Latest / The Infographics Show Podcast / How America Almost Nuked Itself Twice

Transcript

How America Almost Nuked Itself Twice · The Infographics Show Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to beyond infographics. I want you to close your
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: eyes for a second. I mean, unless you're driving, of course.
• 0:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, please keep your eyes on the road.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: If you're driving right, definitely do that. But assuming you're
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: safe at home, just imagine the end of the world,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: specifically a nuclear apocalypse.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: It's a pretty heavy way to start, but yeah, it is.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: But when we picture that ultimate nightmare scenario, the image
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: that usually comes to mind is like a tense, dimly
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: lit situation room. Right. We imagine global superpowers locked in
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: this high stakes standoff and some steely eyed leader intentionally
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: pushing a.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Red button exactly the whole Hollywood movie set up.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's a terrifying thought, but it implies intention
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: It implies that the end of civilization would be a
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: deliberate choice. But I've been on this massive personal exploration lately,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: going down a total rabbit hole into military history, and
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: I had a realization that completely shook me. Oh yeah, yeah. Historically,
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: the greatest threat of a nuclear holocaust wasn't an intentional
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: act of war at all. It was just simple, clumsy
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: human error.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Which honestly completely shatters that whole Cold War illusion of
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: perfect control.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: It really does.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: We have the psychological need, I think, to expect the
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: end of the world to be dramatic and deliberate, not
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: the result of a bureaucratic oops or a mechanical failure.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: And what I found in my own research is both
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: terrifying and just oddly fascinating, because the only thing standing
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: between us in total devastation over the last few decades
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: hasn't been like brilliant diplomacy.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: No, not at all.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: It has been this razor thin margin of engineering that
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: quietly saved millions of lives purely by chance. So we're
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: going to unpack the mechanics of all of it today,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: how these systems fail and how they occasionally save us.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: It's going to be a wild ride, definitely.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: And Hey, if you enjoy exploring these wild moments in
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: history with us, please take a quick second to rate
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: the show five stars on your app. It really helps
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: us out, it really does. Okay, let's unpack this because
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: we first need to establish just how easily these credibly
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: destructive weapons can be compromised or even completely misplaced.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So to really understand this, we need to strip
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: away the pr and look at the physical reality of
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: what the military actually calls a broken arrow, right, a
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: broken arrow. The Pentagon, you know, they love to trot
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: out this neat tidy number. They officially claim that the
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: United States has experienced exactly thirty two of these incidents.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Thirty two, which already sounds like a lot for nuclear weapons.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: It does, And they define a broken arrow as the
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft or loss of a nuclear weapon.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: But when you look at the internal declassified records from
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: the military, the math is entirely.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Different, like completely different.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: We're looking at literally hundreds more of these incidents. Just
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: between the years nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty eight alone,
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: there were hundreds of significant incidents.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: I mean that is an industrial scale level of risk. Absolutely,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: And to ground this in reality, I think we have
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: to talk about the sheer physics of what happens when
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: things go wrong in the air. February fifth, nineteen fifty eight.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: AH the Tybee Island incident.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Exactly. It's two am, pitch black over the coast of Georgia.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: A B forty seven bomber is running this simulated combat
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: mission and due to a massive miscalculation in the dark,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: it literally collides midair with an F eighty six fighter jet.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: The structural damage is just immense. The fighter pilot actually
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: has to eject immediately and he ends up parachuting into
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: South Carolina.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: But the B forty seven bomber, which is now missing
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: a chunk of its wing, is still airborne. It's plummeting
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: from thirty eight.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Thousand feet, which is terrifying.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the pilot, Colonel Howard Richardson, manages to somehow
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: wrestle this crippled aircraft back into as semblance of control.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: At about twenty thousand feet. He knows he needs to
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: make an emergency landing at one Hunterd Air Force Base.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: But there's a huge problem, right, he.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: Is carrying a massive issue in the belly of that plane,
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: a Mark fifteen nuclear bomb.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: And we need to visualize this thing, right, because it's
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: not some small missile. It's twelve feet long, it weighs
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: seven six hundred pounds. It's a massive You cannot land
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: a heavily damaged plane with nearly four tons of asymmetrical
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: dead weight and high explosives on board.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: No, the landing gear would just collapse, the plane would
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: spark and you'd have a massive fireball, right, on the runway.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: So to save his crew, Richardson requests permission to jettison
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: the weapon over water. He gets the authorization, opens the
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: bombay doors, and just drops this massive thermonuclear device right
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: into the waters of Wassaw.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: Sound, right off the shores of Tybee Island, Georgia exactly.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: And you know, Richardson actually received the Distinguished Flying Cross
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: for saving his crew and getting the plane down safely,
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: which he deserved on it for sure. But the aftermath
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: of that drop is where the official narrative completely diverges
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: from reality. For years, the Air Force swore up and
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: down that the bomb was disabled right. They claimed that
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: the nuclear capsule, you know, the actual plutonium core needed
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: to initiate the nuclear reaction, was safely back at the base.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: They told the public it only contained a simulated dummy
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: cap made of lead, which I.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Mean that makes sense from a public relations standpoint. You
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: don't want to tell the residents of Savannah that you
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: just dropped a live nuke in their.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: Backyard, precisely, you want to avoid mass panic. But fast
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: forward to a nineteen sixty six congressional testimony. The Assistant
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: Secretary of Defense WJ. Howard was pressed on the issue,
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: and a completely different truth emerged.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: The actual truth.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: He admitted on the record that the Tybee Island bomb
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: was a complete weapon. It contained a fully functional plutonium trigger.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: A live weapon just sitting there. Yep.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: So the Air Force in the Navy, they spend months
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: out there. They're running handheld sonar, dragging cables across the
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: ocean floor, utilizing teams of divers in like zero visibility water,
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: and the found nothing. Nothing. They never found it. The
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: working theory today is that it's buried under five to
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: fifteen feet of silt at the bottom of the sound.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: I have such a visceral reaction to that. Yeah, because
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: people often compare it to you losing your car keys
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: and the couch cushions, right, But that analogy doesn't work
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: for me at all. It's more like losing your car keys,
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: except your keys have the power to level a city.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Or it's like accidentally dropping a live pressurized landmine into
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: a shifting, muddy river bed right next to your house.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a much better way to put it.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: And after a few weeks of poking the mud with
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: a stick and you just shrug, declare it loft, and
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: go back inside. To watch TV. I mean, how do
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: you just stop looking for something like that?
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question though, about how the military
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: manages risk. They essentially decided that the political cost and
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: the financial cost of continuing this massive, highly visible search
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: outweighed the physical risk.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Of just leaving it there, which is insane.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: And what really proves your point about it being a
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: live landmine is that in two thousand and four, a
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: retired lieutenant colonel named Derek Duke went out into Wassaw Sound.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: He took a boat with specialized radiation detection equipment.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: Just a guy on a boat looking for a nuke.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and he systematically trawled the air and he mapped
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: out this grid about the size of a football field
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: where radiation particles were spiking at four times the naturally
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: occurring background level.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: WHOA four times. Yeah.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: He firmly believed he had triangulated the exact resting place
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: of the mark fifteen.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: And you would think that data would trigger like an
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: immediate massive federal response, Let's go dig this thing up.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: You'd think so, but instead the military investigated and essentially
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: brushed it under the rug. They attributed the radiation spikes
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: to naturally occurring deposits of monozite minerals in the sand,
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: which is so convenient, right, They just declared there was
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: no unnatural radiological threat and closed the book again. So
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: it just remains buried out there today.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Just chilling in the mud off the coast. But you know,
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: it's one thing to lose a dormant weapon in the
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: ocean where the freezing water and the heavy silt sort
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: of smothering. Sure, it's far more chilling when a bomb
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: falls on populated land and actively attempts to detonate.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to January nineteen sixty one over Goldsborough,
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: North Carolina.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: This one keept me up at night. I'm not gonna lie.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: It's the event that truly tested the absolute physical limits
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: of those engineering fail safes we rely on.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: So you have a B fifty two bomber flying a
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: routine airborne alert mission along the East Coast. Deep into
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: the flight, the plane develops a catastrophic fuel leak. The
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: crew realizes they're losing thousands of pounds of fuel and
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: tries to limp back to a base, but the wing
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: just completely fails.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: It shears right off.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: It violently breaks apart mid air, the crew has to
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: parachute out into the freezing night. But left behind, falling
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: to earth are two Mark thirty nine hydrogen bombs.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: And these were four megaton beasts. Just to give you
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: the scale, each of these bombs possess about two hundred
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: and sixty times the explosive power of the bomb dropped
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: on Roshima.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Oh my god, two of us falling toward North Carolina. Yeah,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: And because the plane is spinning so violently as it
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: breaks apart, the immense centrifugal forces basically pull the arming
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: lanyard attached to the bombs.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: Right, hi forces essentially acted as a human crew member
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: pulling the trigger. Now, one of the bombs gets expelled,
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: its parachute fails, and it simply buries itself deep into
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: the earth, mostly unarmed.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, so that's one down.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: But the second bomb is a completely different story. The
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: lanyard pull triggers its internal thermal batteries. It is now
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: fully awake, and it behaves exactly as if it were
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: intentionally dropped over an enemy target.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: Because it's going through its checklist exactly.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: Its parachute deploys perfectly at twenty eight thousand feet, which
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: provides the exact deceleration. It's looking for the barometric switches
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: detect the changing altitude as it descends. It goes through
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: every single stage of its mechanical arming sequence.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: It's doing exactly what it was designed to do.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: Yes, And when its nose makes physical contact with the
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: ground in North Carolina Field, a piezoelectric crystal in the
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: nose crushes, wow, and that sends the final electrical firing
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: signal toward the nuclear core.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: So it fully tried to detonate. And here's where it
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: gets really interesting, because the b isn't evil, right, it's
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: just dumb. It thinks it's doing its job.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: It's like an automated coffee maker set on a timer,
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: but instead of brewing your morning cup, it's blindly following
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: a checklist to trigger armageddon. And the only reason it
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: didn't vaporize the East Coast is because out of the
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: six safety mechanisms built into that sequence, five of them failed.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: Five out of six failed or were bypassed by the
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: breakup of the plane. The only thing that prevented a
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: four million ton TNT equivalent explosion was a single simple
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: low voltage switch.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Just a single switch, the arm safe switch.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: It was just a tiny physical gap in the wiring
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: that prevented the circuit from closing and sending that high
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: vaulted shock to the detonators.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: A tiny piece of wire. Yeah, and my personal insight
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: when looking at this was just I was stunned. If
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: that single switch had short circuited, the lethal fallout could
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: have blanketed Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and even reached New
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: York City. Millions of lives would have been lost or
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: affected by radiation.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: It would have changed human history, and the gravity of
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: that near miss actually horrified the very people who designed
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: the weapons.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: I can imagine.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: Parker F. Jones, who was a safety supervisor, later wrote
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: a highly classified, incredibly sarcastic internal memo about this near miss.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: He titled it Goldsboro Revisited or How I Learned to
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: Mistrust the H Bomb.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: That's a very doctor strange love title.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: Exactly because he knew how close we came.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: But that single switch that saved the East Coast wasn't
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: placed there by magic or luck. Right. It was the
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: result of incredibly rigorous engineering foresight, which brings us to
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Sandy and National Laboratories.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Yes, Sandia, they were the ones constantly asking what if
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: everything goes wrong? Because their mandate was designing failsafes for
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: a fundamentally unsafe premise.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: They had to assume the worst.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: Right. To quote former SANDIA director Bob Purefoy, bombs are
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: relatively dumb. The engineers purposely designed these failsafes because they
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: anticipated human error and catastromic mechanical failures. The fact that
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: the switch held in Goldsborough is a huge testament to
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: the unglamorous life saving work of those safety inspectors and engineers, and.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: The spinoffs from that obsessive focus on safety are just wild.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: The technology they developed for nuclear weapons ended up having
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: a massive societal impact, Oh totally.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: They designed the advanced parachute technology that eventually allowed the
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: Mars pathfinder to bounce safely onto the Red planet, which
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: is amazing. They created instant gunshot residue id kits for
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: police based on chemical swabtech. They even developed systems for
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: predicting the time and place of asteroid impacts.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: It's an incredible resume, But maybe I'm being cynical here.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: I have to question this whole hero narrative. A bit.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Are we glorifying the engineers for fixing a problem they
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: helped create by building the bombs in the first place.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of like thanking the person who
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: pushed you out of the way of a speeding car
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: that they were driving.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: That's a fair point.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: Shouldn't we be absolutely terrified that we rely on a
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: piece of wire to prevent the apocalypse?
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, you're hitting
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: on the inherent paradox of the Cold War. Humanity was
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: pouring its greatest scientific minds into creating the ultimate destructive
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: power while simultaneously trying to cage it perfectly.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: But cages break exactly.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Relying entirely on engineering FAILSAFES is a high stakes gamble,
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: and we know the gamble eventually fails because the accidents
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: didn't stop at Goldsborough, right.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: There were more like Palamaris in nineteen sixty.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Six, Yes, the contamination of Palomars. This was a mid
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: air collision between a B fifty two and an aerial
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: tanker over Spain. Four B twenty eight thermonuclear bombs fell
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: to the ground.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: And this time it didn't end perfectly safely.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: No two of the weapons had their conventional explosives detonate
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: upon impact. It didn't cause a nuclear blast, but it
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: contaminated a massive swath of the Spanish coast with highly
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: radioactive plutonium.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: Dust, which is a disaster on its own.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: It was so terrifying it actually forced President Lyndon Johnson
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: to drastically reduce those air born nuclear alerts.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Because they realized gravity always wins eventually, but even when
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: they stuck the missiles and silos, they weren't safe. Look
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: at the Damascus incident in nineteen eighty.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: Damascus, Arkansas. This one is chilling because of how bizarrely mundane.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: The cause was literally a dropped wrench.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: A dropped wrench socket. An airman doing routine maintenance dropped
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: a socket. It plummeted down the silo and it actually
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: ruptured the first stage fuel tank of a Titan two missile.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: And the fuel he used wasn't just normal rocket fuel.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: Right, No, it was liquid hypergolic fuel. The defining characteristic
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: of that fuel is that the fuel and the oxidizer
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: ignites spontaneously the instant they touch. You don't even need
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: a spark.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: So the tank ruptures and it creates this highly volatile
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: vapor cloud in an enclosed space.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and the resulting explosion completely destroyed the complex. The
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: overpressure blew a seven hundred and forty ton concrete silo
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: door entirely off its hinges.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Seven hundred and forty ton door.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, launched it into the air, and it expelled the
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: missile nine megaton nuclear warhead right out of the silo.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: A nine megaton warhead that's more than double the Goldsboro bombs.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: Thankfully, it landed in a ditch and didn't detonate. But again,
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: we were a hair's breadth away from a catastrophe, all
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: because of a dropped tool.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? Like, why should you
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: the listener care about this today? My personal realization is
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: that this isn't just Cold War history, not at all.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: The risk is still.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: Here, it's arguably growing today. Global leaders are expanding arsenals,
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: they're creating new highly complex delivery systems, and they're ramping
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: up plutonium pit production.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: Right with the.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Erosion of safety standards and transparency globally, the risk of
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: a modern broken arrow is definitely increasing. The more moving
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: parts you have, the higher the probability of failure.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: It's just a numbers game, and you know, we wrap
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: up this journey really just marveling at the bizarre reality
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: that our survival has often hinged on a single switch,
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: or a dropped range, or just a lucky bounce into
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: a ditch.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: It's very humbling, it really is.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: By the way, one final reminder, if you enjoy this episode,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: please rate Beyond Infographics five stars.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: Before we go, though, I want to leave you with
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: a final chilling idea to mull over.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Okay, lay it on me.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: Consider this sheer lifespan of these lost weapons, like one
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: buried off Tybee Island. The half life of plutonium is
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: over twenty four thousand years.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: Now, consider that our planet is undergoing massive physical changes,
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: rising sea levels, shifting tectonic plates, extreme weather events that
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: are altering shorelines.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Oh man, I see where you're going with this.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: What happens when the natural environment eventually shifts enough to
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: unearth the active broken arrows we've tried so hard to forget?
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: Will nature eventually return our misplaced apocalyptic land mines back
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: to us?
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: That is, I mean, that is just genuinely horrifying. We
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: started out talking about human clumsiness, and now we have
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: to worry about the Earth literally spitting our nukes back
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: at us. Well, it's a lot to think about. Thank
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: you so much for joining us on beyond infographics. We
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: get you next time.