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  I'm sure 30 seconds is plennnnntyJun 09, 2010 8:13 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:This here's an interesting page to think about when the "safe distance" question comes up in relation to nuclear blasts. Such things *have* been tragically miscalculated in the past. Despite--or probably because of that--they are pretty darn interesting; for instance, if you zoom in on the center of the Baker detonation at Bikini Atoll, on the ships right around that central spray column at the base of the mushroom cloud's stem--which was 2000 feet wide--you can see exactly how the fireball reached based on how much black smoke is billowing out of the ships that were floated out into the test range.
 
Just to indulge my grim fascination with that particular series of nuclear bomb tests known as Operation Crossroads, here are some more photos from it:
- Test goats calmly eating aboard a test ship before it gets nuked
- Jolly unprotected US Navy sailors trying to scrub the radiation out of the deck of a German cruiser used in the test--with mops (they found this does not work; some of the least damaged/irradiated ships were sailed back to the US with their full crews aboard--this ended up increasing their eventual mortality rate by 5.7%)
- Live fish from the lagoon, so radioactive it can create its own x-ray exposures on film
- The huge water-laden shock wave at the start of the Baker explosion, which was underwater, dwarfing the warships next to it
- The light aircraft carrier USS Independence sustained massive damage but didn't sink (some ships did sink and are still there, at the bottom of the atoll; when they found they could not decontaminate the ships that survived, they sank some of them, including the Independence, near the Farallon Islands, 27 miles off of San Francisco)
- And then as the admiral you celebrate with your wife and a mushroom cloud cake
 
Also I hadn't realized that the bikini, invented by the French in that same year, 1946, was named after the atoll (well that part I knew), not because it or its inventor came from there, but because they thought it would have an atomic-bomb-like impact on the public consciousness; other reasons have been said to be that it was a bathing suit of atom-like size, or that atomic warfare would reduce everyone to primitive costume (ugh).
 
 
 
 
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