Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/07/16/156851175/five-men-agree-to-stand-directly-under-an-exploding-nuclear-bomb?ps=cprs

by iProject • 14 years ago

263 112 14 years ago

npr.org

ars3• 14 years ago

18,500 feet is 3.5 miles. So is there a different between being 3.5 miles under a bomb vs being 3.5 miles away from a bomb?

cma• 14 years ago

Average air density between you and it would be higher or lower depending on exactly what you mean by 'away'.

mc32• 14 years ago

I think the main thing is that at that altitude there are few particles to rain radiation upon you. On the ground there is dust, debris, ash etc. which will carry the radiation and land on everything.

smacktoward• 14 years ago

Yes. Studies of nuclear explosion impact effects distinguish between "ground burst" and "air burst" detonations. Ground bursts typically have a smaller overall radius of damage, but do more intense damage at or near ground zero. Air bursts spread their effects across a wider radius, but damage is relatively more evenly distributed. Ground bursts also produce more fallout, since they dig up and irradiate earth and scatter it to the winds.

ars3• 14 years ago

Reply to 'gcb' who's account is hellbanned, so I can't reply to him directly.

No: Ground bursts cause way more fallout. Air pretty much can not become radioactive no matter how powerful the bomb. But soil can, so it becomes radioactive, then is scattered by the wind.

The fallout from the bomb itself is different and is the same for both - but it's a smaller component, since there isn't that much of it.

lutorm• 14 years ago

The initial radiation and heat wave is likely more intense because there's no ground to shield between you and the blast but, as someone else said, most radioactivity is from induced activity in ground material sucked up in the blast, so from that perspective air bursts are much less "dirty" as the fission products rise into the stratosphere and are dispersed in the winds. Definitely it would be better than being 3.5mi downwind of a ground blast, but probably not compared to being upwind.

The shock wave is probably also less damaging because it comes from straight above so it won't pick up objects and throw them at you.

baby• 14 years ago

3.5 miles is 5.6 km

masterponomo• 14 years ago

That looks like an episode of "McHale's Navy" with all the dimwits standing around.

ses4j• 14 years ago

This image needs to become one of the standard meme images.

russell• 14 years ago

Now we know why no one is afraid of the North Korean nuclear program.

caf4• 14 years ago

It is worth pointing out that designing deliberately low-yield nuclear weapons, like the one used in this test, requires significantly more technical know-how than a higher-yielding basic design.

iamdann2• 14 years ago

It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives.

As someone who has only cursory knowledge of atomic explosions and radiation damage, I was always under the impression that standing under an explosion such as this would almost guarantee a death during or shortly after.

I suppose it's a lot like HIV. Unprotected sex with an HIV positive person doesn't * guarantee* disease contraction, which is the impression I was always get. Not worth the risk, by any means, but still different than I had always been taught.

Dylan16807• 14 years ago

Far safer. You have to remember that they're over three and a half miles from the explosion. They're just in a dramatic direction.

_delirium• 14 years ago

In fact, the entire point of this test was to demonstrate that it was safe to stand under it. While some of the early tests were very unsafe, by the time of this test (1957), the dangers of radiation were well-known, so it wasn't a cowboy-type experiment like the early ones, and the planning would've computed the expected radiation dose and ensured it was safe.

The military did it as a publicity stunt to assuage public fears of nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles by showing that even if they were used in a dogfight directly over a city, they wouldn't pose any risk to those on the ground. The volunteers were even supposed to not wear a helmet or hat to show that it was fine for normal people. If I recall correctly from having seen this discussed previously, they measured radiation doses received, and found that the highest doses (but still not at dangerous levels) were received by the pilots involved in the test, not the ground volunteers.

This was from the relatively short-lived era when several militaries were hoping to make a distinction between "strategic" nuclear weapons, the kind that blow up cities and would only be used in doomsday scenarios, and "tactical" nuclear weapons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon), small-yield varieties that would just be like very big regular weapons and could conceivably be used in a non-apocalyptic war. Due to a mixture of public opposition and fears of international chain reactions that might result from "going nuclear", though, that initiative failed, which is why you saw a transition back into really-gigantic conventional weapons in the 1990s, e.g. the MOAB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-43/B_Massive_Ordnance_Air_B...).

fghh45sdfhr3• 14 years ago

From the article: The thing is, in that particular explosion, those guys would have been in a pretty safe position. The bomb itself was a small one (by nuclear standards — 2 kilotons) and it was way, way above their heads. They weren't in a zone to be too affected by the immediate radiation. The bomb was small enough and high enough that it wouldn't have sucked up dust to produce much fallout. The remaining cloud would have been full of (nasty) fission products, but it would have been extremely hot and most of it would have stayed aloft until it cooled down, by which point it probably would have been spread more diffusely.

iamdann2• 14 years ago

Exactly. That's the part I learned from.

ars3• 14 years ago

No, it's nothing like HIV. HIV is a statistical thing: It's random chance if an infective particle travels.

A nuclear bomb like this is deterministic. Based on the distance, altitude, size (power), and type (fission, fusion, specifics of the design - especially the tamper) of the bomb you can calculate exactly what and how dangerous the effects will be.

The military was trying to show that they are able to make these calculations correctly, and that used appropriately, this type of bomb an be used without undesired damage.

It didn't work for them though, because people have an irrational fear of anything nuclear and are not interesting in hearing about any calculations.

It's one of those paradoxes similar to how people are completely unable to correctly calculate how risky an action will be. For example people are scared of flying but not crossing the street (a common event comes to be seen as less risky) or driving a car (if you are in control it seems less risky).

> It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives.

No, actually it was completely expected. If you can manage to internalize this, and actually believe inside your head that these men were quite safe then you will have gone a long way toward conquering an irrational fear.

PS. You may be thinking of Cancer when comparing to HIV which is indeed a random thing.

mturmon3• 14 years ago

Well, it's deterministic, until you get surprised:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Flat#Baneberry

and then perhaps you wish you had not shelved your "irrational" fear.

pjscott3• 14 years ago

You can calculate some effects, like intensity of radiation and pressure waves, but others, like lethality, and trickier. Within a certain range of radii, your chances of survival depend strongly on where you are and what you're doing. Are you in a building sturdy enough to not collapse on you? Is there anything heavy that might fall on you? Are you near a window? Will the building catch fire?

A lot of this stuff made its way into building codes, after some nuclear tests to figure out what worked.

jerf4• 14 years ago

If you read up on the history of the era and combine that with a study of the real effects of nuclear bombs, it becomes evident that there was an uncoordinated, but nevertheless systematic, effort to grossly overstate the dangers of nuclear war. A game of "Telephone" [1] was played, where at each step the nukes got more dangerous. If nukes were as dangerous to the world as popular culture today imagines, there would be no popular culture; most people grossly underestimate the number of test explosions that were set off at various times. Once again, Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests :

"The United States conducted around 1,054 nuclear tests (by official count) between 1945 and 1992.... The Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear tests (by official count)[3] between 1949 and 1990... France conducted 210 nuclear tests between February 13, 1960 and January 27, 1996..."

Fallout isn't as dangerous as it is commonly portrayed, the bomb's effects are often overstated on every dimension, etc.

But of course, who really wants to go out of their way to correct the record? A number of people reading this will find a strong emotional inclination to leap to the conclusion that this post is pro-nuclear-war advocacy or something. But the truth is that while nukes can't destroy the world or destroy the entire ecosystem (even "nuclear winter" is highly questionable, especially in light of subsequent experiences with high-atmosphere particles, such as in the Kuwait oil fires), they still can kill millions directly and effectively destroy civilization as we know it by wiping out potentially every major city in the world (and get a good bit of damage on the medium-sized ones, too), killing billions more. Perhaps it isn't so bad that the dangers are played up a bit. The real dangers they pose are much harder to understand than the Hollywood B-grade movie version in popular culture, but still quite bad.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

jackpirate• 14 years ago

As a former nuclear submarine officer, and current complete pacifist, I completely agree that the threat of nukes is WAY overblown. For example, much bigger threats to the modern world exist in the forms of uncontrolled small arms trading.

wallflower• 14 years ago

War Games like visualization

http://www.visualnews.com/2011/05/06/visualized-nuclear-expl...

caf4• 14 years ago

Note that a great deal of those tests were underground - the Limited Test Ban Treaty banned all atmospheric tests and was signed in 1963. This was primarily because of the risk posed by fallout.

Needless to say, wartime use of nuclear weapons would not be underground.

anonova• 14 years ago

The article says that the video is from [the National Security Archive][1]. Does anyone know where exactly the raw video can be downloaded?

[1] http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb332/index.htm

eli• 14 years ago

You could email and ask. I'm guessing they got it through a FOIA request. http://archive.org/ hosts a lot of public domain gov't videos too.

rahim• 14 years ago

One of the two authors of the post (Robert Krulwich) is also a co-host on a fantastic podcast called Radiolab. Their most recent episode is about this topic and they tell the story of a Japanese man that was in the blast radius at Hiroshima, went home to Nagasaki, injured, and was caught in the second explosion as well!

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jul/16/doub...

BHSPitMonkey• 14 years ago

> "Quite a few have died from cancer," he told reporter Bill Broad. "No doubt it was related to the testing."

Is there really no doubt? I didn't see any more details in the article pertaining to the deaths, but for the sake of not implying that correlation == causation, I would point out that most cancer patients were never involved in nuclear testing (and, conversely, the cameraman who said the above also shows contradictory results).

yanowitz• 14 years ago

As the saying goes (roughly): "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it's a good place to start looking".

Are cancer incidence rates higher among those around nuclear explosions? Yes. http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/health-effects/rad-ex...

Is there a plausible mechanism by which radiation exposure leads to cancer? yes. http://hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap/achre/intro_...

These two facts greatly increase the probability of linkage.

adrianwaj3• 14 years ago

I've heard from anti-vaccine advocates that a number of diseases were on the decline, and that vaccine use was insignifcant in that decline. But the vaccines were introduced anyway so you could say it was the vaccines that did it but other factors were at hand.

Sometimes I think correlation not only doesn't equal causation, but counters causation, like a son doing well not because of his overbearing mother, but in spite of it. (She would claim the credit anyhow.) - I've read about vaccines causing diseases they are proclaimed to guard against - "weaponized vaccines."

FuzzyDunlop• 14 years ago

On the same tack of radiation, but a different situation, Nick Davies' Flat Earth News describes the Chernobyl aftermath. I can't remember the complete substance of his argument, but it was generally that the effects of these things was vastly overstated in the media.

Not that I'm trying to controvert your point. This is just an allusion to an enterprising journalist's research.

adavies42• 14 years ago

i'd also point out that it was the 50's and they were probably all smokers....

derleth• 14 years ago

> i'd also point out that it was the 50's and they were probably all smokers....

So were millions of other people, none of whom were subjected to that level of ionizing radiation. It's relatively easy to control for factors like that.

ams61102• 14 years ago

And later, we find that one of them is still alive at age 84, others died at ages 86, 83, 71, 63, and one unknown.

Those ages seem to me like pretty good, even mostly quite long lifespans for someone who was already an adult in 1950s.

pedalpete• 14 years ago

I agree with your sentiments, but we shouldn't be looking at death, but incidents of cancer. Either way, the sampling is too small, and I suspect can only lead to misdirection.

kitsune_• 14 years ago

Operation Plumbbob, troops in front of an exploding nuclear bomb (@2:50): http://youtu.be/7mV0Lt2PUjI?t=2m50s

Tactical nuclear artillery being fired (@0:50): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46GBjlUOROY&feature=relat...

delinka• 14 years ago

Holy Hell. That second video really drives home the devastation caused in the blast wave. Paint on vehicles turned instantly to ash and blew away. Wooden structures instantly caught fire. What was unexpected to me (I saw this in the first video which made me aware of it) was the 'backwash' after the initial shock wave.

Terrifying.

cubicle• 14 years ago

The prompt X-rays from the physics package heat up a lot of air very quickly. This expands, producing the supersonic shockwave front.

Then the fireball, being very hot and much less dense than the air around it, rises. Air is sucked towards ground zero, producing the backwash, and the characteristic mushroom cloud of any very large explosion.

mynameishere2• 14 years ago

Actually that second video looked mostly fake. Some of the footage was in "The Day After".

commieneko• 14 years ago

I grew up in the 1960s and we lived within about 30 miles of 10 Titan II silos. They showed us these films constantly in school. With commentary. I can remember taking a map and using a compass to draw out the overlapping blast circles for a class project.

Dove• 14 years ago

If you haven't seen a lot of atomic blasts, look up Trinity and Beyond. It's a documentary about nuclear warhead development and testing, with a lot of historical footage of the blasts themselves. In fact, I think the clip you reacted to is from that documentary.

Anyway, the damage you're seeing isn't actually typical for a nuclear blast. It's an effect called the precursor wind, and is in fact one of the distinctive things tested by shot Grable.

    A precursor is a very strong dynamic wind caused by the
    shell’s oblique angle of approach, and its high   
    horizontal speed. The nuclear explosion essentially 
    inherits the shell’s forward momentum, which sweeps 
    across the landscape causing extensive drag damage in 
    addition to the typical destruction. For instance, a jeep 
    which had been left virtually untouched by the much more 
    powerful Encore device was completely torn apart by the 
    artillery blast, and thrown a distance of about 500 feet.

http://www.damninteresting.com/atomic-annie-and-her-nuclear-...

goostavos• 14 years ago

I highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It goes into incredible detail about the blasts. One of the later chapters, using the example of hiroshima, discusses the effect of the blasts on the human body -- often to excruciating detail.

Your comment about the paint instantly turning to ash and blowing away made me think of the book. At a certain distance from the bomb, the wave isn't strong enough to instantly kill you, but much like paint on a car, you're skin will instantly blister from the heat, and then be blown off by the shock wave.

Horrifying stuff, but a really, really interesting read.

andyjsong• 14 years ago

In the 2nd vid, there are vertical smoke lines next to the mushroom cloud, are those from the bomb itself or something else?

mrphoebs• 14 years ago

those are rockets launched to create smoke trails. The smoke trails were used to study the velocity of the shock-wave emanating from the explosion.

A comprehensive explanation can be found here. http://www.atomcentral.com/atomic-smoke-trails.aspx

bearmf• 14 years ago

This video is so Dr. Strangelove

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

If you want more details on the "Downwinders", this is a pretty good piece: http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/nuclear...

I remember seeing some statistics when I lived in St. George 15 years ago (like high school dropouts) from 18 years after the tests. There was a huge increase in dropouts (and other negative indicators) as the downwinder babies reached adulthood.

GFischer• 14 years ago

Do these tests release heavy metals in significant enough quantities to cause this?

In my country, the children close to the oil refinery have the same behaviour, from heavy metal poisoning.

mturmon3• 14 years ago

Another excellent reference is the MIT Press book, "American Ground Zero":

http://www.amazon.com/American-Ground-Zero-Secret-Nuclear/dp...

It's abundantly clear that the people near the Nevada Test Site suffered hugely from cancer because of these aboveground tests. This national shame is documented in disturbing detail in the book. (It has 11 reviews on Amazon, all 5-star reviews.)

Some shots were particularly dirty, with unexpectedly much fallout. They couldn't/didn't predict this in advance, it was just bad luck if you happened to be nearby when one of these dirty tests went off.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

I wouldn't trust statistics like that unless they had strong differences betweeen other cities over the same time period. There's been a hell of a lot of social change over the last half century, assuming something like dropout rates should remain constant over a period of decades is a non-starter.

bjornsing• 14 years ago

> Some of you may have noticed the nuclear missile video says the explosion took place 10,000 feet above our group of soldiers. Apparently, the video is wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council checked the numbers and says the explosion, part of Operation PLUMBBOB, was actually at 18,500 feet.

Well, there's actually some pretty good proof here that the explosion was closer than that: I count the time between light and sound to be slightly less than 13 seconds (and voices sound right so I'm assuming the recording is accurate in that respect). That would mean the explosion is about 14 000 feet away from the camera.

dhughes4• 14 years ago

Me too!

distance = 1,116.44 feet/second * 12 seconds = 13,397.28 feet

backprojection3• 14 years ago

Significant figures, you have too many of them.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

Keep in mind that speed of sound is not a constant in air, it varies by temperature and pressure (it's actually slower at altitude). Also, the initial fireball (of perhaps a few thousand feet in radius) would have expanded supersonically. that makes the calculation a bit more complicated.

Edit: Also, I watched the relevant portion of the video a couple more times, it seems like there's a possibility the audio is edited. The video cuts back and forth so it's clearly not a continuous shot, we're just trusting that they kept the timing the same and the audio the same, which seems like a bit much to hope for.

theGimp• 14 years ago

It's mentioned some editing was done to make the wait seem shorter.

hollerith• 14 years ago

If the 18,500 figure refers to feet above sea level, then since most of Nevada is at about 4,500 feet above sea level, . . .

mattparlane2• 14 years ago

What I'd like to know is why the recording equipment kept functioning -- isn't an EMP supposed to wipe out sensitive electronics?

At least that's what the movies tell me...

pjscott3• 14 years ago

Vacuum tubes hold up better than today's little transistors, and there are ways of EMP-protecting things, like putting them in Faraday cages.

mattparlane2• 14 years ago

Fairy nuff, I thought transistors might have been used in 1957 but I guess not.

Symmetry2• 14 years ago

The nuke was pretty low energy and it didn't go off in the ionosphere, so no.

drblast• 14 years ago

Wouldn't they have used a mechanical film camera? I don't believe that would be susceptible.

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

A few things.

ICs are a lot more sensitive to EMP than vacuum-tube devices.

The amount of EMP experienced is a function both of the size of the size of the nuke, and of the receiving antenna. One reason the Starfish and Hardtack bursts affected street lighting systems is that these were attached directly to the electrical grid: power lines == large antennas.

Blast yields were also in the megaton range, 1000x greater than the one here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_altitude_nuclear_explosio...

Sharlin2• 14 years ago

There were no "sensitive electronics" in 1957. There were pretty much no electronics at all, particularly not in cameras. The transistor was just invented.

twfarland• 14 years ago

They all sound kind of high. Although such a power is terrible, it must be pretty exhilarating.

ck22• 14 years ago

Think about how all our nuclear tests actually raised carbon 14 levels to such a high point it can actually be used as a marker to determine the age of an object anywhere in the world.

Then think about our crazy high cancer rates.

ekianjo3• 14 years ago

C14 exists naturally as well. The reason you can date C14 containing objects has NOTHING to do with nuclear bombs.

kragniz• 14 years ago

Nuclear testing did change the levels of C14 significantly [1]. Carbon dating is impossible for dates after the '50s, when large amounts of nuclear testing started.

[1] http://www.sciencecourseware.org/VirtualDating/files/RC_3.ht...

ck22• 14 years ago

Yes but the point is nuclear tests doubled the amount of atmospheric carbon 14.

So [all of history: rising C14 level] ... [-nuclear tests-] = now double of all of history rate to that date.

tptacek• 14 years ago

And then think about our historically crazy high life expectancies.

opminion• 14 years ago

Care to explain?

Sharlin2• 14 years ago

Then think about the fact that cancer rates are strongly correlated with long lifespans. (It should be obvious why.)

DCoder• 14 years ago

Compare that to a training exercise the soviets carried out - 40+ thousand troops engaging in combat while a nuke is detonated overhead: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1954USSR1....

kristianp• 14 years ago

This is amazing, but it's not exactly "Hacker News", is it.

sophacles• 14 years ago

Submission guidelines: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I found it interesting and the discussion was even better, I've regularly had a low-grade curiosity about nuclear testing, the effects on people, etc, and a lot of that was brought up (with references true HN style) in the comments. So it is exactly hacker news.

Much like in real life as a programmer - it's not always editors, programming languages etc, sometimes it's just fun. Not too long ago, the whole dev team ended up roped into a heavy discussion one afternoon, we were debating and calculating the observed effects of some hypothetical phenomenon, full whiteboard and math style. The boss comes in and tells us problems with our math and helps us whip up a quick simulation to figure it out. (this is at a university, the bosses are pretty smart cookies, professors and the like) After a couple hours for us (an hour for him), he says, "ok, I guess I should probably suggest you get back to work, but this was fun!". Amusingly 2 of the devs got modules back on schedule the next day, apparently we all just needed some hard but fun and unrelated problem. HN can have that too :)

Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

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