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Tag: nuclear bombs

  • Witness The Power Of An Underwater Nuclear Explosion

    Nuclear weapons are one of the scariest things that mankind has ever invented. I’m just thankful that I was born at the tail end of the Cold War. Living in constant fear of a nuclear attack must have been pretty unnerving, but I still have respect for the technology and power that the nuclear weapon exemplifies.

    I think we’ve all seen a land test for a nuclear weapon. What happens when a nuclear weapon is exploded underwater though? Does it cause a tsunami or something worse? The U.S. military hired a cameraman to film the two underwater nuclear tests. The tests were codenamed Wahoo and Umbrella and were exploded only month apart from each other.

    Check out the explosion below. It’s actually pretty awe inspiring. It’s like a god just did a cannonball into the ocean:

    The most impressive part about the test is that the waves caused by the test completely covered a nearby island. The typical underwater nuclear explosion causes a spray dome with a height of 900 ft. The waves caused by these explosions can still be pretty dangerous up to 1,000 ft away. The cameramen filming the above explosion had to climb into trees due to the high waves that hit the island.

    All nuclear tests today are performed underground for obvious reasons. Performing these kind of tests in the ocean are especially harmful as unexpected consequences can arise. The most famous of which happened at Bikini Atoll where a group of Japanese fishermen were subjected to the nuclear fallout from one of the tests. The event inspired the film Gojira, one of the strongest pieces of anti-nuclear fiction ever created.

  • Listen To What An Atom Bomb Really Sounds Like

    I’m pretty sure that we’ve all seen an atom bomb explosion by now. The mushroom cloud is engrained into the general consciousness as something that is to be feared. I’m sure we all know what an atom bomb sounds like as well, but it turns out that we don’t know anything.

    Thanks to some fantastic archived footage of a public atom bomb test, we can now see what an atom bomb explosion is really like. It turns out that footage involving atom bomb blasts have been doctored to include the sound of the explosion at the moment the bomb goes off. Unless you’re right on top of the bomb when it goes off, that’s not gonna happen.

    It all comes down to the speed of light versus the speed of sound. We see the light from the explosion immediately because light travels faster than anything else on Earth. The video is taken 11km away from the explosion so it takes the sound about half a minute to reach the ears of those watching the explosion.

    One other interesting thing that pop culture has convinced us is that atom bombs continue to create noise and smolder as the mushroom cloud rises. As the video clearly shows, there’s an initial bang, a rush of air and then total silence as the mushroom cloud slowly rises. It’s far more chilling than anything I’ve ever seen.

    Despite how you feel about the use of atomic weapons, this is super impressive science at work. Science isn’t always safe, but it commands respect nonetheless.

    [h/t: CNET]

  • NUKEMAP Uses Google Maps API To Let You Blow Up The Outside World

    NUKEMAP Uses Google Maps API To Let You Blow Up The Outside World

    People make a lot of novel uses of Google Maps technologies. Some people give you ways to share your love with the world. Some people promote nature conservation. You can even take a virtual spelunking tour.

    While all of those are impressive, none are quite as ambitious as NUKEMAP, an interactive Google Map that lets you select any city and nuke the absolute hell out of it.

    The ingenious app was developed by Alex Wellerstein, a scholarly historian on all things nuclear weapons, who was not satisfied with the current nuclear calculators out there on the web so he created one himself. While you can select any city in the world that you want to blow way, Wellerstein put together a short buffet of cities that you might want to nuke to get you started. Even though this app is simulation of unleashing nuclear holocausts on cities, I still couldn’t bring myself to choose Hiroshima or Nagasaki from the drop-down menu. The thought just shivers me timbers a wee bit much.

    Additionally, amateur nukers can either choose their own yield – that’s how strong your bomb is – or you can select from a menu of nuclear bombs that have actually existed, ranging from Davy Crockett, the smallest bomb ever manufactured by the United States, to Tsar Bomba, the largest nuke ever conceived (courtesy of the USSR).

    So… what happens when you make like Slim Pickens riding the uranium bull?

    Don’t take this personally, Phillies, but I chose to drop Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, on Philadelphia. Here’s the damage:

    Once you drop your bomb on a city, you’re presented with a fascinating report of what the bomb’s effects were. For instance, my bomb had a fireball radius of 0.06 miles (that’s the mustard orange center in the map above) and an air blast radius of 1.15 miles (indicated by the gray circle). The devastating facts about my bomb are, as Wellerstein himself astutely describes, “stomach-churning.”

    Oh, and in case you’re wondering about what the death toll would be with one of these apps, I will pass along a quote from NUKEMAP:

    A convenient rule of thumb for estimating the short-term fatalities from all causes due to a nuclear attack is to count everyone inside the 5 psi blast overpressure contour around the hypocenter as a fatality. In reality, substantial numbers of people inside the contour will survive and substantial numbers outside the contour will die, but the assumption is that these two groups will be roughly equal in size and balance out. This completely ignores any possible fallout effects.” (Carey Sublette)

    As abjectly grim as this all is, I gotta say, this is still the most fun I’ve had with Google Maps since… well, possibly ever.