61 years ago today: Those Who Witnessed Castle Bravo Looked Into Armageddon
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/those-who-witnessed-castle-bravo-looked-into-armageddon-fa7610578413The flash from the nuclear explosion was overwhelming, even by the standards of nuclear explosions. Men saw their bones appear as shadows through their living flesh. Streams of blinding light shone through the smallest cracks and pinholes in secured doors and hatches.
Bravo’s thermal radiation was far more intense than expected. More than 30 miles away from Ground Zero on Bikini Atoll, sailors on board Navy ships said the heat was like having a blowtorch applied to their bodies.
The shock wave destroyed buildings supposedly outside of the calculated damage zone. It nearly knocked observation aircraft out of the sky, and caused some men inadvertently trapped in a forward observation bunker to wonder if the explosion ripped their concrete and steel shelter from its foundations and flung it into the sea.
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The first, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a great telling of history focused on the A-bomb and on World War II development. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Well deserved.
His sequel book, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb is not as good of a narrative as is his previous book, but it has no less impact.
One of the important stories in the book is of the Castle Bravo test, which ran away by three times over expectations -- instead of 5 Megatons, it was 15 Megatons -- and exposed many to huge radiation exposure, including Japanese fishermen who happened to be fishing downwind, and many observers who were assumed were safe.
The physicists missed an important cross section, atoms that would fuse given enough energy, thus adding to the weapon's calculated energy release. They missed by a factor of three. And people died.
Rhodes's books are awesome. Highly recommended.
R&K
Rhodes' phrase - wish I'd thought of it.
The first one is fucking wonderful, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The second, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb is a darker and a much more tangled narrative, with much more politics. Both have lots of science. And as to the latter narrative, Teller was a fucking jerk. His early designed H-bombs apparently did not work. But he self-promoted himself as the father of the H-bomb, possibly and mainly because he never met a nuclear bomb he did not love.
Rhodes books are essential history, especially the first.
Regards.
Let alone Clarabell (AKA Bob Keeshan, AKA Captain Kangaroo).
And if folks don't know that one, I know not to quiz them on Phineas T. Bluster.
(Hmmm! Kinda looks like...
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/Hc5QSJz8P8Mejc.ZFEqS6Q--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9aW5zZXQ7aD00MDc7cT04NTt3PTUxMg--/
Naw!!)
Maybe more like Dilly Dally.
As always, my friend.
The Castle Bravo device:
They called it the shrimp.
Because this was the first H-bomb, the Mike device, more than a bit bigger:
And here was the Mike device going off:
But here was the shrimp, Castle Bravo, the largest bomb ever tested by the USA, at 7.5 times more powerful than Mike. BTW, it scared the shit out of everybody who witnessed it, and killed more than a few of them who wandered into the area.
and thank you for the work you do with the VFP. during the BushCheney years I volunteered with Chapter 54, who developed and still present Arlington West.
Dropped from a plane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
It could have been 100 MT, but that would have destroyed the plane delivering it and caused too much fallout, so they used some lead in place of U-238 (as it was, "when detonation occurred, the Tu-95V fell one kilometre from its previous altitude due to the shock wave of the bomb"
.
Also notable for an "oops, that did more than we expected" moment - Starfish Prime, detonated 250 miles up.
...
While some of the energetic beta particles followed the Earth's magnetic field and illuminated the sky, other high-energy electrons became trapped and formed radiation belts around the earth. There was much uncertainty and debate[who?] about the composition, magnitude and potential adverse effects from this trapped radiation after the detonation. The weaponeers became quite worried when three satellites in low earth orbit were disabled. These man-made radiation belts eventually crippled one-third of all satellites in low earth orbit. Seven satellites failed over the months following the test as radiation damaged their solar arrays or electronics, including the first commercial relay communication satellite, Telstar.[11][12][13] Detectors on Telstar, TRAAC, Injun, and Ariel 1 were used to measure distribution of the radiation produced by the tests.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
A nuclear explosion, as seen from a city in the country that set the damn thing off.
cool!
How nature points out the folly of men.
