80 Years Ago Today, Near Alamogordo, New Mexico...
- Thread starter Michael Poche
- Start date
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Ed Driscoll
Friend of Leo's
Yeah, I can't believe Christopher Nolan would completely rip off Stanley Kubrick like that.
Lockback
Tele-Afflicted
Arguably the biggest in history.
It's amazing we've been able to weather 8 decades without another one being used in anger. I suspect that record won't hold up a whole lot longer, unfortunately ...
John Backlund
Doctor of Teleocity
I think it took about a month or two for those words to lose a measure of their ominous gravity...
Some of the more 'novel' ideas we've had...
Completing a section of excavation for I-40 by detonating 23 bombs or yields of 24 to 100 kilotons to cut a mountain pass in California.
en.wikipedia.org
Project Plowshare also had proposals for widening the Panama Canal with hundreds of bombs...a study in 1963 proposed digging a new canal in the Middle East to bypass the Suez Canal by use over 500 2-megaton bombs.
Can't see anything going wrong there.
There are insane and stupid stories and plans from the other side of the Iron Curtain too, mostly stupid and wreckless. Kubrick was unknowingly not too far off with the "Strangelove" premise.
Completing a section of excavation for I-40 by detonating 23 bombs or yields of 24 to 100 kilotons to cut a mountain pass in California.
Project Carryall - Wikipedia
Project Plowshare also had proposals for widening the Panama Canal with hundreds of bombs...a study in 1963 proposed digging a new canal in the Middle East to bypass the Suez Canal by use over 500 2-megaton bombs.
Can't see anything going wrong there.
There are insane and stupid stories and plans from the other side of the Iron Curtain too, mostly stupid and wreckless. Kubrick was unknowingly not too far off with the "Strangelove" premise.
The Soviet invasion is the other half of that equation.
There's another aspect that always gets forgotten. Escalation was impossible. Everybody had to stop and assess the situation.
In the coming years, that was not going to be possible.
willietheweirdo
Tele-Afflicted
Coincidence?
(Should have used a double-cut
) willietheweirdo
Tele-Afflicted
Incidentally, I just finished reading this (pub. 8/12/45!) and found it very worthwhile:
John Backlund
Doctor of Teleocity
Einstein may have been correct….but I certainly hope not.
When I was in grade school, if we thought an atomic bomb was going to fall anywhere near us, we were supposed to hide under our desks. That way when the roof fell in you had NO CHANCE of every getting out of there!
Skyhook
Friend of Leo's
The coloring and layout of that cover looks like it's missing "... for Dummies!".
Yup, safe under the desk.
And don't look outta the window!
John Backlund
Doctor of Teleocity
John Backlund
Doctor of Teleocity
Ed Driscoll
Friend of Leo's
notmyusualuserid
Poster Extraordinaire
Does it mention that Churchill gave America all of the British research, in what was supposed to be a reciprocal agreement, without which there would have been no bomb to drop on Hiroshima in 1945??It is a spectacular story of science and engineering. I (once again) very strongly recommend Richard Rhodes’ book The Making Of The Atomic Bomb, which basically takes you from Rutherford and Thompson probing the structure of the atom around the end of the 19th century to a functioning nuclear weapon 50 years later, with many human interest stories about some of the characters involved - including Szilard, Fermi, Meyer, Bohr and of course Oppenheimer - along the way. (No, watching the Christopher Nolan film is not the same thing at all..)
Guess what?
----RIP----
Tele-Afflicted
What, you also have The Bomb?! Welcome to the MAD club!
