See them here. I find these beautiful in an evil sort of way.
Makes me wanna sing. . .
Happy traaaaails to you . . . until . . we meeet agaaaaaain . …
Tripler
Wait, that was the closing song to Strangelove, que no? :smack:
“We’ll meet again, don’t know where…don’t know when…”
They’re beautiful. I’m equally amazed at the quality of the photographs and the incredible textures the explosions create.
My god, look at that house! That’s two and a half seconds - at over a thousand metres away? Jesus, I knew that was an easy range for a nuke (depending on the yield, I’ve heard radiuses for “complete destruction” go up to 14 kilometres, or nearly 10 miles) but I never imagined the destruction was so . . . complete.
(And the picture with the explosion over the lake is beautiful. My good, look at the sheer size of the thing!)
Yes, if you HAVE to be nuked, it’s best to be at Ground Zero. It’s all over very quickly. None of this long-drawn-out radiation poisoning.
Hollywood tells us that if we’re going to survive a nuclear blast, hide in the nearest refrigerator for definite survival.
I once had a Physics Prof walk in and talk a flash picture of the class.
He then said:
“That’s how long it takes to die at ground zero…”
he then went on to lecture about blast effects at various distances and bomb “strengths”
And interesting class indeed…
Regards
FML
There was an opinion during the Cold War that living near the airbase at Jacksonville, Arkansas would provide a quick and unknowing death. 
If you look close enough, you can see the face of Louis Gossett Jr.’ character from Enemy Mine in the second picture. See him, looking off to the right?
Holy shit.
I find myself fascinated with the Nagasaki photo and the three people in the foreground. I wonder what must have been going through their minds upon hearing the blast and seeing this thing rising up before them. Today, we’d have a fair idea about what it was; they’d never heard of anything remotely like it.
The song was “We’ll Meet Again”, sung by Vera Lynn.
I have a number of pictures taking from Kwaj of detonations (probably the Castle series) at Bikini. They are very pretty, and just like a rendering of an exploding star, something I want to be far, far away from. The hydrodynamics of an explosion are fascinating things to study in concept; the reality of destruction and radioactivity, not so much. One would hope that we would start to put this chapter in man’s use of technology to threaten and destroy others, but then we see Russia making negotiations to based bombers in Cuba, and the United States setting up missile defenses in Eastern Europe, and realize that it’s just a continuous cycle.
Stranger
I understand that, seen live from a distance, a nuclear explosion has purple lightning features about it. I’ve never seen these in any photos or movies of an explosion, and I’m very curious about them – it makes sense, because you’d expect some high-energy recombination and transition photons (like those you see from a lightning flash, which id nitrogen recombining), but maybe at higherf energy. I’d really like to see that sometime.