Imagine waking up to find the map of the world redrawn overnight, not by a treaty or a coup, but by a storm. The 1970 Bhola cyclone killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people in a matter of hours, making it the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded.

This episode unpacks how a Category 4 storm slammed into the low-lying Ganges Delta of East Pakistan, and how political neglect, a broken warning system, and a callous relief response turned a natural disaster into a political earthquake that gave birth to Bangladesh. We follow the chain from storm surge to liberation war to the global humanitarian response it inspired.

• How partition left East Pakistan a thousand miles from the capital, marginalized and dangerously exposed in a flat coastal funnel
• The fatal communication failure where a maritime great danger signal ...