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My favorite window into people's opinions of nukes in the past is the playlist for the CONELRAD Civil Defense Radio mod for Fallout. Just a bunch of period songs that run the gamut from fear of the bomb to cold war stuff (both pro- and anti-war) to a song fantasizing about all other men on earth being dead to people singing about mining uranium. It's neat stuff.bewbies posted:I don't know anything about the science but I read the Radium Girls and that poo poo was hosed up. What's really hosed up is that the makers of the radium paint the girls used had proper protection, so the company should've known better, but it didn't bother. Later, one of the clocks would accidentally have a whole thing of paint left inside it, helping a boy scout build his own little nuclear reactor to irradiate his entire neighborhood.
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Apr 1, 2019 22:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:The mid-50s. The first two "after the bomb/nuclear war" novels I can think of are Nevil Shute's "On the Beach " (1957), and Pat Frank's "Alas Babylon " (1959).
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Apr 1, 2019 22:44
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Boy Scouts end up making a lot more nuclear reactors than you'd think. One thing that shocked me the most in reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb was Chicago Pile 1. These days we have an image of a nuclear reactor as a tightly controlled, highly complex, technically sophisticated and potentially catastrophic operation as opposed to blocks of graphite stacked up by hand under the bleachers at the U of Chicago football stadium.
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Apr 1, 2019 22:47
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Cessna posted:He made a youtube video - sadly no longer there - of the final siege of Rome, where the city gates break open and the city's army is drowned in a sea of dogs/pigs/elephants with Yakkity Sax playing. It was glorious. Truly this is the darkest of all timelines. 
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Apr 1, 2019 22:55
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zoux posted:Boy Scouts end up making a lot more nuclear reactors than you'd think. I've had 'squash courts' stuck in my head as the location under which the first controlled nuclear reaction was managed, but I've seen inconsistent stuff on it my favorite belief I thought I'd read years ago but ultimately decided I must have made up was my belief that Tycho Brahe was a holding-your-piss enthusiast who died from going a bridge too far, if you will, at a dinner with some VIP, then he got piss in his abdomen and died rip
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Apr 1, 2019 23:55
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i thought that was rousseau
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Apr 1, 2019 23:56
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as they said to my green party Russia post, porque no los dos but maybe I got Brahe confused with a real person, I'll look into Rousseau's pissing habits thx
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Apr 2, 2019 00:01
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oystertoadfish posted:I've had 'squash courts' stuck in my head as the location under which the first controlled nuclear reaction was managed, but I've seen inconsistent stuff on it Could be real quote:Tycho suddenly contracted a bladder or kidney ailment after attending a banquet in Prague, and died eleven days later, on 24 October 1601, at the age of 54. According to Kepler's first-hand account, Tycho had refused to leave the banquet to relieve himself because it would have been a breach of etiquette.[53][54] After he returned home, he was no longer able to urinate, except eventually in very small quantities and with excruciating pain. The night before he died, he suffered from a delirium during which he was frequently heard to exclaim that he hoped he would not seem to have lived in vain.[55] Before dying, he urged Kepler to finish the Rudolphine Tables and expressed the hope that he would do so by adopting Tycho's own planetary system, rather than that of Copernicus. It was reported that Brahe had written his own epitaph, "He lived like a sage and died like a fool."[56] A contemporary physician attributed his death to a kidney stone, but no kidney stones were found during an autopsy performed after his body was exhumed in 1901, and the 20th-century medical assessment is that his death is more likely to have resulted from uremia.[57] I believe that's called a "gleet"
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Apr 2, 2019 00:04
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history rules
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Apr 2, 2019 00:05
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WW2 Data Today's entry is about the various SB bombs available to the Germans, such as the 1000kg parachute bomb or the water-bounding anti-ship Kugel K bomb (Sometimes called KURT). Which bomb is very similar to the Max bomb seen previously, and what differs the two? What colour parachutes have been found to have been used with the 1000kg parachute bomb? Which bomb is noted for being sensitive to small arms fire, and why? All that and more at the blog!
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Apr 2, 2019 00:07
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oystertoadfish posted:I've had 'squash courts' stuck in my head as the location under which the first controlled nuclear reaction was managed, but I've seen inconsistent stuff on it It was a rackets court (similar to squash) underneath the stands at a football field. So both 'under the bleachers' and 'squash court' are basically right.
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Apr 2, 2019 00:22
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It was squash courts under the old football stadium. I used to work around there. There's also a little plaque on the street on top of where CP1 was.
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Apr 2, 2019 01:21
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Epicurius posted:The first two "after the bomb/nuclear war" novels I can think of are Nevil Shute's "On the Beach " (1957), and Pat Frank's "Alas Babylon " (1959). Kinda forgetting 1984 (1949), aren't we? And there were radio dramas fretting about the bomb aired in 1945/46. Philip Wylie's unjustly forgotten "Blunder: A Story of the End of the World" was printed in 1946 and turned into one of the first television sci-fi stories in 1951. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0BOSZyMm0Y Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Apr 2, 2019 |
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Apr 2, 2019 01:29
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Kinda forgetting 1984 (1949), aren't we? And there were radio dramas fretting about the bomb aired in 1945/46. Philip Wylie's unjustly forgotten "Blunder: A Story of the End of the World" was printed in 1946 and turned into one of the first television sci-fi stories in 1951. 1984 is a during the nuclear war book. 
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Apr 2, 2019 01:32
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How close to blowing up Chicago did any of the experiments come to?
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Apr 2, 2019 01:36
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fishmech posted:1984 is a during the nuclear war book. No it isn't. The atomic bombing of Colchester happens in Winston Smith's distant flashback. There's no evidence for nuclear exchanges during the main story, just V2-like missiles armed with conventional explosive warheads. EDIT: I found the early atomic fear fiction I was thinking of that even predates "Blunder". It's Arch Oboler's "Rocket from Manhattan", an episode of the radio thriller series "Lights Out" aired in September 1945 which depicts an elderly Manhattan Project scientist aboard a returning lunar orbiter witnessing the world go up in a nuclear armageddon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvbjPFwmKm0 Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Apr 2, 2019 |
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Apr 2, 2019 01:37
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:No it isn't. The atomic bombing of Colchester happens in Winston Smith's distant flashback. There's no evidence for nuclear exchanges during the main story, just V2-like missiles armed with conventional explosive warheads. Winston isn't even sure if it was Colchester that was bombed, or another place. Goldstein's book says the three major superstates pinky-swore not to nuke each other anymore after too much was bombed directly, but we know they feel free to do whatever war they want in the designated disputed zones. And besides, we're also pretty sure much of what's in the book is intentional misinformation. They also never stopped being at war as near as can be known within the narrative, so the most we can say is they intentionally chose to direct nukes away from each superstate's undisputed territories, just as they only make token raids in each other's undisputed areas to make sure there's plenty of excuses to keep fighting available.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:07
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I refuse to have this argument with you, fishmech. IMO Orwell left the atomic war subplot vague enough to be open-ended in interpretation because it wasn't germain to the point he was trying to make.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:12
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Yeah you refuse to have the argument, because you forgot the atomic war never ended in 1984.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:14
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How close to blowing up Chicago did any of the experiments come to? Nowhere close. It wasn't enriched enough, and generated only 0.5 watts.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:16
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Saint Celestine posted:Nowhere close. It wasn't enriched enough, and generated only 0.5 watts. Hey they got up to 200 watts one time. Of course when your scram protocol is a dude with an axe, there exist some reasonable safety concerns.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:22
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Epicurius posted:The first two "after the bomb/nuclear war" novels I can think of are Nevil Shute's "On the Beach " (1957), and Pat Frank's "Alas Babylon " (1959). I really enjoyed "On the Beach," but I couldn't really say why.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:24
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Kinda forgetting 1984 (1949), aren't we? And there were radio dramas fretting about the bomb aired in 1945/46. Philip Wylie's unjustly forgotten "Blunder: A Story of the End of the World" was printed in 1946 and turned into one of the first television sci-fi stories in 1951.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKrj1ymJzmo C'mon people. 1954.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:32
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How long did it take for the US military to strategically think of nukes as more than just a really large bomb? Because that was how they treated it for at least a couple years. I’m sure everyone’s familiar with the plans to drop them all over Japan in Operation Downfall and have troops occupy the position like the next day.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:37
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mllaneza posted:
Eh, Them! beat Big G to the big screen by a few months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4URRp39XOo
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Apr 2, 2019 02:38
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My memory is fuzzy but wasn't the original Godzilla a result of some non nuclear runaway science experiment? The scientist spends the entire film talking about his duty to protect the secret to prevent catastrophic abuse of the knowledge was an obvious nod to the idea of scientific virtue being abused for horrible results aka Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Also the burning sets/scenes were almost certainly made by people who had witnessed the firestorms caused by allied bombing during the war which puts a rather grim twist on it when you realise they were trying to replicate what they saw.
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Apr 2, 2019 02:42
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I've seen a lot of critics talk about how this or that aspect of modern Japanese culture is a response to the atomic bombings, but what was the immediate reaction of the citizenry in other cities and how fast did it spread? I don't know how restrictive the Japanese press was at the time so were they issuing newspapers with mushroom clouds on the front page? For that matter, how did the government sell surrender to the Japanese populace, and how did they take it?
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Apr 2, 2019 02:43
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Epicurius posted:The first two "after the bomb/nuclear war" novels I can think of are Nevil Shute's "On the Beach " (1957), and Pat Frank's "Alas Babylon " (1959). I've read the first and somebody did a let's read of the second here at SA which I enjoyed. On the Beach is interesting as I think it was inspired from the literal fallout of the Castle Bravo tests, and Shute I think might've been the first author to look at nuclear Armageddon the Australian way: as something that happens to the rest of the world but still leaves Australia irredeemably hosed. Somebody with the book-learnin' could possibly comment coherently, I just know I've seen several Aus/NZ movies about the apocalypse If we're talking cultural awareness, I think it's telling that the mid 1950s saw Strategic Air Command was very successful - but by 1960 you had Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe. The nuclear accidents the US military had, most famously coming within 50 cents of electronics from setting off a megaton-range bomb in South Carolina, I think were also a factor. The fact that bombs went from tens of kilotons to by the mid 50s prototyping tens of megatons also probably didn't help. Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't post this again People were very quick to put together the peanut butter of nuclear bombs and the jam of ICBMs into the sandwich of instant annihilation Tree Bucket posted:I really enjoyed "On the Beach," but I couldn't really say why. You enjoy the grim spectre of death and everybody dying
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Apr 2, 2019 02:53
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:How close to blowing up Chicago did any of the experiments come to? The Chicago pile could at its highest output manage managed a couple of hundred watts, but in any event a nuclear power plant can't explode like an atom bomb. The geometry is nowhere near right for that. In an absolute worst-case scenario, like say you're operating a full-size graphite-moderated water-cooled power reactor in an unstable part of its power regime and you decide to both retract all the control rods from the core and also punch a hole in the reactor vessel to let all the coolant flash to steam, you'd get enough rapid nuclear yield to blow the core apart, which would terminate the nuclear reaction. This would be Chernobyl-levels of messy, but it's nowhere near an atom bomb. Building a nuclear bomb is about assembling enough nuclear material into the right geometry for enough fission to occur rapidly enough that you get significant yield before all that energy being released wrecks the geometry. You can't have that in a nuclear reactor, even one fueled by many critical masses of highly-enriched uranium like a nuclear submarine reactor. Here's a test of SPERT, a small test reactor fueled with 93%-enriched uranium, they built to deliberately make explode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FIhafVX_6I Pulled the control rods out, the reaction goes supercritical, all the water boiling generates a steam explosion that blows the reactor apart. There was also a comparatively trivial energy release from the reaction of aluminum in the fuel alloy with the water as the fuel rods disintegrated. Nuclear yield here was 31 megawatt-seconds, which is tiny.
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Apr 2, 2019 03:01
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Seriously, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a really good book. The journey from "hrm, if it turns out that atoms work in a certain way, it might be possible to create a chain reaction" to working fission devices required breakthroughs in physics and the best engineering of the era. If it's not built to be a bomb, it's not going to detonate like a bomb. That doesn't mean it's going to be safe, mind you, just that it won't explode like a proper bomb.
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Apr 2, 2019 03:20
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Warday is another good post-apocalypse book, about a couple of people traveling across the country five years after the bombs fell.
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Apr 2, 2019 03:26
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zoux posted:I've seen a lot of critics talk about how this or that aspect of modern Japanese culture is a response to the atomic bombings, but what was the immediate reaction of the citizenry in other cities and how fast did it spread? I don't know how restrictive the Japanese press was at the time so were they issuing newspapers with mushroom clouds on the front page? For the latter, look up the Jewel Voice Broadcast, basically the Emperor came on the radio and said that Japan lost and the war was over. My great-aunt told me that she just felt numb after hearing it, but that also might have been because this was literally the first time she heard the emperor's voice and could barely understand the archaic Japanese he was using. For the former, I can say that my great-aunt knew there was something different about Hiroshima. She had been drafted to work as a nurse earlier that year and IIRC she was on her way to work at Hiroshima when the bomb hit, and was about as close as you can be to a nuclear attack short of being nuked. She never really went into detail about what she saw then, but even when I was a kid I noticed there was something off about her and how she supressed all her emotions except for barely concealed annoyance. From what I understand, there was a sense of horror that one plane did that much damage, and basically everyone at the city knew it was one plane because the American low altitude bombings created a very distinct and terrifying rumble that went on for hours, while in this case many people didn't even notice the Enola Gay. I don't know how fast or how far the news spread, but I know my great-aunt knew about Nagasaki before the war ended despite still being in Hiroshima.
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Apr 2, 2019 03:32
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Kinda forgetting 1984 (1949), aren't we? And there were radio dramas fretting about the bomb aired in 1945/46. Philip Wylie's unjustly forgotten "Blunder: A Story of the End of the World" was printed in 1946 and turned into one of the first television sci-fi stories in 1951. I was forgetting 1984. If you say there had been a nuclear war in the book, i believe you, but I don't remember it. Colchester may have been nuked, but 1984 wasn't about Nuclear War the way that On the Beach or Alas Babylon were...they were both about the aftermath of World War III and how the survivors were affected. I'm just not familiar with Blunder.
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Apr 2, 2019 04:27
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Cessna posted:Many GREAT American soldiers... My man, did you read the article? He pulls the "were you there" card. It's... something
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Apr 2, 2019 04:28
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Carth Dookie posted:My memory is fuzzy but wasn't the original Godzilla a result of some non nuclear runaway science experiment? The scientist spends the entire film talking about his duty to protect the secret to prevent catastrophic abuse of the knowledge was an obvious nod to the idea of scientific virtue being abused for horrible results aka Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Also the burning sets/scenes were almost certainly made by people who had witnessed the firestorms caused by allied bombing during the war which puts a rather grim twist on it when you realise they were trying to replicate what they saw. you're thinking of the Oxygen Destroyer, which, rather than being what creates Godzilla, is what they use to finally kill him*. pretty much all the various Godzilla eras- with the exception of the recent Legendary Pictures version, and I think Shin Godzilla- have him as being a direct result of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. *of course, they did later make a movie where there IS a kaiju created as a result of the OD's use, and it's arguably more nihilistic and pessimistic than you would think a premise like that would be at first glance
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Apr 2, 2019 05:40
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Don Gato posted:For the latter, look up the Jewel Voice Broadcast, basically the Emperor came on the radio and said that Japan lost and the war was over. My great-aunt told me that she just felt numb after hearing it, but that also might have been because this was literally the first time she heard the emperor's voice and could barely understand the archaic Japanese he was using. Have you seen the film In this Corner of the World? It's the fictional story of a young woman living in Hiroshima during WWII, but its based on detailed historical research on the period and tries hard to accurately represent how normal people would have lived and experienced events. I was sort of surprised at how the fictional protagonist of In this Corner of the World, and the semi-autobiographical protagonist of Grave of the Fireflies both reacted to the announcement of surrender with shock and anger, which I assume reflects popular memory of the event in Japan. It's especially surprising in In this Corner of the World as the like ~19 year old female protagonist never previously uttered a single word about politics before breaking down crying while shouting about how she was prepared to die fighting. Also I can't find it anymore but there's an interview on youtube with an American WWII pilot who flew observation missions around Japan at the beginning of the occupation and delivered mail other things. In the interview he describes how he landed at one isolated airfield with pay for American soldiers stationed in a neighboring town, only to be surprised when he realized the Japanese guard the airfield were totally in the dark about the surrender and hadn't heard anything. Apparently their radio was broken and nobody had bothered to tell them. While he was still trying to negotiate his way back onto his plane so he could fly away and escape, an American jeep drove up completely oblivious to the armed Japanese soldiers, picked up their pay and mail and left without even noticing anything was amiss.
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Apr 2, 2019 06:20
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Squalid posted:Also I can't find it anymore but there's an interview on youtube with an American WWII pilot who flew observation missions around Japan at the beginning of the occupation and delivered mail other things. In the interview he describes how he landed at one isolated airfield with pay for American soldiers stationed in a neighboring town, only to be surprised when he realized the Japanese guard the airfield were totally in the dark about the surrender and hadn't heard anything. Apparently their radio was broken and nobody had bothered to tell them. While he was still trying to negotiate his way back onto his plane so he could fly away and escape, an American jeep drove up completely oblivious to the armed Japanese soldiers, picked up their pay and mail and left without even noticing anything was amiss. Hahaha that loving sucks. I'd be pissed as hell at the guys in the jeep
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Apr 2, 2019 06:57
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Argus Zant posted:you're thinking of the Oxygen Destroyer, which, rather than being what creates Godzilla, is what they use to finally kill him*. pretty much all the various Godzilla eras- with the exception of the recent Legendary Pictures version, and I think Shin Godzilla- have him as being a direct result of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. Than you that was it. I'd forgotten.
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Apr 2, 2019 07:17
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 I saw this and I thought of y'all.
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Apr 2, 2019 07:24
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That original Godzilla wasn't a sfx tour de force or anything (seriously, kong still looks better and it was decades earlier) but I'll be damned if it isn't a really good movie regardless.
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Apr 2, 2019 07:30
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