[JohnfAclambrJA]

Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb:

They weren't crazy. They weren't being punished. All but one volunteered to do this (which makes it all the more astonishing).



On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They'd marked the spot "Ground Zero. Population 5" on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead.

They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he's wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.


Who are these guys? And why is the narrator joyously shouting, "It happened! The mounds are vibrating. It is tremendous! Directly above our heads! Aaah!"

This footage comes from our government's archives. It was shot by the U.S. Air Force (at the behest of Col. Arthur B. "Barney" Oldfield, public information officer for the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs) to demonstrate the relative safety of a low-grade nuclear exchange in the atmosphere. Two colonels, two majors and a fifth officer agreed to stand right below the blast. Only the cameraman, George Yoshitake, didn't volunteer.



The country was just beginning to worry about nuclear fallout, and the Air Force wanted to reassure people that it was OK to use atomic weapons to counter similar weapons being developed in Russia. (They didn't win this argument.)







The Silence

Watching this film, there are many things to wonder (and worry) about, but one of the stranger moments is how the bomb bursts in complete silence. We see a sudden white flash. It makes the soldiers flinch. Then there's a pause, a pregnant quiet that lasts for a beat, then another and then — there's a roar. ("There it is! The ground wave!"), after which the sky above seems to go black and the air turns to fire.

Basic physics explains the pause. Because light travels quicker than sound, you see light first, you hear sound later. In most movies (even in government-released atomic bomb blast films), the sound is artificially time shifted to make the flash and the sound appear simultaneous.

'A Long, Thundering Growl'

But that's not what it's like if you are actually there. Science historian Alex Wellerstein has found an undoctored and deeply frightening recording — which he just posted on Restricted Data; The Nuclear Secrecy Blog.

He got it, he says, from "a Russian correspondent" who was searching the U.S. National Archives. (Why not? Our past is open to all.) The Russian found a recording of an American atomic test in 1953, which shows an enormous flash of white, so white it blanks out the entire sky, then thick clouds of ash (or maybe dirt?) tumble up, a fireball appears — all of this in total quiet. Thirty seconds pass. And then, says Wellerstein,

Put on some headphones and listen to it all the way through — it's much more intimate than any other test film I've seen. You get a much better sense of what these things must have been like, on the ground, as an observer, than from your standard montage of blasts. Murmurs in anticipation; the slow countdown over a megaphone; the reaction at the flash of the bomb; and finally — a sharp bang, followed by a long, thundering growl. That's the sound of the bomb.

It's a sound you would never want to hear in real life, but this a safe way to eavesdrop. Just one warning: For the first two minutes of this video, nothing happens, nothing I could hear, anyway. Then there's a countdown, and at 2:24 from the top ... the bomb bursts; at 2:54 the blast hits.






http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/20...g-nuclear-bomb





A good quality video at the link...

Only 2 K/ton, but still exploding 18,000 ft above your head!

[Buyingtime]

> Only 2 K/ton

You can't do that with uranium or plutonium, not unless it's a dud. Californium?

[tearidrusydet]

Standing Under an Exploding Nuclear Bomb:

Maybe one for the ethics commitee:

An excert from: Eyewitness Testimonies Appeals From The A-bomb Survivors; Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation.

We Never Found Our Daughter's Bones by Kikue Komatsu

"Forty-five years have passed, and still pain tightens around my chest when I bring up those memories. The atomic bombing was the most immense, single catastrophe ever visited on this Earth. August 6 1945, started off beautifully cloudless and calm. Then, out of the blue we were attacked by a flash, heat rays, and radiation. All of central Hiroshima was engulfed in savage fires, growing into an immense conflagration, transforming people into figures more ghostly and monstrous than human.

...

To my left and right ghost-like people lay in the street; most seemed dead. I happened to meet my husband, who, fortunately, had returned safely. We embraced tearfully. We were utterly distraught over our daughter, but what could we do? By evening Hiroshima City was one great sea of flame.

...

... Not far away, groups of floating corpses bumped against each other like rafts on the Motoyasu, Honkawa, and Tenmagawa Rivers.

In spite of what we had seen, my husband and I clung to a slim hope that our daughter had been walking home when caught by the bomb, so we continued to search for her every day. These are cruel memories. A week later, we learned what had become of her. At the time of the explosion, she and the other workers were on the balcony for roll call. Outside the building, their bodies would have bourne the full impact of the blast and heat. No remains or out daughter were ever found. ..."

[bxxasxxa]

Californium?

[Dokescoonse]

Wouldn't it exploding that far overhead that they suffered no immediate injuries mean that it would be safer than standing the same distance away from a ground burst? Less fallout (in the form of debris)?

[voksveta]

Possibly, gives stuff a better chance of travelling somewhere else.

[bortycuz]

2 kilotons its tiny.