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Time to chat about Cold War jet tech, unfortunately it didn't involve

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pilots having aerial snowball fights though guys does sound kind of fun. When [Two fighter jets chucking snowballs at each other]

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we say the Cold War we're talking about the decades after World War II which

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involved America and Russia staring at each other with shifty eyes and angrily [America and Russia on pages of a book looking at each other]

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amassing lots of new weapons. Well neither country wanted to make the first

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move and not in a lovably shy romantic comedy kind of way more like if we have [Stalin and Truman having a stand off]

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an all-out war we might destroy the planet kind of way. All right well since

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neither country would make the first move they played out their aggression in

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the realm of tech, this included building massive nuclear arsenals and continually [Many nuclear bombs appearing]

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upgrading fighter jets and bombers. Jets got faster and bigger and they played

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major roles in the Korean and Vietnam wars but one of their more notable roles [Fightrer jet flying around Vietnam on a map]

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yep dumping Agent Orange on Vietnam. And despite some conspiracy theories Agent

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Orange was not a genetically mutated orange turned secret agent Agent Orange [Orange with a hat on ordering a drink at a bar]

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was actually a powerful chemical cocktail that we dumped on Vietnam in

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order to kill off the jungle foliage in which the enemy liked to hide [Plane drops agent orange and the forest disappears]

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Well later we found out it caused other joys like birth defects, rashes,

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psychological problems, tumors and all kinds of cancer. Yeah we would have

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preferred a suave debonair Orange too. But enough rehashing the good old days let's [Kid in class looks surpised]

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check out one of the newer developments in flight technology the invention and

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use of unmanned drones in war yep they're good for more than just spying on our

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neighbors in their backyards and note that we never ever do that the biggest [Photo of man stood by his swimming pool looking up at the drone]

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benefit of drones is that they can fly anywhere and bomb anything without

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needing a human pilot on board. Prior to the first unmanned plane the US military [Scientist about to throw a paper plane]

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had tried some unorthodox ideas for example in World War II we strapped

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itty bitty bombs to bats, because the idea was that we released them on Japan

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and let the bats roost in people's attics and start fires...So by comparison

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the idea of flying a plane without a pilot seems remarkably [Fighter jet in the sky]

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sane well remote control airplanes had been

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used for surveillance for years by both the military and annoying kids planning

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mischief, but it wasn't until the 1990s that the first truly modern drone was

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built the mq-1b predator it had a 50 foot wingspan and a limited ability to [Picture of the MQ-1B predator drone]

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fire on enemy targets, unsurprisingly the next generation of drones got way way

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deadlier they were called Reapers, lovingly named after a Mr Death himself.

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All right well Reapers are enormous lethal machines that can be operated [Hand holding a controller and the drone in the sky]

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from thousands of miles away, from 2004 to 2007 there were a total of 13 drone

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strikes in the world that we know of in 2010 alone there were 122. Well keep

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going like this and the Reaper will have the Grim Reaper working overtime. [Grim Reaper flying an old fighter plane]

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