Many U.S. and British soldiers witnessed nuclear explosions up close and personal during training exercises in the 1950's. Ken McGinley, for example, wrote an unforgettable account of a nuclear explosion he witnessed on Christmas Island in the Pacific in 1958. Here's an excerpt:

Suddenly, before I could have any more misgivings, a voice came through the tannoy:

"This could be a live run," it said dramatically. "Five ... Four ... Three ... Two ... One ... Zero ..."

There was a moment's pause. Then it happened.

"Cover your eyes!" bawled the voice from the loudspeakers. I had my fists shoved into my eyes and my back to the area where the bomb was going off. At the moment of detonation there was a flash. At that instant I was able to see straight through my hands. I could see the veins. I could see the blood, I could see all the skin tissue, I could see the bones and worst of all, I could see the flash itself. It was like looking into a white-hot diamond, a second sun.

Then the heat came. A slow, intense, searing heat which ate its way into your very bones. It didn't feel "... as if someone has passed an electric fire behind us". On the contrary, it felt as if someone had passed an electric fire through us. I let out a scream with the scorching pain.

"Okay, look at the bomb now," said the voice from the PA system.

The whole scene was unbelievable. A gigantic, dirty-looking mushroom cloud was forming on the horizon. An enormous ball of fire inhabited the base of the cloud and deadly-looking ripples of waves began to emanate from its base. It headed directly for us as we stood on the beach. I quickly glanced around me at the other men just as we got hit by a gale. Some tents got wrecked and the cookhouse collapsed.

That is an exceedingly sobering thought.

Actually, isn't the top pic the Tsar Bomba H-Bomb?

quote: "Actually, isn't the top pic the Tsar Bomba H-Bomb?"

It's a well known pic, usually posted as a French test
conducted in the South Pacific in the 70's.

While I agree with the proposal on a practical level,
I'm afraid that most of the electorate is so deep into
'viral denial' of reality that nothing would touch them short of ... hmmm.

You're right. Confused it with this:

http://www.waagnfnp.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/tsar_bomba-3.jpg

Thought I knew my nukes.

Nantz, Iran

I am aware of all internet traditions.

That might actually work.

People have put nuclear weapons in the same dim, fuzzy memory hole that they've put Hitler.

Teenage kids flip a Nazi salute when their parents ask them to clean up their room with the same casual nonchalance as a drunk yelling "Nuke the bastids!"

An atomic bomb destroying a city has taken on the same emotional weight to the average person as does the Death Star blowing up Alderaan.

Maybe we do need a wake up call.

robert: I believe you're right about where that picture was taken. Further thoughts; I used, in my student days, to have that picture as a poster about 4 feet by 3 on the wall of my digs. It was directly in front of the front door as one came in. I used to enjoy watching people's faces when they noticed something about the picture. At that scale (4' x 3', remember?) if one looks very closely, down on the left hand side there is a silhouette backlit by the bomb's light, about 3mm high. The silhouette was just big enough to see what it was - a full-sized palm tree. People's faces when they saw that little speck were a picture to behold.

Gerard, I completely agree, and I claim priority; I came up with that one a couple of years ago, with one further twist - invite all the world's leaders to witness it. And devote one of the cameras to a shot of their faces as they watch the light of Hell's gate opening.

Interesting video - a little overdone on the hyperventilation and a bit short on actual facts however. The panicky phrase "solid matter began to come apart releasing untold quantities of energy" is ridiculous. Instrument packages to measure the blast were dropped by fellow 509th bombers so it is known exactly how much energy was released: 0.6 grams of the uranium mass was converted to energy releasing the destructive power of 12,000 tons of TNT producing a blast overpressure exceeding 5psi (or 720 lbs per square foot).

I notice, however, that the video and the article here fails to mention that the US warned Japan numerous times that they were going to drop the bomb and had dropped leaflets on Hiroshima and Nagasaki days before the attack warning civilians that their city was targeted begging the people to evacuate. After the bombing of Hiroshima, hundreds of American lives were put at risk again dropping leaflets on Japan warning of the upcoming bombing. Radio stations in Saipan broadcast the warnings every 15 minutes. Luckily many people had evacuated Nagasaki prior to the bombing.

However the damage produced by a 12 kiloton was similar to the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo. We could have done that dozens of times over but would it get a slicly produced, unfactual cartoon on the BBC?

I say let’s do it, let’s take your suggestion and show the world the power of the nuke vs conventional bombing. Let’s subject the cities of Khorāsān-e Razavi and Eṣfahān to fire bombing, Fārs and Khūzestān to conventional carpet bombing and Tehrān and Māzandarān to small nukes just so the world can see the destructive power of each. It’ll be like killing 6 birds with 3 stones!

I would like to weigh in again, if I may. There are no words, but I'll try.

Sagan said it better than I can. “A full-scale thermonuclear exchange would be the equivalent of World War II once a second, for the length of a lazy afternoon.”

That's what lies beneath the surface of ordinary life. I personally think that many of the ills of the West are due to the constant thought, in the back of one's mind, that Lovecraftian horror lies there sleeping, ready to do our bidding if we get careless or mad enough. Not Cthulhu this time; Cthuga.

Strangely enough, one of the creators of the Bomb also gave his name to a puzzle; the Fermi Paradox. What we are discussing here is one of the possible answers to that puzzle. Nuclear weapons are here and cannot be uninvented; we have to learn to live with them - or we won't learn, and the human race will be run. And this hurdle is not the only one we will have to pass; there may be many, but there are at least two - nanotech and orbital adjustment of asteroids - that we can think of already.

Humanity has to grow up. We haven't yet, and there isn't much time left in which to do it.

I hate to say it, but the evolution of human intelligence is starting to look like a maladaptive development. It's been beneficial in the short run but has allowed humanity to develop an efficient means of destroying itself, along with a big chunk of the biosphere. But the Earth has survived worse disasters. When we're gone, evolution will continue. Maybe next time nature will get it right.

Jonathan:

One of the really chilling things about the possibility of our killing ourselves off is this; we are the last chance.

Why? Simple. Any developing technological civilisation has to have easily-available materials, easy to work with, to learn how to make things. Examples; iron ore of worthwhile concentration near the surface.

We disappear, and all our mines and all our works disappear with us. If somebody else comes along, they won't be able to have Bronze and Iron Ages - we've used it all up, at least in places where a civilisation at that stage will be able to get at it.

Of course, the ores and the oil and coal deposits will be replaced - but by the time they are, Earth will be well on its way to becoming uninhabitable by multicellular life, as the Sun ages and grows hotter.

We are it, ladies and gentlemen; the last hope of life on Earth to spread and grow. And perhaps there is nobody else anywhere at all and if we die life dies. Nice thought eh?

Actually, all our works and artifacts and junk and waste dumps and cities and other items will not just be magically beamed off-planet. If anything there will be a lot of resources just lying around much closer to the surface of the planet than every before.

Some may be in vast piles of once molten and now congealed pools but they will still be easier to get at once they stop glowing in the dark.

I was struck by this fact (from Bradley's Flyboys): The rate of casualties we were inflicting on Japan dropped when we dropped Little Man. The firebombing we were using was causing massive casualties.

Also, more were killed by the samuri sword than were killed by atomic weapons.

To your point though, I said much the same thing right after 9/11. Hang a map of Afghanistan (or the Mid-east) on the wall. Throw a dart at the map. Announce to the world that we will drop a small nuke on that spot at noon tomorrow and that after that we begin to get serious.

DriedFrogPills--I would really like to see some citations and sources for your claims about the US warning Japan prior to dropping the bombs.

Everything I've read states that no such warning was given. The US did not want to risk giving any warning because the bomb could have been a dud, the Japanese could have moved POWs into the target area, local air defense might have been bolstered to shoot down the aircrews, and probably several other reasons I do not recall at the moment.

I nominate Damascus, Islamabad, Riyadh, and Tehran for live demonstrations. Each of them have proven to be resistant to more peaceful overtures.

Watch it without sound.

Unfortunately, such a demonstration would only have an effect on the West. And that effect would be to shut down all resistance in the vain hope that the result of surrender would be less worse than the bomb.

With regard to resources - the mountains will wear down again. The Mesabi and Marquette ranges were beneath once high mountains. The earth will be here until the sun dies, and mountains are short-lived compared to that.

Mikey, Earth will be here but the biosphere won't. Why? Simple, really; the Sun is getting hotter. On the timescale of the formation of ore deposits, Earth will get too hot for land life, at the very least. Estimates of average surface temperature around 350,000,000 AD cluster around 50 C. This means very little rainfall and a world-wide desert.

Also, there is very little slack left in the earth's negative feedback mechanisms. At the moment (at least before we started messing with it) the CO2 levels in the atmosphere are just about at the lower limit of the range in which plants can grow. The Earth cools itself by dropping CO2 levels, and that method doesn't work any more.

Gerard,

My first response, as to most of your writing, is "God, yes. That'll show 'em. Pay the f*ck attention!"

Some of the responders here, however (among the most thoughtful and literate on the Web, I find, apparently people who universally understand that "it's" means "it is"), correctly point out that the Last Best Hope of Mankind is increasingly populated with these creatures...

Voice of the Neuter

...and consequently Quod would probably insufficiently Demonstrandum.

My nom de web, btw, refers to the fact that I was born before Hiroshima. The idea that most of the populace could watch a nuclear demonstration and still see it as a video game is profoundly depressing to me, but I have to concede the likelihood.

Worth a try, though. I nominate Seattle.

Maybe you could put up some warnings on your way out of town.

My dad worked for 27 years in the nuclear weapons division of "a major national lab".

He used to say: "What good is a deterrent if we never use it?"

Well, my comment doesn't make much sense without the reference to your essay on "The Voice of the Neuter", does it?

I thought you really nailed it on that one, too, but I guess you'd rather not refer to it internally.

Didn't mean to give offense.

Every generation has to relearn the past by experience. The more terrible the lessons, the longer it must take to relearn them and the harder the lesson learned.

The focus on the A-bomb displays the fallacy of the materialistic focus of today's elite.

They ignore the underlying causes of World War II which was the unchecked rise of miltarism in Japan and the seizure of the state apparatus in Germany and Russia by a radical, militant socialist minority - and a West that allowed it to occur.

Japan's militarism was a plan put into effect by the Meijii empereror and his advisors who deliberately militarised the decision making elite and who slowly eliminiated dissident voices.

Both Germany and Russia had the state apparatus seized by a militant clique of narcissistic fantasists who wrote and plotted from prison for decades. They brutally eliminated opposition using police power and military power. No nations stepped in to stop them. In fact, they fawned over the Red Princes in Russia, German, and Italy.

It was Stalin and Hitler who colluded to carve up Poland which started World War II. It was a fantasy by both men to seize another country and kill its citizens on a mass scale. Had Stalin had an ounce of decency in his body, he could have stopped Hitler with a NO and meant it.

Both men relied on a fallacy that material riches are the same as wealth - not freedom, not rationalisty, not compassion, not the human spirit.

The power of the militant fantasy cults cannot be underestimated.

Worse horrors have been visited upon humans than World War II by fantasy cults - Genghis Khan killed nearly a hundred million people with just a few poverty stricken yak herders. He rode out of Asia into Persia, Russia, Europe, China - where people had forgotten about deterrence. He was only stopped when he ran into people who had not forgotten.

"NUKE THE MOON"

Warbaby,

Just trying to fix the link. I'll try again. Not intentional.

There. Works now.

Had the US thoroughly nuked Afghanistan after Sept 11 it would have served as a sober warning for all the troublemakers in the region. Afghanistan has precious little worth preserving and we could have accidentally nuked the tribal regions of Pakistan as well.

The West has lost its will to incinerate its opponents in order to win, we will all pay for that in the end.

The thought of such weapons in the hands of Islamic fanatics should chill every person to the bone.

The nihilists will do nothing but cheer silently when apocalypsics acquire and use such weapons.

And no, Fletcher. Those apocalypsics who have stated they would use these weapons as soon as they can do not follow the cross. The old Cold War is over, do not be a French General Staff planning for the campaign of 1919 in 1939.

Like William Ayers - everything he is and believes is incredibally antique, beliefs overtaken by events forty years ago. He still advocates for causes that are long gone and dust. A truly pathetic being, a living Miss Haversham, filled with nothing but poison for future generations.

The 20th Century saw wonders, and saw the most putrid self-justifications for indulgence ever. Putting the Boomers and their ilk under sod can't happen soon enough.

The nihilists will do nothing but cheer silently when apocalypsics acquire and use such weapons.

And no, Fletcher. Those apocalypsics who have stated they would use these weapons as soon as they can do not follow the cross. The old Cold War is over, do not be a French General Staff planning for the campaign of 1919 in 1939.

Like William Ayers - everything he is and believes is incredibally antique, beliefs overtaken by events forty years ago. He still advocates for causes that are long gone and dust. A truly pathetic being, a living Miss Haversham, filled with nothing but poison for future generations.

The 20th Century saw wonders, and saw the most putrid self-justifications for indulgence ever. Putting the Boomers and their ilk under sod can't happen soon enough.

Mikey,

First of all, Cold Fury is the stuff. The Glowbull Warming Primer is exquisite.

In re Billy Ayers, here's David Solway on received wisdom:

'This is the fallout from the Academy and “lifeworld” of the carnival 1960s—“that great spurt of narcissistic eccentricity,” in Martin Amis’ wonderful phrase. What that period encouraged was a state of protracted adolescence, that is, a mainly patronizing identification with the oppressed and marginalized, an idolizing of third-world revolutionaries and dictators, anarcho-socialist pipe dreams, a flabby self-election along with a cheaply-bought sense of inordinate sensitivity, and a pseudo-magical journey into Sergeant Pepper land at the expense of our own culture and history.'

My goodness, I wish I'd written that. What is most painful to remember now is how marginal and inconsequential those idiots seemed, and how easily dismissed.

His Majesty the Baby Boomer has been nipping at my heels my whole life. I plan on outlasting the bastards.