On March 1, 1954, the U.S. military detonated a thermonuclear weapon with power that was such a mystery that scientists took bets on whether it would ignite the earth’s atmosphere.
The atmosphere didn’t catch on fire, but the historically powerful blast was nearly three times larger than expected, with its mushroom cloud reaching higher than the height that commercial airliners fly. If detonated in Washington, it’s estimated that the entire population of the region would have died, with millions of additional deaths soon following from radiation poisoning extending to the borders of Canada.
