Great is the hand that holds Dominion over Man

[RedRaven]

A beautifully disturbing video.


A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto


A very good display of Mankind's lust for power at the cost of our potential futures.

[Art Blade]

 ???

[deadman1]

 ??? indeed.

[fragger]

Had no idea there'd been that many :o

[mandru]

There's still a lot of area they haven't covered.   >:D

On the second flash I knew where this was headed.  It's quite a remarkable visual representation and was very well presented.

[RedRaven]

Be good to see an updated version with the past 14 years included.


Was also a little surprised by how few the UK has done compared to USA, France and Russia.

I really like the brief moments of syncronicity in the tones that each Nation has, almost musical at times. And often like an argument. Keeps reminding me of Close Encounters of a Third kind.....Play the 5 tones!

[Dweller_Benthos]

Interesting, I didn't know we set any off in the Aleutians, much less that one that looks like it was in Louisiana or thereabouts.

If you want to see what all those in the southwest left behind, look here.


http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=37.012285,-116.016998&spn=0.025838,0.036221&t=h&z=15

Nope, wasn't Luisiana, it was Missippi, check this out on google earth http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showthreaded&Number=1413934&an=

[Art Blade]

 ???  :-\\

South-West of that location, through which leads a (black?) "Mesa Road," is Death Valley. Nice...  :-\\

[mmosu]

I had no idea . . .  :-(

Very sobering indeed.  You can watch the balances of power shift over time as the Soviet Union falls quiet, and then eventually India and Pakistan begin to add their notes to the song.  The really haunting thing is - it all really happened.

I also didn't know that some of the UK's nuke tests were on American soil.  If you watch closely at the end you can see a few of theirs detonated over the south-western US.  Seems very strange  ????

[Art Blade]

Same here and I noticed that too, and not only at the very end. It started at some point and kept going. Made me wonder, too. The number in total is shocking, 2,000+ atomic bombs.. what the hell are they thinking?

[mmosu]

They're thinking of how to build a bigger and more destructive bomb.  I don't know if this was intentional, but the diameter of the flashes gets bigger as time goes on.  If it is intentional, then it seems to suggest just how much the effective radius of these weapons has increased over the 50+ years covered. 

[Art Blade]

I noticed and thought the same, too. Again. :)

[mandru]

Consider the ramifications when private companies gain access to nukes as with the case of the El Paso Natural Gas Company in this article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy

I first encountered information about Project Gasbuggy from a film my class was shown back in the eighth grade in Elementary school.

Later while in high school the test of Cannikin was announced with some controversy.  It was a bomb tuned to emit in the X-ray spectrum to avoid fissionable particles that tended to obscure navigation instrumentation being the third test on the island of Amchitka in the Aleutians.  No one was exactly sure how it would behave as it's physics were deemed less than predictable.

I happened to be in a writing class at the time and used the test as the subject of a fictional apocalyptic short story that I turned in to the instructor on Friday the day before Saturday 11-6-71 when the Cannikin was to occur.  It gave poor Ms White nightmares the entire weekend.   >:D

[RedRaven]

The testing done by the UK on US soil was most likely due to NATO pacts and treaties. And as they are such close allies in many things I thought it made sense that they would be sharing research on it.


I was unaware of how much testing the UK had done in Australia, but even that makes sense as they lack the large expanse of mostly uninhabited land, and with Australia belonging to the commonwealth it has very strong ties to the UK. Not to mention that UK military have a part in the training of the Australian military, my mothers husband moved there after his service in the Royal Navy was over and worked training the Australian navy in nuclear submarines.


All of these tests individually cause much less damage than the disaster at Chernobyl. Each bomb is a very brief flash in which a lot of the nuclear material is burned up, where as Chernobyl was a ten day fire which was constantly pumping out nuclear contaminants into the atmosphere. Eventually covering most of Europe in varying degrees of severity.
In a few recent documentaries I've seen both Russian / Ukrainian and International scientists, who have been studying the area for many years, in some cases since the disaster have made some very interesting discoveries about how the contaminants are interacting with the environment and its wildlife.
Many species are thriving and have not evolved into freakish mutant parodies as some predicted!
It has lost some species whilst becoming a safe haven for others, such as Bears and the rare Przewalski horse, away from  human predators.


In no way do I approve of the huge number of tests that have been done, but I find myself wondering how much of the anti-nuclear propaganda of the past 50 years or so has instilled people with fear out of naivety and political manipulation. 

[fragger]

I was unaware of how much testing the UK had done in Australia, but even that makes sense as they lack the large expanse of mostly uninhabited land

Sorry, but I beg to differ. Have a look at this:

http://www.maralingaclassaction.com.au/

You can go to the "Story" tab at that site to find out just how widespread the fallout pattern actually was, but this will give you some idea compared to the areas of mainland USA and Europe:

[smg id=3305 align=center width=400]

This has been a bit of a hot topic here lately as a large number of Australian ex-servicemen are set to join their British counterparts who were present at Maralinga in the class action, to be heard in the London courts in the near future. Hundreds of Australians have died or have had their lives ruined as a result of these tests, not just those who were present but their descendants, who continue to be plagued with cancers and birth defects right up to the present day.

I doubt you could convince any of these people that nuclear testing is nothing to be afraid of.

[Art Blade]

" 'mostly' uninhabited" still means inhabited -- so if it is not 'completely' inhabited, does it mean that those who live there are "expendable?" Wow. If you test something that is lethal, then you should test it without harming anyone innocent and helpless. If you find volunteers for it, well. I doubt you'll ever find volunteers for testing how lethal something is, particularly for "testing" lethal radioactive stuff.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I remember my aunt talking about not being able to drink milk sometime in the 50s for a few months because they were concerned that one of tests out west had dropped enough radioactive particles to contaminate milk supplies in the northeast where she lived. That's quite a distance, since it's quite a ways from the test sites in Nevada to upstate NY, but that is the way the wind blows, so.....

[Art Blade]

When Chernobyl blew up in Russia, in Germany we received warning not to go on a mushroom foray because mushrooms were supposed to pick up and store radioactive particles from the fallout (rain > water). There was a lot of discussion what to do or not to do back in those days, due to the radioactive fallout over Europe.

[mmosu]

Good discussion gentlemen  :-X  I'm getting an education here, a lot of stuff about the clash between science and politics/foreign policy that I didn't know. 

[Art Blade]

 :)

I just realised I said mushrooms were supposed to pick up radioactive particles while I meant they were assumed to do that (not a purpose) and by that accumulating radioactive materials, the longer they did that, the more poisonous they became.

[mandru]

I doubt you'll ever find volunteers for testing how lethal something is, particularly for "testing" lethal radioactive stuff.

It's easy when you're holding someone like a soldier's 3 or 4 year contract.   :-\\

When I go to Youtube and search "Nuclear test soldiers" there's quite a few results where soldiers were embedded near atomic blasts to study their psychology, if they would continue to obey orders, live through it and more of that type of scientifically observable stuff.   ???

Test film #60 has the men within 8 miles of a blast sitting on an open plane and then quickly moves towards ground zero to examine conditions of test dummies placed at encampments up to within .5 mile from ground zero where upon the officials decided the men would have come through just fine if their open trenches were deep enough.   :o

Well the test subject sheep placed there survived it at least for the filming crew.   :-X

:'(

[Art Blade]

You're right, back then they didn't know just how  lethal the stuff was. I saw a couple of films/documentaries from the first tests, they were watching the explosion with binoculars and sunglasses and were quite cheerful about how cool that atomic mushroom cloud looked.

When I said what you quoted me on, I was thinking of today's people.. I doubt that today you'd find anyone stupid or uneducated enough to volunteer for stuff like that.

[mmosu]

You know that's true, there is often a latency period when it comes to radiation damage.  Many people "killed" by these blasts undoubtedly didn't actually die until many years later.

[mandru]

You know that's true, there is often a latency period when it comes to radiation damage.

When I first read that sentence I read it as "lunacy period".   ::)

Even if the harm was known by the superiors which I find to be almost certain the men participating as soldiers were most likely told everything was hunky-dory.  Maybe they were even lured into volunteering by the promise of shortened terms of duty.  :-(  That's one way to weed out the malcontents, eh?

Though at the time these tests the hazard of exposure to radiation was well documented.

Long before the first bomb was developed teams of physicists were performing a dangerous operational experiment called Tickling The Dragon where in two fissionable samples when sum totaled were over a critical mass then they were manually brought close together to try to start a controllable fission event behind a lead shield in the same room the observers were in.  It was not uncommon for the two masses to fuse and run out of control killing all present fairly quickly.

Test film #60 and another quite like it that I came across on Youtube that had a woman speaking as part of the narration were created for the sole purpose (the second film said as much) of putting the general public at ease and open to the suggestion of embracing living with the bomb as a beautiful protector.

???

[mmosu]

There is a strange but saddening beauty in some of the explosions.  Ever heard of the Tsar Bomba?  Supposedly it was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated - equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT (that's WWII's "fat man" & "little boy" combined times 1,400!!!  ???) --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzar_bomb

Tsar bomba