JOHNSTON ATOLL – It turns out, sometimes the brightest minds can come up with the dimmest ideas. Enter Operation Fishbowl, the 1962 brainchild of scientists who decided that detonating nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere was a splendid way to spend a summer. Picture this: a bunch of white coats in a room, sipping coffee, and someone says, “Hey, what if we explode nukes in the sky to see what happens?” And, astonishingly, everyone nods in agreement.
The “Brilliance” of Starfish Prime
On July 9, 1962, the great minds behind Operation Fishbowl launched the Starfish Prime test. A 1.4 megaton warhead exploded at 400 kilometers altitude. The result? A spectacular light show that disrupted electronics in Hawaii, 900 miles away. Streetlights went out, phones stopped working, and burglar alarms went haywire. It’s almost as if these scientists thought, “What if we could cause chaos over an entire state? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Let’s Play “Destroy the Satellites”
Not content with just annoying Hawaiians, our intrepid scientists managed to damage or destroy several satellites orbiting the Earth. Telstar 1, Ariel 1, and a few others learned the hard way that being in the vicinity of a nuclear explosion is bad for your health. It’s as if someone looked at space and thought, “This vast expanse needs more radioactive particles.”
Artificial Auroras: The Unnecessary Light Show
The detonations also created artificial auroras, filling the night sky with eerie glows. Scientists were probably patting themselves on the back for creating these beautiful lights, oblivious to the fact that they had also created massive electromagnetic pulses that fried electronics on the ground. Imagine turning on your TV to watch “The Twilight Zone” only to find you’re living in it.
Environmental “Enlightenment”
The idea of environmental impact apparently didn’t cross the minds of these geniuses. Radioactive fallout spread across the Pacific, because who doesn’t love a little radiation with their ocean breeze? It’s almost like they missed the memo that radioactive particles are, you know, dangerous.
The Aftermath: Oops, Our Bad
The sheer brilliance of these tests prompted the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, as even politicians realized, “Maybe blowing up nukes in the atmosphere isn’t the best idea.” But fear not, dear reader, for the legacy of these tests lives on. We now know exactly how not to conduct nuclear experiments, thanks to our pioneering scientists who boldly went where no sane person had gone before.
Conclusion: Trust Us, We’re Scientists
So, the next time a scientist tells you they have a brilliant idea, remember Operation Fishbowl. Sometimes, the folks in lab coats can be just as clueless as the rest of us. Maybe, just maybe, we should occasionally question the wisdom of those who think detonating nukes in the sky is a good way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. And if a scientist claims, “I am Science..” run!
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Let’s not forget the Operation Redwing tests where EVERYBODY told the nuke eggheads “put a parachute retarder on the bomb, the B-36 is already having trouble outrunning things as it is!” and the eggheads said “nope, gotta find out what it does, sucks for the aircrew and their families.”
That test drop of a Mk 17 bent the drop plane beyond safe flight, scorched the fabric off the control surfaces, and was an encore of Castle Bravo’s 50-mile fireball. It took a YEAR for the plane to cool down in isolation before they could assess structural effects, and while it got the crew back home to Fort Worth it was scrapped as soon as the radiation had subsided enough for the scrappers to work. And this was a freakin’ BRAND NEW PLANE!
When an egghead tells you he has a brilliant idea, stuff him in the nearest car trunk.
Raw intellect is… far overrated but, raw intellect with a different, human soul, controlling or moderating that raw intellect is morally wrong.
I still think the officer in command should have responded with “Then that plane doesn’t launch until one of you has his own children aboard.”
Watch RED 2 – pay attention to Sir Anthony Hopkins’s underrated and brilliantly unhinged performance as Dr. Edward Bailey, that’s your typical WMD Science Egghead right there. And they sulk and pout when you tell them you won’t let them push the Big Red Button no matter how ad they wanna see what happens when things go off… *I* wanna see people who shoot kids up with radioactives are compelled to do the onorable thing and perform seppuku, but reality ain’t Burger King and you don’t always get to Have It Your Way. Maybe if these freaks were required to pony up their own funding and use their own families as guinea pigs rather than “playing with house money” using taxpayer funds and other people’s lives…