video rec: 10 for the atom bomb loose again

[psocoptera]

A time-lapse map of nuclear explosions.

This is long (15 minutes) and starts very slowly, but stick with it, oh my god. I couldn't look away. I had no idea. I'm pretty much of a post-Cold-War generation - the first major news event I remember being aware of was the fall of the Berlin Wall - and I didn't grow up worrying about The Bomb. I feel like I maybe have a new insight into that now.

Comments

[gannet.livejournal.com]

... I couldn't watch after #3. But I was born in 1970, which is a different perspective.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

(My first major news event was the 1976 election.)

[antimony.livejournal.com]

That was really well done -- I missed the "map" in your original description, and was expecting photos of tests and locations, but that was impressive.

(The most disturbing bomb-related thing I ever had to view was while writing a paper on the US testing in the Pacific and the quote I needed was a voice-over over an explosion montage -- I probably had to watch that thing thirty times through. But I did grow up a Cold War child -- my parents were super-politically-active, and thus I caught the tail end of it. I never expected to survive to adulthood as a kid -- I really didn't think we were going to make it.)

[mightyinkas.livejournal.com]

My first reaction: Why do we, as a species, need to explode atoms 2000+ times? Couldn't we have been curing diseases or something USEFUL instead?

My second reaction: Well, that explains a lot about California.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I just had *no idea* about the number of tests. I think if someone had asked me, hey, how many nuclear tests do you think there have been, I would have said, I dunno, ten? And they would have chuckled and said, no, much higher, and I would have said a hundred?

I'm sure some of the tests have yielded valuable scientific information, but they can't be cheap... I bet if nuclear bomb physicists had to go through NSF instead of the military, they'd have managed to get their data in a lot fewer trials.

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

wow, thanks for this. one of the unexpected side effects of my dissertation is that I now have a greatly enhanced understanding of what it was like to live 'in the shadow of the bomb' in a way that we just don't now. There's a book I just read called "The American Technological Sublime" by David Nye that talks about, well, Americans and the technological sublime. The sublime is, like, that feeling of awe and fascination that you get when you look at something like the Grand Canyon or whatever -- awe and fascination, but mixed with a particular kind of terror. So classically we think of the sublime as being encountered in natural phenomena, but the book argues that there's a version that has to do with earthshatteringly new technology. The second to last chapter is on the bomb and it spends a lot of time describing the experiences of all the people that saw above-ground nuclear tests, many from what turned out to be quite unsafe distances. The shaking in their bones. (Apparently a lot of people described being able to see *through* their limbs, as if they were looking at an x-ray.)

[uncleamos]

Reactions:

1. I suspect that most Americans - certainly of my generation- don't realize just how many tests were done in New Mexico and how few in the South Pacific. (All the impressive photos are of atmospheric tests.)

2. WTF France?

3. The end was the most interesting, when it summarized all the explosions by country and showed test coverage of the planet. I would suggest starting at 12:00 even more than I would suggest skipping to 1962.

4. In the nuclear age, fourteen test-free years is an eternity. Nuclear proliferation, like Cold Wars, is bad. Test-ban treaties are good.

[ccommack]

Re: 1: Other than Trinity, there really wasn't much in the way of testing in New Mexico; it was all in Nevada. There are great photos of tourists in Downtown Las Vegas gawking and partying as mushroom clouds rose over the mountain. Nevada has been nuked over 900 times, so I suppose I sympathize with their being a little unreasonable on the subject of Yucca Mountain...

Re: 2: I know, right? We had a perfectly workable test ban agreement in place before France decided it would rather test than move its testing site out of Algeria (which was in the process of becoming Not-France at the time.) Cue another

[uncleamos]

Enh, they're all on the other side of the The Mountains. You know the ones. :)

[ccommack]

*several hundred detonations.

[uncleamos]

Yeah, the way the tests ran in groups is also interesting.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing that I noticed was that Nevada has been nuked by Great Britain about 15 times.

[ccommack]

Australia eventually got sick of having the outback nuked. Special Relationship >> Commonwealth Realms.

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

I read Noel Perrin's _Giving Up the Gun_ sometime around when I was graduating from Swat -- which means sometime around the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's a history of Japan's adoption of firearms in the sixteenth century and then its voluntary abandoning of the technology as being immoral. It was written to spread the meme that civilizations really can decide a weapon is too terrible to exist, but I didn't think it would actually happen today, with nuclear arms.
And it essentially hasn't. There are still a lot of nations with them, some of whom have enough to pretty much end life on Earth. It's not the arms that have been changed, but the attitude; no brinkmanship and no sabre rattling. But as someone who grew up with nuclear war being a major dread, I have to wonder how easily it would be to slip back into those conditions. Does anyone really believe we've evolved into the Star Trek Glorious Pacifist Future [TM]?

[jaipur.livejournal.com]

As another someone growing up when destroying ourselves atomically was the big fear--see, e.g., Dr. Strangelove, War Games, The Morning After, Red Dawn--I can't imagine not thinking that way. I wasn't of the generation that had Duck and Cover exercises or bomb shelters in the backyard, but in junior high the school did have a basement that was reportedly where all the students were supposed to go if the bomb siren went off... It makes the transition to fears about 'dirty bombs' and biological attacks easier to get worked up about, both fortunately and unfortunately.