14 ms·
Nuclear Test Films Declassified and Uploaded
- MrBlue 9y agoDirect link to the videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/LivermoreLab/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/LivermoreLab/videos
- trhway 9y agomy favorite detail is the evaporating (almost explosively converted into plasma by the sheer intensity of the energy being radiated) tower that the weapon was placed on top of and the cables which were keeping the tower vertical - the 5 spikes at the belly of the fireball https://youtu.be/woR7j72zE0U?t=9 https://youtu.be/woR7j72zE0U?t=9
- Zelphyr 9y agoThat's what those are? Wow, thanks for the explanation! I always thought that was some weird quirk of the mushroom cloud.
- mikeash 9y agoThis is called the rope trick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_trick_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_trick_effect
- King-Aaron 9y agoThat was a fascinating read, thanks for linking that!
- kbart 9y agoWow, that's one of the best written Wiki articles I've ever read, thank you for the link.
- mysterypie 9y agoSince a couple other people mentioned that this was a really good Wikipedia article (and I thought so too), I looked through the Wikipedia revision history in detail to see how it got written. It's essentially written by one person (Wikipedia user Deglr6328) over a span of 2 years during 2004-2006 followed by hundreds of edits over the next decade by around a dozen users to improve wording, style, references, links, and photos. The pattern for the best material on Wikipedia seems to be that of one subject matter expert or enthusiast writing the basic article and a small hardcore group of Wikipedia editors improving it (and who do improve it greatly -- I'm not minimizing their part). But you need the initial expert or super-passionate person to get it started.
- telesilla 9y agoI feel conflicted that these explosions are so beautiful to watch, and I always wanted to see one in the sky where the ground didn't interfere with the cloud. Now I have but I'm not really satisfied because it references a possible destruction of humanity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n3uane1UT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n3uane1UT8
- trhway 9y ago>it references a possible destruction of humanity? imagine a guy who has a gun in a drawer at home and who smokes 2 packs a day. What is going to kill him with pretty high probability? The same way the humanity is with nuclear weapons and climate change.
- Houshalter 9y agoHow is climate change anywhere near as dangerous as a nuclear war?
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoClimate change is already happening, and well on its way to being both catastrophic and irreversible.
- Houshalter 9y agoSo? What's the worse that can happen? Some cities slowly get flooded and some storms become more frequent? The worst case of nuclear war is all cities get destroyed and humanity is sent back to the stone age. They aren't even comparable.
- trhway 9y agoRoman Empire closed shop when grain production in Mediterranean basin became no more due to the warming up of the climate. At the same time the rest of Europe warmed up and dried up a bit so it stopped being a cold swamp, and it allowed for the European civilization to get started. During the peak of heat 1000 years ago the Mediterranean basin belonged to Caliphates - the world leading, at the time, in many respects civilization which came out of dry and hot Arabia and which was significantly pushed back by Europeans during the next several hundreds years of cooling down. That cooling down became Little Ice Age during which we have Black Death, famines, etc. with European population getting decimated from time to time. Whole human history is basically history of changing climate and its effects upon empires/cultures/civilizations. Viking Age. Mongols ruling all the connected space covered with grasses - ie. where cavalry is unstoppable - during period with just enough rain/snow for such a huge space to balance between swamp and desert, and the period of such delicate balance was naturally relatively short with Pan-Mongolia splitting relatively quickly into pieces separated by deserts/rivers/swamps. Or check out the Late Bronze Age collapse for example. The point here is that couple degrees change over several centuries have very profound effect upon human civilization. These days we've stepped into the territory of couple degrees (and probably more with the process having significant chances to become runaway) over several decades. That is bound to result in dramatic changes. One can try to argue that our civilization today is well insulated from climate changes. And that one will be wrong. Just consider the very recent examples. 198x were the coldest point in the 80 years cycle and that resulted in low grain yields in USSR. It coincided with low oil prices thus resulting in food shortages in USSR, and as result the USSR just disappeared as the hungry people couldn't care less. The same thing with Arab Spring which was triggered by the drought and resulting food shortages : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-rising-food-prices-heightened-arab-spring/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an... So : 1. human civilization is very vulnerable to climate change effects and 2. the climate change, more severe than the ones which have destroyed civilizations in the past, is happening now orders of magnitude faster than those climate changes of the past.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoCheckout the closeup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYbNlgQyz84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYbNlgQyz84
- vonnik 9y agoIf you're ever in Vegas, the National Atomic Testing Museum is a great place to go: http://nationalatomictestingmuseum.org/ http://nationalatomictestingmuseum.org/
- retSava 9y agoAnd if you are in Hiroshima, the museum dedicated to the atomic bombing of the city is worth visiting. Makes you really sad.
- hoodoof 9y agoHard to really say the difference between a nuclear war and the U.S., Russia, UK France and others setting off vast numbers of atmospheric nuclear weapons in the 20th century.
- DougWebb 9y agoUh.... the number of people inside the blast radius?
- craftyguy 9y agoDing ding, we have a winner.
- tyingq 9y agoPopulation density near the blast sites? Not that they all did the right thing, and real people were absolutely affected. But there is a significant difference.
- wahern 9y agoFWIW, declassified intelligence purporting to show Soviet nuclear targets in Australia suggest that large cities would have been spared direct strikes. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/secrets-out-soviets-did-not-target-cities-20120805-23ny1.html Various other outlets and blogs at the time also made the point that, generally, both the Soviets and Americans avoided population centers as well as (IIRC) decapitation strikes.[1] They focused on strategic military targets, primarily those related to first and retaliatory nuclear strike capabilities. Basically air bases, naval bases (especially submarine bases), and related infrastructure--anything that directly supported the launch of nuclear weapons. Continental Europe, especially Germany, was an exception because of expectations of immediate ground warfare and the likelihood of tactical nukes. But arguably that's less an exception and more a variation of the same logic. [1] Decapitation means you've nobody to negotiate with in a timely manner, ensuring the enemy will resort to unleashing every last nuclear weapon at their disposal. Neither side was stupid enough to have unleashed everything at once. All scenarios I've read described an escalation in launches over 1 or 2 days, sometimes longer, with opportunities for negotiated or even unilateral ceasefires.
- r-bryan 9y agoI was a child of the 1950's. Only 50 miles south of New York City, we little grade school kids were routinely drilled in cowering under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Every time I heard an airplane, I was afraid it was going to drop bombs. Popular Science ran features about how to build your own fallout shelter, and how Dad could prepare his family for the coming nuclear apocalypse. The understated, tragic horror of _On the Beach_ was complemented but not countered by the mordant humor of Dr. Strangelove. The clips here don't have the bizarre choreographic beauty of the Dr. Strangelove finale, but they bring back the all too keen anxiety and existential terror of being powerless, while deranged world leaders measure each other's manhood by "mine's bigger than yours." Fine, you proved that yours is big enough, it doesn't really matter whose is bigger any more than whose hair is dumber, now can we _please_ return to sanity?
- jacquesm 9y ago> while deranged world leaders measure each other's manhood by "mine's bigger than yours Not much has changed in 70 years.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoNot much has changed since recorded human history.
- jseliger 9y agoIn terms of elemental psychology, probably not. But the weapons have changed, and moving from conventional to nuclear weapons is a sort of phase shift.
- tedeh 9y agoI'd say something has changed since we're currently experiencing one of the most prolonged periods of peace in the last 2000 years (Europe) [1] and generally the world over [2]. This could be because the "price" of conflict has gone up, but still, it is something to think about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea https://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/were_living_through_the_most_peaceful_era_in_human_history_%E2%80%94%C2%A0with_one_big_exception_partner/ https://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/were_living_through_the_mos...
- gh02t 9y agoThere's a big scramble in the Department of Energy to preserve (and declassify, where possible) a lot of the data from the days of atmospheric testing, which is literally rotting. It's some of the only real world data we have on e.g. fallout dispersal, which is important for building the simulations that would allow emergency workers to safely operate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. It's also of interest for nuclear forensics, which is highly relevant at the moment with the situation in Korea.
- credit_guy 9y ago“Let’s just hope we don’t see a new atomspheric nuclear explosion (test or otherwise) before they’re done with their preservation project.”.... fat chance. North Korea will do an atmospheric nuclear test in the next six months, if not three .
- brunoqc 9y agoDo we have high def color footage of nuclear explosions? That would be cool.
- sho 9y agoCheck out the documentary "Trinity and Beyond" - it has a lot of quality footage, much of it colour.
- reti 9y agoThere's ten minutes on youtube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvnWXf6UZXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvnWXf6UZXY. Captures the essence of the film nicely. There's this weird 'end of the world' kind of undertone to the film. Genuinely scary stuff.
- nerdponx 9y agoThis is some absolutely incredible footage. I had no idea there was color footage of the actual bombings in Japan.
- sigsergv 9y agoBtw, here is one of recently declassified soviet videos about first nuclear bomb test. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BIDzZygIq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BIDzZygIq0 It's a kind of report, explaining experiment setup, equipment, test process and results. Russian, no subtitles but picture itself explains a lot.
- greglindahl 9y agoOne fun thing about photos of early nuclear tests is that the US accidentally published enough info that revealed the top-secret yield of the Trinity test bomb in photographs in Life Magazine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield#Calculating_yields_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield#Calculati... -- all you need is dimensional analysis. Whoops.
- nasredin 9y agoWell, like TFA says hopefully we won't have any new videos of above-ground nuke "tests".