Winning the space race by accident is the most American moment since 1776.

Rest in Peace those who died due to cancer. 😢

There was one Japanese man who survived the bombing of Hiroshima, rushed to stay with relatives and arrived at Nagasaki just in time for the second bomb.  He survived that one too.

“Buh” The Keyboard Warrior is my absolute favorite internet character of all time. ❤🎉

Just did some quick and dirty math. Assuming the manhole cover wasn't vaporized and is still out there in space moving at its "launch speed" it would have covered somewhere around 5.3 trillion miles. For reference Pluto is about 3.16 Billion miles, Proxima Centauri (the nearest star system to ours) is about 25.3 trillion miles. So that manhole cover is about 20% of the way to Proxima Centauri - assuming it is heading that direction.

To give a sense of speed, space starts at 62 miles up, the Karman line. That manhole cover, at the MINIMUM SPEED they calculated, entered space and passed the Karman line in 0.0248 seconds.

We had a saying in the Navy...Never Again Volunteer Yourself.

Hey Spencer and Daniel! FABULOUS reaction to the Fat Electrician! Thank you for checking this one out!

It is good to see you guys back together

If you're able to recognize a "Flash" i.e. you weren't looking exactly at where a sun spawned for a nanosecond, and aren't already screaming in pain from the thermal burns; then you're not in the blast radius and the most immediate danger is the incoming shockwave, after which you should shelter in place, underground or with as much shielding as possible and within a week or two most of the most dangerous radioactive elements will have sufficiently decayed for you to leave and go upwind away from where the most fallout would've blown.

So despite the criticism, "Duck N' Cover" is actually EXACTLY what you should do if you've survived long enough to even notice a nuke went off. If you're close enough to be vaporized and become a "Shadow" you'll never have known anything even happened, so posing for your eternity as a flashlight hand puppet is whatever pose you were in the exact second the bomb went off.

THat cover's moving more than 4 times faster than the Voyager  probes.  It's by far our first ambassador into space!

6:16 One of my grandmas favorite stories. Grandpa had to go pick my dad up from school because during a drill daddy said “that desk wont do a damn thing I’m not getting on the floor”, in 5th grade 😂 school got mad when grandpa told them he was right. My family was/is awesome

There’s a reason we call nukes “Canned Sunshine”😂

For what it's worth, physicists have since determined that the manhole cover almost certainly vaporised like a meteor due to atmospheric friction. It was a very very tiny fraction of the size of the meteorites that actually strike the earth's surface.

The idea behind telling kids to duck and cover wasn't just some psychological placebo to make them feel less helpless, it actually served a real purpose. Everyone assumes that it was intended to protect you from a nuke going off on top of you, which is rightfully derided as a ridiculous idea, but that was never the point of it. Just like when they tell you to find cover in the event of a tornado or hurricane, it was to protect you from flying shards of glass and possibly the roof caving in on top of you when the shockwave hit the building you were in.

Because in a real nuclear attack, most of the cities that would have been the main targets were big enough that the overwhelming majority of the population was not going to be at ground zero where they would just be vaporized, they were going to be in the surrounding area where the shockwave and the fires started by the blast were the real danger in the short term. If you were right next to a nuke going off, ducking and covering wouldn't do jack. But if you were at least a couple of miles away, it just might save your life.

The blast radii of Fat Man and Little Boy were just slightly less than their burst height AGL. This maximized the air blast effect and minimized the fallout, which is why you can walk around Hiroshima and Nagasaki without getting radiation.

In the case of Plumbbob, the blast height was quite a bit higher than the blast radius of the device.

10:30, the bombs were dropped above ground so the ground didn't absorb half the blast, but close enough to the surface that the heat- and shock- waves would devastate the area around it.  The idea of the Genie is that it is far enough in the atmosphere that anything on the ground would be well outside the damage zone, and because the only solids affected by the reaction would be the other planes, likely vaporized even if their own cargo wasn't detonated, so fallout would be minimal.  After 12 years, the US had a pretty good idea of what the damage zones were for a given warhead.

Wow, yeah, that thing definitely went into space! For context, the space shuttle at top speed travels at 17,000 mph!

People thought Doctor Strangelove was fiction.

There is a reason my dad said to me   "never volunteer for anything " as I boarded the plane bound for basic training!