If it’s classified, or anything, I wouldn’t want you to tell me. But…are there any dopers here who’ve seen a nuclear explosion, in person?
I mean, there have been a fair share of atmospheric nuclear tests, over the years. Some of them, like “Operation Fishbowl” over the Pacific, could be seen from populated areas.
In “Desert Rock I” 6500 regular troops performed field exercises in the aftermath of a nuclear detonation.
Heck, according to the Trinity and Beyond documentary, some of them even involved civilian(!) Civil Defense personnel as observers.
So…have any of the 30,000 SDMB users ever seen a genuine nuking? And, if you’re out there, would you be willing to tell us?
I went to school with a guy whose…grandfather, I believe…claimed to have been one of the soldiers involved in a test. He said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Of course, this is one of those “friend of a friend” things, but I don’t see any reason he’d choose to invent that particular story.
My step- dad was in the Army and in New Mexico for a testing, in the '50. He was an Army photographer and after the test he and some buddies drove their jeep through the dust. They didn’t know what the effects were going to be.
My father was in the RAF, and he met a USAF officer in the 1970s who had witnessed one of the first tests in the US.
According to my dad, the guy said that when the bomb went off, he was facing the blast, had his eyes closed tight, and his hand in front of his face, but could still see the silhouette of the bones in his hand.
My father in law was a contract diver for the Navy, and was at Eniwetok for a couple tests (Operation Ivy I think). He told me about one test that sucked the water out of the interior lagoon, along with the sensors he and his team had placed on the sea bottom. He had no pictures, but actually saw himself in one of those nuclear test documentaries!
A colleague of mine was stationed on Christmas Island in the 1950s, when the British tested their device. They were told to turn their backs on the explosion. He told me he could see the silhouette of the bones in his hand too. He died of cancer ( he was sure the cancer and the nuclear explosion were related)
No, but I’ve stood at ground zero on Frenchman Flats at the Nevada Test Site, right next door to Area 51, and seen some of the portait sized color photos they have in the Security offices there…
And yes, I kept my eyes on the skies, and no, I did not see a UFO, an Aurora, or any aircraft at all. Just buzzards.
Never seen one, and never want to. However i did live a few miles from SL-1 at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho when it went critical in 1961. It was the first nuclear accident in the US and it took less than one second to happen.
No, but I have a slice of the tree Enrico Fermi used to relax under when he was working on the Manhattan Project. I guess when they were renovating part of the campus, that particular tree was cut down, sliced up and passed out to some of the Physics Dept.
<hijack> I once worked with a guy who once worked on the SL-1 reactor. He said he had actually been scheduled to work on the night they had the accident, but he had a lst-minute change with another worker, who was later killed in the accident. He said they never really did pin down the cause of the accident. It was a small and rather primitive reactor, which was designed for the potential use of providing power to the arctic DEW sites (which were radar installations that gave a “Distant Early Warning” of a Soviet nuclear missile launch). It had manual control rods that lifted by pulling up on a rope, either by hand or by a overhead pulley system. One theoretical cause of the accident was that one worker was in the process of correctly/slowly pulling up a control rod, when the other worker assisting him decided to get cute and play a game of grab-ass, startling the first worker who jumped up, pulling the control rod quickly, causing an exponential increase in reactor power and a steam explosion that shot the control rod out of the reactor like a spear, impaling the first worker against the ceiling. </hijack>