Doomsday Clock: 89 Seconds To Midnight

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The doomsday clock is ticking closer to catastrophe. Illustrating the rising risks of self-annihilation. It is now. Eighty nine seconds to midnight. The symbolic clock has been reset and is now closer to midnight than ever before. Atomic scientists cite nuclear threats and the climate crisis as two main factors underlying the risk of the end of the world.

The rapid progression of A.I. and record-breaking surface temperatures last year also contributed to scientists' decision. Ongoing conflicts, including the Russia-Ukraine war, escalations in the war in the Middle East, Sudan and Syria, have all impacted scientists' calculations. The symbolic clock has been used by scientists since the Cold War as a warning to world leaders and the public.

Scary stuff. But if it's any comfort, humans have been predicting the end of the world for about as long as there have been humans, in part because we're very, very small, but we think of ourselves as very, very important. So, of course, that kind of main character energy is bound to leak all over everything. We do love to put ourselves at the center of every story.

The ancient Assyrians were wringing their hands over the coming apocalypse more than two thousand eight hundred years ago. They even etched their worries into a stone tablet that somehow survived the centuries. Our Earth is degenerate in these later days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.

Children no longer obey their parents. Every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching. I don't know if it's funny how little people have changed or tragic, but here we are. Speaking of the end of the world, there's actually a clock that measures just how long we have left. It's called the doomsday clock.

But who invented it? And who gets to decide when to move that clock's hands? Oh, oh, looks like there's only 89 seconds left till midnight. Then they got a tall beam of light. The gun. Seem to. Stuffy. What happened in the movie? It could be more serious than the end of the world. The complete and total annihilation of human civilization.

If you're facing extinction, don't you want the most rational and sober minded people stepping up to lead? Sure you do. And yet nothing brings out the kooks and the clowns like the end of the world. Looking at you, Jack Alonzo Goldie. Goldie was the leader of a 1950s doomsday cult. He called himself the Zoom and his followers, the Zoomites.

The Zoom declared that the world would end on April 17th, 1954, via a firestorm of hydrogen bombs. We are convinced the world will end because of man's madness and manufacturing deadly engines of war. We're here to preach understanding and peace throughout the world. We ask no one to believe our teachings. We ask only to be left alone.

The Zoomites conducted operations from a rental summer home in Rockport, Massachusetts, but let it be known that they were heading to an H-bomb proof shelter in Ogden, Utah. The world will definitely, as I said before, come to an end on April 17th, 1954, providing that people of the great nations do not get together against the belief that the almighty dollar is far greater than human life. The reason we know anything about the Zoom and his band of believers is because one of them, a dancer from Providence, Rhode Island named Arlene Goff, busted out in the fit of the giggles at one of their meetings and was expelled.

I laughed when the Zoom told us that in the new civilization, there would be no bald headed men. The Zoom glared at me and then pointed to the door and said, Go, go and learn self-discipline. Go and learn faith. When you have learned these things, return humbly and we may accept you in the fold again. Arlene Goff went on to list the eight conduct rules Zoomites were obliged to follow.

And these rules were on top of a whole list of other requirements, including proven psychic ability. But above all, the rules were designed to ensure that Jack Goldie be treated like a god. And number eight is no impertinence to the Zoom. If the Zoomites ever headed to their cavern in Utah, they kept it a secret. There were only 16 members in total, not including their leader.

And in any case, the world didn't end on April 17th, 1954. The world also failed to end on December 21st, 1954, despite Dorothy Martin, also known as Sister Theodora's very best efforts. Martin led the Seekers, which, as far as we know, was the very first UFO themed doomsday cult. Martin was in telepathic communication with a race of extraterrestrials she called the Guardians, who hailed from the planet Clarion.

These aliens told Martin that Earth would be destroyed by a tidal wave and the believers would be plucked from the flooding planet and whisked away to safety via flying saucer. When December 21st came and went with neither tidal wave nor alien rescue, the Seekers decided that Christmas Eve must surely be the day. Not to spoil the ending or anything, but the world also didn't end on December 24th, 1954, at which point many of the Seekers abandoned the cult, though there were some diehards who insisted that it was their faith that stopped the tidal wave from swallowing the world.

Fun fact, a psychologist by the name of Dr. Leo Fessinger assumed a fake name and infiltrated that cult. He wanted to study the Seekers and see how they made sense of their beliefs. When those beliefs failed them, he was curious as to how they might cope. What came out of that project is the theory of cognitive dissonance.

In a nutshell, cognitive dissonance occurs when two things you firmly believe or perceive or just freaking know contradict each other. Like, for example, everything is really super great as my 401K drains away to nothing and I can't afford to buy eggs. That's cognitive dissonance. How do we reconcile these two contradictory beliefs?

Some people, like the Seekers who gave up and went home, changed the circumstances that are causing the contradiction. Others, like the Seekers who stayed, doubled down on the contradiction, adding layers to it if needed in order to make it all make sense again. And this is part of what makes it so difficult to try to talk someone who's in a cult out of their beliefs.

Anyway, while doomsday cults are nothing new, there was a very good reason for the big uptick in end of the world groups that began in the late 1940s. Two words, Manhattan Project. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. The United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities, Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, effectively ending World War Two, but giving birth to a brand new global nightmare. Suddenly, all of the other ways the world could end seemed quaint and downright manageable.

It was one thing to imagine an enormous tidal wave. It was another thing to know that the ground temperature, that cataclysmic day in Nagasaki, was 7,232 degrees Fahrenheit. To know that tens of thousands of people were incinerated instantly and that those who survived paid the price for generations. Radiation exposure is the terrible gift that just keeps giving.

Cancer and miscarriage and birth defects and on and on and on. Waking up every single day in a world that might just blink out of existence with the sight of a blooming mushroom cloud serving as the ultimate that's all, folks. Well, you can sure understand how some people went a little bit over the edge. Existential terror will do that to a person.

Truth is, many of the scientists and mathematicians who worked on the Manhattan Project were also deeply troubled by what they had ushered into the world. Which in a weird way does make you feel a little bit better about humanity. You know, like you want the people who created the most lethal and destructive weapons ever to exist to be at least a tiny little bit remorseful.

Oh, no. What have we done? A group of former Manhattan Project researchers, including Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer himself and some of the top nuclear physicists in the world got together and formed a collective called the Chicago Atomic Scientists. They began publishing a newsletter. It was a low tech effort at first, basically just a few mimeograph sheets of paper stapled together.

But it soon became a real magazine, one that has been published continuously since 1945. The whole point of the magazine was to communicate the dangers of the atomic age. And who knew better than the Manhattan Project scientists just how catastrophic any atomic war would be, they correctly anticipated the nuclear arms race to come.

They knew what would come. They had to live every waking minute with the full knowledge of the horrors of nuclear war. As they were preparing the June 1947 issue of the magazine, one of the founders of the Chicago group, the physicist Hyman Goldsmith, had the idea to ask an artist to design an image for the cover, something catchy, something that represented their mission.

It just so happened that another group member, physicist Alexander Langsdorf, Jr., was married to an artist named Martyl Schweig Langsdorf. She was a painter and a muralist, but agreed to take a shot at creating an image for what they were now calling the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She was at a concert when inspiration struck.

Marta sketched a clock on the back of the musical score. She thought that setting the clock at seven minutes to midnight would signal the urgency of the situation, how close humanity was to an atomic Armageddon. Every single issue of the magazine since June 1947 has featured a clock on its cover, even when it stopped being a print publication.

It's kind of fitting that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was one of the very first magazines in America to go 100 percent digital. Who better to guess where the future was at it, right? Marta casually dropped that design for the iconic doomsday clock and then went back to painting abstract landscapes. Right up to her death in March 2013, she seemed surprised by the fact that so many people knew her as the creator of the doomsday clock, and before we leave her to rest in peace, there are just a couple of things worth knowing.

For starters, how does a dreamy and sensitive artist end up married to one of Oppenheimer's atomic wizards? Well, they met at Washington University in St. Louis, where Alexander Langsdorf had his first job building a cyclotron. That's a particle accelerator and apparently a real aphrodisiac, too. Also, Alexander Langsdorf was no crazy war hawk.

He was early in regretting his role in the Manhattan Project. He pleaded with President Harry S. Truman to not use the bomb against the Japanese. He grieved the horrific loss of life and destruction right up until his death in 1996. The Applejack alert. Enemy bombers, in theory, are approaching the world's greatest city.

While the sirens wail their grim warning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers scurry for shelter against the attack. Auto traffic is halted. Riders and drivers taking cover in a realistic drill for a day. All Americans pray will never come. A pall of restless silence cloaks the streets and skyscrapers of New York, one of the main targets of the mythical air armada of 400 planes.

Eight million people vanished from view, a lonely vigil over a city paralyzed by atomic attack. Washington, too, takes part in the most realistic nationwide civil defense exercise since the atomic age was born at Hiroshima nine years ago. President Eisenhower leads his staff to a bombproof underground shelter. Beneath the Capitol Dome, streets are clear.

Traffic is stopped, frozen fast until the all clear that will breathe life into the nation's capital. Chicago joins in putting its air raid defenses to the test. Police flag down cars directing motorists to shelters. Across America, Canada, Hawaii and Alaska, the story is the same. The sirens have sounded. A nation stands still.

A whole lot happened between the start of the secret Manhattan project and the day in 1954 when that newsreel was released to the public. June 16th, 1945, the first test of a nuclear weapon in the United States. It was a 15 to 20 kiloton bomb detonated just south of Socorro, New Mexico. Even now, radiation levels there remain 10 times higher than the natural background radiation.

August 1945 brought the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with death tolls over 214,000 souls. August 29th, 1949, the Soviet Union tests its first nuclear bomb, codenamed First Lightning. October 3rd, 1952, the United Kingdom tests its first nuclear bomb off the coast of Western Australia. The people of the world were waking up to the fact that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki spelled way more than the end of World War Two.

Those bombs were the opening act for the nuclear nightmare that now stalks humanity. And if you thought the atomic bomb was a horror beyond reckoning, there was a whole new nightmare in town. The hydrogen bomb. What did the atomic scientists, those visionary geniuses who are now the keepers of the doomsday clock, have to say about the H-bomb?

Albert Einstein and nuclear physicist Edward Teller were both published in the March 1950 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Einstein wrote, Radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on Earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities. Is there any way out of this impasse created by man himself?

All of us, and particularly those who are responsible for the attitudes of the US and the USSR, should realize that we may have vanquished an external enemy, but have been incapable of getting rid of the mentality created by the war. Edward Teller wrote, If the atom bomb did not help to establish peace, why should the hydrogen bomb?

Why should anything else for that matter? I do not believe that the hydrogen bomb or the whole arsenal of technological warfare will save the United States unless we accept the fact that the United States and all the freedom-loving people of the whole world must be saved. The grim alternative is that all of us will live under tyranny.

March 1950. Three minutes to midnight. The US tested the first H-bomb on November 1st, 1952. 500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the monster was detonated roughly halfway between Hawaii and Australia over a chain of 29 atolls and five islands called the Marshall Islands. The islands surrounding Aluja Lab have been swept almost clean by the fireball flare, which enveloped an area three miles wide in the twinkling of an eye.

Aluja Lab is gone. Nothing there but a deep crater and water from an island that once was, but is no more. Out of an ugly mushroom cloud, mankind enters the hydrogen age, an era of danger, of challenge, of opportunity. A letter from a serviceman stationed in the Pacific during the test was printed in the Lyman News in Ohio.

A flame about two miles high was shooting into the air. Then we saw thousands of tons of earth being thrown into the sky. A cloud began to form about 20 seconds after the shot. We heard the sound of an explosion and even at 30 miles, it made my ears ring. The actual shape of the cloud was like, like a cauliflower. And about 15 minutes afterwards, the island on which the bomb had been set off from turned a brilliant red.

It burned for about six hours. During this time, it was gradually becoming smaller. Within six hours, the island that had once been palm trees and coconuts was to nothing. The mile wide island had actually disappeared. Not surprisingly, Japan, the only nation on Earth with direct experience of the impact of atomic warfare, weighed in. The director of the science department of Tokyo University, Dr. Sessha Kaya, told reporters that the United States has created a terrible weapon.

The hydrogen bomb can be thought of as a small sun. It is a mistake to think that the H-bomb is only a larger A-bomb. If this bomb gets out of hand, it may destroy mankind. Navy ships dinged in late 1952 toward Eniwetok Atoll on a momentous mission. The world's first hydrogen bomb housed in this barn-like building was to be exploded on a tiny target island named Ilujaland. Strange secret testing devices had been set up to measure mankind's most fearsome weapon.

While the task force cruised 50 miles from the doomed island, the seconds closer and closer to the first hydrogen blast on Earth. Minus 15 seconds. Minus 10 seconds, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 10. Watch the shockwave as it rolls toward the flagship. The fixed and boiling cloud surges to a height of 40,000 feet two minutes after zero.

Ten minutes later, it is snaked skyward 10 miles. Observers fly toward the target center. The island surrounding Ilujaland have been swept almost clean by the fireball flare, which enveloped an area three miles wide in the twinkling of an eye. Ilujaland is gone. Nothing there but a deep crater and water from an island that once was, but is no more.

Out of an ugly mushroom cloud, mankind enters the hydrogen age, an era of danger, of challenge, of opportunity. The hands of the doomsday clock. Two minutes to midnight. The closest to midnight the clock would be in the 20th century. It may have begun as a DIY newsletter, but the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist soon had a circulation of 20,000.

And it was growing. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer claimed in the July 1953 issue that Russia was gaining in the atomic race. Oppenheimer said Russia and the United States may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life. The basic fact is that the time in which this will happen is short.

We shall need all the help and wisdom and resourcefulness we can muster. This, in all probability, is a very tough fix. The atomic clock ticks faster and faster. Cheerful stuff and super familiar to your grandparents and great grandparents. The Americans of the 1950s started their day with a bowl of oatmeal and daily newspaper stories like this.

The specter of atomic peril hovers constantly nearer. Unimpeded, full scale nuclear attack upon continental America could be of such ferocity that it would overwhelm any civil defense that we might establish. The public is being kept in ignorance of the danger. The news was extra grim in 1953 because now the US had company.

Looks like the Soviet Union had their very own hydrogen bomb. That we live in imminent danger, that an untoward event tomorrow may trigger a tense world to erupt in flames of atomic or thermonuclear warfare, that there will be no place to hide for the great masses of civilized mankind. These are the torturous facts which compel our leaders to spell out for us the tragic nature of the times in which we live.

This is probably a good place to stop and take a quick look at the difference between an atom bomb and a hydrogen bomb. So if there was going to be a quiz, the first thing to remember is fission versus fission plus fusion. For an atomic bomb, you basically want to persuade a heavy element to split into two smaller elements that creates a release into the atmosphere of excess energy that's fission.

You get enough material that can do that. The word is fissionable and that energy will begin slamming into the next atom and the next and the next, causing them to split and release even more energy. Pretty soon there's a whole chain reaction going on and that's called critical mass. Kaboom! This is Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that rained hellfire down on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now, a hydrogen bomb isn't about splitting atoms. It's about hooking them up. A hydrogen bomb, also known as a thermonuclear bomb, takes two light elements and marries them into a single heavier one. We call them hydrogen bombs because they rely on deuterium or tritium hydrogen isotopes. Fission heats and compresses that hydrogen fuel, which causes it to fuse.

That fusion is what brings the extra oomph to a hydrogen bomb. Even though it might seem like both bombs are fundamentally the same, how different could it really be? A heavy element split the two lighter elements or two lighter elements stuck together to make one heavy element. Same, same, right? No, no, no. Thanks to that deadly combo of atomic fission and nuclear fusion, a hydrogen bomb can be up to 1,000 times more powerful than an atomic bomb.

On March 1st, 1954, the U.S. tested a second hydrogen bomb, a 17 megaton beast nicknamed Castle Bravo. Bravo went boom at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. That's a little less than 5,000 miles southwest of San Francisco. Shattering power, hundreds of times greater than any previous man-made explosion, was unleashed when the United States set off its H-bomb number two.

This second hydrogen bomb was actually 600 times more powerful than Little Boy. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. That detonation in the Pacific also, one, left scientific measuring instruments unable to record the full effects of the unprecedented force. Unable because they had estimated the yield of the Bravo test to be a five megaton blast, but instead it was a 15 megaton blast, which, oopsies, was, you know, like three times more powerful than they expected.

And two, apparently pushed radioactive debris and moisture out beyond the safety zone boundary of the test area. And three, jarred and island 176 miles distant. Which made the Castle Bravo test the worst radiological disaster in the history of the United States. Sorry, extreme as all that was, it wasn't even the worst of it.

Prior to the H-bomb test on Bikini Atoll, the military calculated the hazard zone for ships at sea in the vicinity of the bomb test. That zone was calibrated at roughly 150 to 200 miles from blast epicenter. The problem with their math was that it was based on an atomic weapon, not the insanely more powerful thermonuclear weapon that is the hydrogen bomb, which explains how the U.S. naval tanker Patapsco and her crew were showered in radioactive ash.

The Patapsco was on hand to lend support to the task force conducting the bomb test, which meant it was right at the edge of the so-called danger zone. Tragically, it wasn't the only ship in the wrong place at the wrong time that day. A Japanese fishing vessel, ironically named Lucky Dragon No. 5, was in the area, too.

The crew was fishing the waters outside the danger zone. The U.S. had issued a warning about the upcoming H-bomb test so that precautions could be taken. But of course, remember, the math was wrong. And even 200 miles from the blast center wasn't nearly far enough away to be safe. Not only was the Bravo blast about three times as powerful as predicted, but the weather also decided not to cooperate.

Shifting winds carried heavy radioactive fallout far outside the danger zone, where it fell like a gentle, dusty rain onto the deck and crew of the Lucky Dragon No. 5. Fallout made up of 10 million tons of vaporized water, coral and sand. And if you're wondering why that fishing boat didn't get the heck out of there the instant the sky turned blood red and the air itself shook, well, they had lines and nets in the water.

They had fish on those lines, tuna and some shark, and they couldn't or wouldn't leave any of that behind. Instead, they spent about six hours hauling up gear and processing their catch as a white snow of that irradiated coral and sand piled up around them. One sailor gave it a lick with his tongue and declared it to be tasteless.

Another used his bare hands to scoop it into a sack. It stuck to every surface, worked its way into the layers of their clothing, set up house in their nasal passages, throats and lungs. Just one day later, the men began falling ill. Dizziness, nausea, pain, diarrhea, bleeding from their gums. By the morning of their third day post-blast, sores were erupting on their bodies in the places where the radioactive dust had touched.

Their skin darkened, their hair fell out in clumps. In the hold, the fish they'd risked so much to process were every bit as radioactive. It wasn't until the lucky dragon number five docked at the port in Yazoo, Japan, that they understood what was happening. The crew had been poisoned by fallout from the Bravo H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

Confronted with the tremendous power of the latest thermonuclear devices, the United States has more than tripled the distance ships must keep between them and the flashpoint of any new Pacific tests. It's set a radius of 400 miles for the new danger zone. Cool, cool, great, great. Just too late for the Patapsco. Too late for those very unlucky fishermen aboard the lucky dragon number five.

Were they the only humans harmed by the Kessel Bravo test? No. Were you hoping that each and every one of the islands and atolls in the Marshall chain was uninhabited? From a special report by the Defense Atomic Support Agency presented in 1969. Dr. Robert Conrad, who directed radiation studies on Marshall Islanders, highlighted the most serious finding in the Marshallese is the development of thyroid abnormalities, a result that he subsequently described as a late result of fallout exposure.

The wide ranging discussion during this meeting reflected on this and related problems, including nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor's observation that obviously we didn't irradiate the natives on purpose. Obviously, we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We deny the fact that we did not know what we were doing. But there is no basis for that confidence anymore.

Hey, remember that part about the weather not cooperating? As a result of unexpected wind shear conditions, heavy fallout of debris from Bravo on atolls east of the Bikini Atoll test site resulted in high radiation doses to the populations of nearby atolls. It's not like an effort wasn't made to protect the people living on the Marshalls.

While the populations of Bikini and Eniwetok were relocated before the testing began, other populations were evacuated following the Bravo test within about two days following the detonation of the Bravo test and the unexpected fallout on atolls to the east. The resident populations of Rangalap were evacuated to avert continued exposure, to be decontaminated and to receive immediate care for conditions and acute exposures. It just wasn't enough of an effort.

Or maybe maybe it's more accurate to say that no effort could have been enough given how wrong they were about Bravo's power in the first place. There's a world of difference between five megatons and 15 megatons. We have confirmed that exposure to radioactive fallout, particularly soon after detonation of a large device, can result in high exposures and substantial increases in cancer risk.

We know that now. Too late for the citizens of the Marshall Islands. And by the time they were fessing up to all of it in 1969, things were actually looking a little more hopeful for the people of Earth. Thanks to nearly all of the world's nations coming together as one to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Compared to the violently divided and warlike world we're waking up in now, this might sound like the plot for an episode of My Little Pony, but here goes.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was a deal where nations with nuclear capability would help nations without it to develop nuclear power as long as they promise not to make nuclear weapons. Israel, Pakistan and India announced they'd be sitting this one out. But everyone else was like, OK, I guess. Nations with nuclear weapon stockpiles even agreed to get rid of their own arsenals if and when geopolitical conditions made that possible.

And the bulletin of the atomic scientists, it was guardedly optimistic as they pushed the hands of the doomsday clock back all the way to 10 minutes before midnight. The great powers have made the first step. They must proceed without delay to the next one. The dismantling gradually of their own oversized military establishments.

Three years later, the news was even better. 1972 brought the possibility of a strategic arms limitation treaty, SALT. That was an agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union regulating how many ballistic missile launchers either country could possess. If you were alive back then, spending Saturday mornings watching Josie and the Pussycats in outer space in your jammies, you were probably blissfully unaware of the potential for global annihilation being discussed by the grownups in the next room.

Gotta enjoy that blissful ignorance any chance you get. The doomsday clock, 12 minutes to midnight. 1980 marked the 35th year of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We feel impelled to record and emphasize the accelerating drift towards world disaster in almost all realms of social activity. Alongside their failure to advance SALT treaty negotiations towards disarmament, both the United States and the Soviet Union have been behaving like what must best be described as nuclear hollocks, crisis of resources, the spreading trend towards irrationality in the national and international conduct of many states and peoples, and the inability of international institutions to contain political crisis moves the hands of the clock forward.

It's now seven minutes to midnight. 1981, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Newly elected President Ronald Reagan declares that the best way for the United States to end the Cold War is to win it. Four minutes to midnight. And then really hope comes to the world when the Berlin Wall, that heavily guarded and fortified barrier that kept people in the communist state of East Germany from fleeing to the democratic freedoms of West Germany, it was both a real physical barrier and a massive symbol of the vast ideological divide between East and West, between freedom and tyranny.

The myth of monolithic communism has been shattered for all to see. The ideological conflict known as the Cold War is over and the risk of global nuclear war being ignited in Europe is significantly diminished. In response, we turn back the hands of the clock. Ten minutes to midnight. The possibility of human life on Earth continuing look extra good come 1995, even if we did come as close as we ever have to going up in a puff of radioactive smoke, see the Russians mistook a rocket launched in a joint scientific mission between the US and Norway for a nuclear missile.

Oh, that's not good. That's very, very not good. All the US and Norway wanted to do was study the Aurora Borealis. Little did they know that Russian President Boris Yeltsin was alerted and told that it looked like the Americans were starting a nuclear war. Yeltsin was literally handed the nuclear codes for Russia to retaliate.

But he studied the situation and thought, nah, not today. 14 minutes to midnight, but don't get too comfortable. 2002, a top concern is the enormous amount of unsecured and sometimes unaccounted for weapon grade nuclear materials throughout the world. Seven minutes to midnight. 2007, North Korea conducts a nuclear test and many in the international community worry that Iran is working toward a bomb of its own.

Meanwhile, the United States and Russia remain ready to wage nuclear war within minutes. Five minutes to midnight. 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons, modernizations and outsized nuclear weapon arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity. World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from catastrophe.

These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth. Three minutes to midnight. Twenty eighteen. The world has seen the threat posed by the misuse of information technology and witnessed the vulnerability of democracies to disinformation. Two minutes to midnight. Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers, nuclear war and climate change compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber information warfare that undercuts society's ability to respond.

One hundred seconds to midnight. Twenty twenty three. Russia's war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks. Worse, Russia's thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons reminds the world that the possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone's control.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine had increased the risk of nuclear weapons use, raised the specter of biological and chemical weapon use, hamstrung the world's response to climate change and hampered international efforts to deal with other global concerns. Ninety seconds to midnight. And that brings us today to right now.

In twenty twenty four, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Our fervent hope is that the leaders will recognize the world's existential predicament and take bold action. The world is perilously close to the precipice. Nuclear risk, climate change, emerging and reemerging diseases, disruptive technologies, the spread of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication system and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood advances in a eye, making it easier to spread false information on the Internet.

Anybody else breaking out in a cold sweat, blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness. The United States, China and Russia have the collective power to destroy civilization. These three countries have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink. The world depends on immediate action.

Eighty nine seconds to midnight. What a bummer. Why do we have to hear this? Why do we have to know this? Can't we just choose joy? Well, we can and we should. But unless joy lives deep where the sun don't shine, perhaps we might also consider yanking our heads out of our collective asses and realize that if we don't deal with reality, it's going to deal with us harshly.

It already is dealing with us and we just don't want to face it. Because it's scary and it's terrible and we feel very small, very powerless. We're just regular people who want to live regular lives, cookouts with family and friends, high school football on a crisp September afternoon. First steps and first kisses, weddings and babies and birthdays and fireworks, hanging out with the dog.

Just the most mundane, average and everyday beautiful things, the kind of things that are a human being's birthright. We were built to lie in the grass and wonder at the stars, not to be hunched and worry and misery, afraid of each other and seething with anger, paranoia. At the end of the rainbow, there's happiness. And to find it, how often I cried.

But my life is a race, just a wild goose chase. And my dreams have all been denied. Why have I always been a failure? What can the reason be? I wonder if the world's to blame. I wonder if it could be me. The same geniuses that launched humanity into the atomic age, who invented the doomsday clock and have been trying to warn us for decades, are also here to throw out a little bit of hope.

There is a flip side to the abuses of social media. Leaders react when citizens insist that they do. And citizens around the world can use the power of the Internet to improve the long term prospects of their children and grandchildren. They can insist on facts and discount nonsense. They can demand action to reduce the existential threat of nuclear war and unchecked climate change.

Citizens can seize the opportunity to make a better and safer world. Or not. You're the boss of you. Next time on True Weird Stuff. They came to the new world as brides, walking neatly and single file through the muddy streets, disappearing behind the locked door of the convent that housed them. At first, they were objects of fascination.

The fear came later. So did the legends. Some say that these peculiar, pale, young women were vampires. The first vampires in New Orleans. Meet the casket girls on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Lamar Richardson, Heather Elizabeth, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Sam Moore and Don Morgan.

Sherry, it's this kind of feel good episode that makes me so happy to be a part of True Weird Stuff, although there was some hope at the end and I was really glad to hear that. But this is something that we've lived with our entire lives and we've just sort of accepted that way back here in the back of your mind, you think about this from time to time.

It's just the thing is, you can't be consumed about it on a daily basis because it's something that's truly I say it's out of our control. It is and it isn't. You know, as the scientist said at the end, you know, you can you can have a little influence on what happens with some of this stuff. Well, believe me, as as we were working on this one, I thought to myself, well, girl, this is why nobody likes you because you're no fun at a party.

I know. But listen, this is the backdrop. This is the background radiation literally of our lives, our parents' lives, our children's lives, our future grandchildren's lives, all of it. And here's the deal. As the atomic scientists say at the end, it's on us. Leaders react when citizens insist they do. We could be using the Internet to improve our long term prospects or we can just go off into the moon, you know, and share a bunch of conspiratorial memes and deny science and knowledge and history.

And those of us that survive the coming Armageddon, you know, we'll be bombed back into the Stone Age and we can start over, leaving that simpler and more wholesome life without seed oils that people are constantly ranting about on the Internet. We have a responsibility. It's on us. It's on us to to do something, to take some meaningful action, to preserve our own freaking future.

But of course, that's hard and scary. And people something that has just been so foregrounded for me since we've been working on this podcast is. People are much, much more interested in shouting at and shooting the messenger than they are in dealing with the message. We just don't want to hear it. It's scary and it's too much work.

And we you and I might have a fighting chance in hell of being successful if we just talked about like looking for ghosts. And Bigfoot, well, you know, what's funny about this, too, is that the reality of this is now so that the realities of the kinds of tests that were done and the repercussions of that and the repercussions of what happened when the atomic bombs were dropped in Japan back in nineteen forty five, that stuff that's in a history book.

And I think for a lot of people, because it's in a history book, it's like it had happened long ago and it's not a part of our current reality. You know, no, exactly. It happened long ago and it's resolved. Right. Move on. Right. Those zoomites at the beginning of the episode reminded me of those people that that killed themselves with Marshall Applewhite and went to the hill.

Remember, they were going to travel to the hill. Bob, hell, Bob. Yeah, yeah. The Heaven's Gate. The Heaven's Gate. That's that was the name of the cult. And I was thinking about that because, you know, I said that it was a lot like I think being married. I mean, they were they were castrated. They were living in a home in the suburbs that they couldn't afford.

Terrible. It was kind of terrible, you know. Well, by the time they finished castrating you and saddling you with a choking mortgage, you kind of do want to take the poison and catch a ride on a comet like we have an episode we're going to do on another doomsday cult leader and this is going to piss people off. People are going to be so pissed off when they find out that a not everyone believes this one specific sort of religious doctrine.

But for the people who do buddy, are they not going to love learning where that came from and that it came from a kooky ass Cold War doomsday cult? And it has just been now absorbed into the mainstream and people talk about it like it's a legitimate biblical or scriptural thing. And it's not human beings, the fuckery.

Am I right? The stuff we get up to. So let me let me say, yeah, OK, it's no secret to anyone that, like, I'm really fascinated with all this Cold War civil defense, build a bunker, mushroom cloud stuff, because, you know, I have an older brother that was obsessed with it and these were my bedtime stories. But I I've heard about the doomsday clock my whole life.

And this episode genuinely came from the question, well, who gets to decide what time, how many seconds are left till midnight? My jaw dropped when I learned the true story of the doomsday clock. You may have already known this. I I didn't know. I I is this one of those things that I've heard about my whole life, but I've never given too much thought about it.

Like what is exactly going on with this doomsday clock? What one of the things that was interesting about this, too, we'll go back to what happened at the end of World War two and the use of the atomic bombs. I think that. There was always this question of should we use it or should we have not used it? My father fought in World War two and he said he he was in favor of it just because they needed an end to the war because of the way things were.

But you do look back on it and you go, was this the right thing to do or was it not the right thing to do? I'm not taking a side with this. I'm not fighting one way or the other for this because it's what happened. And what's happened happened. But it does make you think about it now in light of how. Devastating this bomb was, I mean, two hundred and fourteen thousand people, I think that's what the number that you said, we're like, yeah, when you think about that, that is astonishing.

That's like that's like taking three football stadiums on an NFL Sunday and incinerating all those people. And the thing so this is the the question of did we did the United States do the right thing in in dropping those two bombs to end World War one or World War two? Rather, I'm sorry. Did we do the right thing? That's a really big question and it's outside of our scope.

But I will say this. I think it's abundantly clear. And and. If it isn't like then I didn't do a good job here, it's abundantly clear that we really didn't know what we were doing. We didn't understand the magnitude of what we were doing. The Castle Bravo test, we did not fully understand what we were dropping because we we we got it wrong by not just a little bit.

We it was three times what they thought it would be in terms of strength and power and spread. That's a really big mistake to make. When we dropped those atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we had never we had only test fired those things. We had never utilized those things before in a real combat situation with real people.

They knew that these were powerful weapons. But I don't think anyone was prepared for what the actual impact of dropping those bombs on. Human cities would be any more than they really understood what they were doing with Castle Bravo. The the downstream long term effects of the exposure that those people had who were in the blast zone and even on the edges of the danger zone, the number of people who died, who developed cancers.

And these things go multigenerational in some cases. He like I understand the people who go, it was the right thing to do, but I also understand the people to go that was not because we we didn't really understand the full magnitude or dimensions of what we were about that I don't know. I don't think so. And what's kind of interesting about this business with the H bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, I don't know.

I I sort of read things and I sort of know things. I don't know if it's part of doing the radio job or what it is. But you end up when you do that job, you end up with a wealth of a bunch of information, you know, because we're always looking around in your head around. I never knew about what happened in the Marshall Island test, but I would imagine it's something that they don't want to they don't want to publicize.

But what happened with the Japanese fishermen, what happened to the people on those islands and the fact that it was three times worse than they thought it was going to be. That's that's not a little oops. That is like catastrophic. It's a big one. And so you can find at the time that this happened. So, you know, these were not super secret missions.

How could they be? You're going to turn the sky the color of blood and people are going to feel the effects as far away as California, right? You can't you can't turn the sky blood red and keep that a big secret. So they were they were class. They were classified ish. They were top secret kind of sort of. But the the enormity of the geographical area and the fact that there were people living on the Marshall Islands.

And that this was in the Pacific, not that far off the coast of California, meant that they couldn't keep it a secret. So, you know, on the day of the test, people didn't know what had happened, but it got out pretty quickly. And even like we have in this episode, a letter that a serviceman who was to his family that was published in an Ohio newspaper.

So the clampdown wasn't all that tight, was it, on information? And there was no controlling what happened with the Japanese fishing boat because they were Japanese citizens, sovereign nation. And when the lucky dragon number five docked in port and these men stumbled off, dying of radiation exposure. Well, you know, that's not going to stay a secret.

But people even then, even as all of this was coming out in the at the time in the newspapers and the TV news or whatever of the radio news of the day, people didn't have any context. And you have to remember, too, that during the Cold War, this was like the atomic age and people were excited by this technology. Right.

They were you know, the future was so bright and we were going to have all this deterrence and this was going to make the world a safer place. And all of the opposite things happened. The context is really what's wild and what tripped me out because we're living in such an age of disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, fractured realities, losses of collective understandings.

Like we're living in a wild freaking time right now. What shocked me was how transparent some of these news stories were. I mean, the reason that we know what happened to the sailors aboard the Patapsco is because they weren't silenced. I mean, think about that for a second. Think about that. It was such a different time.

Yeah, you would think that they would have been. But I also think the other thing about this, you know, we've talked about this before, and that is that when they were having these nuclear tests outside of Las Vegas, it was an event to go watch it, I think to try to explain what the lasting effects of radiation are to people is something that was beyond their understanding, right? It's radiation.

It's this thing. Is it does it hurt you? Do you feel it? Do you taste it? What is it? And I think a lot of it. I think even today, still people don't understand what the long lasting effects of radiation are. Look at the fishermen on the Lucky Dragon, number five, they were tasting it, they were scooping it up with their hands, they had no idea what was happening.

No idea. And why would they? How could they? Right. It was all so new. Like if a laser beam started shooting out the sky into my street, I would I would walk out of my house right now and go have a look at it because I don't know. I don't know if it's harmful or not. It's interesting. I want to see what it is. I want to get a little bit closer.

That's that profound human curiosity that will be the death of us. They didn't know. And you say to yourself, yeah, but come on, guys, like pulverized stuff is falling out of the sky onto your boat. Now, you know, that can't be good. Well, they don't know. They don't know that good. And and the business of why didn't they leave right away?

Well, these were men that needed the job and they weren't going to cut the lines and leave thousands of pounds of hard one tuna in a net drifting to the bottom of the Pacific and get fired. Are you kidding? Not be able to feed their families. Hello, capitalism, you're going to stay and do the job even if it kills you and it did.

I mean, this was seventy five years ago, something like that, that that happened. I mean, and once again, you had some idea of what happened with radiation five years previous to that when the atomic bombs dropped, but really nobody really understood that. I do I do appreciate the fact that you put in layman's terms what the difference between an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb is, because once again, these are things that I've heard about.

I knew the H-bomb was worse than the A-bomb, but at least it sort of explains, at least in layman's terms, a little bit about what's happening with that and the enormity of what happens with these H-bombs. Thank you. And that was like, I'm such a masochist. What is wrong with me? You know, in like my real heart, I want to like make up little songs and sing them to my cat and have a cocktail and look at the sky.

Like, why do I make my life so hard? So I'm sitting outside. I'm sitting outside on the front steps with my laptop. And my husband comes up and he's like, what's working on there, sweet meat? You want to take a break? And you know what he means by that. And and I said, um, give me a few minutes because I'm trying to learn the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fission plus fusion so that I can describe the difference between an A-bomb and an H-bomb.

And he's like. Or you could go for a walk. Well, no, I can't, though, because that's all I'm going to think about until I figure out how to explain it, because it was actually so complicated. It was so complicated and for the longest time. So I made like a flow chart and I was like, heavy elements splits into two, two elements join into one.

And then I was trying to think about it, like if I have a cupcake and I cut it. There you go. Or if I take two cupcakes and smash them together, well, that's going to be more cupcake. This is why I didn't get into MIT to be. But I'm glad if you can talk cupcakes, then I'm with you. OK, fine, that sort of explains what's going on with this.

You know, one of the things that I love to hear when I hear astronauts talk and almost to a person, they say this when they leave the earth and they're looking at the earth in total, they get a sense of, hey, we're all in this big blue marble together, can we not find a way to get along and not destroy each other? That almost to a person, that is the experience that they have.

You know, I think at the individual level, that's who we are as a species. I really do. I think, you know, when you get right down to the ground, I think people do want to be cooperative because in order to survive, we have to be cooperative. We have there's a bunch of C words, cooperation, communication, collective collectivism, collective thinking, collective resource distribution, a lot of C words.

Right. I think as people, we're not so bad. It's when we turn into crowds and populations that we get into trouble. And I think that regular everyday people who just want to get along and choose joy and live their life. And why can't why can't we all just be friends? These are the not the people that crave power and dominion.

The people that govern, they are people who mostly, by and large, crave power. Do we have some heroes in there who genuinely feel like, oh, it's time for Mr. Smith to go to Washington? Yes, we do. We have a lot of fine and noble human beings who step up to serve. But for the most part, the people in charge are people who crave power and I will fight you in the street defending that.

Because look at the scope of human history, not just recent human history. What do people who crave power do with power? What do they do? They consolidate the power and in order to consolidate their power, they have to exploit and oppress. They have to exploit resources and people. They have to silence dissent. And they have to make cold, hard calculations in service of that power.

And that's when people die. And that's where tyranny comes from, because eventually that craving for power and dominion leads to tyrannical use of power. And we've been accelerating that process in the modern world because we no longer have just like sticks and stones and swords and bullets. Now we have these. You heard one of the scientists describe the hydrogen bomb as like a small sun in terms of its power.

Now we've got our weapons are more powerful and our rhetoric is more extreme. And so we're we're more vulnerable than we've ever been. The show begins. This episode began with that stone, that ancient stone tablet from Assyria. And what were the ancient Assyrians bitching about? Oh, kids are just these kids are just so nobody wants to work.

Everybody just wants to write a book and be famous. I mean, it's almost hilarious. Right, because that's what we are as a species and we need to just own that, just name it and claim it and move on from it. But we're in trouble. We are in so much trouble right now. And this whole episode began with me going, well, who the hell gets to decide how close we are to annihilation?

And once I found all that out, then I was really in a cold sweat. Do you remember we had Seth Shostak on who works for the SETI Institute? He he said something very interesting in the interview we had. He said, I'm I'm spitballing here. So I don't remember exactly what he said. He said, even if all the nuclear devices went off, it would not annihilate the whole world.

I think he said it would only annihilate like two thirds or something. Yeah, a third of us would survive, a third of us would survive. So there was, I don't know, at least a little hope in that, that should it come to that, should should that be the situation, then a third of the population would be able to continue on and say, let's not repeat this mistake, hopefully.

And yet one thing that we know from history is is that human beings keep, you know, we keep repeating the pattern because we have to acknowledge what we are, the kind of animal that we are. And and that there's something inside us that is both innately cooperative and innately power craving and that finding that balance.

And we we've imposed all of these external things to try to keep us in line, religion being a great example of social control, like, hey, hey, hey, I know you can blow each other off the map, but don't because that would be bad. And that's the same thing. God doesn't like that. And thank God for it. Right. That we have some something that we can convince people with.

The the thing that. Like. What scares me about where we are in this moment right now is we and I think, again, this is like superhuman nature, we're so overwhelmed by the perils and the threats and the we're constantly bombarded with information and right now a lot of it is just super bad, super bad news, right? Like if you're a person with heavy student debt, so relatable, you probably not sleeping at night, for example.

I have no 401k left. Right. I'm a little anxious about that. They're I'm worried about, you know, they're they're firing the people that keep our food supply safe. Oh, we have an episode on what the food industry used to be like. And I promise you at the end of that, you're going to be wondering if you can exist on old tubes of chapstick and cotton balls because you're going to want to eat anything.

But anyway, we've got all this stuff flying at us. And at the exact moment that we need to forcefully push back, as the as the atomic scientists said, forcefully push back and demand, hold our leaders accountable and demand that steps be taken to improve our chances of peace and prosperity at the exact moment when that is needed the most, we are digging our heads deeper into the sand because we're so scared and so tired.

So that's what freaks me out. Should I go ahead and get that three month supply of food that will last for twenty five years? Now, I see that food and they say it's delicious, but I'm looking at it closely and I think it's going to be difficult to me to maintain my low carb diet. Oh, yeah, it's very carby. That freeze dried rice and stroganoff and they show people eating it.

And they all smile like this is delicious. It doesn't look delicious. So I'm I'm just going to get some canned soup and hope that that'll tide me over should a nuclear annihilation happen. So, I mean, obviously, as someone who has been like way interested in this for my life, like really, since I was a kid, I've been super interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War and World War Two.

And I guess part of it was growing up in a military family, Navy. Part of it is my brother, my older brother's fascination with it. And for most of my life, I've thought about survival and people that I've talked to about this who share these interests have also thought about survival and for a long time in America, the whole country was thinking about survival. If you haven't listened to our episode called The Bunker, that would be a fun one to check out.

Yeah, it's really good episode. There were you know, the government was putting bunkers in public places. People were putting them in their backyards. It was all charade, right? It was all a hopeless charade. But we had the impetus to hope that in the face of annihilation that we could somehow prevail, right? Well, talk to people now, and this is what this is what gives me the middle of the night existential zoomies.

I talk to people now and they say things like, well, I don't want to survive. If something bad is coming, I hope I hope I hope it hits me instantly. I I don't want to be here afterward. That's new. That's the idea of I don't want to survive. Yeah, I don't want to survive. It's the opposite of the people were scared, like Cuban Missile Crisis.

Right. People were scared, but they believed that there was a even in the even in the face of pending apocalypse, that there was something worth surviving for, that there were these ideals and values that you were willing to defend, even if it meant living in a hole in the ground for some period of time and emerging into a smoking hellscape that you would then spend the rest of your short life trying to rebuild.

People still had a vision for the future. And now people that I talk to and things I see online, I'm constantly like reading people's posts and sub stacks and Reddit and comments. And there's a real. A vibe now of, oh, no, I want to I'm going to pour a glass of really good bourbon and I'm going to sit on my deck and I'm going to watch the world burn.

And then I'm going to be gone. And that scares me as much as any of these weapons ever could. Talk me out of it. Tell me you're seeing something different. You know, I mean, all I can think about is that high carb food, but I think I have I'm usually optimistic about people and our abilities to overcome certain things as human beings for our own self-preservation.

So I I always had this belief that. We will we will win out with some kind of understanding that we need to be able to live in peace in some kind of way. And I know that that seems awfully optimistic, but I believe that there there is that possibility. I do believe that we can see that. And I if I I can't live in the dread every day, I can't, because my feeling is I have the work that I have to do in front of me.

I mean, I have the you know, I'm a voting person. I vote, you know, and I vote for what I think is the right thing to do. And and I hope that that's going to make some kind of a difference. It's the only power that I really have in that situation. And then I try to do the work that's in front of me and say, I, yeah, I know this is hanging over our heads, but at the same time, I'm going to be able to see what kind of peace and joy that I can find in this world with what's right in front of me and the things that I'm supposed to do today.

And I love that. And I think that's probably the healthiest way to be. So let me say so, like, I'm a social worker who firmly believes that even though you can't save everyone, you save as many as you can and you hope that that makes a difference. Right. It's the parable of the starfish, you know, the parable of the starfish, this person's walking along the beach and it's littered with thousands and thousands of dead starfish that have been cast onto the sand after a storm.

And as this person is walking down the beach, they're picking up a starfish and throwing it back into the ocean. One after the next, after the next. And a passerby says, what are you doing? Why even bother? Look at all these starfish. You're never going to save them all. It doesn't matter what you're doing. The person picks up another starfish and flings it into the sea and says matters to this one.

So that is that kind of I've always loved that because it really sort of encapsulates my view of the world, like you're not going to save everyone. Of course you're not. But you could maybe save this one. And who knows what may happen as a result of that. So hear me out. So, you know, for all this time, I'm going around one person at a time and saying, listen, listen, listen.

I know that you think that the enemy might be the person next to you in the bathroom stall. You don't think that woman next to you in the Target bathroom stall is a real woman. You don't think she's feminine enough. First of all, like, my God, that's so insane. Mind your business. But second of all, that woman who's peeing next to you is not your enemy or your problem.

We have a bigger problem in the world and we have to we have to see it together. We have to work together for the good of ourselves and our families and our children and our communities. And if we can join together and not be distracted by that bullshit, maybe we can make a difference. And every time I tried that, people would would say to me, cry harder, lived hard, and it made me crazy because I'm like, let me finish.

I'm like, I am not I'm not I don't give a damn what you I don't care about any of that as a as a species, we're in trouble. We have got to see each other as brothers and sisters, not as the enemy. Well, that got exhausting. And so here we are. Now, I can't go door to door and beg you to give a shit about the future of your species.

But here is the explanation of what the doomsday clock is. And maybe that maybe knowing that will have you going, wait a minute. If even Einstein was like, girl, you got to get your act right. Yeah, I got to be changing my thinking a little bit. So this an episode like this is me trying to pick up more than one starfish at a time, fling them into the water.

And, you know, and sometimes if you're throwing the starfish into the water, other people will see that and that example will make them think, yeah, I can do this, too. And then you've got two people, then 20 people. And then, you know, I was just up in western North Carolina where they had such devastation from the hurricanes.

And I was up in in Hot Springs, which was one of the hardest hit places. Eighty five percent of the businesses downtown were wiped out. They rely very heavily on tourism and it just absolutely decimated the economy and these businesses. And I have followed about three or four of those businesses online. And one of the amazing things is as the waters receded, how people reached out to one another, people who didn't know each other, people who had vacationed there, had some spare time, went and volunteered there and the way that they pulled together.

It was so heartening to see that. And it was human beings at their absolute best, understanding the enormity of the disaster, then linking hands together, saying, how can we support one another to try to get through this? It has been one of the. One of the most heartening things that I have seen in the last six months and in a visit up there, and I got to see some people and got to see them in action doing some of this stuff.

I mean, oh, my God, it just you cannot help but be overcome and inspired. When you see crowds splintered into individuals, that's what you're talking about. The crowd is like, well, you shouldn't you should have prepared for a hurricane. But the individual is like, can I help you replace that broken window? Does your family need food?

The crowd, the mob mentality, the crowd mentality is the danger. And the problem that we have now, the challenge that we have now is the Internet and social media, which should be and could be such a ground force for community building is instead of big, loud crowd. It's just an angry mob. It's it's only when you can break that crowd down into individual people that you have.

Any chance at all, and if I didn't have some faith in humanity, like why even bother, like why even bother sitting down and having people yell at me if I didn't believe that there was a fighting chance? Why am I taking your abuse, Brian? Like, come on, we we really can do this and we really can do better. But we can't do it as a mob.

One of the things that was on my mind a lot when I was writing this one, Max, were all the threads I'd seen. I had to like, I don't know, nine months ago, I deleted and deactivated my Twitter because I was afraid. I was afraid that the the Nazi was it was going to be contagious. Like I just could not my it was breaking my heart to see my fellow human beings be so disgusting.

And I couldn't I couldn't live in the world thinking that my fellow human beings were this awful. So I got off Twitter. But before I deactivated my Twitter. There was I was in a bunch of threads about survivable nuclear war. And one of the things that broke my heart and scared the bejeebers out of me was that that these people that who were posting these things think that what they're talking about is real and there's no such thing.

There's no such thing. You don't you don't have any idea what it would mean to have a even a small nuclear weapon detonated in your city, what that would mean for you today and going forward for generations, people have no concept of how annihilating these weapons are and they've proliferated. And now every other clown has one.

I mean, we don't even know what the nuclear capabilities of some of the bad actors on the global stage are. So if you're on social media yammering about survivable nuclear war and you think that maybe we should drop a nuke on a blue state, you know, and that should that should deal with the demonic Dems or the libs or whatever it is you're ranting about.

I. Folks, we're we're way down the way down the road of being unsavable when we don't understand these basic concepts, you won't survive it. And you know what? You won't want to. That's the other thing you really won't want to when you actually look at what happened when they dropped those bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When you look at what happened to the men on that Japanese fishing boat. You probably do want to pour a bourbon and go out in the first blast. And so we can't turn away from it. It's depressing. I just want to choose joy. Why are you so obsessed with politics? You can't turn away from your own potential annihilation. Don't you want to at least take a swing at changing course?

Don't you? I do. Because denial, my love, is not not it. Denial is not going to get it done. And I was, you know, at the end of this episode, I was like, Satan, get me to a vampire story, which is what we have coming up for you on the day. A vampire story. Vampire story. But here's the thing about that, y'all, y'all, y'all dig one, just go one layer down from what you learned in school.

Just one tiny layer. Just turn the page because what they didn't teach you in school will blow what's left of your mind and it's a vampire story. Next week's weird stuff. So now when you when you're casually like cruising along in your newsfeed and doomsday clock has been set to one minute to midnight, now you'll know what that what that means and that that's not just some like clickbait.

Like that's a thing. That's a real thing based on real, real things, real stuff. Yeah, that's why we call it true weird stuff. Yeah, that's why that's why I don't get invited to many parties. You think I don't want to be like the other girls? You think I don't want to be like, oh, my God, this mascara. You think I don't want that? Of course I do.

You think I don't want to put a little bow tie on my cat and sing him a song? Of course I do. It's just, you know, reality and whatnot. All right. So on that cheerful note, did we miss anything? Is there anything else that we feel like we need to cover in this one? No, I think we hit it all. I think we hit it all. Yeah.

And does it does it piss you off at how much of this you weren't taught that you didn't know? Does it piss you off that you didn't know that one of the islands in the Marshall Islands melted and vanished into the sea from the strength of that Castle Bravo test? Did you catch that, by the way? Yeah, it pisses me off that I didn't that I didn't explore this more.

Not that I wasn't taught this more that I didn't go and try to find this kind of information. I mean, that's I was up shocked and appalled. Can you imagine the lawsuits today? Oh, you you couldn't today. I mean, they're still doing these tests, not like Castle Bravo, but so the Soviet bomb I had to I mean, I couldn't put it in this episode or it would have been the winds of war would have been so long.

Oh, that is such a Gen X reference, girl. The Zee's mouth is like that. I got it, Sherry. Girl, with your after school special, your Trapper Keeper, what? Um, so the the Soviet hydrogen bomb was called the Bomb Tsarina, like the Tsar, the Russian Tsar, this was the Bomb Tsarina. That bitch. Swallowed the world. We I mean, we could have done a whole episode just on the hydrogen bomb, your worst nightmare.

We're not the only ones that have these capabilities. And we're we have no control over what the other kids are doing with their toys. Just remember that zero. So while you're worried about who's peeing in the stall next to you, your betters who have power and dominion and control, they're playing a whole different game and it ain't four dimensional chess.

It's a game called Risk and they are playing on the world stage. They are playing with countries and land masses and populations. And when the game is risk, you're not so worried about the individual players on the board. That's Candyland and you're a grown up now. OK, you're you're a grown up and you're playing risk and that is that is the world that we're living in.

But no worries. We're going to escape it next week when we head into the wilds, the wilds of Louisiana before Louisiana was a state in the union. And we meet New Orleans first vampires. Thank you so much for listening to True Weird Stuff. We'll see you next week. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner.

And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff, hit our website, True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content, everything true weird is waiting for you at True Weird Stuff dot com and follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram.

True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Slade Nash. Copyright 2025. Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.