The article says that the video is from [the National Security Archive][1]. Does anyone know where exactly the raw video can be downloaded?
[1]: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb332/index.htm
Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
11–20 of 118 posts
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#12It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives. As someone who has only cursory knowledge of atomic explosions and radiation damage, I was always under the impression that standing under an explosion such as this would almost guarantee a death during or shortly after. I suppose it's a lot like HIV. Unprotected sex with an HIV positive person doesn't * guarantee* disease contraction, which is the impr…
Far safer. You have to remember that they're over three and a half miles from the explosion. They're just in a dramatic direction.
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#13It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives. As someone who has only cursory knowledge of atomic explosions and radiation damage, I was always under the impression that standing under an explosion such as this would almost guarantee a death during or shortly after. I suppose it's a lot like HIV. Unprotected sex with an HIV positive person doesn't * guarantee* disease contraction, which is the impr…
From the article: The thing is, in that particular explosion, those guys would have been in a pretty safe position. The bomb itself was a small one (by nuclear standards — 2 kilotons) and it was way, way above their heads. They weren't in a zone to be too affected by the immediate radiation. The bomb was small enough and high enough that it wouldn't have sucked up dust to produce much fallout. The remaining cloud would have been full of (nasty) fission products, but it would have been extremely hot and most of it would have stayed aloft until it cooled down, by which point it probably would have been spread more diffusely.
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#14One of the two authors of the post (Robert Krulwich) is also a co-host on a fantastic podcast called Radiolab. Their most recent episode is about this topic and they tell the story of a Japanese man that was in the blast radius at Hiroshima, went home to Nagasaki, injured, and was caught in the second explosion as well!
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jul/16/doub...
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#15It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives. As someone who has only cursory knowledge of atomic explosions and radiation damage, I was always under the impression that standing under an explosion such as this would almost guarantee a death during or shortly after. I suppose it's a lot like HIV. Unprotected sex with an HIV positive person doesn't * guarantee* disease contraction, which is the impr…
From the article: The thing is, in that particular explosion, those guys would have been in a pretty safe position. The bomb itself was a small one (by nuclear standards — 2 kilotons) and it was way, way above their heads. They weren't in a zone to be too affected by the immediate radiation. The bomb was small enough and high enough that it wouldn't have sucked up dust to produce much fallout. The remaining cloud wou…
Exactly. That's the part I learned from.
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#16It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives. As someone who has only cursory knowledge of atomic explosions and radiation damage, I was always under the impression that standing under an explosion such as this would almost guarantee a death during or shortly after. I suppose it's a lot like HIV. Unprotected sex with an HIV positive person doesn't * guarantee* disease contraction, which is the impr…
No, it's nothing like HIV. HIV is a statistical thing: It's random chance if an infective particle travels.
A nuclear bomb like this is deterministic. Based on the distance, altitude, size (power), and type (fission, fusion, specifics of the design - especially the tamper) of the bomb you can calculate exactly what and how dangerous the effects will be.
The military was trying to show that they are able to make these calculations correctly, and that used appropriately, this type of bomb an be used without undesired damage.
It didn't work for them though, because people have an irrational fear of anything nuclear and are not interesting in hearing about any calculations.
It's one of those paradoxes similar to how people are completely unable to correctly calculate how risky an action will be. For example people are scared of flying but not crossing the street (a common event comes to be seen as less risky) or driving a car (if you are in control it seems less risky).
> It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives.
No, actually it was completely expected. If you can manage to internalize this, and actually believe inside your head that these men were quite safe then you will have gone a long way toward conquering an irrational fear.
PS. You may be thinking of Cancer when comparing to HIV which is indeed a random thing.
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#17It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives. As someone who has only cursory knowledge of atomic explosions and radiation damage, I was always under the impression that standing under an explosion such as this would almost guarantee a death during or shortly after. I suppose it's a lot like HIV. Unprotected sex with an HIV positive person doesn't * guarantee* disease contraction, which is the impr…
Far safer. You have to remember that they're over three and a half miles from the explosion. They're just in a dramatic direction.
In fact, the entire point of this test was to demonstrate that it was safe to stand under it. While some of the early tests were very unsafe, by the time of this test (1957), the dangers of radiation were well-known, so it wasn't a cowboy-type experiment like the early ones, and the planning would've computed the expected radiation dose and ensured it was safe.
The military did it as a publicity stunt to assuage public fears of nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles by showing that even if they were used in a dogfight directly over a city, they wouldn't pose any risk to those on the ground. The volunteers were even supposed to not wear a helmet or hat to show that it was fine for normal people. If I recall correctly from having seen this discussed previously, they measured radiation doses received, and found that the highest doses (but still not at dangerous levels) were received by the pilots involved in the test, not the ground volunteers.
This was from the relatively short-lived era when several militaries were hoping to make a distinction between "strategic" nuclear weapons, the kind that blow up cities and would only be used in doomsday scenarios, and "tactical" nuclear weapons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon), small-yield varieties that would just be like very big regular weapons and could conceivably be used in a non-apocalyptic war. Due to a mixture of public opposition and fears of international chain reactions that might result from "going nuclear", though, that initiative failed, which is why you saw a transition back into really-gigantic conventional weapons in the 1990s, e.g. the MOAB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-43/B_Massive_Ordnance_Air_B...).
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#18> "Quite a few have died from cancer," he told reporter Bill Broad. "No doubt it was related to the testing."
Is there really no doubt? I didn't see any more details in the article pertaining to the deaths, but for the sake of not implying that correlation == causation, I would point out that most cancer patients were never involved in nuclear testing (and, conversely, the cameraman who said the above also shows contradictory results).
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#19Operation Plumbbob, troops in front of an exploding nuclear bomb (@2:50): http://youtu.be/7mV0Lt2PUjI?t=2m50s
Tactical nuclear artillery being fired (@0:50): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46GBjlUOROY&feature=relat...
Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
#20> "Quite a few have died from cancer," he told reporter Bill Broad. "No doubt it was related to the testing." Is there really no doubt? I didn't see any more details in the article pertaining to the deaths, but for the sake of not implying that correlation == causation, I would point out that most cancer patients were never involved in nuclear testing (and, conversely, the cameraman who said the above also shows cont…
As the saying goes (roughly): "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it's a good place to start looking".
Are cancer incidence rates higher among those around nuclear explosions? Yes. http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/health-effects/rad-ex...
Is there a plausible mechanism by which radiation exposure leads to cancer? yes. http://hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap/achre/intro_...
These two facts greatly increase the probability of linkage.