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I think Peter Kuran has said that the majority of interesting footage is neglected rather than classified. He specializes in X-ray photos of the first few milliseconds.
Do you have a link?
And his movie is Trinity and Beyond
See also atomcentral.com
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> Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world Someone's got to explain to me how this was even remotely plausible. We've had orders of magnitude more energetic events in earth's history that they would be aware of (dinosaur slaying asteroid for instance). These didn't manage to destroy the earth by turning the atmosphere into a fusion reactor. Surely they were aware of this. S…
There are different versions of the story. In one of them, somebody asked the question whether the atmosphere could ignite, and that was very quickly answered in the negative, but then Oppenheimer mentioned it to the people in Washington, and after that the question recurred periodically because the higher ups got unduly alarmed. And then of course there are versions making it into a much more dramatic story. When th…
By the conclusion, the joke about the “near zero” physical possibility of the end of the world has transmuted in Oppenheimer’s mind into certainty that Trinity ignited social forces leading to the same doom.
Were the founders of EG&G the ones charged with developing the technique to capture the photos?
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I doubt it. I've ruminated a little on this and what I think is that as people start dying off, the survivors will find a rather pleasant existence before the end. People start dying off, and all of a sudden housing prices go down. There's more parks open. The air feels fresher gradually. It's a gradual decline as human influence tapers off near the end. I think it will be more "The Last of Us" than "Mad Max"
Housing price goes down, but there's no maintenance. No shops open nearby, no hospitals, no firemen, no police, no gas stations. People will flock to cities that still have services. Then the cities will have the same population density as before.
Currently reading Command and Control after visiting the Titan missle silo I'm Tucson Az. If you're into Nuclear history check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_%28book%29
"Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability." (part 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQEB3LJ5psk
They cover both the technology itself and its history, including the incidents you are reading about. These people are the ones who developed the methodology and the technology for nuclear device safety, or at least a significant chunk of it. I think it has recently become much more mathematically heavy, with zero knowledge proofs and other fancy stuff used to talk to the locks in the devices.
It had no music and actually (if I recall correctly) had no sound at all for what seemed like the longest time.
It really did make the extreme gravity of the event sink in very deeply.
Fully agree with libraryofbabel's comment here of it being "one of the most successful and horrifying experiments in the history of science".
I used to teach a class on the history of contemporary science (WW2-present) and I started the class with Trinity. There’s no other moment better. We know how it turned out, but the people there waiting for the test did not know how it would turn out. The bomb might not have worked. Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world. Hans Bethe had sat down and done the calculations…
> Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world Someone's got to explain to me how this was even remotely plausible. We've had orders of magnitude more energetic events in earth's history that they would be aware of (dinosaur slaying asteroid for instance). These didn't manage to destroy the earth by turning the atmosphere into a fusion reactor. Surely they were aware of this. S…
Enjoyed this article, but was immediately distracted into another rabbit hole from the editor's note on the time zone, which I hadn't heard before: > If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945 So, I went digging because time zones have been a weird fascination for me due to dealing with all their annoyances as an engineer, and found thi…
One of my big gripes with the film Oppenheimer was the blast itself, obviously a climactic moment in the film. It looked like someone set off a bunch of chemical explosives. That’s not how it looked in real life. Totally bizarre decision. I don’t know if they were trying to avoid effects on purpose of go gritty and retro or something but the “unearthly cosmic horror” feel of the first a-bomb blast is important. It’s…
I'm never watching this movie again. The dead silence to 100dB boom was unreasonable, dangerous, and amateurish filmmaking. And not the least of which Atomic bombs aren't that loud.