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Thanks moonshot925, but I don't see what the big deal was -- everyone alive on 19 July 1957 withstood it. Okay, sure, most were at a much greater distance from the blast... |
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Posted on 07/19/2012 7:42:23 PM PDT by moonshot925
^^ The link
An AIR-2 Genie air-to-air unguided rocket armed with a 1.7 kiloton W25 nuclear warhead was launched from an F-89 Scorpion fighter aircraft.
The weapon detonated 18,000 feet above five USAF officers.
The purpose of the test was to prove that the weapon was safe for use over populated areas.
If they’re safe for use over populated areas, what’s the point?
They had great big brass ones.
The test doesn’t make sense to me. A nuke typically goes off at 1500 or so feet for maximum wave propagation.
Air-to-air missile, for shooting down enemy bombers and whatever over US territory. You don't want to destroy the village in order to save it.
About that time I was building a Revell model of the F 89. And I believe that was a Canberra flying as wing man to the Scorpion.
Because we don't want to kill our own people.
The AIR-2 Genie rocket was designed to destroy Soviet bombers over US territory.
The weapon was designed as an air to air nuclear missile, so setting it off at that altitude is certainly realistic, and they would want to be able to use is over CONUS.
Everyone on earth survived it.
Interesting reactions.
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Thanks moonshot925, but I don't see what the big deal was -- everyone alive on 19 July 1957 withstood it. Okay, sure, most were at a much greater distance from the blast... |
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Optimum HOB is the cube root of the yield in kt times the optimum HOB for a 1kt weapon, so a one megaton device would have HOB of 6500 feet, and a 1.7kt would be ~800 feet. A 5 megaton cracker would be 11,000 feet.
They wanted to show the Soviets that we were willing to pop a nuke over our cities to get one of their bombers, or a formation of bombers.
I bet those guys were not fully briefed. Lots of the “volunteers” were not.
What was it called, something like ‘Operation Smoky’
When airmen were men and not politically correct.
Article also on Daily Mail website
From their remarks, they understood exactly what was happening. I assume they were brass, which accounts for their enthusiasm. I wonder how they made out. I suppose if they didn't wait around for that cloud to settle on them, they might have been OK. I guess this is where "fully briefed" comes in. In the early tests, the hazards of radioactive fallout were not given the respect they required, to say the least, but by 1957, I would have thought they were more generally understood. Maybe it was a few more years before "fallout" became a bugaboo.
Fallout was not an issue here. Fallout comes from dust kicked up from the ground. An airblast well above the surface of the ground will have virtually no fallout. Just the material that comprised the missle and whatever dust that was already naturally floating in the air.
Thanks for the ping. I wonder how they got them to volunteer.
“I assume they were brass,”
Yup, there were references to “Colonel”, I think. You’d pick brass for a publicity stunt like this to be sure it went OK.
There would not be “much” fallout from a 1.7 kt airburst. The debris cloud would be hot as all get out but would not mass much. Serious fallout happens when the isothermal sphere (inner fireball) touches ground, then you get a kiloton of dirt irradiated strongly with neutrons rising up as a vapor, to rain down in little spherules that are very hot. Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not produce much either, and they were airbursts. Most radiation casualties there were from prompt effects.
The thermonuke shots that vaporized entire islands generated huge masses of fallout.
This shot was about the size of the Argus shot and neither would produce much stuff.
The fallout is material contaminated with the reaction products and unreacted uranium from the explosion. In this small airburst, I would suppose that the cloud consisting of the bomb and target material would remain relatively concentrated and settle in a localized area, but the amount of radioactive material should be the same whether or not it is mixed with ground material and dispersed.
Note that the test subjects saw and described this cloud, and surely direct exposure to it would have been highly dangerous.
Well, they always talk about Strontium 90. Isn’t this a direct reaction product? Neutron irraditation of ground material is an interesting point, and one I’m not familiar with, so I’ll grant what you say. I guess this would be mostly due to metals in the soil ?
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