How little did we know in 1957. Or maybe we did, and then this is just stupid. On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They'd marked the spot 'Ground Zero. Population 5' on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.
Directly overhead two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead. They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb.
YouTube link
More about this experiment.
(via b3ta)
5 comment(s):
I'm curious about why anyone thought they needed more than a kilo of explosive to bring down a plane.
huh? You're probably confused about the kiloton, which indicates that is is the equivalent of 2000 ton (so 2,000,000 kilo) of TNT. And it is not used for bringing down planes.
The test is of a Genie air-to-air missile, and it was designed to bring down aircraft.
I wonder what happened to those five guys. Did they have eye damage? Did they suffer any radiation contamination?
No, it seems the experiment did not harm them. Sidney Bruce dies age 86, Frank Ball died age 83, Joh Hughes dies age 71, Norman Bodinger may still be alive , and Don Lutrel dies age 63.
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