Okay. So this is the explosion of Apple to, a 29 kiloton nuclear bomb.
"Our families and our nation in the nuclear age."
Part of operation Teapot, the series of 14 nuclear tests conducted in 1955 at the Nevada
National Security Site, an area that has the natural beauty of a rhinoceros's leg. And
you can guess that they tested structural strength, and the integrity of photo stations,
and thermal radiation protection. I went to an empty mall parking lot to see
the historic remnants of another thing that they tested: the mannequins. Why did they
stock the test site with mannequins wearing clothes from JC Penny?
"I looked at the mannequin sitting about so indifferently."
They were stock mannequins made by a company called LA Darling, mannequins that were blown
up, tumbled, covered, and scorched. It explains a lot about nukes and the fifties,
a lot about the Cold War, and maybe even a little about us today.
"Operation Cue." No, no, no, no.
This is not where we start. With new testing programss, you get this weird little dividing
line. Parking lot Phil, take it away. Lemme show you.
There's the civil side and the military side. On this side, you've got the bombs, the tests,
the war capability. On this side, you have the newsreels, education, and the mannequins.
So they are connected, but also separate. The Apple II test, this boom, is part of Operation
Teapot, which are all these special weapons tests done at the Nevada Test Site in 1955.
It's 65 miles North of Las Vegas, 1,360 square miles in the middle of nowhere. And in this
operation, they did more than 40 test series here.
So basically just a ton of tests. These are all relatively small compared to
later detonations, but they were huge on a human scale. The thing that made the Apple
II tests unique wasn't that it was just a test of a bomb. It was a test of the response
to the bomb. The other side of that parking lot line, this was run by the Federal Civil
Defense Administration. The FCDA was a sprawling government agency
responsible for coordinating the home response. All those atomic newsreels you see, the voiceover
so stolid that you can feel the square jaw: "the explosive power of atomic bombs used
in this test was in the kiloton range." The FCDA - they supplied the paranoia in Cold
War paranoia, and that is why they bothered with the mannequins.
Like most JC Penney's this one is a ghost now, but you can still see some of the fixtures
inside. There's a sign up here. I feel bad for it. I feel bad for JC Penny.
Operation Q was the FCDA's big nuke test. There were six key areas. But the big idea
was to bring a bunch of people from all over the country to watch the bomb go off and then
see how they responded. The idea was to simulate a nuclear attack
and, as importantly, how you recovered from it. In addition to a bunch of testing materials,
they built two houses, a wood, one, and a brick one. You can still see them today. It
is...it's eerie. They were stocked full of food and furniture.
Grandma's Pantry: a supply for a family of four. All this was donated from merchants
across the country, and then they added the mannequins, which wore clothes donated by
JC Penny. "Rows of mannequins were set up in the open
facing the blast." The experiment was prolonged due to high winds
so many times that people started calling it Operation Miscue. Operation Miscue is actually
the joke name that this Nevada showgirl took. Remember, Las Vegas, you know, look at her
headpiece. But eventually the miscue stopped and Operation Cue began
We have testimonies from the humans who saw the blast. Most mentioned the blinding light
and the tremor in their bodies. The mannequins issued no statements. Some survived. Some
had freakish results. Plastic babies huddled while their plastic brothers lay on the floor.
Men who were watching their living room paint dry were suddenly toppled over their coffee
tables. But these mannequin tests, even though they
were surrounded by dosimeters and cloaked in techno jargon, they weren't done for science.
The reason they were done? Just look at the roast beef.
"I particularly remember some roast beef. It was done to perfection and roasted in cans,
which could have been salvaged from demolished buildings."
After the test, everyone lined up and had a delicious meal of post-apocalyptic food.
Is there anything more 1950s then getting excited about your roast beef after the collapse
of civilization? But it is not just kitschy, that they were
super proud of their tomato juice, their roast beef, and their baked beans. You know, the
curly fries are the best part, right? I just want to be clear, the FCDA should have paired
their roast beef work with curly fry manufacturing capabilities. This was a test of post nuclear
food rationing, a dry run for survival after detonation.
The real meaning of this trip was a dynamic you see throughout the 1950s and the Cold
War, the Civil Defense side of the line to make the apocalypse terrifying enough to take
action yet mundane enough to believe that you could survive it. FCDA volunteers were
pulled from all over the country to act out the recovery.
The mannequins were less a diagnostic test of a bomb's effects than a test of recovery
efforts. They knew which mannequins got blown up. And which ones lived. But the post-bomb
recovery was where all the energy went. Each mannequin was recovered and then turned over
to litter bearers of the casualty service after being properly tagged. Trainings for
those disaster recovery services extended to sanitation, engineering, police, rescue,
fire, and communications. But here's the thing. The training was as
important for what happened after Operatoin Cue was over. It continued. Look at this list
of participants in the operation. They are from all over the country. In addition to
the TV show about Cue that a hundred million people saw, this was a way to distribute civil
defense knowledge, or propaganda, depending on how you look at it, around the country.
People came from Portland, Des Moines, Bmidgi. Then they went home and they talked about
what they saw. They became walking billboards for operation Cue. And it worked. Local newspapers
reported on Operation Cue attendees, further distributing the message that a hundred million
people had already seen on TV. The biblical horror of the nuclear apocalypse
was real and it should be planned for like a particularly important PTA meeting.
Companies were just another channel for the same training. The mannequins were nuked to
train the general population on how to deal with a nuclear attack. And yes, the training
included everyone who was at the Nevada test site that day, but also everybody who saw
the mannequins. Now, to be clear, there were weird tests too,
from standard structural testing to stuff like dogs being fed for a year on beef stew
that was stored near the blast zone to see if it was radioactive. Sorry, dogs. Does this
all sound familiar after a year of having our behavior, expectations, and our entire
lives shaped by a public crisis? Do you remember the Michigan doctor?
"My name is Jeffrey VanWingen." This video went viral last year, just when
the Coronavirus pandemic became kind of a real thing. None of us knew what to do. And
so you ended up with a doctor's video going viral as he disinfected his pickles and soaked
his fruit in the sink. "But we should be spending ideally 20 seconds
on each piece of fruit, just washing and scrubbing." We can see the absurdity of nuked mannequins
and radioactive beef stew because we have some distance from it. We tested the nukes
because of geopolitical chess and pushing the scientific envelope. But we nuked the
mannequins because making a plan to count and feed and transport, the public in the
event of war was a real need, but it was also a way to say, "Hey, we know what we're doing.
We're in control here. Right?" I'm gonna finish this sandwich now, because
I didn't want to be eating it during the serious parts of this video. Please like, and subscribe,
I'd be super appreciative. I've put some sources down in the description. And now I'm going
to finish the meal that I started while I still can.