Starfish Prime, part of Fishbowl within Operation Dominic I, detonated a 1.4-megaton W49 at 400 kilometers over Johnston Atoll. In Hawaii, 1,400 kilometers away: roughly 300 streetlights out, burglar alarms triggered, telephone relays damaged. The blast injected a surge of energetic electrons into the magnetosphere, creating an artificial radiation belt stronger than the natural Van Allen belt, which destroyed or crippled about a third of the two dozen satellites then in orbit, Telstar 1, launched a day later, took 100 times its expected dose. The belt persisted for years; some effects lasted a decade. The political sequel: the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty banned nuclear tests in space.
Flat earth and dome communities adopted Fishbowl as the smoking gun, the tests were attempts to breach the firmament, per the name itself: fishbowl. The actual naming is mundane, test series drew code names from lists, and the physics is documented at length, but the reading persists because the event's real strangeness, nuking the sky, cracking the orbital environment, auroras at the equator, sounds like scripture no matter how the reports phrase it.
The claim: the fastest arms-control agreement in Cold War history, signed thirteen months after Starfish, is the two superpowers' joint admission that they had accidentally discovered a weapon neither could survive using, and EMP hardening, not disarmament, was the real program that followed. Verdict: the timeline supports it, and the current era of satellite dependence makes Fishbowl less history than preview. They tested a hole in the sky in 1962. Everything since has been learning to live next to it.
If they poisoned the orbit for a decade in one shot, what did the classified failures do?