EARLY EPISODE: How the US Poisoned the Marshall Islands

Joe u know I love you but goddamit man please stop saying nuclear the way george W bush says it

SO hype for this episode! My grandfather was at one of the Bikini Atoll tests. He got some leukemia from it

David Hahn - great Dollop episode.

If you want a good explanation on what went wrong with the Castle Bravo bomb I recommend Kyle Hills Half-life History episode on the matter. Free on Youtube. That whole series is really good and focuses on nuclear disasters and mismanagement.

Strauss and the US Government denied radiation affected the fishermen and said that they were probably 'red spies' and they they were actually in the danger zone.

It's Americium that's in smoke detectors. Also, don't worry, I won't tell Liam you're stepping out on him.

So one of the big problems with Castle Bravo was the fuel source. It was about 60% lithium-7, which they thought would stay inert, because the time it'd take to react and produce any valid fusion fuel would be on too long a time scale (~1 second) to matter in a nuke. They were mostly right, but if you hit lithium 7 hard enough, it produces Tritium (fusion fuel) just as fast as lithium 6 (which was the intended fuel source for the device), so there was significantly more fuel in the device than intended in the first place. Lithium 7 reactions also produce extra neutrons that lithium 6 reactions do not produce, so on top of making more fusion reactions, the added fast neutrons caused further fission in the primary of the weapon.

Love the episodes with Sarah significantly more than Liam

i was hoping for a reference to the SpongeBob theory about how Rock Bottom fish are even weirder than Bikini Bottom bc it's the crater from Castle Bravo and got the most radiation

You guys were talking about 2 different nuclear projects. Sarah is taking about the time they put a reactor in a b-36 peacemaker(I think) and tried to make a nuclear aircraft. It worked but was considered too risky since planes crash and stuff. Joe is talking about a hypersonic ram jet cruise missile that would carry multiple warheads, nuke a few cities then fly around until its reactor died spewing radiation directly into the atmosphere to essentially salt any earth it flew over.

Minor correction fdr actually died around a year into his fourth term if he had died in the middle his third term Henry Wallace would have become president and the cold war may not have gone to the fever pitch it did