Citation Needed - Project 57

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Project 57 was an open-air nuclear test conducted by the United States at the Nellis Air Force Range in 1957,[1][2] following Operation Redwing, and preceding Operation Plumbbob. The test area, also known as Area 13, was a 10 miles (16 km) by 16 miles (26 km) block of land abutting the northeast boundary of the Nevada National Security Site.[3]

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pop culture moms, find it wherever you get your podcasts. ["The Daily Show Theme"] Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Heath and I'll be hosting this internet radioactivity and I'm joined by my favorite isotopes. Cecil, Noah, Tommy. I carry all those extra neutrons right in my midsection.

They just bulk up right there. Right? I feel right in my elevators. I'd have a better joke, but I'm extra dense Eli do you have a thing about radioactivity? I hate being the neutron guy There you go Alright Noah what person place thing concept phenomenon or event are we gonna be talking about today? We said we didn't always have to do a joke

at the start anymore. It's Heath, you did. And you know who said that? It was Heath. It was Heath. You just set him up for that is what you did. He's a trap. And by the way, listener, it's not a coincidence

that the last time I did an essay, I was talking about how football season is about to start and this week when I do an essay, I sound like this. We're gonna be talking about Project 57, Heath Heath. Okay and what he labored preamble stands between us and knowing what we were talking about. Stealing that Heath. Thank you. Are we anti-balayboard preamble on that show? Yes we are. I don't know. This is not a no. I just don't like it when we run long Listen, are you as you may be aware? You're still listening to last week's episode that Eli did about a monkey So alright as you all probably know between 1945 and 1962 the US went fucking nuts testing nuclear bombs

And every place you could possibly get one we knew the ground we knew the air We knew underwater to see if you could get a real-life Godzilla hell in 1962 we even knew space in an operation called starfish prime that knocked out a third of all operational satellites including the world's first TV communication satellite at one point they cut Like a aluminum can in half and stuck a nuke in the center and detonated just to see how high you get the top part. Teenage US military giggling and running away from a mushroom cloud in the mailbox like, oh mom's gonna be so mad! Right? Oh it was just like that too, except mom was a fucking nuclear watchdog agency that was impotent at the time. So okay, so in the aftermath of Starfish Prime, we did start

to dial back our nuke fest. In 1963, the US and the USSR signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which officially moved all nuclear testing underground. In fact, the disastrous results of Starfish Prime led directly to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which designated outer space for peaceful use only. That is a distinction that would remain until literally anybody could think of any effective way to weaponize it. In fact, the OST is technically still in effect

even as we establish a literal branch of the military dedicated entirely to bio-having. It feels like it's not. I don't know, Noah. I don't think we can call the Space Force a branch of the military unless we can call Bleach and sunlight a new field of medicine we're exploring. No, it's separate but equal. Eli, it's separate.

But each- I remember the only way to stop a bad guy with a death star is with a good guy with a death star. Thank you. That's true. A concealed death star. Right, well, obviously. Carry your death star on the CTA. But of course, today's essay isn't about the forward-thinking commitment to peace and human

flourishing that characterizes the militaries of today. For Project 57, we have to go back to the sense of nuclear afocatism that defined the 1950s. Because coincidentally, the project took place in 1957. The name had nothing to do with the year. It was just the 57th in a series of nuclear tests. Or actually, there were more than that because some of the tests in the series just got names. Right.

So Project 57 was preceded by Project 56, but it was followed by Project Plumbob, which was followed by Project 58. Right. Which was followed by Project 58A. So we had a kind of a fucking Fast and the Furious approach to sequel naming on these things. Fast and the furious plum Bob was followed by fast and the furious measure twice cut once. Yeah.

Fission the original big dad energy. Seriously. Dad's last words to me. Flush and plums on. I bet. I bet. And plum. So anyway, so I didn't keep it plush and plum.

So anyway, so of all the nuclear- I didn't keep it plum once. I got in such big fucking trouble. Oh my god. It was flush. I had it flush, but it wasn't plum. I got in such big trouble. It wasn't plum.

Doesn't matter. You don't get half fucking credit here. This isn't horseshoes. This isn't hand grenades. So anyway, so of all the nuclear tests that the US decided to do in this period, you could make a pretty solid argument that Project 57 was the most careless. Remember, I said one of these was in space, right? But I am actually going to make that argument, this whole point of the fucking essay, because the question that Project 57

was trying to answer was about incidental disbursement of radioactive material. Specifically, what would happen if a nuclear bomb was ripped open during an airplane crash and spilled its radioactive guts all over the countryside? Bad? Are we done? Well, in order to answer that question, Heath, you actually have to do that. Yikes. Okay. I did not know about this, but Idaho is making a lot more sense now based on the con.

Now, to be clear, they didn't actually crash a plane with a wide open nuclear weapon in it, but not because that was too dangerous. They did the dangerous parts of that. They just didn't do that because it was too expensive. Plus, you don't need to crash a plane and you don't need to split open a perfectly good nuke. All you need was radioactive waste being spread over a large area. So that's the part they did.

Okay, but New Jersey already existed in 1957. radioactive waste being spread over a large area. So that's the part they did. Okay, but New Jersey already existed in 1957. All right guys, just spitball in here. You know how farmers, they like spread out a bag of seed like loose handfuls? I've got this friend at Monsanto who does miracle grow. All right, so let's talk for a second about plutonium because most of the time when we talk about radioactive substances with our science communicator

hats on is to calm people down and tell them how dangerous shit isn't. Right? Like, people hear that such and such a radioactive substance is used in the manufacture of whatever. And our job is to go out there and tell people, yeah, but you get a higher dose of radiation when you eat a banana or something like that, right? So to be clear, that is not the case when we're talking about plutonium. Plutonium, if inhaled, is right up there with the deadliest substances known to science. One microgram of plutonium, that's one millionth of a gram, is enough to kill a person if it

gets in their lungs. And the half-life of plutonium is over 20,000 years. So that is the stuff the US government decided to launch over a wide area to see what happened. There's someone right now on TikTok that would sell people ingestible plutonium and that the half life is 20,000 years means you live for 40,000 years. According to that.

Oh, God. OK, Cecil. But it's alkaline plutonium. I don't think it is. That either. Yeah. So so as you may be aware, we have a term for launching radioactive material over a wide area. We call that a dirty bomb. And it's one of the most terrifying scenarios in the world of nuclear disaster management. Now

to be fair, pretty much all the scenarios in nuclear disaster management are one of the most terrifying. So it's not saying much, but it's certainly terrifying enough that you don't want the government doing it for science project purposes. But they did. Yeah. The nerds are always like, oh, we need to fund science, we need to fund science, but it's worth remembering that this is what they did when we gave them money. No, that's fair. Now, so the they in this situation is important

because I don't want to just say the US government did it. That spreads the culpability too broadly. The Defense Department did this and they actively hid what they were doing from other parts of the government. There were watchdog organizations that were supposed to oversee nuclear testing and provide at least enough oversight that the DOD didn't go fucking exploding plutonium coated bombs on American soil. But those organizations were designed to be ineffective and the DOD

had a long playbook of ways to skirt any type of regulation. Now, General, when you testified, and I quote, we are affirmatively and unequivocally not, not dropping nuclear waste from airplanes where your fingers crossed behind your back at that time. And remember, you don't not have to answer the question. I not think, Link. What? So, okay, so the first thing they needed was a place to conduct their test and it couldn't just be any old where because it needed to be a place that you could theoretically rope off for the next

20,000 fucking years. Now the natural answer here is the nuclear proving grounds in Nevada, which was a favorite site for nuclear test detonations when they weren't trying to nuke Godzilla, awake, or scare off aliens. And thus it was the kind of place you didn't have to worry so much about contaminating. That being said, tests that exploded there were subject to scrutiny by all those pesky watchdog organizations. So instead, they chose Area 51. Okay.

So people who worked at Area 50, they must get mad all the fucking time. I was trying to explain what was going on. Well, I mean, in this instance, they didn't get the nuke, but yeah, most of the time, yeah, they didn't get the alien either. We just did like regular science, whatever. So Area 51 will no doubt get its own citation needed episode at some point in the future. In fact, I was actually researching for that exact episode when I came across this story, so I don't want to go into too many details on it. Suffice to say that it was pretty

much existed entirely to keep watchdog organizations in the dark. It was technically outside of the officially designated Nevada test site and, at least at the time, was not officially designated as government property. The US government wouldn't actually officially admit to operations in Area 51 until 2013. So there would be no official record of anything that happened there and no need to account for it

to like congressional committees or anything like that. Okay, bold statement, but I think we probably shouldn't have places like that. No. Nope, sure shouldn't. Nope. Got it. Nope. Wink. No, no, sure shouldn't. No, got it. No, no, no, of course not. Yeah, right.

I'm doing the eyeball thing. Yeah. No, of course, in 1957, Area 51 was not the fully operational air base it is today. They'd used it to test the U-2 spy plane, but that and of course reverse engineering that UFO from Roswell was pretty much all they had done there to that point and and the YouTube testing was over. Now a few years later the CIA would start testing Oxcart which was designated as the YouTube successor but in 1957 it was just this top secret military facility that had essentially been mothballed until it was needed

again so at least in the minds of the folks at the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project it was the perfect place to set off their dirty bomb. Going back, I assume the U2 spy plane is how they got that album onto everyone's iPod, right? And we're gonna get that done with or without you. So. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH So, I want to do something that I normally wouldn't do. I want to read you the Wikipedia article about Project 57 in its entirety. Now don't worry, it's not very long, but I want to emphasize here just how anodyne this project sounds when you're only relying on like the official sources.

Here it is, quote, Project 57 was an open air nuclear test conducted by the United States at the Nellis Air Force range in 1957 following Operation Red Wing and preceding Operation Plumb Bob. The test area, also known as Area 13, was a 10 mile, 16 kilometer by 16 mile, 26 kilometer block of land abutting the northeast boundary of the Nevada National Security Site. Project 57 was a combination safety test. The high explosives of a nuclear weapon were detonated asymmetrically to simulate an accidental detonation. The purpose of the test was to verify that no yield would

result as well as to study the extent of plutonium contamination. The contaminated area was initially fenced off and contaminated equipment buried in place. In 1981, the US Department of Energy decontaminated and decommissioned the site. Hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of soil and debris were removed from Area 13 and disposed of in a waste facility at the Nevada test site." End quote. Don't worry, guys. We put up a fence. Yeah. That's the job done, guys. Dust your hands. Yup. Yeah, that'll hold them up. Yes.

No, and that's it. That's the whole article. They got some like numbers below that in a chart. That's the way the US government officially describes we set off a dirty bomb 90 miles north of Vegas. Yeah, you don't have to see it. We put up the little thingy that says caution wet floor asterisk. It's cool. It's cool. It's gonna be fine. So yeah, don't love to see it. We put up the little thingy, it says caution, wet floor asterisk.

It's cool, it's cool, it's gonna be fun. So yeah, we'll see how that goes. But first, a little op-poe of nothing. All right, gentlemen, thank you for coming to this meeting of the weird committee of science people who did bizarre and bad shit until people noticed in the early nineties. Anyone got an update for me? Uh, yes, sir. We just wanted to check in and say that project MK ultra is going really well. Really?

Okay. So, uh, then you discovered the psychic powers then? Oh, no, no, we, uh, tortured people and then we documented it extensively so that pretty much any asshole Who doesn't trust the government can cite it as proof of their delusions. Just you know forever. Excellent. Excellent. Yes, and uh, yorgie We launched dog into space Okay, um Sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Did you learn anything from that?

Don't die. I feel, I feel like, I feel like you knew the dog was going to die without launching it into space, so no. Uh, uh, great. Sure. Yeah. And, uh, Chris, right. Yeah.

Uh, Chris from nuke stuff. Uh, so y'all know that we launched nukes, uh, as a weapon of war five or six years ago for the first time. And we just kind of, you know, we weren't sure how that would affect the planet. Right. Like there was that like a very real concern that it would set the atmosphere on fire. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we just did that like, oh, hundreds more times. Sure. Yeah. And,. And what have you learned?

Oh, uh. Boom, you know, like huge. All right. Yes. Well, gentlemen, obviously, it's great work. Everyone get out of there and complain about climate change like we had no idea it was coming until Al Gore made a movie about it. Amazing. Fantastic. Hell yeah. Oh, we also did monkey. Yeah, I got that man. Thanks a lot. Monkey also died. You knew that going in. Okay, it's official. We are very much in the final sprint to election day. And face it

between debates, polling releases, even court appearances, it can feel exhausting, even impossible to keep up with. I'm Brad Milky. I'm the host of Start Here, the daily podcast from ABC News. And every morning my team and I get you caught up on the day's news in a quick straightforward way that's easy to understand with just enough context so you can listen, get it and go on with your day. So kickstart your morning. Start smart with start here and ABC News because staying informed shouldn't feel overwhelming. And we're back. When we left off, DoD was planning to spread plutonium all over Nevada like fucking peanut

butter with a giant knife for safety. Cool. So what's next? Okay, so as careless and insane as this plant test was, there still was a lot of valuable data to be gleaned from him. Scientists had no fucking idea what would happen if you disperse plutonium over a wide area. I mean, we knew it would be deadly, of course, but that's all we knew. And since we were carrying large amounts of plutonium around on vehicles that had a tendency to explode their way out of the sky, it was information that the world needed. Hey, maybe put the plutonium in the fucking black box or something. Or like, figure out how, you know, not exploding out of the sky might happen.

Well, that's kind of what they were trying to do here, right? So, there were probably better ways to obtain that information than actually exploding plutonium all over the fucking place. But those ways took longer, they were more expensive, and they were all nerdy shit that didn't let you blow shit up. So we went with the dirty bomb. So this test, Project 57, was originally conceived by the aforementioned Armed Forces Special Weapons Project.

And to be fair, as soon as you gave something that name, you had to know they were going to explode plutonium all over Nevada. You don't have an Armed Forces Special Weapons Project if you don't want to contaminate at least some of your desertscape. But eventually, they would rope in the Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the defense contractor and plausible deniability buffer EG&G. And their job was to simulate what would happen if an Air Force plane carrying an XW-25 nuclear warhead crashed dispersing radioactive chemicals all the way down.

Okay, fine. We'll do your plane blows up and spews radioactive payload everywhere to see what happens. But next week, we're going to see what happens when you swing a hammer at a nail and smack yourself in the balls. Okay? I want to see what happens. But next week, we're going to see what happens when you swing a hammer, add a nail and smack yourself in the balls. Okay. I want to see what happens. Now we're doing with a ball back. Now I mentioned earlier that the project rejected the existing nuclear testing site to keep its project off the watchdog radar, but that's not the only reason. One of the main questions they were trying to answer was how radioactive an area would be if you spilled plutonium all over it.

And to answer that question, you needed to start with a place that wasn't already radioactive as all fuck. And I should also note that the excessive amount of secrecy wasn't just to hide the fact that they were setting off a dirty bomb, the atomic energy commission also didn't want anybody to know that they had no fucking idea what would happen if an airplane carrying a nuke crashed. Guys, I want to figure out what happened at the earth. If the sun blew up, does anyone know how to blow up the sun so I can gather that

data or it's for science? Yeah. Guys, remember we don't want to tip anyone off on this. This will be a secret apocalypse. Yeah. How does that happen? We don't want to tip anyone off on this. This will be a secret apocalypse. It's a hush hush. Yeah. How does this happen? Like twice apocalypse.

So some guy was like, hey, so, you know, crashing a flying apocalypse tube, apparently it's got a hard cap of zero, like a bunch of red tape. Do we have any wiggle room there? Yes. And somebody's like, yes, actually we do. I figured it out.

I figured it was out earlier. Yeah. So, all right. Don't slide plutonium across the table So they found their ideal location just a few miles northwest of area 51 It was a relatively flat area with no existing structures on it No previous radioactive contamination and far enough in the middle of nowhere that no there was like no chance of curious eyes asking What the fuck they were doing now to the extent that it was designated at all it was called a safety test because that was technically true and and they put a

doctor in charge of it to make it sound like they were trying to answer some kind of medical question or something which again is true in a sort of technical how dead will this make a person's sense I guess. Okay but that does explain why the official results of this experiment were take a Z-Pak and don't listen to women. make a person sense I guess. Okay but that does explain why the official results of this experiment were take a Z-Pak and don't listen to women. That makes today because I was wondering where that came from. Yeah, doctor my face seems to be melting off. My last period was three weeks ago but I really don't see how losing weight is gonna fix this though. Yeah.

Say this was 1957 it was worse then. So less plates equals dates right? I'm a terrible batter. So in preparation for the test workers set out 4,000 steel pans coated with sticky resin over the 10 by 16 mile area. They call this technique the bachelor's dishwashing staging area. Yeah, right. So these were meant to capture plutonium particles so they could measure the disbursement. And at the same time, they set up 68 air sampling stations all over this 70 square mile area.

They also wanted to test how plutonium would interact with various urban surfaces, so they built a bunch of mock-ups of sidewalks, curbs, and random chunks of pavement in the fucking 120 degree desert. They also parked a bunch of cars and trucks in the contamination area to see how they would hold up. And in what must have been the most visually disjointed aspect of all of this, they had a bunch of air sampling balloons tethered at different heights. But these were all from like five feet to a thousand feet off the ground, just all over the fucking place. And just in case this wasn't horrible enough for you yet, they also wanted to see what

the effects would be of this dirty bomb on live animals. So included in this random smattering of targets were nine burrows, 109 beagles, 10 sheep and 31 albino rats. Yeah, no indication anywhere in the sources of how they wound up on that mix of species and amounts. The amounts to what the fuck happened there at some point, they had one hundred eight people and somebody was like, I don't know if we're going to get enough signs of this.

And why did the rats have albinism? Yeah, that's a great question. Okay, so I know this story is about the government carelessly throwing plutonium around 90 minutes from one of the busiest cities in the world. And that part is sad, but the part I'm definitely going to be maddest about is the Beagles. I'm just calling you right now I'm maddest about yeah, that's the one part where I was almost like I should leave this detail out But yeah, no, it's it. That's the sad part. I've been to Vegas twice this year and both times I was like you can put a little plutonium

So, okay, so originally the test was scheduled to take place on April 5th. Flamingo Hotel, a little bit of plutonium. Yeah, I really am. I put a little plutonium here. So originally the test was scheduled to take place on April 3rd in 1957, but weather wasn't cooperative. High winds shut the test down because you don't want to set your dirty palm off unsafely, right?

And then a series of delays ensued, keeping the operation in a holding pattern for three more weeks. But finally, on April 24th at 627 a.m., a small nuclear warhead coated in plutonium was detonated to simulate the crashing plane. Because again, the DoD never passed on a chance to detonate a nuke back then. The radioactive cloud spread north as expected over an 895 acre area. They waited for the right weather for the accidental plane explosion simulation? Yeah, they want to do it safely. Now, so do you get to know what the weather is when that happens?

Well, no, no, but you don't want the wind going towards Vegas, right? Like you want to make sure that you're going to... Yeah, that would have been on tape. Yeah, exactly. Right. So here's the most fucked up part of the test. And we've already been through 109 beagles here. So that's saying, the one possible justification for doing something

this dangerous and stupid would be to test the various methods for cleaning up a contaminated area after a nuclear disaster. They did not do that. What? Of course. This desk wasn't about to clean up. It was about the aftermath. So they spent about a year collecting data in the area, dissecting all the animals that they nuked and analyzing the shit that they left in the path of the bomb.

And then they just wrapped up. The area was fenced off with nothing more impenetrable than barbed fucking wire. The various trucks and shit that they use, they were just buried in the desert with stickers on them that said contaminated material on the fucking front and back. And then some of the clothing worn by the researchers in the aftermath of the test

was found to be contaminated as well. So that was also buried in the fenced off area as well. Okay, I have a lot of notes for them. I have a lot of notes for them. I have a lot of notes for them. One, I needed it to not be stickers. Sure. When you said stickers. Nothing in the plan from the nuclear test people

can have the word stickers in. I feel like that needed to be placards. Also, they only did two stickers apparently. They did front and back. You can't get like eight stickers to surround that. You can't even do it. What are you doing? Why not do top? You're bur that shit. You can't even do it. Why not do top you're burying it You know start with top like you get all the way down to the sticker. You're like oh fuck

You gotta invent like a video game hologram thing pops out and everybody can see it's spinning She's like if you got a spade and you're digging through like, you know feet and feet of plutonium soaked soil to get you learned Whatever is down there. Whatever's down there whatever's down there all right that's your yeah you should yeah it's your fault for ignoring the fence you're right you get to a sticker you're not like oh yeah there's a sticker on it yeah you're doing like scratch this is why I've been vomiting out my fucking intestines for so long this makes this makes my bowel movements make a lot more sense guys. The good news is I'm probably from Nevada. So this Put a sticker on me

So, okay So here you've got an area over a hundred square miles that's contaminated as all hell from one of the most deadly inhalants known to humanity It's gonna be contaminated for conservatively twenty four thousand years That's just a half-life right and the only thing preventing free travel through it is barbed wire fences with keep out by the order of the U S air force signs on them. And Hey, fun fact, desert critters tend not to recognize the authority of the U S air force, even when they're on American soil, which is why we have to let Greg Abbott hunt them for sport.

That's where you're going with this right now. Yep. Yep. So I will. Hunting Greg Abbott for sport is probably the one where I was going before, but hey, we'll take a diversion. And again, consider that we're talking about a substance where even a microgram of it getting in your lungs is deadly. So the minuscule amount that might be carried on, say, the foot of a kangaroo mouse could be problematic. Right? Now, the kangaroo mouse that wanders into this area is probably just going to die, but there will necessarily be a liminal area where the plutonium levels aren't enough to automatically kill anything that wanders in,

but are high enough to be carried out. Plus, plutonium that gets into your system stays there forever. So, if like up, or 20,000 years years anyway so if a bird was to eat the dead kangaroo mouse that would put the plutonium into the food chain turns out what happens 90 miles north of Vegas does not stay 90 miles north of Vegas I know this isn't the point but I am very excited that I just learned there's an animal called kangaroo I'm googling it right now. I don't want to ruin what's in my head though. In my head it's so hot. It's cuter. It jumps so high and they box. Alright, I'm checking it out. Alright, kangaroo. So if you're clinging to the hope that the tiny amount of plutonium... He jumped!

Yes, he is though. So if you're clinging to the hope that the tiny amount of plutonium that could be carried out on those kind of animals is negligible, I should point out that earthworms move soil by the ton. Right? So the doctor they put in charge of the project pointed out as much in a classified report that was issued in 1958, quote, Charles Darwin studied an acre of garden in which he claimed 53,000 hardworking earthworms moved 18 tons of soil.

Translocation of soil earthworms ingestion of plutonium could turn out to be a significant influence intentional or unintentional in the rehabilitation of weapon accident environment." End quote. Now, again, I want to say that like this whole, hey, man, worms are eating this shit and moving it all over the place. That observation came a year after the test. To be fair, he wrote the report right away, but it took a year to get a second appointment. Otherwise they would have had a second.

Right, right. Now eventually the government did come through and do some like, at least slightly more intense cleanup of the area, but that happened in 1981. So for 24 fucking years, there was just a blanket of finely dispersed plutonium blowing around the Nevada desert. And when they did clean up, they basically just dig up all the plutonium contaminated soil and moved it to another spot where presumably they still, yeah, right. Cause they still haven't figured out how to make fucking earthworm barbed wire or whatever so yeah it's still just there all right if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence what would it be I

probably just quit smoking for nothing really and are you ready for the quiz yeah just do it quick all right Noah what's a great name for this movie adaptation? A. Windy the Plue, Tonium. B. Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear and presentation. It's hard to say. C. 10 Things I Hate hate about uranium or D Garner with the wind. Oh to Garner with the wind is excellent. It's a little bit of a win. It is D All right. No if we've learned anything from this essay, it's that science aka systemized knowing things is bad and dangerous

a That's why I don't do it be the answer is B B A. That's why I don't do it. B. The answer is B. Damn it, it is B. Something else. Aw, dang it. B. All right, Noah. The Dirty Bomb sounds like a great name for a cocktail, which I need after hearing this essay. So what you read below is not a real name

for a cocktail you can order while in Vegas. A. Ass juice. A delightfully classy beverage served in a miniature toilet. Fuck, I feel like that's real. B, the area one apropos alien secretion, which is melon liqueur, rum, pineapple juice, and a migraine aura.

C, brain hemorrhage shots, that is peach schnapps, curdled Bailey's and Kennedy. The dirty bomb. See an actual real cocktail, which is absent with a red bull mixer. Go lay down, go lay down. No, and served with far too little plutonium to wipe out the monsters that would order this. Good lord. Why would you do that to your boss?

There is actually no combination of words that could be conjured that has not already been used as a liquid regret moniker. Oh, it's definitely secret answer F all of the above. And fucking ass juice is a real drink in Vegas. And curdled Bailey. Jesus fucking Christ. I don't know which of those sounds the worst. Ass juice. Wow. There's actually a shot in the TGI Friday's recipe book called the test tube baby. And

it's in like, it's in like other bartender manuals too. And it's got instead of the red, it's got like cream to look exactly. Test tube baby. It's a weird one. It's a weird one. No, you have one though. You got all the quiz questions. Well, but now I know all this shit. So have I? Everyone listening, we're all listening. I want Tom to have to do a fucking essay for telling me about this curdled Baileys drink. That sounds so fucking nasty. Alright, well,

for Tom, Noah, Cecil, and Eli, I'm Heath, thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week, and Tom will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, Lawful Assembly, Talking Ship, but you might be on a quick break, Dear Old Dads, God of Movies, The Skating Atheist, The Skeptocrat, and D&D-. And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved Patreons, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citationpod. And if you'd

like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com. we call parenting. Join me, Sabrina Kohlberg, and me, Andi Mitchell, for Pop Culture Moms, where each week we talk about what we're watching and examine our favorite pop culture moms up close to try to pick up some parenting hacks along the way. Come laugh, learn, and grow with us as we look for the best tips and maybe a few what-not-to-dos from our favorite fictional moms. From Good Morning America and ABC Audio, Pop Culture Moms. Find it wherever you get