This date in history

[Jimbuna]

1917 German plan to get Mexican help in WW I exposed (Zimmerman telegram).

1923 Flying Scotsman goes into service.

1942 The "Battle of Los Angeles" takes place, a series of anti-aircraft engagements over the city in response to a rumored but false Japanese attack. It would last until the morning of the following day.

1981 Britain's Prince Charles announces engagement to Lady Diana Spencer.

1991 US-led forces begin Operation Desert Sabre, the ground invasion of southern Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait.

[Jimbuna]

1916 Battle of Verdun: German troops conquer Fort Douaumont without firing a shot, the largest and highest fort defending the city of Verdun during World War I

1932 Austrian immigrant Adolf Hitler gets German citizenship.

1933 First genuine US aircraft carrier named, USS Ranger.

1945 US aircraft carriers attack Tokyo.

1991 US, barracks in Dhahran Saudi Arabia, hit by scud missile, kills 28

[Aktungbby]

1836 : Samuel Colt patents the revolver...and I'm still packin' the Colt's PyThon .357 and two blackpowder Colt's Navy .36's as required!

[Jimbuna]

1815 Napoleon Bonaparte and his supporters leave Elba to start a 100 day re-conquest of France.

1914 HMHS Britannic, sister to the Titanic, is launched at Harland & Wolff, Belfast.

1916 Germans sink French transport ship Provence II, killing 930

1924 Trial against Hitler for treason in "Beer Hall Putsch" in Munich begins.

1935 German Luftwaffe is re-formed under Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering.

1935 RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging) first demonstrated by Robert Watson-Watt.

1952 PM Winston Churchill announces Britain has its own atomic bomb.

1991 Coalition planes bomb Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait during the Gulf War, killing hundreds and creating the so-called 'Highway of Death'

[Aktungbby]

1929: President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill establishing Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming consdering current political correctness: MeeToo movements, the recent conviction of producer Harvey Weinstein etc. it boggles my mind that a mountain range and a national park are still called ... the big tits !!? even if it's in French...

[Jimbuna]

1925 Hitler resurrects NSDAP political party in Munich.

1933 The Reichstag, German parliament building, destroyed by fire; set by the Nazis, who blame it on Communists.

1942 Battle of Java Sea began: 13 US warships sunk and 2 Japanese.

1990 Final day of the rum ration in the Royal New Zealand Navy.

1998 Britain's House of Lords agrees to end 1,000 years of male precedence by giving a monarch's first-born daughter the same claim to the throne as any first born son.

2012 Wikileaks begins disclosing 5 million emails from private intelligence company Stratfor.

[Jimbuna]

1844 12-inch gun aboard USS Princeton explodes, killing Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, and other high-ranking U.S. federal officials.

1915 WWI: After the French try to drive the Germans forces back into the Champagne region, they gain a few hundred yards - at the cost of 50,000 casualties.

1933 Adolf Hitler bans German Communist Party (KPD)

1967 A West German court rules that impostor Anna Anderson failed to prove that she was missing Russian duchess Anastasia Romanov, ending a legal case that lasted almost 30 years.

1971 A British soldier dies in Derry after his vehicle had been attacked with petrol bombs (he died as a result of inhaling chemicals from fire extinguishers that were used to put out the fire).

[Aktungbby]

1993: A gun battle erupts at a religious compound near Waco Texas when the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms tries to arrest Branch Davidian leader David Koresh on weapon charges: four agents and six Davidians are killed as a 51 day standoff ensues...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

David Koresh's lawyer called the Danforth report a whitewash. Ramsey Clark—a former U.S. Attorney General, who represented several Branch Davidian survivors and relatives in a civil lawsuit—said that the report "failed to address the obvious": "History will clearly record, I believe, that these assaults on the Mt. Carmel church center remain the greatest domestic law enforcement tragedy in the history of the United States."

[Jimbuna]

1944 Karol Wojtyla, future Pope John Paul II, is run down and injured by a Nazi truck in Krakow.

1964 LBJ reveals US secretly developed the A-11 jet fighter.

1968 US end regular flights with nuclear bombs.

[Jimbuna]

1913 David Beatty becomes Rear-Admiral Commanding the Royal Navy's 1st Battlecruiser Squadron.

1916 Germany begins attacking ships in the Atlantic.

1917 US government releases the plain text of the "Zimmermann Telegram" to the public.

1941 Himmler inspects Auschwitz concentration camp.

1954 US explodes Castle Bravo, a 15 megaton hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, which accidentally became the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the US.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1954 US explodes Castle Bravo, a 15 megaton hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, which accidentally became the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the US.

But even worse, it was a surface burst in a coral reef, which is just a really, really bad idea. Detonating nuclear weapons on a desert floor, like in Nevada, still presents significant fallout issues. But a coral reef is really an awful place to set them off, and not just because coral reefs are awesome and shouldn’t be blown up. They are an ideal medium for creating and spreading contamination: they break apart with no resistance, but do so in big enough chunks that they rapidly fall back to Earth. Particle size is a big deal when it comes to fallout; small particles go up with the fireball and stay aloft long enough to lose most of their radioactive energy and diffuse into the atmosphere, while heavy particles fall right back down again pretty quickly, en masse. So blowing up and irradiating something like coral is just the worst possible thing. And, of course, it became famous for raining nuclear fallout down on inhabited islands over a hundred miles downwind, and exposing a crew of Japanese fishermen to fatal levels of radiation.
It was this latter event that made BRAVO famous — so famous that the United States had to admit publicly it had a hydrogen bomb. And accidentally exposing the Japanese fishing supply to radiation, less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has a way of making the Japanese people understandably upset. So the shot led to some almost frank discussion about what fallout meant — that being out of the direct line of fire wasn’t actually good enough.

A BAD BUSINESS ALL ROUND AS THE FALLOUT EXCEEDED EXPECTATION BY 250%:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons of TNT, 2.5 times the predicted 6.0 megatons, due to unforeseen additional reactions involving 7Li, which led to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to the east of Bikini Atoll. At the time, it was the most powerful artificial explosion in history.
Fallout, the most heavy of which in the form of pulverized surface coral from the detonation fell on residents of Rongelap and Utirik atolls, while the more particulate and gaseous fallout spread around the world. The inhabitants of the islands were not evacuated until three days later and suffered radiation sickness. Twenty-three crew members of the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryū Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5") were also contaminated by the heavy fallout, experiencing acute radiation syndrome. The blast incited international reaction over atmospheric thermonuclear testing

IN A NUTSHELL:

 

the yield of 15 megatons was 3 times that of the 5 Mt predicted by its designers. The cause of the higher yield was an error made by designers of the device at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They considered only the lithium-6 isotope in the lithium-deuteride secondary to be reactive; the lithium-7 isotope, accounting for 60% of the lithium content, was assumed to be inert..It was expected that the lithium-6 isotope would absorb a neutron from the fissioning plutonium and emit an alpha particle and tritium in the process, of which the latter would then fuse with the deuterium and increase the yield in a predicted manner. Lithium-6 indeed reacted in this manner.
It was assumed that the lithium-7 would absorb one neutron, producing lithium-8, which decays (through beryllium-8) to a pair of alpha particles on a timescale of seconds, vastly longer than the timescale of nuclear detonation. When lithium-7 is bombarded with energetic neutrons, rather than simply absorbing a neutron, it captures the neutron and decays almost instantly into an alpha particle, a tritium nucleus, and another neutron. As a result, much more tritium was produced than expected, the extra tritium fusing with deuterium and producing an extra neutron. The extra neutron produced by fusion and the extra neutron released directly by lithium-7 decay produced a much larger neutron flux. The result was greatly increased fissioning of the uranium tamper and increased yield....

BUT THEY SURE LOOK PRETTY
< AN ABJECT LESSON HOW TO CRAP IN OUR OWN (CORAL) SANDBOX 101...LITERALLY

Before testing began, the 167 Marshallese people who lived on Bikini were relocated to other islands. The U.S. military used the Marshall Islands to test nuclear weapons from 1946 to 1958.

Today, a handful of caretakers live on Bikini. Most do field work for the U.S. government, including sampling the soil, plants, water, and marine life around the island. Many people from the Bikini Atoll are still hoping to return to their homeland, although tests indicate that the amount of radiation present in the island's food web could be harmful to them. The type of radiation detected at Bikini (cesium-137) has been linked to an increased risk for several types of cancer.

[Jimbuna]

1796 Napoléon Bonaparte is appointed Commander-in-Chief of the French Army in Italy.

1882 Queen Victoria narrowly escapes assassination when Roderick Maclean shoots at her while boarding a train in Windsor.

1915 British vice admiral Sackville Hamilton Carden begins bombardment of Dardanelles forts.

1965 One of the most popular musical films of all time, "The Sound of Music", starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, is released (Academy Awards Best Picture 1966)

1965 US Air Force begins Operation Rolling Thunder, a three year sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

1966 215,000 US soldiers in Vietnam.

1968 USAF displays Lockheed C-5A Galaxy, biggest plane in the world, with a cargo compartment 37m long.

1969 First test flight of the supersonic Concorde.

1991 UN votes in favor of US resolutions for cease fire with Iraq.

1991 US Army controversially destroys a retreating Iraqi Republican Guard column at Rumaila Oil Field, despite a ceasefire being observed.

[Aktungbby]

1962: Wilt Chamberlain (Wilt the Stilt!)scores 100 points for the Phildelphia Warriors in a game against the New York Knicks, an NBA record that still stands! Considering there were no 'threepointers' in them-thar days, a most remarkable feat. Final score: 169 to 147; Philly won the shootout! MOVE OVER MICHAEL JORDAN

[Jimbuna]

1917 German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann publicly admits the "Zimmermann Telegram" is genuine. Generates support for the US declaration of war on Germany in April.

1942 First combat flight for Canadian British-built Avro Lancaster bomber.

1945 RAF bombing error hits The Hague killing 511

1991 Iraqi generals and US general "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf meet to discuss Gulf War cease fire.

[Jimbuna]

1918 First recorded case of Spanish flu at Funston Army Camp, Kanas; start of worldwide pandemic killing 50-100 million.

1936 First flight of the airship Hindenburg at Friedrichshafen, Germany.

1944 First US bombing of Berlin.

1945 In the United Kingdom, Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, joins the British Auxiliary Transport Service as a driver.

1985 WWII veterans returned to the "Bridge over the River Kwai"

2012 Vladimir Putin wins Russian presidential election amid allegations of voter fraud.

2018 Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal are poisoned by nerve agent in Salisbury, England.