Ed Helms

But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary.

Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast.

I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life.

And that's a unicorn.

No one had ever seen anything like that.

It was unbelievable.

Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So the EMP waxing the power grid was bad enough, but the long-term effects were worse.

So the military had made sure that all the satellites orbiting Earth in 1962 were safely out of range of the blast.

So we're good, right?

Well, no, not quite.

Because not only was the initial EMP blast way larger than expected—I love that, by the way.

They just didn't know how big—

The explosion would be.

The detonation also launched high energy particles into Earth's magnetic field.

It created an artificial radiation belt that spread out from the spot we nuked, and it definitely was not harmless.

It became a wave of radiation that caused extensive damage to satellites, American, Canadian, British, and even one Russian satellite, including the first ever satellite to broadcast a TV signal, Telstar-1.

So that satellite's run-in with the new Starfish radiation belt made it just the first victim.

The charged particles lasted in our atmosphere for at least 10 years, zapping satellites that passed through it and damaging fully a third of all satellites around the Earth in 1962.

I was not familiar with this story before a few months ago and was floored by this.