this umbrella very much included getting back to the drawing board on several occasions. That was Operation Fishbowl, an extraordinarily ambitious project in which several nuclear bombs were to be detonated at the edge of space, all to fuck around and find out

how high-altitude blasts affected radio communications, radar, and satellites. There was also the still unanswered question as to how electromagnetic radiation created by high-altitude explosions acted differently from the radiation generated by nuclear explosions closer to the surface.

And more whimsically, it was asked, what would the auroras look like? And whatever they looked like, why were they acting that way? Now, we must ask. In a world where one can get away with launching and setting off not one, two,

three bombs, but an anticipated eleven, whose yield ranged from 10 kilotons to 1.4 megatons of radioactive TNT. Where in the world can you get away with this? You guessed it.

All of the tests were to be launched on missiles taking off from Johnston Island. And for my fellow geographically challenged Americans who may be wondering where this is to make sure they're nowhere near it, don't worry. I've got you.

Please imagine Hawaii. you. Point to it and now move your finger roughly 825 to 860 miles southwest into an even more isolated patch of the Pacific Ocean. Here you'll find an atoll made of a smattering of four islands. But it wasn't always that number. The atoll originally

consisted of two islands, Johnston and Sand Island, surrounded partially by a coral reef.