Starfish Prime

2 posts

Thanks, Reddit

An old post of mine suddenly got a great deal of traffic the last couple of days. I’d recorded a piece called Starfish Prime a couple of years back, and in the accompanying blurb, I did a small bit of explanation on the name.

As it turns out, this week was the 50th anniversary of the event for which it was named. A Reddit user linked my article as an informative source, which it really isn’t. For the story of the weird experiment our government did involving detonating nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere, there’s a good article from Scientific American here.

Sometimes history is stranger than fiction.

Starfish Prime

On 07/09/1962, the government detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead 250 miles above Johnson Island. Dubbed Starfish Prime, the experiment released an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that fused power lines and disrupted electrical and communications systems over a 1500-mile radius.

According to observer Cecil R. Coale,

“Then a brilliant white flash erased the darkness like a photoflash. Then the entire sky turned light green for about a second. In several more seconds, a deep red aurora, several moon diameters in size, formed where the blast had been. A white plasma jet came slowly out of the top of the red aurora (over Johnston Island) and painted a white stripe across the sky from north to south in about one minute. A deep red aurora appeared over Samoa at the south end of the white plasma jet. This visual display lasted for perhaps ten minutes before slowly fading. There was no sound at all.

Continued...