The Wilson cloud lifts, revealing a vertical black object, larger than ships in the foreground, which most observers believed was the upended battleship Arkansas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads
Posted on 03/02/2015 6:55:46 AM PST by C19fan
It was a plutonium fission detonation via implosion. Yield was around 20 kilotons (20,000 tons).
Castle Bravo was 15 megatons (15,000,000 tons)
Had the USS Arkansas been in the same location for a 15 megaton shot it would have ended up, mostly, in the stratosphere. As highly radioactive particles.
I am a Downwinder.
I believe to this day that my CFIDS is a by-product of the nuclear tests. A lot of my classmates suffer various maladies in ratios that are far beyond the “norm.”
Southern Utah had a large number of Down Syndrome babies born during and after the tests.
Thanks for the ping, Nully.
Yeah, that, and one of the lithium isotopes they thought would be "inert" wasn't -- it fused, too. I think it was Li-7, IIRC.
The USS (formerly KM) Prinz Eugen was in two of the tests at Bikini.
It survived both tests and is laying upside down at Kwajalein.
It’s clean enough for diving now.
No. That was Operation Crossroads-Baker, an underwater shot performed much earlier in 1946.
Smoke rockets to be able to photograph the progress of the blast wave.
Just prior to the shot rockets were launched to create the vertical smoke trails. Those trails were used as a visual reference for the observation of the blast wave.
Scientists messing with things they don't fully understand is why you aren't living in a cave, eating raw meat that you killed with your bare hands ... and then dying of infection from the bite wounds you sustained killing it.
You should thank God (the real one, who gave us a mind and the freedom to use it) for scientists who mess with things they don't fully understand.
< signed >
-A Scientist (also An Engineer)
It’s all about learning the “unknown unknowns.”
And what are the deaths of a few innocent people in the grand scale of advancing science?
My late Brother in Law was in the Navy at the Bikini test explosions. He died young ... while in his fifties.
I still think of the Night Gallery (?) Episode where William Windom played a Government Scientist grieving for his Dead Daughter. They had a Psychiatrist trying to treat him so he could get back to work on a Project.
He had designed a Weapon that used Non-Fissionable Material and the Military tested it, for the last time...
Indeed.
The worst I've ever gotten from that is singed. Castle Bravo is the most extreme example I can think of. "We" had a lot to learn. It is instructive to compare today's almost paranoid radiological safety measures to Marie Curie's standard laboratory practice ...
What was not accounted for was lithium 7 being involved in the reaction. When the Li-7 was cooked, it changed to Li-6, which acted like the rest of the Li-6. The lighter isotope provided the tritium to fuse with the deuterium. Thus the runaway. There were more neutrons available to fast fission the U-238. The latter provided much of the yield as well as the fallout.
Many of our greatest scientific discoveries have occurred by accident.
Twisting the tail of the tiger
The Wilson cloud lifts, revealing a vertical black object, larger than ships in the foreground, which most observers believed was the upended battleship Arkansas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads
So it still would have been pointed straight up! (more or less)
That or become a scientist yourself, and help expand the frontiers of what we know ... and what we know that we don't know.
In any case, life's a bitch ... then you die.
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