Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything (2020) s01e06 Episode Script
Nukes
1
At this very second,
there are thousands of nuclear warheads
crisscrossing our oceans on submarines,
in silos on high-alert status,
ready to be launched within minutes.
[Nasser] We know they work
because governments have tested them,
and tested them and tested them.
Those tests
did serious damage to our planet.
But they also laid the groundwork
for an array
of surprising scientific discoveries.
From detecting potential tsunamis
to uncovering million-dollar fraud.
Even deciphering the fat cells that are
hanging around your waist right now.
I'm going to tell you a story
of unintended consequences.
A story of turning lemons into lemonade.
Except the lemons in this scenario
are thermonuclear weapons.
[explosion sound]
[upbeat music playing]
I'm Latif Nasser,
and this is a show
about the astonishing connections
all around us
that'll make you see the world
in a whole new way.
I want to take you on a whistle-stop tour
of the biggest, boomiest bomb blasts
in human history
to show you that no matter
how horrible they were,
and they were horrible,
they taught us things
that we couldn't have learned
any other way.
The story begins in the middle of nowhere,
New Mexico.
In the 1940s,
some of the smartest people in the world
assembled here on a top-secret assignment
to create the deadliest weapon
that anyone had ever known
to stop the deadliest war
that anyone had ever fought:
World War II.
Most nights they could be found here,
at the Owl bar,
which is still serving
the same green chili cheeseburgers
that fueled those scientists
as they were coming up
with what they called "The Gadget,"
the first ever atomic bomb.
[eerie music playing]
[man] There's a lot of uncertainty.
They don't really know
what's gonna happen.
And they are looking at
"Where do you set off a thing
where you don't know
how big it's gonna be?"
They're doing everything
for the first time.
Uh, will it work? They don't know.
[Nasser] Alex Wellerstein
is an old friend from grad school.
He's an atomic weapons historian
who knows more about nukes
than probably any one person should.
He's taking me through Jornada del Muerto,
the journey of death,
to get to a place
that's usually off-limits to civilians.
[Nasser] Oh, is this it? Are we here?
[Wellerstein]
We look like we're in military land here.
-Oh yeah, "US Army."
-"Entering active test range.
Area is potentially contaminated
with explosive devices.
Stay on the roads.
Don't disturb the items."
[Nasser] God, the sign itself
looks like it's contaminated.
[Nasser] On this spot, Robert Oppenheimer
and his team of scientists
set off the first ever nuclear bomb.
This is Trinity.
Wow.
-[Wellerstein] There it is.
-Yeah? This is where it happened?
This is where it happened.
-Is it even safe to be this close?
-It is.
[both chuckle]
All right, let’s go in.
[Nasser] Leading up to the test,
the scientists had betting pools.
Some bet it would be a dud.
Others, that it would be the equivalent
of less than a ton of TNT,
or maybe 300,
or maybe 45,000 tons.
One scientist
half-jokingly raised the possibility
that it would set
the entire atmosphere on fire.
Hilarious, right?
Despite all the uncertainty
they tested it anyway.
[Nasser] Wow. I can't believe
This is it. This is the spot.
[Wellerstein] Yeah.
First nuclear explosion on planet Earth.
[Nasser] Man
I feel like
if I'm ever gonna have an accident
that turns me into a superhero,
it's gonna be right here.
I'm gonna be bit by a snake.
-Yeah, become Rattlesnake Man.
-Yeah.
I don't think it works that way,
unfortunately.
-Okay.
-Yeah, yeah.
-That’s stupid.
-[laughs]
[eerie music playing]
[static vibrations]
-[Nasser] Are you getting anything?
-[Wellerstein] It’s clicking.
The radiation levels here
shouldn't be that high.
They cleaned this up a lot in the 1950s.
[Nasser]
Is the ground higher than the air?
Definitely. So if we hold it up here,
it still goes a little bit.
And you can see it's more hovering now
in the middle of that.
We put it down here and it kicks
a little bit more, periodically.
And that's because there's stuff
on the ground that is radioactive.
[Nasser] Which is to say there are
tiny unstable atoms in the ground
that are shooting off subatomic particles
and bursts of energy, like little bullets.
Alex and I are looking for
a very specific type of radioactive stuff.
[Nasser] Oh, is this some of it?
Oh, wow.
Oh, my God, look.
Yeah, that’s definitely it.
That’s trinitite.
Oh, my God, it’s gorgeous.
[Nasser] Trinitite,
a mineral that you can only find
in this one place on planet Earth.
A remnant of the first ever
nuclear bomb blast.
It's just glass,
but it's glass that was forged
in the center of a nuclear explosion.
So imagine that the bomb has gone off.
-Giant fireball.
-[Nasser] Yeah.
[Wellerstein]
Sand gets sucked inside this fireball,
where it is hotter than the Sun,
and it's turning into
a glassy, liquidy mixture.
That boom, it doesn't stay up there.
It comes down.
This whole area was a lake
of this radioactive green glass.
Oh, my-- It rained green glass?
It rained liquid green glass down.
So that's trinitite.
-[Nasser] Wow.
-[Wellerstein] Yeah. Don't eat it.
[laughs]
-Got it. Should we look for more?
-Yeah.
[Nasser] Recently scientists realized
this green glass
can tell us way more
than just about that one morning in 1945.
Oh, thank you very much.
That trinitite might actually be a clue
into one of the biggest mysteries
in all of Earth science:
the origin of the Moon.
[man] The Moon is an incredibly
important feature in our lives.
It controls the cycles of the Earth.
It controls the tides.
But how it formed still remains
largely unknown.
[Nasser] James Day of Scripps Institute
is trying to solve the mystery.
There are many theories out there,
but the working theory
is called the giant impact hypothesis.
Some scientists think
that soon after Earth first formed,
a giant Mars-sized object called Theia
slammed into the Earth
sending giant chunks of debris into space,
and that some of that debris,
possibly from Earth, possibly from Theia,
came together and became the Moon.
[Day] Now, this process
would have been cataclysmic in scale.
The heat, the intensity of energy
would have been immense.
We cannot reproduce this event in the lab.
[Nasser] So how do you even study
a bang that big?
Well, you find the biggest bang you can.
[Day] We think that the moon formed
at very high energy,
very high temperatures.
And what bigger event
than nuclear detonation?
[explosion sound]
[Nasser] Because we know it was created
at the site of a massive explosion,
that green trinitite glass
offered up the perfect clue.
And sure enough, when James and his team
compared the trinitite
to rocks from the Moon,
they found them oddly similar
on a chemical level.
Both were missing
the same volatile elements, like zinc.
It was as if all those elements
had just melted right out of them.
[Day] This suggests that indeed
the moon did form in a cataclysmic event.
And not just that.
We may be able to tell the temperatures
and the conditions under which it formed.
This observation
would not have been possible
without the study of trinitite materials.
And so this event
has changed our understanding
of how our moon has formed.
[Nasser] And so we find a clue
to the birth of the Moon
in the birth of the bomb.
-So it's like it all started right there.
-Right there. The nuclear age,
some people say the whole modern era,
the Anthropocene,
started at right that moment.
But how long after Trinity
were the bombs on Japan?
So, Trinity is July 16.
Uh, bombs were pretty much ready
to drop on Japan in early August.
Did they know that they were dropping it
on civilians?
Uh, Oppenheimer was on a small committee
of a couple other scientists
who were asked, "Should we set them off
somewhere uninhabited
and give them a chance
to surrender first?"
Which some scientists had wanted.
They had advocated for this.
And Oppenheimer said, uh,
I don't see any reason
why we shouldn't drop it on a city.
We can't guarantee
that anything else would end the war.
Oppenheimer thought
it might kill 20,000 people.
It killed more like 200,000.
And he would always say,
you have to understand
the context in which we were working.
And that was the best
of all possible solutions in their mind.
Wow.
Man, that’s like, that’s like…
that’s a lot of people.
Yeah.
[sinister music playing]
[Nasser] Not even the experts knew
what the bombs would do
to the people of Japan.
In that respect, these would be
the grisliest nuclear tests of all.
[bell dings]
[bell dings]
Jack Dairiki
was a Japanese-American kid
who visited Hiroshima with his father
when he was ten years old.
[Dairiki] We didn’t know
what was going to happen.
At that time,
the war was going on in Europe.
But Japan was not at war.
That was before Pearl Harbor.
Before Pearl Harbor. So we had no concern.
[narrator] The attack
on Pearl Harbor united Americans
as never before in history
[Nasser] When war broke out,
Jack's family in the US
was sent to an internment camp.
Jack and his father,
meanwhile, got stuck in Japan.
With no way back to the United States,
they moved in with relatives in Hiroshima.
Jack even started school there,
but his class was conscripted
to work in a factory.
So on August 6, 1945,
he showed up for roll call in the morning,
when he heard three American planes
approaching the city.
We were watching the aircraft
to see which way it would go.
We said, "Why is there aircraft coming?"
There was no siren going off.
And then, poof, it exploded.
Lightning flash,
ten times brighter than the sun.
-So you just saw this flash?
-Yeah, just a flash.
And then we instinctively
fell on the floor,
so the debris flying over you
wouldn’t hit you.
And then the blast came right over,
and then my body went floating in the air,
and that’s when I saw the mushroom cloud.
[Nasser] The bomb blast would kill
between 90,000 and 140,000 people
within the next few months,
and that's not even counting
those who would later die
of cancers linked to the bomb.
So many lives snuffed out.
The bomb also leveled
whole swathes of the city,
burning much of it to ash,
which is all the more terrifying
since only seven-tenths of a gram
of uranium actually converted to energy.
So, to give you a sense of how much
seven-tenths of a gram of uranium is.
It's about the size of this sesame seed.
That's all it took.
So let me just understand.
So you did this from memory?
[Dairiki] Yeah.
So this was your memory of what you saw?
-[Nasser] This is so colorful.
-Yeah, it was.
Like a rainbow. All color and fire.
-Really?
-Just rolling up, just like a genie.
-Like a genie, wow.
-Yeah.
[Nasser] Three days later,
another bomb blast on Nagasaki
would kill at least 70,000 more people.
Those, like Jack, who survived
are known as hibakusha.
They've left us with a powerful warning
just by telling their stories,
but they're also being memorialized
in another way.
It sounds like
they were going around trying to find
as many of the survivors as they could,
and they were trying
to just scrutinize their whole bodies.
-That's right. And it's still going on.
-Wow.
[Nasser] That's right. Scientists
are still tracking thousands of hibakusha.
It's one of the longest
epidemiological studies ever conducted.
Every two years they'll come back
to see how you're changing.
-And to see how that nuclear exposure
-Yes.
-affects you 50 years or more from then.
-[Dairiki] That's right, yeah.
Even the children of the offspring
of the survivors are being examined
to see if there's an effect on them.
But so far, I am really in good shape.
I say I'm alive because 80,000 people
died in my place,
you know, and I pray for them.
My religion has helped me.
Their spirit is helping me as well.
[Nasser] And Jack is helping all of us
because this study
has shaped our understanding
of how much radiation
a human body can take.
And major institutions like the UN
have repeatedly cited it
in establishing international standards
to cover, among others,
power plant workers,
uranium miners and medical patients.
Thanks to this study,
something that harmed so many people,
now has a legacy of protecting all of us.
And Jack is a part of that.
But it isn't just Jack.
A surprisingly high percentage
of the hibakusha
still go every two years
for their medical check-ups
as they have done for over 50 years.
Now, what makes that
all the more remarkable
is they don't get anything out of it.
They don't get money.
They don't even get free healthcare.
Thank you for going to those check-ups
every two years.
You've done something for all of us.
Well, that’s the whole idea.
I could have just ignored it, you know,
but I thought, wait a minute,
for the future generations
this might be very important.
That’s our responsibility, too.
We tell the people who passed away,
we’re going to do something so
this will never happen again to anybody.
Yeah.
The bombs that the US dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were the first and, as of now, thankfully,
the last nuclear bomb blasts
dropped on people during wartime.
But as far as nuclear bomb blasts
in general go,
they were just the beginning.
[Nasser] After World War II,
the US started making and testing
more nuclear bombs.
A lot more.
And they filmed every one.
They called them "shots",
and they gave them
these operational code names
that sound like they were made up
by someone on LSD.
Operation Nougat,
Operation Roller Coaster,
Operation Plumb Bob,
Operation Fish Bowl,
Operation Buster Jangle,
the Hard Hat Test, the Chinchilla Test,
the Aardvark Test, the Tomato Test,
Little Feller, Little Feller II,
the Johnnie Boy Test, the Danny Boy Test,
and my favorite of all the names,
the Gumdrop Test.
Soon the Soviet Union
and a handful of other countries
started testing nuclear bombs too.
Together, they nuked basically everywhere
you could possibly nuke.
On land, underground, underwater,
in midair, even in space.
Altogether, they detonated on average
one nuke every nine days
for the next 50 years.
[explosion sound]
And here
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
it's Greg Spriggs's job
to study those tests,
and to figure out exactly how much damage
a nuclear blast would do
in the real world.
It's a pretty weird job.
Imagine going to work every morning
to try to accurately simulate and measure
your scariest nightmare.
But it's an important job.
Because if one of these things
ever goes off,
by accident or on purpose,
we need to know what's gonna happen.
Hence Greg.
[Spriggs] We wanted to understand
nuclear fallout
so that we could advise the government
that
if we drop this particular bomb,
how much fallout will occur,
how far will it blow around the Earth
And was that for bombs that
the American government was gonna drop
or that was gonna potentially
get dropped on us here?
Both ways. The civil defense personnel
were also interested in this.
They wanted to be able to predict
how many people were going to be injured,
and what kind of assets they would need
in order to respond to an emergency
-if somebody were to bomb us.
-And to make a computer code that could
[Spriggs]
That could predict that. Exactly.
[Nasser] And to make that code
as accurate as possible,
Greg needed to base it on what's called
ground truth:
data of actual nuclear explosions.
The very best set of data available
were the films of the tests.
[Greg] They had cameras on each test
to do high-speed photography,
and then they had an army of technicians
and film experts
that would manually read
each of these films
to figure out
what the yield of the device was.
[Nasser] The yield is basically
how big a boom the bomb makes,
and that was the data Greg was after.
From there he can measure
how much damage different bombs
would do in the real world,
how much radiation they would produce,
and how far it would spread.
[Greg] Things have progressed
in terms of technology,
particularly in the art of scanning things
and analyzing things digitally,
so we needed to try to look at these films
and reanalyze them
and see whether it was done correctly.
Now you've been scanning them,
what have you been finding?
Some yields have been changing
by as much as 40 percent.
-And so--
-As much as 40 percent?
40 percent. As much as 40 percent.
-So they could be 40 percent worse?
-Yes.
Some of these bombs
are even worse than we imagined.
Twenty, thirty, forty percent more deadly,
more destructive than we ever thought.
When you watch these, is it like… what…
Are you horrified?
I'm in total awe.
I can't believe the immense power
these things release.
This is unbelievable to me.
[Nasser] But the remnants of these tests
don't only exist on film.
Every time one of those nukes
exploded into a giant fireball,
all kinds of radioactive stuff fell out
which is why they call it fallout.
Some of that fallout
poisoned people's homes,
made it so they couldn't go back,
or worse still,
managed to afflict people downwind
with cancers and other illnesses.
But other bits of that fallout
wound up in surprising places,
where it might just be helping us.
[upbeat music playing]
In the world of high art,
criminal counterfeiters
can rake in astronomical profit.
That is, if they can get past
forensic art detective Nica Gutman.
So how much, ballpark,
how much art would you say
that's out there in the world is fake?
It's amazing.
They say 20 to 50 percent
of the works on the market
are fakes, forgeries, misattributions,
and unknown, and that's huge.
-Wait, 20 to 50?
-Mm-hmm.
-So half?
-Yep.
And when you're spending
100 million dollars on a work of art,
that's a huge risk.
Yeah, it’s hard to think of another field
where something can so instantly
go from being millions of dollars,
even hundreds of millions of dollars,
to being nothing.
It makes you think how could you ever
not do this before you buy a work of art.
-[Nasser] Yeah.
-[chuckles]
[Nasser] Nica's always trying to stay
one step ahead of the forgers,
and it turns out that some
of the best weapons in her arsenal
are nuclear bombs.
And here's why.
Boom, a nuclear bomb goes off.
Neutrons fly out,
crash into the nitrogen in the air,
so hard it turns into carbon,
but not normal carbon,
a slightly unstable version
that radiates just a tiny bit
called carbon-14, or radiocarbon.
That C-14 gets kicked high up
into the atmosphere,
blows all over the world,
and falls back down
onto unsuspecting plants
like cotton and flax,
which absorb the C-14 and use it to grow.
That cotton gets picked, spun,
and woven into canvas.
The flax seeds get made into oil,
which is the oil in oil paint.
An artist puts them together
to make a painting and voilà.
The painting
has the same amount of C-14 in it
as the cotton and flax did
when they were harvested.
And if all that happened during or after
the peak period of nuclear testing,
known as the bomb pulse,
you can put a date on that painting.
So that means if you are looking
at a painting before nuclear testing
and a painting after nuclear testing,
what do you see as the difference?
The difference
is that after nuclear bomb testing,
we can date a work of art
within one to four years
-Within one to four years?
-Yeah.
-If it happened since nuclear testing?
-Yep.
And that’s really significant
in the world of art
for detecting fakes and forgeries.
[Nasser] And that's exactly
what happened in 2013
at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation,
when canvas fibers revealed
a painting supposedly by Fernand Léger,
that would have been worth millions,
was made at least four years
after his death.
Oops.
[Gutman] If you have
an old master renaissance painting,
and, uh, we did bomb curve testing,
and the canvas came out
to be the year 2000,
-you know, that’s our smoking gun.
-[Nasser] Wow.
Like there’s something
in this tiny, tiny, tiny way
that's a giveaway.
That’s like a giveaway to your age.
Oh, absolutely. I don’t think we as humans
would want that done to us. [chuckles]
[chuckles] Right.
[Nasser]
And yet Carbon-14 can do that too.
The fallout from the bomb tests
can't just help us date the painting,
it can also help us
date the hand that paints it.
Kirsty Spalding is a neurobiologist
at the Karolinska Institute
who's trying to tackle one of today's
most pressing public health emergencies:
the global obesity epidemic.
And no, not just by swimming laps
in a freezing cold Swedish lake.
The more I realized
that these really basic questions,
that I absolutely assumed were addressed,
uh, remain unknown.
[Nasser] People gain and lose weight
and fat all the time. That's clear.
But there were still a lot of unknowns,
like "Why is it so hard to lose weight,
and once we do, to keep it off?"
Kirsty had a hunch that the answer
could only be found at the cellular level.
So she asked a simple question:
What happens to our fat cells
when we do lose weight?
Do they go away?
Or do they stick around?
To find out,
Kirsty would need to determine
how old certain fat cells were.
But, to her surprise,
she found that nobody knew how to do that.
And then she heard about the nukes.
It was proposed to me
that maybe I wanted to look at
bomb pulse carbon dating method,
but adapting it to being able
to determine the age of cells.
It was really considered
a far-fetched idea at the time.
[Nasser] Enter Bruce Buchholz
of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
So how did you learn about any of this?
-Carbon-14 in general?
-Yeah.
Uh, I have a background in physics
and nuclear engineering
-Watch your head.
-Yeah.
-and was aware of the bomb pulse.
-Yeah.
But it really hadn’t been used
in biology much at all.
[Nasser] Until Bruce learned that the C-14
from the bomb pulse,
the same stuff being used
to detect forged paintings,
is actually hidden inside of us.
Okay, so here we go again.
Boom. Neutrons. Bizarro carbon in the air.
On the ground, plants take it up.
But this time it's corn,
grains, lettuce
The plants we eat
and the plants that get eaten
by the animals we eat.
[Buchholz] When the cells are created,
the concentration of carbon-14
at that time gets stamped into the DNA,
so you can then measure
the carbon-14 in the DNA
to figure out how old a cell is.
It's a timestamp of when a cell was born.
[Nasser] And not just any cell.
If you were born after 1945,
the fallout from nuclear tests
is in your hip, your lip, your fingertip.
Don't freak out. It's harmless.
But it's literally
in every cell of your body,
including your fat cells.
The obese have a fat cell number up here
and the lean have a number down here.
What happens
if an obese person loses weight?
Do they go down here?
So we followed a number of individuals
that lost a lot of weight,
decreased their body fat,
but the fat cell number
stayed exactly the same.
What was happening was
the fat cells were just getting smaller.
We're not the first group
to show that,
but if you marry that
with our carbon dating,
then it truly becomes interesting.
[Nasser] Using C-14 dating,
Kirsty discovered
that the average fat cell
lasts for about nine to ten years.
So, just imagine what you had for dessert
a decade ago tonight.
But the real surprise came
when she started to see what happened
once those individual fat cells died off.
[Spalding] If you lose
a significant amount of weight,
the body continues to pump out
the same number of fat cells.
Then it's like,
well, why isn't the body listening?
Evolutionarily, we were designed
to be able to store fat
through times of famine and times of need.
It's only now that we're entering into
a time of significant changes in our diet
and more sedentary lifestyles
that the ability to store fat
is becoming quite harmful.
[Nasser] And to Kirsty, that should send
a really important message
to families with young children.
If they get really obese
when they're young,
that’s the fat cell number they will have
in their adulthood,
and it's much harder for them
to lose weight.
[Nasser] Scientists are also using
carbon-14 to date everything
from the plaques in your arteries
that cause heart attacks
to the plaques in your brain
related to Alzheimer's.
It's like now we have
a little clock in each of our cells
that can help us see
how fast they get sick,
how fast they get better,
even how quickly they age and break down.
But these little clocks
have a clock of their own.
And that's because in the early 1960s,
after the US and the USSR
almost blew each other to bits
in the Cuban Missile Crisis,
they agreed to slow down.
They signed a treaty
saying that, from now on,
they'd only test nukes underground,
where it doesn't make carbon-14.
So at that point,
the concentration started to go down.
That pulse, now,
is almost back to pre-bomb level.
[Nasser] In just a few years,
with almost no testing taking place at all
and the existing carbon-14 decaying away,
the spike in carbon-14 in our atmosphere
will basically peter out.
And with it will go our ability
to calculate the ages of canvases, colors,
and even our colons.
Nuclear testing
just, like, opened up this window,
and we're right
the window's about to close.
Yeah, it's getting close.
[Nasser] If any of this is making you
regret the ban on nuclear testing, don't.
Despite all of the amazing discoveries
they've led to,
nuclear weapons may still be
the most immediate threat
to ourselves and to our planet.
By 1996, the UN adopted
a total nuclear test ban,
which meant
no nuclear explosions anywhere.
But what the world soon realized
was that for that ban
to be anything but symbolic,
they needed a way to know, in real time,
if anyone was violating it.
What they needed
was a test to test for tests.
Uh, a kind of nuclear alarm bell
that would ring no matter where on Earth,
in the air, on land, under the ocean,
that someone was trying
to blow up one of these things.
But I don't know
if you know how big the Earth is.
That's basically impossible, right?
Well
not quite.
[suspenseful music]
Now, in order for me to tell you
what happens next,
we have to hit the road again.
Drive an hour that way,
and you get back to Trinity,
the site of the original nuclear test,
but we're going to drive an hour that way
to a spot that's helping prevent
future tests.
[Nasser] In a remote spot
outside of Albuquerque,
about 30 stories underground,
is a sophisticated seismic station
that is so sensitive
it can feel the faintest rumblings
of an underground nuclear explosion
a half a world away.
But this is just one node
in an immense global network.
Part of the International
Monitoring System,
a grid of 337 stations
scattered across 89 countries,
through the oceans
and even on the ice caps.
They measure everything
from seismic waves underground
to trace radioactive particles in the air
and even to imperceptible sound waves
underwater.
All of this data is flowing here,
to the IMS's central hub
in Vienna, Austria.
If you sneeze a nuclear sneeze
anywhere on, over,
or under the surface of planet Earth,
within minutes, the people in this office
could say gesundheit.
This giant network of sensors
around our whole globe
Has anything like that
ever existed before?
Never.
No country could have such a network.
Where? How? It's impossible.
You need an international endeavor
to build something
that everyone will trust
and then will rely on.
In God we trust.
All others, we monitor.
[Nasser] So that's exactly
what this system does,
every second of every day.
It looks for clues
of possible nuclear detonations.
But it turns out,
it's about even more than that.
As scientists from around the world
began listening for nukes,
they started noticing other things.
The data doesn't just tell them
about covert nuclear tests.
It tells them which volcanoes
just erupted on remote islands,
which ice sheets just cracked
due to global warming,
where that meteorite
you just saw streaking through the sky
actually touched down,
where a tsunami might hit next,
where a plane or even a submarine
might have crashed
and where to look for survivors.
They can even notice whale sounds,
and, from those, be able to track
their changing migratory patterns.
[Nasser] For all the surprising things
we learned from nuclear tests,
turns out the test for nuclear tests
might teach us just as much.
The insights without the death,
the awe without the fear,
the silver lining
without the mushroom cloud.
[Nasser]
Over the course of the last 75 years,
we invented, tested,
dropped, tested again,
and finally banned these bombs.
But in that same time,
we also learned new things
about the heavens
and the Earth
about how we get sick,
and how we get better.
None of that excuses us
for creating the bomb in the first place,
but I think it does tell us something
about ourselves:
that when you look dead on
at our cruelest moments,
our darkest impulses,
that even there
you can also find the opposite:
an impulse to take care of one another
and to learn about our shared home.
[inspirational music playing]
[upbeat music playing]
At this very second,
there are thousands of nuclear warheads
crisscrossing our oceans on submarines,
in silos on high-alert status,
ready to be launched within minutes.
[Nasser] We know they work
because governments have tested them,
and tested them and tested them.
Those tests
did serious damage to our planet.
But they also laid the groundwork
for an array
of surprising scientific discoveries.
From detecting potential tsunamis
to uncovering million-dollar fraud.
Even deciphering the fat cells that are
hanging around your waist right now.
I'm going to tell you a story
of unintended consequences.
A story of turning lemons into lemonade.
Except the lemons in this scenario
are thermonuclear weapons.
[explosion sound]
[upbeat music playing]
I'm Latif Nasser,
and this is a show
about the astonishing connections
all around us
that'll make you see the world
in a whole new way.
I want to take you on a whistle-stop tour
of the biggest, boomiest bomb blasts
in human history
to show you that no matter
how horrible they were,
and they were horrible,
they taught us things
that we couldn't have learned
any other way.
The story begins in the middle of nowhere,
New Mexico.
In the 1940s,
some of the smartest people in the world
assembled here on a top-secret assignment
to create the deadliest weapon
that anyone had ever known
to stop the deadliest war
that anyone had ever fought:
World War II.
Most nights they could be found here,
at the Owl bar,
which is still serving
the same green chili cheeseburgers
that fueled those scientists
as they were coming up
with what they called "The Gadget,"
the first ever atomic bomb.
[eerie music playing]
[man] There's a lot of uncertainty.
They don't really know
what's gonna happen.
And they are looking at
"Where do you set off a thing
where you don't know
how big it's gonna be?"
They're doing everything
for the first time.
Uh, will it work? They don't know.
[Nasser] Alex Wellerstein
is an old friend from grad school.
He's an atomic weapons historian
who knows more about nukes
than probably any one person should.
He's taking me through Jornada del Muerto,
the journey of death,
to get to a place
that's usually off-limits to civilians.
[Nasser] Oh, is this it? Are we here?
[Wellerstein]
We look like we're in military land here.
-Oh yeah, "US Army."
-"Entering active test range.
Area is potentially contaminated
with explosive devices.
Stay on the roads.
Don't disturb the items."
[Nasser] God, the sign itself
looks like it's contaminated.
[Nasser] On this spot, Robert Oppenheimer
and his team of scientists
set off the first ever nuclear bomb.
This is Trinity.
Wow.
-[Wellerstein] There it is.
-Yeah? This is where it happened?
This is where it happened.
-Is it even safe to be this close?
-It is.
[both chuckle]
All right, let’s go in.
[Nasser] Leading up to the test,
the scientists had betting pools.
Some bet it would be a dud.
Others, that it would be the equivalent
of less than a ton of TNT,
or maybe 300,
or maybe 45,000 tons.
One scientist
half-jokingly raised the possibility
that it would set
the entire atmosphere on fire.
Hilarious, right?
Despite all the uncertainty
they tested it anyway.
[Nasser] Wow. I can't believe
This is it. This is the spot.
[Wellerstein] Yeah.
First nuclear explosion on planet Earth.
[Nasser] Man
I feel like
if I'm ever gonna have an accident
that turns me into a superhero,
it's gonna be right here.
I'm gonna be bit by a snake.
-Yeah, become Rattlesnake Man.
-Yeah.
I don't think it works that way,
unfortunately.
-Okay.
-Yeah, yeah.
-That’s stupid.
-[laughs]
[eerie music playing]
[static vibrations]
-[Nasser] Are you getting anything?
-[Wellerstein] It’s clicking.
The radiation levels here
shouldn't be that high.
They cleaned this up a lot in the 1950s.
[Nasser]
Is the ground higher than the air?
Definitely. So if we hold it up here,
it still goes a little bit.
And you can see it's more hovering now
in the middle of that.
We put it down here and it kicks
a little bit more, periodically.
And that's because there's stuff
on the ground that is radioactive.
[Nasser] Which is to say there are
tiny unstable atoms in the ground
that are shooting off subatomic particles
and bursts of energy, like little bullets.
Alex and I are looking for
a very specific type of radioactive stuff.
[Nasser] Oh, is this some of it?
Oh, wow.
Oh, my God, look.
Yeah, that’s definitely it.
That’s trinitite.
Oh, my God, it’s gorgeous.
[Nasser] Trinitite,
a mineral that you can only find
in this one place on planet Earth.
A remnant of the first ever
nuclear bomb blast.
It's just glass,
but it's glass that was forged
in the center of a nuclear explosion.
So imagine that the bomb has gone off.
-Giant fireball.
-[Nasser] Yeah.
[Wellerstein]
Sand gets sucked inside this fireball,
where it is hotter than the Sun,
and it's turning into
a glassy, liquidy mixture.
That boom, it doesn't stay up there.
It comes down.
This whole area was a lake
of this radioactive green glass.
Oh, my-- It rained green glass?
It rained liquid green glass down.
So that's trinitite.
-[Nasser] Wow.
-[Wellerstein] Yeah. Don't eat it.
[laughs]
-Got it. Should we look for more?
-Yeah.
[Nasser] Recently scientists realized
this green glass
can tell us way more
than just about that one morning in 1945.
Oh, thank you very much.
That trinitite might actually be a clue
into one of the biggest mysteries
in all of Earth science:
the origin of the Moon.
[man] The Moon is an incredibly
important feature in our lives.
It controls the cycles of the Earth.
It controls the tides.
But how it formed still remains
largely unknown.
[Nasser] James Day of Scripps Institute
is trying to solve the mystery.
There are many theories out there,
but the working theory
is called the giant impact hypothesis.
Some scientists think
that soon after Earth first formed,
a giant Mars-sized object called Theia
slammed into the Earth
sending giant chunks of debris into space,
and that some of that debris,
possibly from Earth, possibly from Theia,
came together and became the Moon.
[Day] Now, this process
would have been cataclysmic in scale.
The heat, the intensity of energy
would have been immense.
We cannot reproduce this event in the lab.
[Nasser] So how do you even study
a bang that big?
Well, you find the biggest bang you can.
[Day] We think that the moon formed
at very high energy,
very high temperatures.
And what bigger event
than nuclear detonation?
[explosion sound]
[Nasser] Because we know it was created
at the site of a massive explosion,
that green trinitite glass
offered up the perfect clue.
And sure enough, when James and his team
compared the trinitite
to rocks from the Moon,
they found them oddly similar
on a chemical level.
Both were missing
the same volatile elements, like zinc.
It was as if all those elements
had just melted right out of them.
[Day] This suggests that indeed
the moon did form in a cataclysmic event.
And not just that.
We may be able to tell the temperatures
and the conditions under which it formed.
This observation
would not have been possible
without the study of trinitite materials.
And so this event
has changed our understanding
of how our moon has formed.
[Nasser] And so we find a clue
to the birth of the Moon
in the birth of the bomb.
-So it's like it all started right there.
-Right there. The nuclear age,
some people say the whole modern era,
the Anthropocene,
started at right that moment.
But how long after Trinity
were the bombs on Japan?
So, Trinity is July 16.
Uh, bombs were pretty much ready
to drop on Japan in early August.
Did they know that they were dropping it
on civilians?
Uh, Oppenheimer was on a small committee
of a couple other scientists
who were asked, "Should we set them off
somewhere uninhabited
and give them a chance
to surrender first?"
Which some scientists had wanted.
They had advocated for this.
And Oppenheimer said, uh,
I don't see any reason
why we shouldn't drop it on a city.
We can't guarantee
that anything else would end the war.
Oppenheimer thought
it might kill 20,000 people.
It killed more like 200,000.
And he would always say,
you have to understand
the context in which we were working.
And that was the best
of all possible solutions in their mind.
Wow.
Man, that’s like, that’s like…
that’s a lot of people.
Yeah.
[sinister music playing]
[Nasser] Not even the experts knew
what the bombs would do
to the people of Japan.
In that respect, these would be
the grisliest nuclear tests of all.
[bell dings]
[bell dings]
Jack Dairiki
was a Japanese-American kid
who visited Hiroshima with his father
when he was ten years old.
[Dairiki] We didn’t know
what was going to happen.
At that time,
the war was going on in Europe.
But Japan was not at war.
That was before Pearl Harbor.
Before Pearl Harbor. So we had no concern.
[narrator] The attack
on Pearl Harbor united Americans
as never before in history
[Nasser] When war broke out,
Jack's family in the US
was sent to an internment camp.
Jack and his father,
meanwhile, got stuck in Japan.
With no way back to the United States,
they moved in with relatives in Hiroshima.
Jack even started school there,
but his class was conscripted
to work in a factory.
So on August 6, 1945,
he showed up for roll call in the morning,
when he heard three American planes
approaching the city.
We were watching the aircraft
to see which way it would go.
We said, "Why is there aircraft coming?"
There was no siren going off.
And then, poof, it exploded.
Lightning flash,
ten times brighter than the sun.
-So you just saw this flash?
-Yeah, just a flash.
And then we instinctively
fell on the floor,
so the debris flying over you
wouldn’t hit you.
And then the blast came right over,
and then my body went floating in the air,
and that’s when I saw the mushroom cloud.
[Nasser] The bomb blast would kill
between 90,000 and 140,000 people
within the next few months,
and that's not even counting
those who would later die
of cancers linked to the bomb.
So many lives snuffed out.
The bomb also leveled
whole swathes of the city,
burning much of it to ash,
which is all the more terrifying
since only seven-tenths of a gram
of uranium actually converted to energy.
So, to give you a sense of how much
seven-tenths of a gram of uranium is.
It's about the size of this sesame seed.
That's all it took.
So let me just understand.
So you did this from memory?
[Dairiki] Yeah.
So this was your memory of what you saw?
-[Nasser] This is so colorful.
-Yeah, it was.
Like a rainbow. All color and fire.
-Really?
-Just rolling up, just like a genie.
-Like a genie, wow.
-Yeah.
[Nasser] Three days later,
another bomb blast on Nagasaki
would kill at least 70,000 more people.
Those, like Jack, who survived
are known as hibakusha.
They've left us with a powerful warning
just by telling their stories,
but they're also being memorialized
in another way.
It sounds like
they were going around trying to find
as many of the survivors as they could,
and they were trying
to just scrutinize their whole bodies.
-That's right. And it's still going on.
-Wow.
[Nasser] That's right. Scientists
are still tracking thousands of hibakusha.
It's one of the longest
epidemiological studies ever conducted.
Every two years they'll come back
to see how you're changing.
-And to see how that nuclear exposure
-Yes.
-affects you 50 years or more from then.
-[Dairiki] That's right, yeah.
Even the children of the offspring
of the survivors are being examined
to see if there's an effect on them.
But so far, I am really in good shape.
I say I'm alive because 80,000 people
died in my place,
you know, and I pray for them.
My religion has helped me.
Their spirit is helping me as well.
[Nasser] And Jack is helping all of us
because this study
has shaped our understanding
of how much radiation
a human body can take.
And major institutions like the UN
have repeatedly cited it
in establishing international standards
to cover, among others,
power plant workers,
uranium miners and medical patients.
Thanks to this study,
something that harmed so many people,
now has a legacy of protecting all of us.
And Jack is a part of that.
But it isn't just Jack.
A surprisingly high percentage
of the hibakusha
still go every two years
for their medical check-ups
as they have done for over 50 years.
Now, what makes that
all the more remarkable
is they don't get anything out of it.
They don't get money.
They don't even get free healthcare.
Thank you for going to those check-ups
every two years.
You've done something for all of us.
Well, that’s the whole idea.
I could have just ignored it, you know,
but I thought, wait a minute,
for the future generations
this might be very important.
That’s our responsibility, too.
We tell the people who passed away,
we’re going to do something so
this will never happen again to anybody.
Yeah.
The bombs that the US dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were the first and, as of now, thankfully,
the last nuclear bomb blasts
dropped on people during wartime.
But as far as nuclear bomb blasts
in general go,
they were just the beginning.
[Nasser] After World War II,
the US started making and testing
more nuclear bombs.
A lot more.
And they filmed every one.
They called them "shots",
and they gave them
these operational code names
that sound like they were made up
by someone on LSD.
Operation Nougat,
Operation Roller Coaster,
Operation Plumb Bob,
Operation Fish Bowl,
Operation Buster Jangle,
the Hard Hat Test, the Chinchilla Test,
the Aardvark Test, the Tomato Test,
Little Feller, Little Feller II,
the Johnnie Boy Test, the Danny Boy Test,
and my favorite of all the names,
the Gumdrop Test.
Soon the Soviet Union
and a handful of other countries
started testing nuclear bombs too.
Together, they nuked basically everywhere
you could possibly nuke.
On land, underground, underwater,
in midair, even in space.
Altogether, they detonated on average
one nuke every nine days
for the next 50 years.
[explosion sound]
And here
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
it's Greg Spriggs's job
to study those tests,
and to figure out exactly how much damage
a nuclear blast would do
in the real world.
It's a pretty weird job.
Imagine going to work every morning
to try to accurately simulate and measure
your scariest nightmare.
But it's an important job.
Because if one of these things
ever goes off,
by accident or on purpose,
we need to know what's gonna happen.
Hence Greg.
[Spriggs] We wanted to understand
nuclear fallout
so that we could advise the government
that
if we drop this particular bomb,
how much fallout will occur,
how far will it blow around the Earth
And was that for bombs that
the American government was gonna drop
or that was gonna potentially
get dropped on us here?
Both ways. The civil defense personnel
were also interested in this.
They wanted to be able to predict
how many people were going to be injured,
and what kind of assets they would need
in order to respond to an emergency
-if somebody were to bomb us.
-And to make a computer code that could
[Spriggs]
That could predict that. Exactly.
[Nasser] And to make that code
as accurate as possible,
Greg needed to base it on what's called
ground truth:
data of actual nuclear explosions.
The very best set of data available
were the films of the tests.
[Greg] They had cameras on each test
to do high-speed photography,
and then they had an army of technicians
and film experts
that would manually read
each of these films
to figure out
what the yield of the device was.
[Nasser] The yield is basically
how big a boom the bomb makes,
and that was the data Greg was after.
From there he can measure
how much damage different bombs
would do in the real world,
how much radiation they would produce,
and how far it would spread.
[Greg] Things have progressed
in terms of technology,
particularly in the art of scanning things
and analyzing things digitally,
so we needed to try to look at these films
and reanalyze them
and see whether it was done correctly.
Now you've been scanning them,
what have you been finding?
Some yields have been changing
by as much as 40 percent.
-And so--
-As much as 40 percent?
40 percent. As much as 40 percent.
-So they could be 40 percent worse?
-Yes.
Some of these bombs
are even worse than we imagined.
Twenty, thirty, forty percent more deadly,
more destructive than we ever thought.
When you watch these, is it like… what…
Are you horrified?
I'm in total awe.
I can't believe the immense power
these things release.
This is unbelievable to me.
[Nasser] But the remnants of these tests
don't only exist on film.
Every time one of those nukes
exploded into a giant fireball,
all kinds of radioactive stuff fell out
which is why they call it fallout.
Some of that fallout
poisoned people's homes,
made it so they couldn't go back,
or worse still,
managed to afflict people downwind
with cancers and other illnesses.
But other bits of that fallout
wound up in surprising places,
where it might just be helping us.
[upbeat music playing]
In the world of high art,
criminal counterfeiters
can rake in astronomical profit.
That is, if they can get past
forensic art detective Nica Gutman.
So how much, ballpark,
how much art would you say
that's out there in the world is fake?
It's amazing.
They say 20 to 50 percent
of the works on the market
are fakes, forgeries, misattributions,
and unknown, and that's huge.
-Wait, 20 to 50?
-Mm-hmm.
-So half?
-Yep.
And when you're spending
100 million dollars on a work of art,
that's a huge risk.
Yeah, it’s hard to think of another field
where something can so instantly
go from being millions of dollars,
even hundreds of millions of dollars,
to being nothing.
It makes you think how could you ever
not do this before you buy a work of art.
-[Nasser] Yeah.
-[chuckles]
[Nasser] Nica's always trying to stay
one step ahead of the forgers,
and it turns out that some
of the best weapons in her arsenal
are nuclear bombs.
And here's why.
Boom, a nuclear bomb goes off.
Neutrons fly out,
crash into the nitrogen in the air,
so hard it turns into carbon,
but not normal carbon,
a slightly unstable version
that radiates just a tiny bit
called carbon-14, or radiocarbon.
That C-14 gets kicked high up
into the atmosphere,
blows all over the world,
and falls back down
onto unsuspecting plants
like cotton and flax,
which absorb the C-14 and use it to grow.
That cotton gets picked, spun,
and woven into canvas.
The flax seeds get made into oil,
which is the oil in oil paint.
An artist puts them together
to make a painting and voilà.
The painting
has the same amount of C-14 in it
as the cotton and flax did
when they were harvested.
And if all that happened during or after
the peak period of nuclear testing,
known as the bomb pulse,
you can put a date on that painting.
So that means if you are looking
at a painting before nuclear testing
and a painting after nuclear testing,
what do you see as the difference?
The difference
is that after nuclear bomb testing,
we can date a work of art
within one to four years
-Within one to four years?
-Yeah.
-If it happened since nuclear testing?
-Yep.
And that’s really significant
in the world of art
for detecting fakes and forgeries.
[Nasser] And that's exactly
what happened in 2013
at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation,
when canvas fibers revealed
a painting supposedly by Fernand Léger,
that would have been worth millions,
was made at least four years
after his death.
Oops.
[Gutman] If you have
an old master renaissance painting,
and, uh, we did bomb curve testing,
and the canvas came out
to be the year 2000,
-you know, that’s our smoking gun.
-[Nasser] Wow.
Like there’s something
in this tiny, tiny, tiny way
that's a giveaway.
That’s like a giveaway to your age.
Oh, absolutely. I don’t think we as humans
would want that done to us. [chuckles]
[chuckles] Right.
[Nasser]
And yet Carbon-14 can do that too.
The fallout from the bomb tests
can't just help us date the painting,
it can also help us
date the hand that paints it.
Kirsty Spalding is a neurobiologist
at the Karolinska Institute
who's trying to tackle one of today's
most pressing public health emergencies:
the global obesity epidemic.
And no, not just by swimming laps
in a freezing cold Swedish lake.
The more I realized
that these really basic questions,
that I absolutely assumed were addressed,
uh, remain unknown.
[Nasser] People gain and lose weight
and fat all the time. That's clear.
But there were still a lot of unknowns,
like "Why is it so hard to lose weight,
and once we do, to keep it off?"
Kirsty had a hunch that the answer
could only be found at the cellular level.
So she asked a simple question:
What happens to our fat cells
when we do lose weight?
Do they go away?
Or do they stick around?
To find out,
Kirsty would need to determine
how old certain fat cells were.
But, to her surprise,
she found that nobody knew how to do that.
And then she heard about the nukes.
It was proposed to me
that maybe I wanted to look at
bomb pulse carbon dating method,
but adapting it to being able
to determine the age of cells.
It was really considered
a far-fetched idea at the time.
[Nasser] Enter Bruce Buchholz
of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
So how did you learn about any of this?
-Carbon-14 in general?
-Yeah.
Uh, I have a background in physics
and nuclear engineering
-Watch your head.
-Yeah.
-and was aware of the bomb pulse.
-Yeah.
But it really hadn’t been used
in biology much at all.
[Nasser] Until Bruce learned that the C-14
from the bomb pulse,
the same stuff being used
to detect forged paintings,
is actually hidden inside of us.
Okay, so here we go again.
Boom. Neutrons. Bizarro carbon in the air.
On the ground, plants take it up.
But this time it's corn,
grains, lettuce
The plants we eat
and the plants that get eaten
by the animals we eat.
[Buchholz] When the cells are created,
the concentration of carbon-14
at that time gets stamped into the DNA,
so you can then measure
the carbon-14 in the DNA
to figure out how old a cell is.
It's a timestamp of when a cell was born.
[Nasser] And not just any cell.
If you were born after 1945,
the fallout from nuclear tests
is in your hip, your lip, your fingertip.
Don't freak out. It's harmless.
But it's literally
in every cell of your body,
including your fat cells.
The obese have a fat cell number up here
and the lean have a number down here.
What happens
if an obese person loses weight?
Do they go down here?
So we followed a number of individuals
that lost a lot of weight,
decreased their body fat,
but the fat cell number
stayed exactly the same.
What was happening was
the fat cells were just getting smaller.
We're not the first group
to show that,
but if you marry that
with our carbon dating,
then it truly becomes interesting.
[Nasser] Using C-14 dating,
Kirsty discovered
that the average fat cell
lasts for about nine to ten years.
So, just imagine what you had for dessert
a decade ago tonight.
But the real surprise came
when she started to see what happened
once those individual fat cells died off.
[Spalding] If you lose
a significant amount of weight,
the body continues to pump out
the same number of fat cells.
Then it's like,
well, why isn't the body listening?
Evolutionarily, we were designed
to be able to store fat
through times of famine and times of need.
It's only now that we're entering into
a time of significant changes in our diet
and more sedentary lifestyles
that the ability to store fat
is becoming quite harmful.
[Nasser] And to Kirsty, that should send
a really important message
to families with young children.
If they get really obese
when they're young,
that’s the fat cell number they will have
in their adulthood,
and it's much harder for them
to lose weight.
[Nasser] Scientists are also using
carbon-14 to date everything
from the plaques in your arteries
that cause heart attacks
to the plaques in your brain
related to Alzheimer's.
It's like now we have
a little clock in each of our cells
that can help us see
how fast they get sick,
how fast they get better,
even how quickly they age and break down.
But these little clocks
have a clock of their own.
And that's because in the early 1960s,
after the US and the USSR
almost blew each other to bits
in the Cuban Missile Crisis,
they agreed to slow down.
They signed a treaty
saying that, from now on,
they'd only test nukes underground,
where it doesn't make carbon-14.
So at that point,
the concentration started to go down.
That pulse, now,
is almost back to pre-bomb level.
[Nasser] In just a few years,
with almost no testing taking place at all
and the existing carbon-14 decaying away,
the spike in carbon-14 in our atmosphere
will basically peter out.
And with it will go our ability
to calculate the ages of canvases, colors,
and even our colons.
Nuclear testing
just, like, opened up this window,
and we're right
the window's about to close.
Yeah, it's getting close.
[Nasser] If any of this is making you
regret the ban on nuclear testing, don't.
Despite all of the amazing discoveries
they've led to,
nuclear weapons may still be
the most immediate threat
to ourselves and to our planet.
By 1996, the UN adopted
a total nuclear test ban,
which meant
no nuclear explosions anywhere.
But what the world soon realized
was that for that ban
to be anything but symbolic,
they needed a way to know, in real time,
if anyone was violating it.
What they needed
was a test to test for tests.
Uh, a kind of nuclear alarm bell
that would ring no matter where on Earth,
in the air, on land, under the ocean,
that someone was trying
to blow up one of these things.
But I don't know
if you know how big the Earth is.
That's basically impossible, right?
Well
not quite.
[suspenseful music]
Now, in order for me to tell you
what happens next,
we have to hit the road again.
Drive an hour that way,
and you get back to Trinity,
the site of the original nuclear test,
but we're going to drive an hour that way
to a spot that's helping prevent
future tests.
[Nasser] In a remote spot
outside of Albuquerque,
about 30 stories underground,
is a sophisticated seismic station
that is so sensitive
it can feel the faintest rumblings
of an underground nuclear explosion
a half a world away.
But this is just one node
in an immense global network.
Part of the International
Monitoring System,
a grid of 337 stations
scattered across 89 countries,
through the oceans
and even on the ice caps.
They measure everything
from seismic waves underground
to trace radioactive particles in the air
and even to imperceptible sound waves
underwater.
All of this data is flowing here,
to the IMS's central hub
in Vienna, Austria.
If you sneeze a nuclear sneeze
anywhere on, over,
or under the surface of planet Earth,
within minutes, the people in this office
could say gesundheit.
This giant network of sensors
around our whole globe
Has anything like that
ever existed before?
Never.
No country could have such a network.
Where? How? It's impossible.
You need an international endeavor
to build something
that everyone will trust
and then will rely on.
In God we trust.
All others, we monitor.
[Nasser] So that's exactly
what this system does,
every second of every day.
It looks for clues
of possible nuclear detonations.
But it turns out,
it's about even more than that.
As scientists from around the world
began listening for nukes,
they started noticing other things.
The data doesn't just tell them
about covert nuclear tests.
It tells them which volcanoes
just erupted on remote islands,
which ice sheets just cracked
due to global warming,
where that meteorite
you just saw streaking through the sky
actually touched down,
where a tsunami might hit next,
where a plane or even a submarine
might have crashed
and where to look for survivors.
They can even notice whale sounds,
and, from those, be able to track
their changing migratory patterns.
[Nasser] For all the surprising things
we learned from nuclear tests,
turns out the test for nuclear tests
might teach us just as much.
The insights without the death,
the awe without the fear,
the silver lining
without the mushroom cloud.
[Nasser]
Over the course of the last 75 years,
we invented, tested,
dropped, tested again,
and finally banned these bombs.
But in that same time,
we also learned new things
about the heavens
and the Earth
about how we get sick,
and how we get better.
None of that excuses us
for creating the bomb in the first place,
but I think it does tell us something
about ourselves:
that when you look dead on
at our cruelest moments,
our darkest impulses,
that even there
you can also find the opposite:
an impulse to take care of one another
and to learn about our shared home.
[inspirational music playing]
[upbeat music playing]