[High Praise! to The Puppy Blender]
5 guys standing around joking & laughing as a 2-kiloton nuke goes off 3.5 miles over their heads:
[YouTube direct link] (Viewer #316,438)
Although not without the standard-issue nukes-are-icky liberal boilerplate, the article at NPR is still quite informative about the background for this video. Especially the “where are they now” summary. You can almost see the tearstains on the author’s keyboard upon discovering that all 5 men weren’t dead from cancer within the year.
I’ll take your word for it, Harvey. I don’t read or listen to anything from NPR…sucks I have to pay for it.
“…You can almost see the tearstains on the author’s keyboard upon discovering that all 5 men weren’t dead from cancer within the year.”
Oh the sweet sweet taste of Liberal Tears! There really is nothing so tasty anywhere in the ‘verse.
Cept maybe Unicorn meat.
When I was at UC Davis in the early 90’s. There was a class offered called “nuclear weapons and society”….or something like that. It was an elective, but being the science! type, it sounded like it might be more interesting than basket weaving, so I signed up.
To my surprise, it was taught by 2 physicists from Lawrence Livermore who actually worked on the Manhattan Project. It was a really cool class…partly because they actually went into great detail about how one would build a nuke, and although most of the class was WAY over the heads of most of the students who just wanted their elective credit, with a little physics and math (ok…maybe more than a little) a student like myself was able to piece together the little details they left out. Needless to say it’s very very hard to build a nuke and even harder to get one to explode, but the 2 guys teaching the class told us many stories of their wild and misspent youth…like when they “heard through the grapevine” that the trinity test was going to happen and approximately where, they just got into their convertible, drove out to the middle of the desert, and WAITED in their convertible, cause they were young, and curious, and wanted to see if it really works…and just by pure luck they ended up far enough away and facing the wrong direction for their eyes to have gotten burned out by the flash the explosion produced…but it was “neat” to see it in person they said.
Then on another day one of them brought in a lump of melted metal, which came off the tower that held the bomb used for the trinity test….he also brought a gieger counter to show us that it was, in fact, pretty radioactive….but not at a harmful because it was all alpha particles.
Both of these men were probably in their late 70’s and they were both quite surprised that given their history, they never had any radiation-related problems or cancer.
One of my favorite classes ever and some of my favorite teachers.
And not one of the 5 men gained superpowers?
Must not have been enough Gamma rays, dang!
“Party. 1700 Hours. 3-1/2 miles under the nuclear fireball. Bring cigars.”
These guys were already superheroes.
I worked with a seaman who watched tests in the Pacific from his ship. As he put it, “we’d all go up on deck to watch, we didn’t know better”
He was in his sixties when I worked with him, and his ligaments and tendons were detaching.