#nuclear testing

[miamaimania]

Sedan Crater ~ Nevada Test Site (1962) ◆ What remains when progress craters.

[oldnewyork]

“ A group of women outside the Russian Mission to the United Nations in New York City protest the testing of nuclear arms on Nov. 1, 1961.”

[catgirl-kaiju]

thinking abt The House in the Middle: a 1950s propaganda film that promoted the idea that you can substantially decrease the risk of your house being destroyed in an atomic bombing by keeping the lawn tidy and putting on a new coat of paint on it (sponsored by a coalition of paint companies pretending to be a community outreach org) wherein they attempt to demonstrate this by showing three mock-up houses in various states of disrepair and clutter being subjected to heat and blast from atomic testing.

the titular house in the middle is the tidiest and has fresh coat of paint and it's very obvious that it got just about as fucked up by the blast as the other two, so they resorted to overlaying a matte painting of the middle house looking intact over the blast footage and replaced the rubble left of the middle house with a new house that looks just fucked up enough to fool the audience, but was very clearly not subjected to the heat and blast from an atomic bomb.

it's so fucking funny how obvious the propaganda spin is and it is a great case study in learning how to be critical of filmed content that you see being presented as fact. anyway, here's the poster i made for the archived copy i have on my plex server:

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

How do you think radiation would affect morphing? Could they morph it out of their system like they can with venom (I could be misremembering, but I think it's venom someone morphs and gets rid of it)? And since radiation messes with the cells and dna of organisms, how do you think it would affect the morphs or morphing process itself?

Not A Biologist, but. This does feel like an interesting potential Animorphs book, because we know that radiation fucks with cells' ability to replicate correctly and can mess up DNA coding. So assuming that morphing involves some of the same processes as reproduction and/or healing, then it seems like heavy radiation exposure could cause morphing to go really wrong, or at least really weird. Obviously the famous one is your cells get too good at dividing (i.e. cancer) but I could also see this working with morphing to produce, like, involuntary or excessive morphing.

Hmmm. New headcanon time: part of the reason the Animorphs are consistently better at morphing than most andalites isn't just sheer amount of practice. It's the fact that the U.S. massively increased the worldwide radiation load, especially in Nevada and surrounding states, with all their nuclear tests in the 1940s - 1980s. West Coast Americans are basically proto-nartec and have the crazy morphing skill to show for it.

[666chainz]

[thesobsister]

Dancer Sally McCloskey doing an interpretive dance to a nuclear test, specifically, Operation Upshot-Knothole's Dixie test-firing, an 11-kiloton air drop detonated at 6,000 feet, performed April 6, 1953. The detonation was too far off the ground to gather up the debris that forms the characteristic "stem" of a mushroom cloud.

Angel Peak, where she performed her dance, is just 33 miles northwest of Las Vegas. So, it's comforting to know that the government was conducting nuclear tests within a short drive from a major population center. Look out downwind! *haha* Jolly good fun!

via MeFi

[jeintalu]

Trump Says U.S. Will Restart Nuclear Weapons Tests After 30 Years

Trump Says U.S. Will Restart Nuclear Weapons Tests After 30 Years

The president’s remarks were made shortly before his face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea.

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]