Ed Helms

On July 9th at exactly 11 p.m.,

A Thor intermediate range ballistic missile carrying a 1.4 megaton W49 thermonuclear warhead launched from Johnston Atoll, a remote island in the Pacific.

It climbed 250 miles into space and then detonated successfully.

Now, that's the same altitude as the orbit of the International Space Station, which I didn't exist at the time.

I'm just telling you for a sort of like a comparison.

But they were just firing wildly into the sky.

And there's kind of are.

But yeah, true.

For comparison, airplanes only fly as high as six or eight miles into the atmosphere.

We're talking 250 miles up here.

So there was no mushroom cloud.

There's no shockwave.

Just a burst of light so bright it could be seen 870 miles away in Hawaii.

So they're not even close to Hawaii.

They are almost 1,000 miles from Hawaii.

And yes, the expectant crowds were watching the sky.

And they got...

A heck of a show.

One newspaper said after the first blinding flash, the spot was haloed in greenish-yellow light, which spread out, turning pink and then deep red.

What followed was a swirling, glowing bubble of plasma that distorted the Earth's magnetic field and carved a temporary cavity in the ionosphere.