In the middle of the Cold War, when nuclear weapons testing pushed science to its most extreme limits, one experiment may have accidentally launched the fastest object humanity has ever created. During a secret underground test known as Pascal-B, a 60-pound steel cap was welded onto the top of a deep test shaft. When the nuclear device detonated below, a high-speed camera captured the cap in a single frame—just one thousandth of a second—before it vanished forever.

Did the blast vaporize it instantly? Or did the explosion accelerate the steel plate to unimaginable speeds—possibly faster than Earth’s escape velocity—sending it briefly into space?

Decades later, even the scientists involved couldn’t say for sure. With only a single frame of film and a lot of physics to debate, Pascal-B remains one of the strangest mysteries of the Cold War: a moment when nuclear science, curiosity, and raw explosive force may have launched an object faster than anything in human history… and lost it in the process.

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