It was rumored that during the Cold War, American National Park Yellowstone was on the list of "first strike" points. In other words, a seemingly harmless corner of nature was under the gun of Soviet intercontinental missiles, along with US military bases, missile silos and command posts.
Again, these Russians …
Well, the Pentagon, underground command posts and airfields with strategic bombers - we understand that. In the event of a military conflict, these objects always fall under the attack of the enemy first. But what is Yellowstone's fault? Why did the Soviet generals dislike him so much?
The answer is actually simple. The Soviet generals really liked the American national park. I liked it because, in the opinion of Soviet scientists, it was enough to “bang” a rocket to a certain place in the park once, in order to result in such a global cataclysm in the US, which even hundreds of nuclear warheads cannot create. It is believed that American scientists with their Soviet colleagues fully agreed on this issue. In any case, they did not stop observing the caldera located under Yellowstone for a minute.
Magma cauldron
What is a caldera? Imagine a huge oval cauldron, 55 kilometers by 72 kilometers, turned upside down. This cauldron is located under a volcano and is filled to the brim with boiling magma. The bottom of the boiler is very thin and can break through at any moment. And if this happens, then against the background of the eruption of Yellowstone, the death of Pompeii will look like a rather tragic, but still a special case. Something like a burned-out bath in a summer cottage.
The Cold War of 1946-1991 is over, and Russian warheads (perhaps) no longer gaze bloodthirsty at the national park's caldera. However, Yellowstone's problems did not end there. American scientists are sounding the alarm - the eruption can begin at any moment and the victims will be innumerable!
Promotional video:
Great Falls
In April this year, a resident of the town of Great Falls, located in Montana, about 300 kilometers from the famous park, filmed an unusual sight on video. A convoy of trucks, which included a transport called Payload Transporter III, an auxiliary engineering truck for transporting, installing and maintaining Minuteman warheads, passed through the town at full speed. Nuclear, note, warheads.
In the United States, federal highways are allocated for the transport of such goods. None of these trails go through Great Falls. So what are the nuclear weapons doing in the immediate vicinity of Yellowstone?
The most recent data show that the pressure on the dome is growing, and the US government may have decided to sacrifice the park by conducting a series of controlled explosions, that is, to "burn" the nuclear charges themselves, thus relieving the excess pressure under the dome. Of course, this will be a disaster (nuclear, note), but in this case it is better to sacrifice a little, having previously evacuated everyone, may suffer, than to sit and wait for the supervolcano to wake up and begin to destroy everything around.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century, Igor Nikitin