Part 2/14:
Mer kicked off with some intriguing facts about 1961. That year marked the dawn of the space age, with Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to orbit Earth, a feat humorously exaggerated as “a giant slingshot with rubber bands.” Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions intensified with East Germany building the Berlin Wall to stem the flow of refugees. The Vietnam War escalated as the US sent troops into South Vietnam, and the Soviet Union detonated the ZAR bomb—an unfathomably powerful nuclear weapon, described as capable of wreaking havoc on a planetary scale, though scaled back for radioactive fallout concerns.