A true “blast from the past,” back when America still had the b@lls to do things like this and not feel ashamed about it.
Scientists messing with things they don’t fully understand.
What the scientists didn’t know at the time was that the “dry” lithium deuteride had much more explosive potential when the neutrons it released split the atoms in the uranium-238 “jacket” much higher than anticipated. That’s why the original yield estimate was around 6 MT, when in reality it came out to 15 MT.
Bump
Teller watched a seismograph wiggle in a basement at UC Berkeley and knew immediately that the test had been successful. He declined to attend the test in person because he was PO’d about something.
As they used to say during the Cold War, “a test a day keeps the Reds away.”
Was this the test where a decommissioned battleship was blow vertical standing up in the water?................
Can anyone explain why these blasts have squiggly lines of smoke near them that look like jellyfish tentacles? The donation pic in this thread has them.
I’ve seen them in many pics of nuclear blasts, and don’t know what they are.
Whoops, didn’t see that coming.
I’ve forgotten the exact year, but I witnessed one of the long-ago Nevada atomic explosions. It was on a Saturday morning. I was with my brother, in the California Sierras on a two day weekend fishing expedition above Bishop. It was around 5:30 AM and we were near the top of Piute Pass (14409 ft), above the timber line, sitting on rocks and looking down our trail into the very-dark Southeast direction ... The sky suddenly flashed -— followed minutes later with sounds of the explosion booming around inside that high-mountain area.
Israel has somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 to 600 of these puppies and the means to deliver them. Think of the photo at the top of the thread as Tehran’s fate when they decide to pop off a Hiroshima style firecracker.
Seems the takeaway is that sometimes we learned things through testing that were completely misunderstood or unknown before the test. Well, isn’t that what the doing of science is for? Would it be better that we still didn’t know these things?
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...
My Dad was at Ivy Mike. That was the “wet” device on Eniwetok Atoll.
“The Bravo shot in 1954 was not the first test at Bikini Atoll, part of the 140,000-square-mile Pacific Proving Grounds. Nor would it be the last—from 1946 to 1958”
Note that these are EXACTLY the same years as most of the Baby Boom generation were born. I’m convinced their milk was contaminated by this testing.
Very good article. As I read it, I could not help but think someone at the test site said “Hey y’all, watch this” before pressing the red button.
For the weapons geeks
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Castle.html
Most interesting to me about this test was the fact they had no idea the effect on Lithium 7 from the reaction, thereby amplifying the yield 2.5x.
Of course, this illustrates why a very handy hydrogen storage medium is illegal to sell (Lithium 6)...