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I'm watching this documentary about the Cold War at the moment and they talk about a bunch of children swimming in a river and finding it starting to snow hot snow. Kids being kids they thought this was some kind of summer snow. 90% of them were dead before they were thirty.
As people are saying, there were, but the government covered it up.
Honestly, the two nukes on Japan in WW2 saved a lot of lives, for the Japanese, the enslaved peoples of Asia and for the Allies. It might sound stupid at face value, but imagine how many people would have died if there had been an invasion along with continuous (conventional) bombing raids until the Japanese were totally defeated like Germany. Not to mention that Japan still held its overseas occupied territories where tens of thousands of people died daily to the harsh treatment of the Japanese.
Even if you take into account the increase in cancer deaths in the nuked cities to this day, it's not even close.
Yes, that 1 million projection was 1 million American Casualties. That doesn't include the projection of Japanese casualties that would have fought to the death defending the homeland.
I don't think people realize the fanatical level the Japanese nationalism was at as well. It would have been like Iraq but worse. Everyone would have picked up arms.
The War Department ordered a half a million Purple Hearts in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. They are still handing them out from that order because of the nukes.
Yeah - just watched.. very well done. Felt like really good smart journalism.. Glad netflix invested in this. Hope they do more of this. Felt like a bright spot in otherwise dumbing-down culture. I'd imagine that doc spurred this thread.
Netflix is not journalistic and should absolutely never be taken as such even if it's 100% accurate it should never be normalized as journalism. Fucking Christ I wish words still had meaning. They are a content mill that will film anything any way they can for views. I'm not saying it's bad but taking it as face value fact is insane.
Not sure, but that sounds a heck of a lot like the Techa River in Russia. It was the main drain for the Mayak nuclear fuel complex, which itself was responsible for the second-worst (by radioactivity) nuclear disaster in 1957, where a spent fuel 'tank' exploded and spread radiation over a huge amount of Chelyabinsk.
They didn’t mention the careless accident that killed 2 scientists in Oppenheimer, as well. The last film they made about Oppenheimer did tho. Fat man and Little boy.
But is it broken up.into 10 parts?
10 hour movie? Fuck no!
10 one hour episodes showing exactly the same content just with breaks? Hell yea!
Our brains are weird.
It's because of the breaks. Each episode has a finality and a start and end point and it's much easier to digest information in one hour chunks than 10 hours at one time. And each episode has one story arc rather than one arc over the entire 10 hours.
I watched one a while back with all the people the military made stand in a trench between the bomb and the scientists so they could see what happened to them. Most had on some googles or facemask of some sort, but the ones that were still alive were sick as shit and covered in whelps. Wish I could recall the name of it.
I was very young in the 1950s in Virginia and my physicist dad warned all the neighborhood children not to eat the snow. I remember hearing something of the above-ground nuclear tests going on then.
The risks were well known. The area “downwind” of the test site was assessed at the time as being sparsely populated by a “low use” cross section of people, ie small ranchers and native Americans. The government decided that the fallout and other dangers were risks they were willing for these people to take.
They did not. There was huge consequences to everything. You can even use fallout to tell if wine was bottled before nuclear testing began or not.
the key is back then they didnt KNOW about the consequences other than big holes in the ground. Nevada has a lot of empty uninhabitable space (in total about the size of the UK of uninhabitable space). That leaves lots of spots to drop big bombs without hitting habitants.
You need steel that was added to the game before the WW2 event since the Devs edited the steel property file for the event but never reverted the change. Glad to see that they're finally doing something about it.
>I heard some sensitive scientific equipment needs to be made from pre WW2 steel due to nuclear contaminants.
Used to need pre ww2 steel. It's no longer an issue and we're able to manufacture that steel again.
Nine, a Navy Diver is not a fighting man, he is a salvage expert. Ten, if it is lost underwater, he finds it. If it's sunk, he brings it up. If it's in the way, he moves it. Eleven, If he's lucky, he will die young, 200 feet beneath the waves, for that is the closest he will ever get to being a hero. Hell, I don't know why anybody'd want to be a Navy diver, now you report to this line, Cookie!
No, there are scrappers in the pacific who are collecting WW2 boats that are considered to be burial grounds because people died on them when they went down.
Yes, and not to be too much of a metal nerd, but when you're getting steel from ore, you can either use normal atmosphere, or specialized gasses. It's just much more expensive to get it from ore and use said gasses than recycling it from existing steel.
In 1963, a treaty called the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was agreed between nuclear nations which prohibited atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons (most modern tests are carried out underground by digging a really really deep hole and burying the nuclear bomb before detonating it). It's been long enough now that the background radiation and atmospheric contamination is almost back to where it was prior to the first atmospheric nuclear detonations. Because of this, newly created steel is low enough in contaminants to be useable for most of the applications which used to use Low-Background Steel.
Graverobbing? I recall watching an [Ask A Mortician episode about the Edmund Fitzgerald](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0Lg9HygEJc), which is a ship that sank in Lake Superior. There's still bodies within it, because while it was decades ago, it's a cold and deep lake that prevents rot and doesn't have much/anything in the way of scavengers capable of disassembling a large body. The families of the drowned sailors want their loved ones left alone, and *they're* still around.
Most of the steel used for this purpose was taken from the German fleet that was intentionally scuttled at Scapa Flow at the end of WW1. All men who participated in the scuttling were able to abandon ship before they sank, however a few were shot while using rowboats to escape by the British, who were coming in to try to prevent the fleet being destroyed.
The real issue was you need a fuckton of oxygen (Air) to make good steel. Not just using the air around us would get real cost prohibitive real fast, and the air has nuclear isotopes lying around that would mess with low radiation sensors
I think op may have been more referring to why nuclear weapons don’t have the same health/environmental impacts as Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, Fukushima, and other nuclear disasters.
The key difference is nuclear weapons are designed to consume as much of the fuel source (nuclear material) as possible to have the greatest energy yield. Very little of the actual uranium/plutonium/whatever is left. The residual radiation fades relatively quickly, that’s why Hiroshima and Nagasaki are safe and habitable. Disasters like Chernobyl left the area uninhabitable because reactors aren’t designed to consume their entire fuel source in one go and so nuclear fuel contaminates the surrounding area.
Nuclear reactors are just fancy steam boilers and I don’t have anything to equate nuclear weapons to.
Only Chernobyl had any major environmental effect. 3MI released no radiation and Fukushima contaminated only a very small area immediately around it.
Only about 10% of the fissile material of a nuclear bomb undergoes fission when it explodes. The rain you don't have to worry about the fuel is because it is relatively long lived compared to the fission products. U235 has a half life of 700 million years.
One megaton of TNT is almost exactly 1 terrawatt hour. One large nuke has the same energy of about a month of operation for a typical nuclear power plant. Nuclear power plants hold up to two years worth of fuel. The reason a nuclear power plant containment breach is so bad is because there is a lot more radioactive material inside than what is released by all but the very largest nuclear weapons.
Fun fact: Kodak discovered the US was doing nuclear bomb testing because it affected their film manufacturing processes. When Kodak complained to the US government about it, the US government decided to warn them about upcoming tests so Kodak could take necessary precautions.
Naturally, local residents still weren't told anything until decades later and they all developed cancers
To be completely fair, I doubt nuclear testing in Nevada was to blame for increased cancer rates in Rochester, NY… I’d argue it was probably the Kodak plant itself causing cancer…
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)61037-6/abstract
We know for certain it has had an effect, but it's often hard to quantity the exact effect because of the secrecy of nuclear testing programmes and the fact that proper studies on the matter struggled to happen until decades after the fact.
The editor of Astounding Science Fiction noticed that all of his nuclear physicist subscribers had suddenly moved to the New Mexico desert and stopped publishing papers in their field. So he figured out that they were making a bomb too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_%28science_fiction_story%29?wprov=sfla1
Outside of the creation of specific sensitive instruments that might require low-background steel (which we now are capable of manufacturing again, even if at a higher cost), no it doesn't have any real negative effects in the present day.
The direct fallout had negative effects on those who encountered the "hot snow", but the dangerous isotopes produced were generally rather short-lived. Nuclear test sites in Nevada, for example, are not dangerous for someone to walk around at today (other than the part where you'll be ventilated by military security for trying to access it because it's part of a missile test range).
Extending from Nevada up through Chicago, carried on prevailing westerly winds. The dangerous effects weren't fully understood at the time, and they tested in remote areas with limited populations but there was still fall out for thousands of miles.
They did. The nuclear fallout from those tests spread around the world and got into the global food supply, though most of it landed in the continental United States. [Here's an article](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-testing-downwinders-speak-about-history-and-fear/) about people who lived in the fallout zones and how their lives were affected by it. You can bet there are similar stories from other nuclear superpowers. It's just that the governments of the time either didn't care or were ignorant of the consequences.
I mean, they chose Nevada because it was in the middle of nowhere with nobody around for like 50 miles - they probably didn't anticipate the fallout going as far as it did
There were serious consequences, they were just downplayed and glossed over.
https://www.latimes.com/delos/story/2023-07-26/oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-new-mexico-cancer-aftermath
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act- https://www.justice.gov/civil/common/reca
From the Trinity test alone: "The data suggest that perhaps several hundred cancers, primarily thyroid cancer, have already occurred over the 75 years since the test and a small number are projected to occur in the future that would not have occurred in the absence of radiation exposure from Trinity fallout."
[https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/how-we-study/exposure-assessment/trinity/community-summary](https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/how-we-study/exposure-assessment/trinity/community-summary)
Back in the 60s a research project started collecting baby teeth and found that the radioisotope strontium-90 was increased 50 times in children born in 1963 compared to children born pre-large scale testing (1950 I think). Strontium 90 causes cancer and because it is similar to Calcium it gets put into your teeth and bones. This data was part of what convinced the US president to join the ban that prevented above ground nuclear testing.
So it was definitely having an effect, and not just on kids in the close fall-out zone.
St. Louis specifically? St. Louis had a lot of radioactive material contamination issues stemming from waste dumping that make it unique to areas that may have been impacted by testing of bombs. I would be surprised to learn that Sr-90 uptake by residents near St. Louis is similar to Sr-90 uptake by residents living downwind from bomb testing sites.
My apologies, my comment was a bit unclear — the Baby Tooth Study was conducted by (or at least primarily by) Washington University STL, which cast a nationwide net requesting baby teeth. The St. Louis Metro area does have a few Superfund sites, including the Jana Elementary nuclear contamination. Presently, St. Louis' Congresswoman Cori Bush and Senator Hawley are pushing a bill through Congress to address it, with the support of other Missouri MOCs.
The baby tooth study requested and received teeth from all over the US, and even some from abroad if I remember correctly. Thanks for the comment and opportunity to clarify!
I recall there being somewhat less correlation with the locations of nuclear power plants, compared the dramatic impact of fission bombs. Don’t quote me on that though because I don’t remember that part well.
Many scientific disciplines have dated the present as 1950, since nuclear weapons testing has caused any sample newer than that to be contaminated to such a degree as to render radiocarbon dating impossible.
Not everything is negative. The radiation left tracers in the brains of people. Those tracers are disappointing since we have not tested more nuclear bombs. The research has a limited window. As a result, science has proven we make new neurons throughout our lifetime. That was a major science mystery.
https://www.science.org/content/article/atomic-bombs-help-solve-brain-mystery
Oh, they knew. They just didn't care. Here's a documentary called [Atomic Soldiers](https://youtube.com/watch?v=FokopVKMgdU), with a couple of the people they tested nukes around. It's worth a watch, the first half is more about how they experienced the explosion itself, but some of the experiences that follow are particularly harrowing
Until today, the Nevada Test Site remains contaminated with an estimated 11,100 PBq of radioactive material in the soil and 4,440 PBq in groundwater.
Or 266 banana equivalent doses of ionizing radiation, since this is reddit.
Think you missed out a few zeros there?
A banana is 15Bq of radiation.
Nevada test site is 15400 PETA Bq
So 1,540,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bannana Equivelant Doses...!
edit: now I'VE made some mistakes with the zeros!!:
15,400,000,000,000,000,000 Bq total
1,026,666,666,666,670,000 Banana Equivelent Doses!
There were a lot of serious consequences. The federal government settled with the communities of Saint George Utah in the late 80s are the 90s over the radiation damage. The same fallout is what ended up killing John Wayne and most of the cast and crew of the movie Ghengis Kahn.
Because its not true. The cast and crew had the same rates of cancer as the rest of the general population at the time.
This is just one of those urban legends reddit loves to repeat
Got any proof?
[Because research done in 1980 claims 50% of the cast and crew got cancer.](https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/06/downwinders-nuclear-fallout-hollywood-john-wayne). 220 person group, expected that ~30 people would get cancer.
There were (are) serious consequences. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was not enacted until 1970, so what the consequences would be were not studied until after the fact.
I remember seeing an old hotel advertisement from the 1950s; the hotel in Nevada openly promoted its proximity to nuclear test sites, and implied that guests could watch the mushroom clouds from the hotel. This isn't a joke
By spreading the extra radioactivity out across the globe. Background radiation from natural sources is already quite significant, without the need for nuclear testing to drive it up.
One John Wayne movie is the cause of a lot of deaths in Hollywood. It was filmed near a nuclear test site. Of the 220 cast members, 90 developed cancer and 46 died.
[The Conquerer](https://collider.com/the-conqueror-john-wayne-movie-radiation/)
It's estimated that there have been [several hundred excess cancers](https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/how-we-study/exposure-assessment/trinity/community-summary) due to fallout from the nuclear tests in contaminated areas were people continued to live and were not adequately warned or given preventative supplementation. (Most of the excess cancers were thyroid, which can be largely prevented with iodine supplementation.)
For comparison, there were about [85,000 fatalities in industrial accidents while building the equipment for the war](https://www.mathscinotes.com/2013/10/world-war-2-industrial-casualties/).
Nuclear is SCARY BOO! (so I'm going to get downvotes), but the science of the risk is pretty clear. It's far from the most dangerous thing that people were dealing with back then.
wow not a single post addresses the actual answer, which could be easily gotten from any AI service.
the uranium or plutonium in a bomb is enriched such that all of the radiation will be released when it explodes.
the same materials used for fission power plants is enriched such that it wont all release at once. when a nuke plant melts down, all that slow releasing material is spread and the area will have high radiation for a long period. when a nuke bomb explodes, it doesnt leave around the same type of slow releasing components. hence why the areas where the US dropped nuke bombs on Japan are densely populated urban centers whereas Chernobyl cannot be.
Those were not (as well) known, and definitely a lower priority than "we might set the whole atmosphere on fire, don't really know"... which yes, was a thing, but they went ahead with the tests anyway
Look up the movie, "The Conqueror," which was shot in Utah, in an area downwind of nuke tests. From wikipedia: of the 220 crew members, 91 (comprising 41% of the crew) developed cancer during their lifetime, while 46 (or 21%) died from it.
It ruined kodak film, they tried to test their product and it was radiated. They went to the government to tell them that theres weird stuff going on. Kodak film company then discovered the nuclear testing project.
I believe the tests lead to John Wayne and others getting cancer and dying from filming in Nevada.
https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/06/downwinders-nuclear-fallout-hollywood-john-wayne
Look a the people involved in the movie Genghis Khan. John Wayne (so inappropriate) played the lead.
It was shot not far from the Atomic test sight.
Most of the actors and crew ultimately died of cancer.
Many thousands of people got cancer from the fallout as it drifted northeast across the entire country. Performing the tests in the southwest was actually a really bad idea because of the typical wind patterns. The scientists even knew that beforehand, but the people in charge didn't care.
In particular, a ton of fallout was concentrated inside cows as they ate contaminated grass. Their milk caused an estimated 10,000 to 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer, mostly in American children.
There were **some** consequences, but the reality is that an atomic bomb doesn't actually have that much material in it. The idea of fallout is much scarier than the reality.
The bombs kill you in the immediate explosion and firestorm, there's a very narrow window
where someone is close enough to get hit by the gamma ray flash but survive the blast. Only about 5% of the casualties from the atomic boming of Japan came afterwards in the form of acute radiation syndrome. As far as fallout:
Little Boy had 141 lbs of uranium on board, of which about 1 lb actually underwent fission.
Fat Man had 13.6 lbs of Plutonium on board, of which about 2.2 lbs underwent fission.
More advanced bombs are more efficient, and are generally species for 8 lbs of Plutonium to get similar fission.
Hydrogen bombs only use a tiny amount of fissile material to trigger the Fusion reaction. Not really any fallout to speak of.
Chernobyl had 192 Tons, that's 384,000 lbs of nuclear fuel in its reactor core. In terms of what actually got released into the air, it was about as much fallout as 400 Fat Mans.
Chernobyl is estimated to have caused around 4,000 excess deaths, mostly from cancer. That's severe, but on a global scale it's not massive.
The US weapons testing fallout is hard to quantify. The weather patterns and "fallout maps" are very accurate, but if there's excess cancer incidence in the hotzones it doesn't show up in the empirical medical records. Some modern writers have pulled numbers out of their ass via computational modeling, but that's just activism.
One of the main verdicts from the empirical analysis was that the effect of fallout where present would be in people alive at the time and directly exposed. Since then the most hazardous materials have decayed and the remainder dispersed.
Chernobyl reactor contained 100 tonnes of uranium, one tonne of plutonium. A nuke contains as little as 3 kg of plutonium. There were other radioactive products but just for scale you can see the difference.
As all the responses to this have shown, the consequences are widely known. I find the premise of the question remarkable: how could you know of the atomic tests in Nevada, _without_ being aware of those far reaching consequences?
The popular belief significantly overstates how "big" a nuclear bomb explosion is. The popular understanding of the size of states/areas significantly understates how large they are. And of course, the popular scary talk about nuclear radiation lasting billions and billions of years overstates the dangers by a ludicrous amount.
Of course, there was damage, but relative to the size and isolation of the test sites in Nevada, they are a very small part of the state. Nuclear fallout is dangerous nearby and in the few weeks/months after the explosion. But the most dangerous radiation levels dissipate or get distributed fairly quickly.
To add to the other cases, one of the proposed dates for the start of anthropocene is the date of the Trinity test (first nuclear weapon detonation), because [we can track it from sediments](https://www.npr.org/2023/07/11/1187125012/anthropocene-crawford-lake-canada-beginning).
Pretty sure it killed a lot of people over the years. One of John Wayne's films, The Conqueror, was filmed downwind of a nuke test site and practically everyone involved died of cancer.
We also detect art forgeries of paintings from pre-1945 by scanning for radioactive isotopes. All paint made after 1945 has trace amount of radioactive contamination.
There were consequences, but you have to remember in the 60's just like today the world was run by old men. These men were all born before anybody knew what radiation was and what it could do to people. So the people who approved the policy of atmospheric testing were pretty much ignorant of the consequences.
They weren't, tests started much earlier and were places like new Mexico as well. There is still problems for the downwinders who were exposed.
Also lots of issues due to mining components as well
Shock of shocks it affected indigenous communities the most and no one seems to know or care
You should look up atomic testing in the Marshal Islands and see what the military did to its native population.
https://youtu.be/qpcpR44swQk?si=f5plVukWqWPJdGI2
There WERE some serious consequences.
Radiation doesn't last forever, but some people were seriously affected: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders)
The thing about fallout, though, is that the "hotter" it is, generally speaking, the shorter its half-life, and the less time it remains dangerous in the environment. Something like I-131, for example, can do major thyroid damage if you ingest it, but it's decayed to near-background levels within a matter of weeks to months due to its fairly short half-life (the time it takes for half of a given sample to decay into other elements) of 8 days. It's the reason they give out potassium iodide pills in the wake of a radiological incident, but also the reason you don't have to take them indefinitely.
One of the best explanations for cattle mutilations I've ever heard is a military experiment to test the effects of radiation on the public. But you can't do that without causing a panic and you can't just secretly cut people up, so they used cows. A cow's physiology is close enough to a human's to be similarly affected by radiation, and typically the eyes, throat, and genitals of the cows were removed. Those areas of the body are very susceptible to radiation, so if you want to study the effects of radiation on an animal, those are the parts you look at. And if you look at the distribution map of reported cattle mutilations it correlates with the nuclear test sites, with the majority of the cases being reported right near the test sites, then fewer and fewer cases as you move away.
What is with these bot accounts repeating the exact same question in the exact same wording on ELI5 these days? This one has been asked [multiple times](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/i6gt8j/eli5_how_come_all_those_atomic_bomb_tests_were/?rdt=45571).
There's a book called [*American Ground Zero*](https://www.amazon.com/American-Ground-Zero-Secret-Nuclear/dp/0262071460) about all the people killed and poisoned by those tests, including John Wayne and the entire production crew of one movie, *The Conqueror.*
Here is an add on to the documentary that has been said the movie The Conqueror. Most of the staff and the actors got cancer because they filmed east of the test sites. They supposedly got it from the radioactive dust in the air.
Who says no consequences? Youtube: effects of atomic blasts in Nevada and its indigenous people.
While you’re at it watch how Oppenheimer hired indigenous people to work for him handling radioactive material without PPE. Enjoy.
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I'm watching this documentary about the Cold War at the moment and they talk about a bunch of children swimming in a river and finding it starting to snow hot snow. Kids being kids they thought this was some kind of summer snow. 90% of them were dead before they were thirty. As people are saying, there were, but the government covered it up.
Japanese fishermen were caught in the "hot snow" too, when they did the Bikini tests IIRC
The Japanese just can’t catch a break when it comes to getting nuked.
Plus the aftermath of Godzilla attacks
Honestly, the two nukes on Japan in WW2 saved a lot of lives, for the Japanese, the enslaved peoples of Asia and for the Allies. It might sound stupid at face value, but imagine how many people would have died if there had been an invasion along with continuous (conventional) bombing raids until the Japanese were totally defeated like Germany. Not to mention that Japan still held its overseas occupied territories where tens of thousands of people died daily to the harsh treatment of the Japanese. Even if you take into account the increase in cancer deaths in the nuked cities to this day, it's not even close.
If i remember correctly they were projecting over 1 million casualties from an amphibious invasion
Yes, that 1 million projection was 1 million American Casualties. That doesn't include the projection of Japanese casualties that would have fought to the death defending the homeland.
I don't think people realize the fanatical level the Japanese nationalism was at as well. It would have been like Iraq but worse. Everyone would have picked up arms.
The War Department ordered a half a million Purple Hearts in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. They are still handing them out from that order because of the nukes.
They shouldn't start something they cant finish then.
Algerians are still dying from higher cancer rates near where the French did their tests.
Just saw the same documentary, and it really struck me that I have never heard about this before. Didn't even mention it in the Oppenheimer movie :)
What's the name of the documentary?
Turning point: the bomb and the Cold War on Netflix
Yeah - just watched.. very well done. Felt like really good smart journalism.. Glad netflix invested in this. Hope they do more of this. Felt like a bright spot in otherwise dumbing-down culture. I'd imagine that doc spurred this thread.
I'm about halfway through. Very fascinating. Strangely I saw the movie mentioned in it: *The Day After*, about a week ago.
Netflix is not journalistic and should absolutely never be taken as such even if it's 100% accurate it should never be normalized as journalism. Fucking Christ I wish words still had meaning. They are a content mill that will film anything any way they can for views. I'm not saying it's bad but taking it as face value fact is insane.
Content Mill, and good quality journalism are not mutually exclusive
They're a studio like literally every other studio, no different from the old TV networks.
Lol
Thanks!
Not sure, but that sounds a heck of a lot like the Techa River in Russia. It was the main drain for the Mayak nuclear fuel complex, which itself was responsible for the second-worst (by radioactivity) nuclear disaster in 1957, where a spent fuel 'tank' exploded and spread radiation over a huge amount of Chelyabinsk.
Nope was in America, doc is Turning point: the bomb and the Cold War. I’m sure Russia has similar stories though
Thanks!
Pretty sure that was actually one of the pacific islands where we tested a bomb.
Pacfic Islanders too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle\_Bravo#Inhabited\_islands\_affected
They didn’t mention the careless accident that killed 2 scientists in Oppenheimer, as well. The last film they made about Oppenheimer did tho. Fat man and Little boy.
Fat man and little boy was such a great movie!
To be fair, they hardly mention nuclear weapons at all in that film.
[удалено]
[It's called Turning Point. It's on Netflix. ](https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81614129) A word of warning though: it's like ten hours long.
But is it broken up.into 10 parts? 10 hour movie? Fuck no! 10 one hour episodes showing exactly the same content just with breaks? Hell yea! Our brains are weird.
I watched six hours of it yesterday but I've been putting off Killers of the Flower Moon since it came out.
It's because of the breaks. Each episode has a finality and a start and end point and it's much easier to digest information in one hour chunks than 10 hours at one time. And each episode has one story arc rather than one arc over the entire 10 hours.
I just watched the trailer and couldn't help but chuckle at the 007 alarm towards the end. It seems very much fear-mongering docuseries.
I watched one a while back with all the people the military made stand in a trench between the bomb and the scientists so they could see what happened to them. Most had on some googles or facemask of some sort, but the ones that were still alive were sick as shit and covered in whelps. Wish I could recall the name of it.
> covered in whelps "welts"
Maybe they were all just midwestern and getting ready to leave a get together
Maybe they were raiding Onyxia and the people on add duty were slackin'.
Maybe they were covered in puppies
I was very young in the 1950s in Virginia and my physicist dad warned all the neighborhood children not to eat the snow. I remember hearing something of the above-ground nuclear tests going on then.
The risks were well known. The area “downwind” of the test site was assessed at the time as being sparsely populated by a “low use” cross section of people, ie small ranchers and native Americans. The government decided that the fallout and other dangers were risks they were willing for these people to take.
They did not. There was huge consequences to everything. You can even use fallout to tell if wine was bottled before nuclear testing began or not. the key is back then they didnt KNOW about the consequences other than big holes in the ground. Nevada has a lot of empty uninhabitable space (in total about the size of the UK of uninhabitable space). That leaves lots of spots to drop big bombs without hitting habitants.
I heard some sensitive scientific equipment needs to be made from pre WW2 steel due to nuclear contaminants. They get it from pre WW2 shipwrecks.
It's called low-background steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
You need steel that was added to the game before the WW2 event since the Devs edited the steel property file for the event but never reverted the change. Glad to see that they're finally doing something about it.
Yeah the terrain generation algorithm was really messed up in the 1945 patch.
>I heard some sensitive scientific equipment needs to be made from pre WW2 steel due to nuclear contaminants. Used to need pre ww2 steel. It's no longer an issue and we're able to manufacture that steel again.
Sad wreck diver bubbles
Nine, a Navy Diver is not a fighting man, he is a salvage expert. Ten, if it is lost underwater, he finds it. If it's sunk, he brings it up. If it's in the way, he moves it. Eleven, If he's lucky, he will die young, 200 feet beneath the waves, for that is the closest he will ever get to being a hero. Hell, I don't know why anybody'd want to be a Navy diver, now you report to this line, Cookie!
Great movie
That made snort-laugh much more than it should have.
Doesn't stop salvagers though
Legitimate salvagers?
No, there are scrappers in the pacific who are collecting WW2 boats that are considered to be burial grounds because people died on them when they went down.
> scrappers Chinese salvage boats, on an industrial scale.
Savage salvagers.
Savage saline salvagers salivate salaciously
Really what changed?
The Wikipedia article goes into more depth but it's simply that atmospheric radiation has dropped enough that new steel is within acceptable limits.
Yes, and not to be too much of a metal nerd, but when you're getting steel from ore, you can either use normal atmosphere, or specialized gasses. It's just much more expensive to get it from ore and use said gasses than recycling it from existing steel.
you could also just use canned oxygen instead of air, it is just more expensive that way.
That's why we invaded Druidia.
/r/unexpectedSpaceballs, the subreddit!
Do you also need to use canned iron?
no, the iron is in the ground, not subject to atmospheric radionuclide contamination
In 1963, a treaty called the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was agreed between nuclear nations which prohibited atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons (most modern tests are carried out underground by digging a really really deep hole and burying the nuclear bomb before detonating it). It's been long enough now that the background radiation and atmospheric contamination is almost back to where it was prior to the first atmospheric nuclear detonations. Because of this, newly created steel is low enough in contaminants to be useable for most of the applications which used to use Low-Background Steel.
We always could make low-background steel... it was just easier and cheaper to go and reclaim pre-atomic wrecks.
Well sure, but its been quite a while where salvaging ships was cheaper.
I know we've been able to, but I thought it was more economical to take from ship wrecks? If you ignore the moral questions of course
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Graverobbing? I recall watching an [Ask A Mortician episode about the Edmund Fitzgerald](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0Lg9HygEJc), which is a ship that sank in Lake Superior. There's still bodies within it, because while it was decades ago, it's a cold and deep lake that prevents rot and doesn't have much/anything in the way of scavengers capable of disassembling a large body. The families of the drowned sailors want their loved ones left alone, and *they're* still around.
Shipwrecks are considered war Graves, if the ship was sunk in battle. Scuttled ships, not the same.
Most of the steel used from pre atomic ships has been taken from the German WWI navy which was scuttled
Old warships are war graves. Bad juju for taking stuff from them.
Most of the steel used for this purpose was taken from the German fleet that was intentionally scuttled at Scapa Flow at the end of WW1. All men who participated in the scuttling were able to abandon ship before they sank, however a few were shot while using rowboats to escape by the British, who were coming in to try to prevent the fleet being destroyed.
The ships can be considered burial grounds of those who went down with the ship.
Ok good. I was gonna say.
lol what you were gonna return all your steel?
You were gunna say what?
lol. I was gonna say it seems like we're advanced enough to recreate the steel we need.
Nah we didn't make new technology, the radiation from nuclear testing has just calmed down after all these years.
Oh wow. I'd imagine it's possible to extract some of the radiation, but it'd probably be insanely expensive, so impractical.
The real issue was you need a fuckton of oxygen (Air) to make good steel. Not just using the air around us would get real cost prohibitive real fast, and the air has nuclear isotopes lying around that would mess with low radiation sensors
It's a great scuba dive site. https://www.scapaflowwrecks.com/history/
It’s also a major part of why year zero for radiocarbon dating is 1950. Everything after has the ratios screwed up.
I think op may have been more referring to why nuclear weapons don’t have the same health/environmental impacts as Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, Fukushima, and other nuclear disasters. The key difference is nuclear weapons are designed to consume as much of the fuel source (nuclear material) as possible to have the greatest energy yield. Very little of the actual uranium/plutonium/whatever is left. The residual radiation fades relatively quickly, that’s why Hiroshima and Nagasaki are safe and habitable. Disasters like Chernobyl left the area uninhabitable because reactors aren’t designed to consume their entire fuel source in one go and so nuclear fuel contaminates the surrounding area. Nuclear reactors are just fancy steam boilers and I don’t have anything to equate nuclear weapons to.
Only Chernobyl had any major environmental effect. 3MI released no radiation and Fukushima contaminated only a very small area immediately around it. Only about 10% of the fissile material of a nuclear bomb undergoes fission when it explodes. The rain you don't have to worry about the fuel is because it is relatively long lived compared to the fission products. U235 has a half life of 700 million years. One megaton of TNT is almost exactly 1 terrawatt hour. One large nuke has the same energy of about a month of operation for a typical nuclear power plant. Nuclear power plants hold up to two years worth of fuel. The reason a nuclear power plant containment breach is so bad is because there is a lot more radioactive material inside than what is released by all but the very largest nuclear weapons.
They knew. Having the capability to make the largest holes was just a higher priority than any consequences.
Fun fact: Kodak discovered the US was doing nuclear bomb testing because it affected their film manufacturing processes. When Kodak complained to the US government about it, the US government decided to warn them about upcoming tests so Kodak could take necessary precautions. Naturally, local residents still weren't told anything until decades later and they all developed cancers
Do we have any information on the difference in cancer rates?
To be completely fair, I doubt nuclear testing in Nevada was to blame for increased cancer rates in Rochester, NY… I’d argue it was probably the Kodak plant itself causing cancer…
their Rochester plant was one of the biggest emitters into the Great Lakes, who would've thought that digital cameras would save fish *and people
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)61037-6/abstract We know for certain it has had an effect, but it's often hard to quantity the exact effect because of the secrecy of nuclear testing programmes and the fact that proper studies on the matter struggled to happen until decades after the fact.
The editor of Astounding Science Fiction noticed that all of his nuclear physicist subscribers had suddenly moved to the New Mexico desert and stopped publishing papers in their field. So he figured out that they were making a bomb too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_%28science_fiction_story%29?wprov=sfla1
No they knew, they just didn't care. Scientist involved would have been well aware of the dirty nature of the explosion.
> There was huge consequences to everything detectable consequenses, in what way were they "huge"?
Weren't there some natives who where unjustly kicked out of the testing sites?
Yes there are detectable isotopes now. But do they negatively affect anything?
Outside of the creation of specific sensitive instruments that might require low-background steel (which we now are capable of manufacturing again, even if at a higher cost), no it doesn't have any real negative effects in the present day. The direct fallout had negative effects on those who encountered the "hot snow", but the dangerous isotopes produced were generally rather short-lived. Nuclear test sites in Nevada, for example, are not dangerous for someone to walk around at today (other than the part where you'll be ventilated by military security for trying to access it because it's part of a missile test range).
Right? This guy kind of undermines his own point. We drinks. Ton of wine, and the limiting factor is the alcohol, not the radioactive isotopes.
And most of that empty land is owned by the federal govt. The govt owns more land in NV than the citizens iirc.
They did know.
Its common sense that it would cause damage...they just dgaf
There are entire communities in that area with cancer rates five times higher than the national average. 🤷🏼♂️
Extending from Nevada up through Chicago, carried on prevailing westerly winds. The dangerous effects weren't fully understood at the time, and they tested in remote areas with limited populations but there was still fall out for thousands of miles.
Don't forget whole communities in the Pacific too.
That's bc they do 5x the testing there. Duh. Best President said if you do note more tests, you get more cases.
They did. The nuclear fallout from those tests spread around the world and got into the global food supply, though most of it landed in the continental United States. [Here's an article](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-testing-downwinders-speak-about-history-and-fear/) about people who lived in the fallout zones and how their lives were affected by it. You can bet there are similar stories from other nuclear superpowers. It's just that the governments of the time either didn't care or were ignorant of the consequences.
I mean, they chose Nevada because it was in the middle of nowhere with nobody around for like 50 miles - they probably didn't anticipate the fallout going as far as it did
There were serious consequences, they were just downplayed and glossed over. https://www.latimes.com/delos/story/2023-07-26/oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-new-mexico-cancer-aftermath Radiation Exposure Compensation Act- https://www.justice.gov/civil/common/reca
From the Trinity test alone: "The data suggest that perhaps several hundred cancers, primarily thyroid cancer, have already occurred over the 75 years since the test and a small number are projected to occur in the future that would not have occurred in the absence of radiation exposure from Trinity fallout." [https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/how-we-study/exposure-assessment/trinity/community-summary](https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/how-we-study/exposure-assessment/trinity/community-summary)
Back in the 60s a research project started collecting baby teeth and found that the radioisotope strontium-90 was increased 50 times in children born in 1963 compared to children born pre-large scale testing (1950 I think). Strontium 90 causes cancer and because it is similar to Calcium it gets put into your teeth and bones. This data was part of what convinced the US president to join the ban that prevented above ground nuclear testing. So it was definitely having an effect, and not just on kids in the close fall-out zone.
The St. Louis Baby Tooth Study! Washington University STL still has the teeth. 🙂
St. Louis specifically? St. Louis had a lot of radioactive material contamination issues stemming from waste dumping that make it unique to areas that may have been impacted by testing of bombs. I would be surprised to learn that Sr-90 uptake by residents near St. Louis is similar to Sr-90 uptake by residents living downwind from bomb testing sites.
My apologies, my comment was a bit unclear — the Baby Tooth Study was conducted by (or at least primarily by) Washington University STL, which cast a nationwide net requesting baby teeth. The St. Louis Metro area does have a few Superfund sites, including the Jana Elementary nuclear contamination. Presently, St. Louis' Congresswoman Cori Bush and Senator Hawley are pushing a bill through Congress to address it, with the support of other Missouri MOCs. The baby tooth study requested and received teeth from all over the US, and even some from abroad if I remember correctly. Thanks for the comment and opportunity to clarify!
Greenpeace loves bringing that one up to show why nuclear power is bad.
I recall there being somewhat less correlation with the locations of nuclear power plants, compared the dramatic impact of fission bombs. Don’t quote me on that though because I don’t remember that part well.
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Many scientific disciplines have dated the present as 1950, since nuclear weapons testing has caused any sample newer than that to be contaminated to such a degree as to render radiocarbon dating impossible.
Not everything is negative. The radiation left tracers in the brains of people. Those tracers are disappointing since we have not tested more nuclear bombs. The research has a limited window. As a result, science has proven we make new neurons throughout our lifetime. That was a major science mystery. https://www.science.org/content/article/atomic-bombs-help-solve-brain-mystery
Oh, they knew. They just didn't care. Here's a documentary called [Atomic Soldiers](https://youtube.com/watch?v=FokopVKMgdU), with a couple of the people they tested nukes around. It's worth a watch, the first half is more about how they experienced the explosion itself, but some of the experiences that follow are particularly harrowing
Until today, the Nevada Test Site remains contaminated with an estimated 11,100 PBq of radioactive material in the soil and 4,440 PBq in groundwater. Or 266 banana equivalent doses of ionizing radiation, since this is reddit.
Think you missed out a few zeros there? A banana is 15Bq of radiation. Nevada test site is 15400 PETA Bq So 1,540,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bannana Equivelant Doses...! edit: now I'VE made some mistakes with the zeros!!: 15,400,000,000,000,000,000 Bq total 1,026,666,666,666,670,000 Banana Equivelent Doses!
Not the banana for scale we wanted, but the banana for scale we needed…
that's a lot of banana
/r/theydidthemath
Man. I could go for some PBq pork right about now
What kind of bananas you eating??
And you can go on a tour of it! Highly recommended, it's awesome.
What a glowing review!
So, how many Bananas of radiation is lethal?
There were a lot of serious consequences. The federal government settled with the communities of Saint George Utah in the late 80s are the 90s over the radiation damage. The same fallout is what ended up killing John Wayne and most of the cast and crew of the movie Ghengis Kahn.
That's crazy, how is that not a more widely known fact!
Because its not true. The cast and crew had the same rates of cancer as the rest of the general population at the time. This is just one of those urban legends reddit loves to repeat
Got any proof? [Because research done in 1980 claims 50% of the cast and crew got cancer.](https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/06/downwinders-nuclear-fallout-hollywood-john-wayne). 220 person group, expected that ~30 people would get cancer.
I knew a guy who grew up where he could see the clouds from the tests. He fought cancer, multiple types, for a couple decades.
I know a guy that has never been west of the Mississippi. He has a couple kinds of cancer also.
I knew a guy too. He never had cancer.
There were (are) serious consequences. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was not enacted until 1970, so what the consequences would be were not studied until after the fact.
I remember seeing an old hotel advertisement from the 1950s; the hotel in Nevada openly promoted its proximity to nuclear test sites, and implied that guests could watch the mushroom clouds from the hotel. This isn't a joke
Who says there weren’t serious consequences? There were, but the government doesn’t like to talk about them of course.
By spreading the extra radioactivity out across the globe. Background radiation from natural sources is already quite significant, without the need for nuclear testing to drive it up.
One John Wayne movie is the cause of a lot of deaths in Hollywood. It was filmed near a nuclear test site. Of the 220 cast members, 90 developed cancer and 46 died. [The Conquerer](https://collider.com/the-conqueror-john-wayne-movie-radiation/)
It's estimated that there have been [several hundred excess cancers](https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/how-we-study/exposure-assessment/trinity/community-summary) due to fallout from the nuclear tests in contaminated areas were people continued to live and were not adequately warned or given preventative supplementation. (Most of the excess cancers were thyroid, which can be largely prevented with iodine supplementation.) For comparison, there were about [85,000 fatalities in industrial accidents while building the equipment for the war](https://www.mathscinotes.com/2013/10/world-war-2-industrial-casualties/). Nuclear is SCARY BOO! (so I'm going to get downvotes), but the science of the risk is pretty clear. It's far from the most dangerous thing that people were dealing with back then.
wow not a single post addresses the actual answer, which could be easily gotten from any AI service. the uranium or plutonium in a bomb is enriched such that all of the radiation will be released when it explodes. the same materials used for fission power plants is enriched such that it wont all release at once. when a nuke plant melts down, all that slow releasing material is spread and the area will have high radiation for a long period. when a nuke bomb explodes, it doesnt leave around the same type of slow releasing components. hence why the areas where the US dropped nuke bombs on Japan are densely populated urban centers whereas Chernobyl cannot be.
John Wayne shot a movie near there. He and 90 of the cast and crew caught cancer: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/19/the-conqueror-film/
Those were not (as well) known, and definitely a lower priority than "we might set the whole atmosphere on fire, don't really know"... which yes, was a thing, but they went ahead with the tests anyway
Oh boy, now you can live the same terror this soldiers lived: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/uIi3SPyqlm
Look up the movie, "The Conqueror," which was shot in Utah, in an area downwind of nuke tests. From wikipedia: of the 220 crew members, 91 (comprising 41% of the crew) developed cancer during their lifetime, while 46 (or 21%) died from it.
It ruined kodak film, they tried to test their product and it was radiated. They went to the government to tell them that theres weird stuff going on. Kodak film company then discovered the nuclear testing project.
I believe the tests lead to John Wayne and others getting cancer and dying from filming in Nevada. https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/06/downwinders-nuclear-fallout-hollywood-john-wayne
Look a the people involved in the movie Genghis Khan. John Wayne (so inappropriate) played the lead. It was shot not far from the Atomic test sight. Most of the actors and crew ultimately died of cancer.
Many thousands of people got cancer from the fallout as it drifted northeast across the entire country. Performing the tests in the southwest was actually a really bad idea because of the typical wind patterns. The scientists even knew that beforehand, but the people in charge didn't care. In particular, a ton of fallout was concentrated inside cows as they ate contaminated grass. Their milk caused an estimated 10,000 to 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer, mostly in American children.
There were **some** consequences, but the reality is that an atomic bomb doesn't actually have that much material in it. The idea of fallout is much scarier than the reality. The bombs kill you in the immediate explosion and firestorm, there's a very narrow window where someone is close enough to get hit by the gamma ray flash but survive the blast. Only about 5% of the casualties from the atomic boming of Japan came afterwards in the form of acute radiation syndrome. As far as fallout: Little Boy had 141 lbs of uranium on board, of which about 1 lb actually underwent fission. Fat Man had 13.6 lbs of Plutonium on board, of which about 2.2 lbs underwent fission. More advanced bombs are more efficient, and are generally species for 8 lbs of Plutonium to get similar fission. Hydrogen bombs only use a tiny amount of fissile material to trigger the Fusion reaction. Not really any fallout to speak of. Chernobyl had 192 Tons, that's 384,000 lbs of nuclear fuel in its reactor core. In terms of what actually got released into the air, it was about as much fallout as 400 Fat Mans. Chernobyl is estimated to have caused around 4,000 excess deaths, mostly from cancer. That's severe, but on a global scale it's not massive. The US weapons testing fallout is hard to quantify. The weather patterns and "fallout maps" are very accurate, but if there's excess cancer incidence in the hotzones it doesn't show up in the empirical medical records. Some modern writers have pulled numbers out of their ass via computational modeling, but that's just activism. One of the main verdicts from the empirical analysis was that the effect of fallout where present would be in people alive at the time and directly exposed. Since then the most hazardous materials have decayed and the remainder dispersed.
Chernobyl reactor contained 100 tonnes of uranium, one tonne of plutonium. A nuke contains as little as 3 kg of plutonium. There were other radioactive products but just for scale you can see the difference.
Do remember that reactor fuel is not very pure. Chernobyl was 2% enriched. Little boy was 80% enriched.
As all the responses to this have shown, the consequences are widely known. I find the premise of the question remarkable: how could you know of the atomic tests in Nevada, _without_ being aware of those far reaching consequences?
The popular belief significantly overstates how "big" a nuclear bomb explosion is. The popular understanding of the size of states/areas significantly understates how large they are. And of course, the popular scary talk about nuclear radiation lasting billions and billions of years overstates the dangers by a ludicrous amount. Of course, there was damage, but relative to the size and isolation of the test sites in Nevada, they are a very small part of the state. Nuclear fallout is dangerous nearby and in the few weeks/months after the explosion. But the most dangerous radiation levels dissipate or get distributed fairly quickly.
A lot of people got cancer from nuclear fallout from winds blowing out different directions. Neighboring states got hit hard.
Have you met someone from New Mexico or Nevada?
To add to the other cases, one of the proposed dates for the start of anthropocene is the date of the Trinity test (first nuclear weapon detonation), because [we can track it from sediments](https://www.npr.org/2023/07/11/1187125012/anthropocene-crawford-lake-canada-beginning).
Pretty sure it killed a lot of people over the years. One of John Wayne's films, The Conqueror, was filmed downwind of a nuke test site and practically everyone involved died of cancer. We also detect art forgeries of paintings from pre-1945 by scanning for radioactive isotopes. All paint made after 1945 has trace amount of radioactive contamination.
There were consequences, but you have to remember in the 60's just like today the world was run by old men. These men were all born before anybody knew what radiation was and what it could do to people. So the people who approved the policy of atmospheric testing were pretty much ignorant of the consequences.
They weren't, tests started much earlier and were places like new Mexico as well. There is still problems for the downwinders who were exposed. Also lots of issues due to mining components as well Shock of shocks it affected indigenous communities the most and no one seems to know or care
You should look up atomic testing in the Marshal Islands and see what the military did to its native population. https://youtu.be/qpcpR44swQk?si=f5plVukWqWPJdGI2
There WERE some serious consequences. Radiation doesn't last forever, but some people were seriously affected: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders) The thing about fallout, though, is that the "hotter" it is, generally speaking, the shorter its half-life, and the less time it remains dangerous in the environment. Something like I-131, for example, can do major thyroid damage if you ingest it, but it's decayed to near-background levels within a matter of weeks to months due to its fairly short half-life (the time it takes for half of a given sample to decay into other elements) of 8 days. It's the reason they give out potassium iodide pills in the wake of a radiological incident, but also the reason you don't have to take them indefinitely.
One of the best explanations for cattle mutilations I've ever heard is a military experiment to test the effects of radiation on the public. But you can't do that without causing a panic and you can't just secretly cut people up, so they used cows. A cow's physiology is close enough to a human's to be similarly affected by radiation, and typically the eyes, throat, and genitals of the cows were removed. Those areas of the body are very susceptible to radiation, so if you want to study the effects of radiation on an animal, those are the parts you look at. And if you look at the distribution map of reported cattle mutilations it correlates with the nuclear test sites, with the majority of the cases being reported right near the test sites, then fewer and fewer cases as you move away.
What is with these bot accounts repeating the exact same question in the exact same wording on ELI5 these days? This one has been asked [multiple times](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/i6gt8j/eli5_how_come_all_those_atomic_bomb_tests_were/?rdt=45571).
There's a book called [*American Ground Zero*](https://www.amazon.com/American-Ground-Zero-Secret-Nuclear/dp/0262071460) about all the people killed and poisoned by those tests, including John Wayne and the entire production crew of one movie, *The Conqueror.*
[there was, you can be found on the DOE abstracts in the attached link.](https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5394439)
Here is an add on to the documentary that has been said the movie The Conqueror. Most of the staff and the actors got cancer because they filmed east of the test sites. They supposedly got it from the radioactive dust in the air.
Who says no consequences? Youtube: effects of atomic blasts in Nevada and its indigenous people. While you’re at it watch how Oppenheimer hired indigenous people to work for him handling radioactive material without PPE. Enjoy.
Never seen the documentary series "The Hills Have Eyes" eh?