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The Wing Commander and every key staff officer on the base was fired. If it had blown to the northwest it would have been over Wichita in a couple of minutes. Lucky us, the cloud moved to the southeast which was largely farmland and hit no houses before it dissiapated. I followed it in a helicopter radioing info back to our control center. The gas cloud was so lethal it would kill anything almost instantly. One time we had a spill of a deadly gas from the Atlas (liquid fuel) in Wichita. Wish I still had my docimeter to see just what it would read as I worked around nuclear B-47’s, B-52’s, Atlas, and Minuteman for many years. I am not so sure I would want to go near them anymore. A couple of my buddies were statinoned in the Pacific flying helicopters and were participants in the various blast during all the unclear testing. I assume it would be a standoff flight to see how much radiation it would absorb during the blast. The lucky winner departed and lucky him crashed in the mountains of Colorado and was not injured. ![]() We had about 15 pilots and all of us wanted to go. We were tasked to send a helicopter and pilot to participate in a nuclear blast. In the early 60’s I was flyin UH-1F’s for the Air force at Cheyenne. Somehow I recall this shot was made remotely (I’d hate to be the poor who had to pull the lanyard on that shot, I said about Babylon), but it’s incredible to me there was a big “bang” follow a while after by a much bigger nuclear “boom”, rather than just one big “boom” the moment they pulled the trigger. I still wonder about the physics of firing a nuclear warhead out of a cannon. Nixon scared the crap out of me, though.Īnd there was the Damned Interesting article a few weeks ago on Project Babylon. Then again, with nukes, maybe “commensenseaphobia” is the ticket. ![]() “assholepoliticiansaphobia” comes to mind. Am I left with an irrational fear? Arachnophobia is fear of spiders – is there a technical term for fear of nuclear holocaust? I always thought this was craziness – even a little 15 kiloton nuke threw a bunch of radioactive crap up in the air, didn’t it? I assume 7 miles was understood to be outside the area of influence of a small nuclear weapon or the period, I suppose, but I grew up with duck and cover drills and full-frontal imagery of the “Big One” scorching out my eyeballs. I love watching stuff blow up, like most guys I know. ![]() This is because the shell caused a very abnormal destructive waveform called a “precursor.” Surprisingly, even though the yield was only about half that of Encore, it did a great deal more damage. Annie’s 15-kiloton shell burst with precision accuracy over the designated target area, about 500 feet above the ground. History’s first atomic artillery shell explosion, Shot Grable, occurred on May 25, 1953. Seventeen days earlier, a twenty-seven kiloton nuclear device codenamed Shot Encore had been exploded over the same general vicinity, at a height of about 2800 feet. The test area had been prepared in advance by plugging trees into large holes drilled in the ground, and by scattering vehicles, buildings, railroad cars, bridges and other equipment at varying distances from the blast site in order to study the amount of damage that occurred. But the thing that made her really special was the fact that her shells packed a nuclear payload with the equivalent destructive power of 15,000 metric tons of TNT. #GUNSHOT WITH PARTICLE PLAYGROUND AFTER EFFECTS PORTABLE#Army tried out its new toy, nicknamed “Atomic Annie.”Īnnie was a 280 millimeter portable artillery piece, able to fire her 800 pound shells a distance of about seven miles. Among those atomic explosions was a test called Shot Grable, where the U.S. During this operation, eleven nuclear devices of varying yields were exploded at the Nevada Test Site, about sixty-five miles north of Las Vegas. #GUNSHOT WITH PARTICLE PLAYGROUND AFTER EFFECTS SERIES#In 1953, the United States Department of Defense was conducting a series of nuclear weapons tests called Operation Upshot-Knothole. ![]()
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