Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 123 - Broken Arrow

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Francis from the Hell of a way to die Podcast and Shocks, everyone's favorite podcast lawyer join the show to talk about all of the times the US and USSR lost nuclear weapons due to horrible incompetence. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: https://interestingengineering.com/broken-arrows-the-worlds-lost-nuclear-weapons https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/17483/8-nuclear-weapons-us-has-lost https://www.introtoglobalstudies.com/2012/10/broken-arrow-lost-nuclear-weapons-in-canada/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/command-and-control-goldsboro-1961/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. Where in hell is Major Kong? Recording locally. Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and we have a packed metaphorical studio as we're all thousands of miles away from one another, uh, today with Francis from hell of a way to die. And Hey, shocks are,

uh, our, our local podcasting attorney. That's something to call me anyway. Podcasting at law. Oh, yeah. We were joking about podcast lawyering in the,

in the lawyer chat a few days ago. And I mean, I'm really just spending time on both of your podcasts until I start my own with my intern, Alan Dershowitz. Oh, God. He's assured me that he has a very particular expertise, a certain set of skills, if you will. I'm really happy that someone's finally going to do a weekly podcast on consent age laws. Oh no, his podcast is supposed to be daily. What? Yeah. A daily dirsh.

That is some fucking manic energy right there. That is a man who needs to tell everybody that he's very innocent. Saying something's a daily dirsh is what it like i feel like it's when puss comes out of you somewhere yeah i mean at the very least it's like a sign like anyone who says that they want to start a daily podcast should immediately just

be like just immediately shunted to some sort of like mental health treatment like even other podcasters like that is too much yeah like that's like a very clear cry for help like we're the skim of the earth but we will not hang out with you like i get it you know it's it's covid we're all in quarantine everybody you know the obama's got a podcast the the buddha jeg's got a podcast ever everybody got a podcast now and now the other side is doing it too and now we've got the Dersh, uh, the Dersh, the daily Dersh,

the daily douche is what I'm just going to start calling it now. Now I shouldn't call it that because, uh, a douche is a feminine hygiene product and gets things clean. And I don't think that anything will be happening clean on the Dersh podcast. It's sad that Epstein was taken from us before we could get an Epstein podcast. Right. Epstein, like live from, uh could get an Epstein podcast. Right? Epstein live from... We need to sneak a

cell phone into the floor of Supermax. And get the Unabomber. Though I suppose if there's a medium that the Unabomber would not be attuned to, it would probably be podcasting. You know, it's really sad because there was a very strange

podcast called Ear Hustle that the California Department of Corrections made in conjunction with their inmates. And the Unabomber is in federal prison, so that can't happen. But I feel like, you know, I'm going to start a change.org

petition to get Ted Kaczynski a podcast. Isn't Manson still in, like, you know, I'm going to start a change.org petition to get Ted Kaczynski a podcast. Isn't Manson still in, like, California State Penn? Oh, he died. Oh, yeah, that's right. He did. Fuck. Yeah, he died from being a miserable old fuck.

Yeah, no, I've been watching Mindhunters. So, like, my sense of, like, time, space, and reality has become so become so totally like melted that I can't even fucking figure that out anymore yeah but yeah speaking of melting oh I did it I fucking did it because we're talking about nukes today son you're like how many like 150 episodes

in and you just did like a really solid segue you're fucking learning I know it only took 123 hours of podcasting i got this actually i think this is i think it's like 100 124 now i'm not sure i'm a hack and fraud boy now he's fucking he's all over it yeah it's it's absolutely i'm going to uh hustle in on the buddha judge casts and uh with with room temperature takes like my, like my segue there. But you know what's not room temperature?

A nuclear explosion, which actually, thankfully, we are not going to be talking about a nuclear explosion today or this podcast would be much darker and South Carolina would be much more green of the neon variety. Because we're talking about broken arrows. When I say broken arrow, what jumps into your mind i know immediately you're gonna say that horrible christian slater movie uh that fantastic christian slater vehicle uh you're leaving out the the heavyweight john travolta i believe that's all i remember is john travolta yelling broken arrow very calmly but very firmly into a

military style telephone literally the only thing that I remember about that movie it's just what John Travolta calls phone sex I'll be honest with you like if I don't think about it very clearly broken arrow and face off are the same movie in my head I don't have any solid reason to explain that yeah I think it's just because they both came out around the same movie in my head and i don't know i don't have any solid reason i'm not alone on that yeah i think it's just because they both came out around the same time and we're both like

you know both involved john travolta and so both of them are just like the same movie in my head i i originally wrote this script and i made a nicholas cage joke and i had to go back and change it because i realized they weren't the same fucking movie that's the problem you take these war movies because because for a minute i thought it was uh no i was seeing mel gibson say broken arrow which maybe he did that's we were soldiers baby yep yeah and so and that's the thing like as soon as you have like you you put on a dude that's kind of uh old but still kind of beefy into Odie, Greens, and Helmet, they all become the same person to me.

So like John Travolta, Mel Gibson, Christian Slater. I don't know who is in that movie, The Thin Red Line, that's got a lot of people in it. A lot of people. Right, you look at it, it's just like, I know who all of these people are, but i cannot tell who they are in this in this movie also that movie sucks ass it's it's not great uh thanks to nick we'll be watching it for a fucking bonus episode oh jesus i tried to watch that recently not recently but like a year ago

it's like three and a half hours long well i'm like i was trying to watch the deer hunter it got panned at the time, and I was like, you know, maybe I just didn't appreciate it for what it was. And then I got like an hour into it, and I'm like, no. Super no. You can tell all of these people and O.D. Green apart because John Travolta is the one that killed his son via a cult, and Mel Gibson is the one screaming anti-Semitic slurs.

We got a fucking rogues gallery of good people on this podcast that we're referencing. Who else did we just talk about who's fucking terrible besides everything in the intro? Now I'm just thinking of Mel Gibson and signs like yelling slurs at the aliens. That's actually how they got them to leave. They weren't allergic to water. They just were like, you know, he's really bringing them. He's making us very uncomfortable. He called my wife sugar tits, and we're not even sure what those are

because we're aliens and we have to leave. You know, it never really connected until now, the fact that Tom Cruise is both a huge Scientologist and was also in War of the Worlds. And you have to wonder if there was some deeper significance to him while he was watching himself in a movie where aliens are taking over the world.

Did he think he was fighting Xenu? He just thought it was a documentary. Only if instead of the tripods, they were like a Boeing 747, which I think is what Xenu flies to Earth in or something. As long as you get your pilot license, you have to Xenu responsibly. Now, someone brought up Weaver Soldiers already,

but that was a different term that is no longer in popular use, which is like you have to call in air support, like all available air support to a unit that's cut off. But we're talking about... Yeah, it's just like Just bomb the shit out of everything around me because it's all fucked. It turns out that was just the overall strategic

goal in Vietnam, and it worked out great. Vietnam, and as a portent of things to come, Cambodia and Laos and just most of Southeast Asia. It's fine. Thankfully, nothing bad happened there poll who anyway um we're talking about nuclear broken arrows more specifically uh or all those fun times the militaries of the world accidentally

lost a nuclear weapon which i assume this is like one, maybe three, four or five times. Fellas, I got some bad news. We, we have lost a lot of nukes. Um, and you know, I just,

I, all I think of, you know, we, we've all been in the military. Um, we know that things get misplaced all the time. And the amount of like,

I just think of the amount of nukes that like America was making and the Soviet union was making like back during the cold war when it was just like, when it's like assembly line nukes, it was just like, do we really have serial numbers and hand receipts on all of those? Like, are we really going to kid ourselves or is it going to be one of these days? Like just like an underground explosions are going to happen in South Dakota.

And there's like, ah, shit, that's right. I left a nuke there. There's an old Minuteman one there. Totally forgot about it. My bad, guys. My bad. Even in general, too, you gotta

figure, what happens if maybe all the nukes are fine, but maybe there's a Friday nuke before a 72-hour holiday weekend. Is that really gonna be up to snuff? Maybe it's you know like leaking a little bit maybe not all the screws are like it torqued down quite all the way you know

guys i got some bad news because you are much more you're much closer to how a lot of this happens than you probably know um because for a lot of reasons now there is some play with this definition of broken arrow as some people use it to expand to cover everything that considered a military nuclear accident but the US government more specifically calls them nuclear accidents that

do not risk nuclear war which seems to be really dancing around the issue at hand here. We need to specify our nuclear explosions. Are there the war ones or the oops ones? Yeah, we have this so often. We had to change the definition to make us not look so bad. Well, and it also makes you think that just practically,

if we were only gradually learning about all the ones that are of what i imagine would be a slightly lesser category of ones that almost didn't cause a war you have to wonder about all the ones that are probably still classified that are under the category of yeah well you know then there was a time that we were overflying the soviet union we accidentally just like you know let a nuke fly uh that happened more than once but we'll get there uh now as all of us know there's there's a really big problem when it comes with nuclear weapons other than you know they're horrible doomsday weapons that should never been brought into this world and that is they are by definition weapons that the military uses this has an unfortunate side effect of some of the most

destructive weapons on earth ever have ever been created being left to the hands of well people in the military at least so far ISIS hasn't stolen one and paraded around with flat tires or something like they do with our Humvees all the time

yeah not yet it's not from a lot they did manage to elude a fuckload of uh of biological sorry chemical weapons no biological weapons that we're aware of um now that we are that you and i are aware of yeah that's what covid is that's not that's my new thing now oh god damn it coronavirus was released by isis um stolen chemical weapons i'm just having this image of just like isis like phone technicians like infiltrating verizon install 5g towers you like look up and there's like a like attached to like the

that's the telephone pole outside your house there's just a black isis flag like oh wow you know it's it's an at&t commercial it's like did you know the caliphate has the world's most encompassing network welcome to caliphate wireless just machine start playing in the background a wireless company that only gives you old nokia brick phones they'll last forever and man they're a blast oh god damn it yeah the isis 5g towers are fine until they start doing the call to prayer at five in the morning every day it's weird as soon as i installed the 5g tower suddenly the uh the tint in my

entire neighborhood went like vaguely like yellow brownish and you know started hearing the call to prayer every day i don't know i'll become a martyr for these prices uh now everyone in this show uh especially the the the the current gathering is hyper critical of the military. That's because at one point or another, we've all been in it. And we were all enlisted. So, and most of the people who have been on this show were enlisted in one military

or another at some point. I don't think I've ever had an officer on the show because my own producer will not come on the show. Now he just sends me. He's just like, what do you think I have a staff sergeant for get over there go do the bitch work and also make the coffee uh just like think of how many people

over the years that we've all worked with that like you whenever you go to like the range or you do something that could be construed as dangerous everybody just looks very carefully at them like they have have bricks for hands. They can't shoot. They give you that creepy school shooter vibe. We've all, at any point of our careers, worked with at least 10 of those people in any given unit.

Now switch out the fact that they no longer have an M4 or an M16 if your unit doesn't love you, and now they're responsible for the proper transporting, storing, and maintenance of a nuclear weapon. You know, I'm not going to like, I don't want to dog any of the professions that I'm about to mention.

But for a little bit, I worked alongside some electricians and IBEW, you know, Union Strong, Union Strong boys. But one of them was like, he was a little older. He had been in the Navy and he was a nuke tech. And like, I'm not, I'm, you know, again, not trying to be insulting, but he wasn't that smart just in general. Like he was very good at what he did. He was a very nice person.

He was really cool to hang out with, but you know, he's a, he's like of average intelligence, you know, and he liked to drink and he was in the, I mean, he was in the Navy.

So of course he, you know, in the Navy in your twenties, he was, you know, a little bit insane. Like all of them are like all of us were. Yeah.

So, so yeah, just, I've met one new tech and he's, he was a guy who was like, I don't think you should have been in charge of those. It makes me uncomfortable. And more specifically, what most of the failures for all these broken arrows on the US side is, the Soviet Union will get their turn, is the failure of the planes that the nukes are on.

Because this is before ICBMs. lanes that the the nukes are on because this is before icbms um and i know i've known several people who worked as like maintainers on fighter jets or other planes and yikes folks and this is like in the 2000s where like you legitimately do have to score higher uh you know right now we're talking about the late 1940s when you could feasibly stumble over your dick into the military and be functionally illiterate um like well like also like as i remember too you know in that interwar period in between uh world war ii and korea i mean you know like pretty much a lot of the folks would like with a half a brain got out at that point like got demobilized in like 46 and 47 i mean that's like part of the

reason the first part of the korean war was like such a solid clusterfuck because they just had like a bunch of dudes who just kind of like decided to just hang out in the ranks and then they got and then they did conscription too didn't they like yeah it's still happening so you've got you went to a whole new war in a whole new place that you didn't understand it was a completely different kind of asymmetrical war and all you're left with are like the people who decided the real world was um was just they didn't want to deal with it so they stayed in the army or or the uh and and the conscripts which is you know i that's that's yeah or like all the dudes who were so like such tapped like world war ii veterans that they like you know they they couldn't exist anywhere else.

Right. That was my dad's drill sergeant. I think when he joined the Marines, it was like 58, 59. And his drill sergeant was a former Pacific Theater Marine combat vet from World War II. And so as you can imagine, dude was just fucking out to lunch. Would just rabbit punch the various different recruits. I think actually got

removed from being their DI halfway through their boot company because he was just such a violent shithead that they actually couldn't keep him around anybody anymore. Imagine you're a specialist sergeant or whatever like november 1945 and uh everybody's getting getting demobbed and you re-enlist

everybody's like really dude you're re-enlisting and you're like what are the odds that happens again and then like you do like a six-year contract so you get stop loss in 51 and you're like You do like a six-year contract, so you get stop loss in 51, and you're like, oh, I played myself. I did not read a history book, as it turned out. So, yeah, like I kind of pointed out, most of the problems that are going to come up are with the maintenance and piloting of these planes. But remember, when we first started dropping these giant bastards in 1945 uh when

being a pilot in the u.s army air force later to be the u.s air force wasn't really that difficult um not like today or even a decade or two decades ago um you could just become a pilot like you didn't require any kind of extensive education a couple hundred hours behind the sticks and you were good to go well those planes you know the f-35 is a complicated piece of machinery planes back then you know you turn it left you turn it right the the rudders the flaps i've look i've flown microsoft uh simulator you're overqualified then. So I'm good. I can fly a Cessna through the arch without running into the sides nine times out of ten. So I'm pretty sure I could have done some bombing over Dresden. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I played the original Microsoft flight simulator and I was able to fly a you know 737 right through the twin towers you beat me to it i have to admit i was gonna say i was playing microsoft flight simulator and i flew to new york city once um just once just uh just one. One ping, Vasily. But yeah, flying these things wasn't overly complicated. Like Francis pointed out, there wasn't a whole lot going on in that cockpit.

Sure. I bring that up now because, as everybody's probably well aware, our entire nuclear arsenal is not air-based anymore. I mean, they can be, but they're mostly ICBMs or nuclear vehicles that can be fired from a submarine thousands of miles away and so far away that you can comfortably end the world without leaving your desk. The days of the Enola Gay slowly puttering over some city and evaporating its population by dropping a bomb are long gone, but that was not always the case. As soon as World War II ended,

the Cold War started, because that's what happens when the world becomes populated by superpowers, and they're going to do superpower stuff, and by that mean destroy the lives of everybody around them to further their political or economic goals. Now, for a few years, the U.S. enjoyed nuclear supremacy, but that wouldn't last long. In 1945, a Soviet spy ring in the U.S. had obtained the blueprints for the U.S.'s early nuclear weapons. In fact, they had pretty much infiltrated the Manhattan Project pretty goddamn well over the years, almost from the beginning and in almost every department, because that's going to happen. That's some good opSEC, guys. Way to go.

Yeah, and I mean, most of the spies, they're like, oh, yeah, we kept it all the Russians. Yeah, well, most of them were Americans. I mean, you know, and I think the only thing that we can all say about that is comrades, good work. We did it. You know, all the more for the glory of the Soviet Union and our glorious leader, Joseph Stalin.

The communists were simply saying, this is information that belongs to the people, and so they liberated it. We have to redistribute the nuclear weapons to everybody. Exactly. You have too many. Give a few to Libya. I'm sure it's...

Thank you for joining us, Hillary Clinton. I'm sorry. She meant giving them to Libya in a different way. All I'm saying is Joe Kasabian has information that could lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton. That's all. I'm not... Guys, I'm feeling very depressed,

and I have to go shoot myself six times in the back of the head. Yeah, they call that the Stalin special. But to be fair, everybody says the Soviets stole all of their designs from us. That isn't true. They also had their own great science projects as well as brilliant local talent. They had their own Operation Paperclip. Yes, they did.

You get a Nazi scientist, and you get a Nazi scientist, and you get a nazi scientist and you get a nazi scientist and you get a nazi scientist uh their main problem was actually just getting their hands on uranium as the u.s had quite literally cornered the market on the mines in the belgian congo and if you aren't aware of the history of what's going on there yikes um and it's all gone don't worry about it yeah uh the fact that the name is the Belgian Congo should ring a few bells. Any Congolese people that disagree

with renaming your country the Belgian Congo raise a hand. Oh wait, you can't. We made sure you could not. Oh Jesus, fuck. It's gotten dark. The Belgians made sure that nobody else would get any of the uranium coming out of that mine.

By 1949, it didn't really matter. The Soviets had detonated a plutonium bomb known the RDS-1, and it was pretty much identical to the US Fat Man bomb, which had been dropped in Nagasaki. The reason for that is the soon to be executed Soviet spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, quite possibly, though it is still debated, had passed along perfect and uninterrupted designs from Los Alamos to the Soviets. Now, I should point out what is debated is not that the Rosenbergs were spies. It's if they actually managed to do this or if the U.S. is looking to blame someone. They were spies. There's absolute evidence to prove that.

I guess what is in question if they were good spies or not I don't know do you remember a couple of years ago when like a Russian spy was caught but they were like he was he just was living his their life there whoever was was just living their life in America for 20 years and passing

on like information anybody could have looked up on the internet because they were just such a terrible spy oh yeah America's just like we caught you but you really haven't actually done anything so go home i guess that guy's my spirit animal i think they were uh i think one of them was in cambridge and like and like the whole thing was that they were like they're almost like manchurian candidate like they were you know supposed to like there was a whole spy ring they're supposed to to go off and reach the upper echelons of American society, but then they all

just kind of didn't. Wait, is that why you're podcasting from an undisclosed location near Edward Snowden? Yeah, this isn't actually Kerry Shocks. This is just a number station we dialed into. There are so many NSA installations around me on Oahu, I cannot be

making that joke right now. Whose door is getting kicked in first is the real question. I have no weapons here, but I'm sure they'll find at least six on my body. Anyway, after the Soviets got their hands on a nuke, and they did their US counterparts and began refining and evolving those nukes into more easily deliverable weapons via long-range bomber because like the two bombs that were dropped required very specially uh like outfitted planes and like the the how much they weighed damn near dropped the goddamn things out of the air uh it was a whole thing uh but eventually long-range bombers

that could actually carry these heavy-ass weapons were built and that's when the u.s had the b-36 and the soviets with the tu-95 they both came out in the late 1940s and early 50s and for the first time dropping a nuke on a country would be much much easier than ever before you know progress there's no stopping it uh yeah hopefully by uh yeah yeah 2026 uh all or half of all nukes will be delivered by women of color it'll be great um this began yes queen yes this this began uh the idea of mutually assured destruction that would not be called that for quite some time uh for people are not aware it's a strategy of we know we can't stop our first attack but our defense is if we can still nuke you anyway and we know that you can also nuke us so therefore neither of us can go to war because we'll just end the world in a flash of nuclear hellfire uh it's not great stuff

fine fine a strategy built by very normal people that's a world stretching understatement right there it's not you know it's the best thing you can share destruction not great yeah turns out not the best it's that shrugging emoji next to it mutually assured just means sharing yeah I mean that's why we'll share the uranian wasteland we've had enough of uranium

how about ourranium because remember this like we said this before ICBM so people had to think of a way to always be ready to set nukes on planes on their way. Well, beginning in 1955, the U.S. Strategic Air Command, also known as SAC, because we're all mature people, came up with a plan. And that was to keep bombers loaded with nukes on alert at all times and ready to go within 15 minutes. Now, correct me if i'm wrong we have done away with that and we just always have bombers with nukes on them ready to go in the air currently don't we oh we'll get to that okay

we don't and for a very good reason um that began to beg a question what if too many of these planes on the ground were destroyed before they got uh before they could lift off uh what happens if there's some kind of breakdown in the chain of command and they weren't told because washington was nuked but they're like we need something better than this enter the airborne alert program the alert program went by several different operational names like head start round robin and chrome dome uh but they're all pretty much the same um they're they're all functionally not much different uh the airborne alert program would change the backbone of the plan from being planes ready to go to planes already in the air all the time 24 hours a day

year round this is gonna bring some problems wasn't it uh wasn't it curtis lemay who like was initially at the helm of like strategic air command i believe so yeah yeah this is why i believe this is one of his ideas like talk about like an exceedingly like fucking normal human being like he was also just like a fucking absolute lunatic wasn't he like wasn't he one of the ones who was essentially like yeah no if uh if we had lost the war i would have absolutely been tried for war crimes because i definitely did some light war crimes yeah he was one of the people who kind of openly admitted like this is a victor's court but i'm also okay with it

yeah i don't disagree with that um i, we didn't commit any genocides, but we did have concentration camps and we probably would have been prosecuted for it like the Tokyo tribunals overseen by the emperor or whatever. I mean, it sounds sick. Let's hear it out. But this meant that planes would always be up in the air armed with nuclear weapons.

They would be flying over various different countries in Europe, just outside Soviet airspace. And none of these European nations, besides maybe the UK, had any idea that these planes were armed with nuclear weapons. Hell yeah. It's our business. Don't worry about it. Mind your our business. Don't worry about it. Mind your own business. A lot of this is over North America as well, but a lot of this is over Greenland and Spain and nations like that.

They did not know. In fairness, if we'd nuked Spain in the 60s, as long as it fell in Franco's house. Again, you're much closer to the story than you think you are, and you're going to find this hilarious. Amazing story than you think you are uh and and you're gonna find this hilarious oh amazing all right let's go for it because that that kind of happens on accident but the nuke does not go off but uh so this became common knowledge the fact that all of

these weird jets have nukes on board on accident which we'll get to now if this sounds nuts having planes all the time up in the air, armed with world-ending bombs, it is nuts. It's because it is. But the U.S. military isn't crazy, right? Right? Well, technically only kind of. The pilots wouldn't be staying up in the air for 24 hours. Don't be ridiculous.

It'd only be 20 hours. Oh, cool. four hours. Don't be ridiculous. It'll only be 20 hours. Oh, cool. And I need to remind you that this is the 1950s through 60s. So this is fully 100% in the feed pilots' amphetamines in order to keep them awake and fly

endlessly territory. Something that continues to a much lesser extent to this day. We made a whole episode about it uh we accidentally bombed canadians because we had national guard pilots are out of their mind on meth but oh yeah in afghanistan right yep yep uh but i on the this is all nuclear flights stressing the limits of human endurance while armed with the most destructive weapons known to man all be piloted by dudes who are ripped to the gills on speed.

Honestly, this is the future that our... This is what our race deserves. As the human race, this is what we deserve is like a thing. This is like if you... This is like if you and your buddies are leaving the bowling alley and you've got that

one friend who's like, yeah, I'm drunk, but I drive better when I'm drunk. But now let him drive a nuke. I'm drunk, but I drink a Red Bull with my vodka, so I'm good. I'm just thinking about Chris Farley fucking speedballing in the early 90s and just shoving him in the front of a B-52 and just saying, yeah, go for it, man. What's the worst thing that can happen? Chris Farley, his arm hanging out the window with a needle

still hanging from it, piloting a nuke over Denmark. Okay, but first off, if we also get David Spade to be his co-pilot, that's a movie. Yeah, I mean, that's fair. That's a movie that Black Sheep should have been. Kids, I gotta

get you on the right track! As Greenland just goes up in a fucking mushroom cloud just like riding the bomb all the way down to the soviet union just screaming like living in a van down by the river uh now there's a small problem with all this this round the clock mission called for at least 12 planes to be in the air at all times circling waiting for the order to end the world which would come to them via teletype or radio within the within the plane now regardless of what happened on the ground like regarding their oncoming relief 12 planes had to be up in the air that means if like a flight was grounded due to maintenance problems, which was very common, the other flights would have to stay up even

longer as a replacement could be found and get ready. This was not uncommon, so these poor bastards would have to be in the air for days at a time, and they would also have to refuel in flight, which is incredibly hard and very dangerous to do when you're not

incredibly tired and filled full of fucking, I don't know, trucker speed. If you're thinking, wow, a podcast, man, that sounds like a recipe for disaster, you'd be 100% correct. The U.S. admits to a broken arrow of some kind or another 32 different times. Jesus Christ.

Now, like we've pointed out, those are just the ones we know about this is like if you look at parallel universes and you're like the only ones you see like all the everything that runs parallel to our reality is like the different ways that like humanity destroys ourselves we're in that one that one narrow so far in that one narrow little key where it's just like they drop the bomb and like you know you roll the 100 side of die and it comes up 100 you're like whew good thing good thing that just keeps happening

for us I guess it turns out somehow we still lost I reckon this is it nuclear combat toe to toe with the rooskies somehow we still lost. I reckon this is it. Nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Ruskies. Yeah, I found a strange little soundboard, so we're going to have that happening.

Now, I should point out that Broken Arrows have not stopped happening. Not that long ago, during a training mission, a whole bunch of live nukes got loaded on a plane and transported across the United States without anybody knowing. This is technically a broken arrow because they were lost for hours.

Like somebody accident, like they were just there and somebody picked up the paperwork, the clipboard off of one and then set it down on the other. And then the tech sergeant comes in and is like, oh, I don't know. I guess I'll have to load these funny looking bombs on here and like how does this happen i it was a complete and utter air force related fuck up and most of the time like what for like nukes can be transported uh like not armed which happens a lot and probably more often than people think like they remove the fissile cores and they can more safely

be transported there's always some risk and in my mind that's the way that they should always be transported uh these ones were armed uh when they left the dakotas yeah all right not exactly sure of all the details for it but technically a broken harrow happened like five years ago that is and this is this is just incredibly telling of not only how stupid the American military is, like just somebody accidentally loaded the wrong bombs on, but that armed live newts were just sitting out with not even like a sign that says hey don't load these yet we need to disarm them as they are armed alive nuclear bombs like the the the fit the cascading failure is also like that parallel universe like in a normal place in a normal universe somebody would have been like

whoa there's a mistake here something should have Some other thing should have happened. So we have this cascading of constantly fucking up and then constantly getting out, wriggling out of it to everybody's surprise and just dusting ourselves off and learning absolutely nothing from it. You just have to figure out all the times

that, I mean, I'm sure between you, me, and Joe, every single... All of us have pulled some dumb form of watch at some point. Just watching something that did not need to be watched, that was immobile and too heavy and couldn't fucking move even if it wanted to, or was worthless or pointless or just whatever. For one reason or another, did not need to be watched. And there wasn't a guy. wasn't like a single guy you couldn't find a single fucking airman in like the entirety of like the dakotas to just like hey dude watch this train make sure it doesn't fucking leave i had to sit for 12 hours and watch an empty connex yeah like like for no for no apparent

reason other than we don't want somebody else to take it it's like just lock it like no they'll get like because every soldier also doesn't trust other soldiers so like if you don't sit here and watch this somebody will steal it from us so we need you and like two other guys to sit here and stare at this thing to make sure nobody steals it and like to be honest though that that probably was smart because i'm sure that it may it there's there was a very real chance of that getting stolen right the whole connex yeah i had to pull armed guard over porter potties because people kept drawing dicks in them and you know what it was it was me if there's anyone from my old unit listening to this podcast first of all i hate you and second of all uh we pulled armed

guard over porta potties because it was me and i refuse to admit it so you're welcome god i love everybody hates you so much joe but like fair they already hated me after the fact though it's funny like sometimes sometimes fucking over your buddies is real funny yeah now the main difference between the soviet union and the united states is while most of the united states broken arrows happened because of planes pretty much all of the soviet broken arrows that we know of because soviet reasons almost exclusively caused horrible nuclear accidents at sea. This is because while the Soviets did have deterrent systems, it was mostly ground-based,

leading to fewer nukes ever being up in the air, like they had the 15 minutes on standby type thing. Yeah, there was also a problem of an armed forces-wide maintenance problem that would routinely ground their entire air force. And even this so even the soviet union like is pretty well known for their very very lax idea of safety they knew that keeping nukes in the air around the clock was kind of a bad idea um so they kept them in the oceans i'd imagine true that they were also like you know it's it's you know uh hunt for october notwithstanding it's you know pretty difficult to like in an entire nuclear sub to defect versus just having six random assholes in a plane out over close to NATO in striking distance and being able to land at an airport. True.

And I really wish these subs defected because that would be significantly less destructive as to what happened. And they did have a very large fleet of submarines, seemingly designed by someone who really wanted to make Godzilla become real. On literally dozens of occasions, various Soviet nuclear subs began leaking radiation or melting down from the 1960s all the way up to the current day Russian Navy with a mysterious, with a recent mysterious fire sinking

and massive leak of radiation from a Russian sub that they still refuse to explain as to what exactly happened. Joe, Joe, gun to your head. If you had to choose and somebody was like, you have to join either the Soviet Army or the Soviet Navy or the Soviet Air Force. Air Force, 100%. Really really was their air force at least

survivable well i mean as a shitty enlisted person there was much less of a reason for me to immediately die from horrible neglect um which which which was i mean like if someone uh like our part seven series on our soviet afghan war goes over this really well. But like they had more soldiers just like murdered from hazing accidents during this Afghan war than they had killed by the Mujahideen. And nobody kept track of them. Like nobody gave a shit. So like your life literally meant nothing. So I'd rather be on the ground crew of something. I'll probably still get sucked in by some horribly designed intake valve or something

and get turned to ether. But I don't know. At least the tank will eat my nutsack. I don't know, man. I think I would rather be pink misted through the engine of a MiG than anything else that would have... That's just quick.

You're like, oh, you're done. Not just being tossed off of a roof because I happen to be the newest guy there. Yeah, I was going to say, just beat to death and stabbed because you wouldn't run your pockets the minute you got to your barracks at your first game. We call this game, we're going to stab the new guy. How do I play it? You don't. You just stand there.

Now, the reasons for most of these design flaws are unknown because Soviet reasons. But a lot of it is from simply bad engineering. Their power plants are rushed out with very little testing and very little training, leading to confused crews who had no idea how to control them from causing meltdowns and fires. More specifically, the fires were an issue with their electrical wiring, which would cause another engineering problem within the Soviet submarines. It was a fire suppression system that would automatically pump CO2 into crew compartments if it sends a flash or smoke. If anybody's unaware of what happens when the oxygen you breathe is 100% replaced by CO2 for literally any amount of time you die um

or at the very least you get knocked unconscious yeah you don't die of fire you don't burn to death hey maybe that's i think our mrap systems had something like that where they're like no the fire suppression system in here could live could like literally blind you if you're not careful or something so don't smoke inside the MRAPs. That was because it was powder-based. It was powder-based and could get in your eyes, which I've had happen to me before and it fucking sucks.

I'm sure you can still see, though. It's not like you had the oxygen sucked out of your lungs. A lot of times, if people remember our our confederate submarine episode like the sub would sink they would resurface it throw the dead bodies out and then just recrew it that happened a lot um the soviets like sometimes it wouldn't kill everyone because

not everybody would be in the crew compartment like it would be like up and like i like the i don't know the captain's area because everything's compartmentalized or like the torpedoes are like up front or like an engineering space or like somewhere another yeah very rarely would it wipe out a whole crew but you'd have like oh half the crew died why oh sergey smoked a cigarette when before he went to bed um or like that's like that's why the russians all need to vape now that was the uh that was the i don't know like um um all of like the small boats that i was on that actually had like inboard engines like inboard diesels and shit like the 47s but they

had fixed co2s and like part of the drill for that like part of running the drill for that was that you you know you had to absolutely make sure that like the hatch running the drill for that was that you you know you had to absolutely make sure that like the hatch was dogged and everything was closed before you hit the like the button but it definitely wasn't fucking automatic because that's automatic that 100% would just like kill the shit out of it like me most of these bodies were found with like because it's like super uh it's it's like a very, very low temperature before it comes out. Yeah. And they would do like autopsies on them, which I was actually more shocked that they did autopsies on these guys because it's the Soviet Navy.

And they found like ice crystals forming in their lungs. Yeah. Which, guys, if you did not wear, it's terminal. You're not going to come back from that. It's what's called having Soviet lung. And the surviving members of these crews would be able to bring them back and they would just

chuck all the dead bodies out and recrew them. But in most of these cases, if a sub was lost, which did happen, there was no attempt to recover any part of it. The Soviets simply left their nuclear tip torpedoes and reactors just laying in the

ocean for decades where they still are uh this obviously led to a lot of them becoming horrible sources of radioactive radioactive uh pollution that continued to be parked on the ocean floor and fucking up the planet long after the death of the soviet union all i'm saying

is if it was actually a problem, we would have gotten a Godzilla by now. We haven't gotten a Godzilla by now, so it's not actually a fucking problem. It's more liberal lies about the effects of various different things that aren't actually a problem that we don't need to worry about. Radiation is

liberal bullshit. It came from the Earth. It's just going back to the Earth. It's all natural. I actually have a uranium crystal that I sleep with under my pillow every night and I have no problems and every morning I wake up, I look out

and I smell purple and that's fine. It's really normal for people in Boston to have Fosse jaw in 2020. Listen, I'm not a Kennedy. Let's fucking calm that shit down right now like for instance one of them is still uh crashed off the coast of norway and it sank in the late 80s and it's it's currently putting off radiation one million times the normal level uh that should be found in the ocean um well and i will say what water is a good blocker of radiation so it's it's not great but also like i'm sure that like norway hasn't gone and dug that

up and like tried to contain it because it's just like i mean it'd be worse if we moved it at this point it's kind of what it came down to yeah norway said like's really bad, but be worse if we took it out of the water. So thankfully, all this is contained in the world's oceans. Good news, everybody. Mother nature can take another one for the fucking team, right? Fine.

And this is why I'm, one of the things that makes me sad is I won't be around in like, you know, 20 million years to see like after we're gone, what will evolve from our cast-offs in detritus. That's actually how the

angels from Evangelion come from is the submarine. It's just like Mother Nature's swaying back and forth, inhaling wildfire smoke and pollution and radiation from Soviet submarines. I didn't hear a fucking bell, did you? But now with that,

let's talk about some of America's greatest self-owns. And by that, I mean all of the times we almost killed ourselves. The first one happened pretty much as soon as these flights started in 1950. A B-29 crashed in New Mexico, which, by the way, a lot of these come down to new mexico sorry guys

that's actually how your governor was born uh but uh is this killed the entire crew because this happens most of the time uh and nearly accidentally nuked albuquerque but for a nuke to go off the high explosives trigger a detonator, which then triggers the nuclear reaction, which leads to people's shadows being burnt into concrete for all of time. Now, in most of these bombs, there's a series of safeties that are there to ensure there's no accidental detonation. That means before they purposely go and drop the nuke, the pilot has to arm it. Now, this isn't 100% fail-proof fail proof but it works very very well otherwise this story would be much much different um so this time what happened is the explosives went off and nearly triggered the device but the safeties did their job and didn't make albuquerque look

slightly worse than it does now um i've never been to albuquerque i'm just throwing shade on everything that isn't ohio because this didn't happen in ohio i'm sorry um i mean the really the only the only shame here is that it didn't happen to ohio i think we can all agree that and if we're honest indiana i mean we're all thinking it if there was ever going to be a place that you know nuclear bombs would probably fall probably indiana Are we sure they haven't? I'd just drop it in one of the Dakotas. It's mostly just wildebeests and whatnot up there, right? I mean, I'm really just saying this so that way...

It's a red wall up there, man. So Nate can get angry later and say that maybe we should have nuked him. Nate will absolutely shit talk on Indiana as well as anybody else. If we nuked Indiana, the only thing that would have changed is Mike Pence would just be Homelander from The Boys. So a couple months later, it happened again in August, triggering the explosives, killing the crew, but not setting off the nuke. Again, New Mexico. crew but not setting off the nuke again new mexico uh there's a lot of crashes like these every once in a while the crew and the plane understands that they're crashing before you know they crash and they jettison their nuclear weapons which is actually sounds insane but it's actually

much safer because it gets it away from the scene of the crash and there's parachutes attached to it uh the idea being they'll simply thump safely to the earth and uh like it gets rid of the possible threat of the explosion from the aircraft crashing triggering their explosives possibly bypassing a safety creating a chain reaction to where like people start growing weird limbs a thousand years later so they did this over canada the thing is, Canada was not informed beforehand, and the explosives went off. Now, thankfully, the bomb was missing its core. That would require for a full nuclear reaction, but the bomb was still packed full of 100 pounds of uranium,

which, of course, was spread over a huge arc by all of those explosives going off, which this happens literally every time, in case anybody's wondering. Where in Canada is this? What part of Canada is uninhabitable? It is Quebec. In case anybody was curious why Quebec is Quebec.

It's the French. It's fine. When you absorb enough nuclear radiation you just start speaking French. I'm just imagining the blob but it's just a big piece of radioactive poutine i'd eat that poutine 10 times out of 10 uh yes i know it'd kill me and it'd be delicious spoken like a true red wings fan right there that's really what that is that's right now this

caused the u.s government to shrug say my bad and then dig up literally tons of contaminated earth before it gave people a bunch of really fun cancers but that doesn't work this method of nuclear cleanup almost never works it's actually what's going on in fukushima for the large part is like they're digging up huge amounts of surface soil and then just throwing it in bags and thinking that that's good enough but the problem is like you spread soil around when you collect it this way so therefore it's impossible to collect. Uh, but yeah.

Yeah. As soon as you, as soon as you like put your shovel in and disturb dust, it's in the wind now. It's like, just, just like state, like tack down some really good tarp for like 10,000 years and you'll be fine. Did you,

uh, in your, in your research over this, did you ever, uh, come across what happened in I think it was the Bay Area in San Francisco related to the Bikini Athol

tests? I didn't cover the Bikini Athol test because honestly all of Castle Bravo deserves its own episode that's fair but generally what happened was it was a runaway test they had a much more powerful nuclear reaction than they ever thought possible so they did not in any way prepare for anything that could

happen next so yikes yeah well and then it was an accident they uh when they got the when they got the ships back to like stateside they um wanted to decontaminate them so they just washed them off yeah they just gave them like fresh water wash downs and like you know wash down the equipment and the rest of it on land that I guess was like in the greater bay area and then like essentially just like sat on it for a while and then

sold it to the city and I guess they built a like a police headquarters on top of it and then like all their cars and shit started melting everyone got terrible fucking cancer so just like the worst like everyone just like got like immediately fucking terribly ill and like the buildings were basically melting into the fucking asphalt because it turned out like the entire property was just like like just radiate like almost visibly radiating with just terrible contamination.

Yeah, normally that's only metaphysical. This is actually what happens when a police department is sponsored by Dr. Manhattan. If you look at the pictures from Bikini Atoll, you can see the outlines of the mushroom cloud. Ships are just sitting there.

That seems bad. I'm sure every single one of those sailors has uh like a dick that looks like a fucking i don't know the letter z just like a glow stick from a rave i made i made fun of i made fun of a post about like how the soviets were like we're just gonna drop bombs and send like 45 000 troops to to yes to do but like we absolutely did the same things like we'd drop bombs and be like, alright everybody, walk slowly towards the mushroom cloud. We're going to see what happens.

That decade between World War II, I guess not even a decade, but between World War II and the Korean War where that's the atomic age and that's my absolute favorite design time in America. But also, I love the time in america but also like i

love the aesthetics of it but also like they were they were also just like i'm gonna paint my eyelids with uranium why are my teeth falling out like it was just the wild west of like the of like america like yeah we're in the middle of a pandemic right now we're just like you know i can't believe the lies that our government would tell us but like back then they're just like hey're just like you know i can't believe the lies that our government would tell us but like back then they're just like hey we just like flattened two cities with the power of this like metal that we dug up let's make glassware out of it because it glows in the dark could you imagine if we had this kind of like the the nuclear um market uh now the way things work there would be like someone there'd be a group of people like guys maybe we shouldn't be uh wearing plutonium based condoms these are bad for you and then

someone would be like lol shut the fuck up lib as they like butt chug plutonium to own the libs oh oh i'm so sad we missed that if i'm'm honest. Just melting through their lower intestines like, yes, yes. We had them taking fish medicine and drinking bleach. Injecting bleach, sir. I'll have you do it. Right. It's like, look, let's just, you know, please do. Go ahead. I'm interested. I would love to see you be correct about injecting Lysol into your veins.

I don't think you will be, but where has America been greatest? But for those who go forth to make sure the pathway is clear for the rest of us, you're dead now. Okay, cool. Well, now we know. Thank you. Thank you for your service. You truly don't respect American freedoms unless you sound yourself with a plutonium rod. Just like Jordan Peterson, just like licking fucking radioactive watch dials as part of his new diet that his daughter got him to do.

Just like gradually just like rotting his fucking jaw. The radiation melts away the pounds, literally. Not boofing radioactive material is cultural Marxism. So back in March of 1956, that's the only Jordan Peterson impression I'm ever doing on this show, and I hate myself for it. Back in March of 1956 1956 shit got really bad and

this falls into the thing that francis was talking about like what if a nuke just goes off and nobody has any idea where it's from so a b-47 carrying two nuclear cores and at least one fully functional bomb nobody will really tell us from florida to morocco just kind of disappeared and most people assume it crashed into the ocean because, I say assume, because literally no trace of this fucking thing has ever been found. That includes all of the nuclear material on board. The U.S. government refuses to say what exactly the plane was carrying, more about the bomb, but it was probably a Mark 15, which has a yield of 3.4 megatons, and it was never heard from again.

Now, this one is almost certainly leaking horrible amounts of radiation after decades of being exposed to saltwater and the pressures of the deep ocean, where it probably still remains today. I have to say probably, because who fucking knows, because the government lost a nuke.

The even more wild thing about this is that's essentially just like the plot of the james bond movie thunderball which was like released like 10 years later which is just like amazing that it was like oh they're probably horrible nuclear accidents where we're just like losing planes with nuclear weapons out there i don't want to make a fucking hollywood movie out of it with a like a scottish dude it'll be fine yeah hollywood always wants to make these movies like oh what if like the worst happened and uh and then the government's just like yeah yeah do you want our notes are you right like yeah we do this literally all the time oh yeah imagine anyway uh don't go looking around uh anywhere between

here and morocco yeah no it's. We absolutely did that. It's cool. You know, you need some technical advisors. You know, as long as you show our planes like looking really like shiny and new, like we will definitely give you some technical advisors. A couple months later, a pilot in training accidentally nearly nuked Suffolk, England. Kind of.

The crew was undergoing training and crashed directly into the nuclear storage facility in Lakenheath Airfield. The storage facility is known as the Igloo. The crash sheared off the detonators and safeties of six different bombs. The only thing that stopped everything from getting really, really bad was the fact that the cores weren't installed. The only thing that happened is that nuclear or radioactive material was spread over a long distance. And that's actually where TERFs come from. But like someone involved called the entire thing a miracle. Because like one of the bombs is due to be be fully armed and sent on its way.

But the way this guy crashed, which they all died because they always do because it's a plane crash, he managed to shear off every safety thing before crashing into it. I love some dude being like, man, that's a real miracle. It's like, I've got a different definition of what a miracle would have been, which is that guy would have landed and we all stopped making nuclear bombs. Yeah, it's a miracle as everything behind you is on fire and people are running around

as their skin melts off and their bone marrow dies. Then there was a time in 1957 where a bomb just fell through the bomb doors of a plane flying over Albuquerque, New Mexico. Again. Thankfully... I think there's maybe just this one Air Force technical, or Master Sergeant, or whatever the fuck they got,

who just really... I don't know. Has his ex-wife, or his dad he doesn't like, or something, who just lives in Albuquerque and just hates the shit out of New Mexico. And he just conducted this long-lasting,

decades-long plot to try to just nuke the shit out of New Mexico because of his own petty grudges. But they're all these wily, coyote-ass fucking ideas. It's all some Mr. Bean shit. He just can't quite shoot straight. It's actually an some Mr. Bean shit. He just can't quite shoot straight. It's actually an old school

Santa and a Mexican Empire nationalist. It will be ours again. Just trying to reclaim Atlasan. Just fucking getting after it. Thankfully, this didn't hit anything. It landed on nothing. It landed an empty farm and the explosives went off,

but the nuke did not. Unfortunately, this ended up with the death of a cow, which is the only domestic American fatal victim of a nuclear bomb. Notice how I said fatal. Notice how I said fatal. Yeah, and very much domestic. We will actually drop nukes on several more citizens

before this episode's over. In June of 57, they lost two more nukes on several more citizens before this episode's over. In June of 57, they lost two more nukes, this time over the Pacific Ocean. They have never been located either. Though this, in 1958, they did the same thing again, though this time off the coast of Georgia, they have not been found. In March of 11th, 1958,

this is the one that everybody is probably aware of. A U.S. Air Force Boeing B-47E LM Stratoget took off from Savannah, Georgia, and was scheduled to fly to the U.K. The aircraft was carrying nuclear weapons in case of the war with the Soviet Union, and they were both armed. Captain Earl Kohler noticed a fault light in the cockpit, indicating the bomb's harness locking pin had not been engaged so he sent the other captain, Bruce Kolka to the bomb bay door to fix the problem. As Kolka reached around the bomb to pull himself up

he mistakenly grabbed the emergency release pin. This is like that Farside comic where the guy is in the airplane and his hand accidentally hits the wings stay on the wings fall off button yeah like don't hoist yourself up by the nuke release pin also can you imagine what that guy's face looked like like the moment that happened like you just like grab onto it and you just watch the bomb just fall through the bay doors.

Bro, you just got to jump in after it because at that point you're already fucked. And at that point, that was the only pin holding in place. The Mark six bomb dropped out of the Bombay doors. The bomb weights forced the doors open and the bomb dropped 15,000 feet to the ground. Two sisters, a six-year-old named Helen and a nine-year-old named Frances Gregg. That's an unfortunate name for a little girl. I should laugh at that because she gets nuked.

Along with their... Along with their nine-year-old cousin ella davies were playing uh 200 yards or 180 meters from a playhouse that their father had built for them the bombs just landed directly on top of the playhouse like just one of the fucking odds kolka had like those were kolka's kids that he had lost custody over some shit the high explosives detonated and created craters 70 feet wide and 35 feet deep unfortunately or fortunately uh the fissile nuclear core had been stored elsewhere on the plane all three children were hurt as was was their father, mother, and brother. The family sued the Air Force and received $54,000.

Today, the crater is still visible. Imagine being accidentally nuked by the United States military and given enough money for, like, I don't know, like a slightly upgraded Escalade. They're just helping rebuild the playhouse that got nuked. To us, the only thing that's broken is a playhouse. So we'll give you a little money for that. You can rebuild it, all right?

It'll be fine. Just the captain, like, leans down, like, at the very end after they've settled the whole thing and just whispers in the little girl's ear, like, no, fuck your playhouse in particular. Koga's looking out the windows like, tonight, you. So again, in 1958, a nuke was accidentally dropped on Mars Bluff, South Carolina, and the explosives detonated and injured six more people. I could not find if they got any money. I assume this time they could afford maybe a Corolla. This begins something of a military grudge against the Carolinas in general because the nearest a U.S. target has ever come to actually being nuked

and causing a city would occur in Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961. A B-52 carrying two nuclear bombs suffered a sudden structural failure. And by that mean, its right wing just fell off. They found that. So instead of pulling the nukes fall out lever, he pulled the wings fall off lever. They should really stop putting those levers inside of those airplanes.

It's Russian roulette, but does the plane fall apart or do we accidentally bomb someone? This time you get both. I love being the American champion of military engineering. The plane broke apart in midair, leading to the two nuclear weapons to be released, hopefully to save them, because they could deploy their parachutes.

And that's fine. This actually worked relatively well for one of them. One bomb was found entirely undamaged above ground and stuck in a tree because its parachute got stuck there. The other bomb's parachute failed and smacked into a muddy field outside the city going 700 miles per hour. The bomb was blown apart on impact.

But then something that never happened before went down. And it was discovered by a very, very unfortunate bomb recovery team. They found the second bomb and found something horrifying. Three of the four bomb and found something horrifying three of the four bombs arming mechanisms those being the safeties that stopped the bomb from actually going off were tripped and so was the fourth the only thing that stopped it from fully triggering was an electrical failure so like the fourth safety was still in place but like it was tripped the only thing that stopped it from coming off completely was like the bomb failed once again you just like imagine

being the team that like comes along that shit and you just like like find all four of them just at like tripped you're like um do i? Do I cover my ass? Like, just like, what the fuck do you even do at that point? We actually have those exact accounts of those men who found the bomb. Oh, Jesus Christ. Lieutenant Jack Revell was the bomb disposal expert who was responsible for disarming a nuclear bomb, which, by the way, how the fuck do you get that job, spoke about the discovery of that second bomb. When the second bomb switch was found,

Revell recalled, until my death, I'll never forget hearing my sergeant say, Lieutenant, we found the arm safe switch. And then I answered back, great. And he answered back, not great. It's unarmed. In case if anybody was wondering of how strong that bomb would have been it was 250 times the the destructive power of the one that was dropped in hiroshima goldsboro would have been eliminated it would have destroyed everything within an eight mile

radius and almost certainly killed millions of people. Cool! Science! Now, I literally can't go over all the times a nuclear-armed plane crashed and shot radiation everywhere because, again, that happened tens of times, nearly once a year during the 60s, because that takes several hours to do. Though, before I need to move on, I do need to point out an accident that occurred in 1959 off the coast of Whidbey Island in Washington State,

mostly because I just left there and I thought this is kind of hilarious. A Navy aircraft crashed into the Puget Sound and it was carrying a nuclear depth charge, which was never found. The Navy badly polluted the Puget Sound and that is just nothing new. They continue to do that to this day. But nobody ever found the nuclear death charge and i had never heard of a nuclear death charge before so i looked into it everybody had these things the soviets the u.s and the uk all carried this acme ass weapon all at once uh at one time or another and remained in use specifically by the uk until 1998 and they had a yield of 250 kilotons.

The UK's version had 190 kilotons. For comparison's sake, Fat Man, the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, was 20. 20 kilotons. So I might ask, were these only put on planes for the most part yeah cause I just like

I only say this cause I also just watched what is it Greyhound the Tom Hanks movie that just came out about like the convoy and I can just only imagine like if it's like you know hundreds of kilotons like powerful

if you're in a ship and you toss that off the back like you're just gonna blow Imagine if it's hundreds of kilotons powerful. If you're in a ship and you toss that off the back, you're just going to blow the shit out of yourself. Yeah, you become a Shaheed so you can own that sub that you may or may not have destroyed. One, you're just going to evaporate all the fucking water around you. Your ship's going to fall, get blown up, but then also fall like fucking like a hundred feet like down into the ocean is like you just create a crater around you

this is how the pacific rim movie got started i swear to god uh and probably the most well-known broken arrow outside of north carolina and maybe greenland which we'll talk about happened near palomara spain during the era of Francisco Franco. A pilot had been flying for entirely too long, crashed into the refueling plane, and sent four different bombs flying in four different directions. Three impacted on land, spreading radiation over a two-kilometer area, while another landed in the sea, not to be found for two months.

Over 1,400 tons of soil had to be removed and sent to a nuclear storage facility and uh it guess where it went to go be stored and then leak everywhere south carolina yeah because of a fuck the carolinas in general uh i should point out like again that this cleaning tactic definitely doesn't work and the u..S. fucked it up really bad this time and knew and lied about it. And this was only discovered in 2006 when the Spanish Energy Research Agency carried out a study.

The study found the U.S. actually dumped a fair amount of radioactive soil in a nearby cemetery for veterans. I mean, we're going to build a zombie movie off of that immediately, like right now, like zombie soldiers from hell, but you have to like respect them too because they're heroes. Yeah, I just hope it was like a fascist's veteran cemetery, in which case, good, desecrate their bodies.

Yeah, like it also, like, and now afterwards they picked up, like they use it as a storage area in lieu of transporting it to the united states south carolina but the u.s didn't think that like storing it there would spread contamination to the cemetery which it did because of course it did it's radioactive uh and if you already kind of figure that congratulations you have a better understanding of nuclear materials and the people who are handling these things in 1966. According to Time magazine in 2009, the area is still heavily contaminated and people have a very high rate of cancer. And it was called one of the world's worst nuclear accidents that nobody seems to give a shit about because of America reasons. But also Francisco Franco used this as an excuse

to ban all NATO flights over Spanish airspace because they just dropped nukes on them. So we pissed off our allies. I get it. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Also, small side note here. Do you remember that Cuba Gooding Jr. movie,

Men of Honor, forever ago, where he plays a Navy diver? Yeah. Well, that's based on a true story of the life of Carl Brashear, who lost his leg and stayed as a Navy diver. Well, he lost his leg in the recovery operation to find the nuke that fell into water outside of Spain. Fuck. How did he lose his leg? It's like a diving accident, I think. Something like crushed him uh

it didn't brush against it and i was just like oh shit i found it it melted my leg off kaiju actually yeah and it was a it was a spanish kaiju in the 60s so it's fascist as hell black shirted kaiju uh though even though that clusterfuck didn't cancel the around the clock operations one finally would two years later 1968 a b-52 named hobo 28 because they could took off on january 21st for a 24 a 24 hour long operation their crews experienced but they did have one slate fuck up sitting for 24 hours kind of sucks, so they brought along some extra seat cushions. Nothing major, right?

But they placed them too close to the plane's heater, which caused them to catch on fire and fill the cabin with smoke, forcing the crew to bail out, and they went down near Thule, Greenland. Six of the seven crews survived because one man had to die for a comfortable ass. The bomb slammed into the ice and

broke apart, spraying radiation everywhere. Unfortunately, in Canada, Greenland was not aware of the situation, but more specifically, either it was Denmark, and Denmark controlled Greenland. And Greenland had a strict no-nuclear weapon

policy over and in its territory and has had ones since 1957. And they had not been told. But now the U.S. couldn't keep it quiet because the wild amounts of radiation coming from the crash site. The four bombs on board held around 13 pounds of plutonium apiece,

and half of it spilled out into the air. The U.S. trying to save itself from Denmark hating it. Spoiler alert, they failed, and everyone in Europe and most of the world hates us anyway because of stuff like this and the wars. But the U.S. agreed to dig out all the contaminated ice and snow. Conditions are perilous, and temperatures average below minus 25 degrees, and even slight winds plunge the wind chill down to minus 50. The sun did not rise over the crash area until February,

and that caused its own problem, snow glare. So that gave several people snow blindness, which meant nobody did a very good job. several people, snow blindness, which meant nobody did a very good job. But they worked for four months and eventually got around 237,000 cubic feet of radioactive snow, ice, and water, not to mention the crass debris that had to be loaded and stored in sites

back in the United States, which, South Carolina. So that, the secret was up, and was the the last air operation operation in chrome dome which was like the last iteration of these was actually ended on january 22nd the day after hobo 28 went down because they knew like you know we really fucked up this time uh though if you're you know like danish and you're listening to this, the fallout was not entirely done, actually. In the 1990s, information came out that the Danish prime minister had kind of ignored his country's own nuclear policy,

and they had allowed the U.S. to store nuclear weapons at the Thule Air Base as well as Danish airspace over Greenland, not Denmark, in order to transport them because of racism. Whose racism? Ours or theirs? Everybody's. Because they could keep it over, because Greenland has a native population.

Oh, okay. And they could just nuke them, not us, I guess. So H.C. Hansen, the prime minister of the time, agreed with the U.S. ambassador to allow storage of a, quote, supply of munitions of a special kind. And since he was not explicitly told they were nukes, how did he know? Therefore, the agreement was still good.

There was no nukes because he didn't know there were any. There was only special munitions. Dude must have been a lawyer. Probably. After this, the politicians just as bad. Yeah, yeah. They can fight to the death in the pits of radioactive

hell. But you repeat yourself. After the Thule air operations were done, Operation Crowdom, the last iteration of them, was ended. And it ended the day after it went down, like we said. Now, with the air alert that the 15-minute turnaround on the ground

continued like it had started on the ground, meaning that all of this was completely pointless, and who knows how many hundreds or thousands of years of radioactive pollution had been injected into the planet via plane crash just so the U.S. and the Soviet Union could have a doomsday dick-measuring competition

using world-ending weapons. And that's the broken arrows, y'all. I'm glad that we have cartoonishly managed to keep stepping. It's like we keep stepping on rakes, but also we keep moving our head to the side so the rake just hits you in the shoulder you're just like and you never like it could have been worse at no point in time like since it doesn't hit us directly in the face we're never learning we're never just like oh shit maybe i shouldn't have done that like you know not not

to say anything negative about the good people of albuquerque but perhaps nuclear weapons would be a little bit more downplayed if we had just accidentally wiped y'all off the map i'm not i'm not saying only time can tell uh go full patata pulsatist on us all i'm saying is whom's whom's can say which would be a better uh better thing over the long term you know exactly you know like we're still we're still finding out and so we'll never know Albuquerque maybe you should have made the ultimate sacrifice so shocks Francis we do a little thing on the show called questions from the Legion and this is the first time there's ever been a actually this isn't the first time it's ever been a three-way questions from Legion but I'm

gonna say it is anyway because I'm revising my own history um you got an executive order for that? Yeah, sure. And if not, I'll drop another nuke on the Carolinas. Now, if you would like to ask a question from Legion, you can donate a dollar, ask it on the Discord, slam to my DMs or email, or attach it to a pigeon and send it to Hawaii. Now, this question comes from the Discord. It says, what is your favorite stupid military project

of all time? And I think mine goes without saying that it's definitely remote viewers. Are you guys familiar with those? Yeah, that's back when we were trying to figure out oculate shit. Yeah, we tried to make psychers from Warhammer 40k a reality, pretty much.

They would sit in isolation and attempt to just picture things from the soviet union and they were wrong like literally every time uh but like the main reason why it's really really funny is that it went on for like decades and we we dumped millions of dollars into it and the main reason why we did it is because we thought the soviets had psychics which like of course they fucking didn't uh but the reason why that we thought they had psychic is because we thought the Soviets had psychics, which like, of course they fucking didn't. But the reason why we thought they

had psychics is because the Soviets simply said they had psychics. So, because they knew that we would do something stupid. Like, attempt to make psychics. And that's what we did. I gotta say, mine is probably MKUltra.

That one's good. just because of the sheer insanity of like military like medical anything where they're just like i don't know we're just gonna like pump you full of lsd and and fucking slap you around and see what happens maybe that'll make you a better soldier and like it kind of does maybe but also it doesn't like mk ultra is such a weird nebulous like brain thing that they've done and uh i don't know like i there's i should go further into like my own research but that just feels like a conspiracy hole that i don't want to get caught in um conspiracy gene seed right there i. I will also give an honorable mention to the Davy Crockett, which is one of my favorite...

Oh, fuck yeah. My favorite weapon ever created by the military, where it's just like, what if we put a tiny nuke that looks literally like a nuke in a cartoon, where it's that little fat little bomb with the bomb tails on it? What if we put that on a recoilless rifle and just shot that? What would happen?

And it turns out... It's literally a Fallout weapon. In and uh just shot that what what would happen and it turns out it's literally a fallout weapon yeah it's called in fallout they have that in there uh and yeah it's like you know thankfully this episode has come full circle and we're right back at ted kaczynski again because he was an mk ultra wait really yeah for sure yeah he when he was at mit he was uh taken by or and like uh like a mentor or whatever that worked for the CIA. That's not conspiracy theory. That's actually documented fact. Yeah, Oswald was too, wasn't he? No.

That, I believe, is more part of the he was conditioned by the CIA to shoot Kennedy type conspiracy theory. There's something that he was in the military and he was part of like. Yeah, he's a Marine.

Fucked up stuff. So, yeah. Well, and also like, as you see, like during this period, it was just like, I don't know. Well, you know, just make him walk into a nuclear explosion or dose him with a bunch of acid and just like, you know, whatever. Yeah, like the experiments at the proving grounds where they just literally dose people with thousands of times the normal amount of acid and just to look what happened. Like what, what if this,

but you made them like pocket a whole bunch of acid. Like it's, it's that, it's that fucking bit from half baked. Like, have you ever done this on weed? Like, but,

but, but for real and acid, have you ever done a apartheid on acid? That's what we're going to do. Somewhere like Joran van der Kloep or like Praetorius is like, yes, actually I did.

What's your favorite military? I don't know. I mean, in keeping with this episode, my first response is definitely going to be, I'm pretty sure it was Greenland where we developed and prototyped a series of like relatively portable nuclear reactors because we were trying to spearhead, like being able to like set up like, you know, Arctic Circle nuclear, like military bases, like up above the Arctic Circle. Arctic Circle military bases up above the Arctic Circle. And so similarly, we created these nuclear reactors that were supposed to be transportable and tested them, and then they didn't quite work like we were supposed to. And I'm also pretty sure that they ended up just getting buried underneath the ice and

snow up in Greenland when we were done with them because we didn't actually transport them back home. And so as a result, I last I remember, and I can't remember if it was Martin who talked about this. I feel like I remember someone talking about this, but it was essentially that now because of climate change, this like massive amount of nuclear radiation is now going to be like also like released in the atmosphere after like, you know,

fucking 80 years of being buried under the snow. Ah, those are the consequences of my own actions. But also, you know, but I think my, my, my,

my honorable shout out will be Operation Gladio. Oh, that one, especially the Italian version is fucking bug shit. And yeah, just because like, you know, like the, you know like the you know the

nazi rat lines weren't enough after world war ii but like you know nato and the united states had to develop an entire like you know leave behind operation where they consciously like consciously undermine left-wing parties over the course of western europe and also just and propped up like you know right- wing governments in their place and then just buried like arm catches and had like just like insane like right wing contacts just like running

around with like you know NATO payloads and like you know being able to like target you know soft infrastructure targets throughout the course of Western Europe and accidentally developed you know the years of western europe and accidentally developed you know the years of steel in italy like that in and of itself is just like such a fucking like i don't know it's amazing and like we're truly doing anything if we didn't drop a right-wing

death squad in your neighborhood like were we truly ever there if if there's not a right-wing death squad nearby when i remember reading like uh i don't know maybe last year the year before about how there was also a whole like special forces outfit around the fold the gap and elsewhere in germany that was essentially like even in beyond like gladio was there to you know conduct like you know fucking uh uh you know like wolverine style shit like in like you know attaching like sticky bombs style shit, like in like, you know, attaching like sticky bombs to Soviet tanks and blowing up dams or whatever. Like the fact that, you know, and even Gladio,

like that was really never discovered until the Swiss government found out about it, you know, in like the fucking, like in like 92 or something. I was really hoping that you were meaning like Wolverine from the X-Men because that would be fucking sweet. Yes.

Yes, exactly. Finally giving Canada weapons of mass destruction, but its name is Logan. He's already Canadian. It's why he's the only good X-Men. But y'all, thank you for coming on the show. I know this was completely unplanned, but I thought it would be good to have everybody on

be completely fucking ridiculous because we just did four weeks in a Russo-Japanese War series. So it's always good to have these more relaxed, absolutely unhinged episodes because I need them for my mental health. So thank you for joining me. If you have anything to plug, this is what we call the plug zone. I have that other military podcast that you've heard of uh hell of a way to die what's it called listen to it i guess hell of a hell of a way to die weird and i'm gonna get i'm in and carrie will soon have a podcast a law dog podcast uh with alan dershowitz and the ghost of jeffrey

epstein and uh and the hell dude somehow. And we're all going to get together and we're going to go kind of Animaniac style. We're going to go through the age of consent laws in every different country throughout the world until we end up on St. James Island.

Jesus Christ. Look out for that. It's going to be good. We're all going to get massages from women who are very old while our wives are there so that way it's very normally we're all going to fly there and have very

normal times and then we're going to have a we're going to have a season finale episode in a holding cell in the southern district of New York and it's going to be fine we're all going to walk away and it's going to be fine. We're all going to walk away, and it's going to be good. Thank you for turning this into the weird fucking pedo gate podcast there for like five seconds. I forget what it's called. My third eye is open. And until next time, everyone,

I don't know, don't nuke the Carolinas. Just don't do it. Later.