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Dietrich Wegner made this 20-foot tall children’s playhouse out of polyfill, rope, wood, and steel. It’s entitled Homeland and is a convincing imitation of a nuclear detonation. Remember: your kids are never too young to start learning post-nuclear apocalypse survival skills. Link -via reddit | Photo: Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery
During the early years of the Cold War, Britain proposed placing nuclear mines along the eastern border of West Germany. These could be detonated when Warsaw Pact armies crossed, destroying them and deterring follow-on forces from invading Western Europe. But there was a problem with the mine design. It tended to freeze during the winter and become useless. So the British military considered nesting live chickens on the bombs. The body heat from the chickens would keep the vulnerable components of the bombs from become disabled:
Scientists working on the project realised that the bomb could fail in winter if vital components become too cold, so they explored ways of keeping the inner workings warm. One proposal put forward consisted of filling the casing of the nuke with live chickens, who would give off sufficient heat, prior to suffocating or starving to death, to keep the delicate explosive mechanism from freezing. Despite the potential importance of chickens to the project, the mine was codenamed ‘Blue Peacock’.
The plan was never carried out.
Link via Dan Lewis | Photo by Flickr user MonkeyMyshkin used under Creative Commons license
Yucca Flat in Nevada was the site of 827 nuclear detonations while the US enhanced its nuclear weapons. Pictured above is a Google Maps satellite view of the pock-marked surface.
Link via Boing Boing | Image: Google
Have you heard of the proposal to end the Gulf of Mexico oil leak by nuking the site? At DVICE, Kevin Hall writes about other engineering schemes that involved using the explosive force of nuclear weapons in peaceful (if perhaps crazy) ways. For example, if the Panama Canal is too narrow, just blast a wider channel with a few controlled explosions:
We could have all grown up with the Pan-Atomic Canal instead of the Panama Canal we know today. That is, if Operation Plowshare ever took off (the government’s term for using nukes in construction, including the highway-blasting idea above and the harbor you’re about to read about below). Building the Panama Canal was a long, deadly process. Also many ships are too big to traverse the canal. To make everything easier, why not just nuke it wide open? Well, radioactive fallout was a huge concern, and that fear even scrapped plans to use atomic bombs to create entirely new canals.
Link | Photo: US AID
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This is a recently-declassified US government photo of a hydrogen bomb detonating in space. The test, called Starfish Prime, set off the nuke 250 miles above the Earth’s surface. NPR explains that the US did so see if the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth had military uses:
The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth’s atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb’s radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and — most peculiar — d) if a man-made explosion might “alter” the natural shape of the belts.
Video at the link.
In 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian was working on a 6.2 kg (14 lb) spherical mass of plutonium at the Los Alamos laboratory. He was stacking bricks of tungsten carbide around the plutonium core when he noticed a nearby neutron counter signaling that the addition of the final brick would make the assembly supercritical. Daghlian immediately withdrew his hand ... and the brick slipped onto the center of the plutonium core and the assembly went critical. Daghlian was able to dissemble the bricks (the core didn't explode), but he died from radiation poisoning 28 days later.
Nine months later, physicist Louis Slotin, an expert in triggering devices, and seven other scientists gathered in the laboratory to perform a dangerous experiment he called "tickling the dragon's tail." The experiment involved creating the beginning steps of a nuclear fission reactor by placing two half-spheres of beryllium around the plutonium core. The trick was to keep the beryllium from touching the plutonium core, which Slotin had done many times before.
But on that day, Slotin decided to use a screwdriver instead of shims, and his hand slipped and the beryllium hemisphere touched the plutonium core, which instantly went critical. Slotin realized his mistake, and used his hand to lift the beryllium just a fraction of a second later ... but that was enough to give him a lethal dose of radiation. The other scientists saw a "blue glow" of air ionization and felt a "heat wave" - they were saved from immediate death (though later 3 of them died from side effects of radiation years later). Slotin, on the other hand, died 9 days later.
Both of Daghlian and Slotin's accidents were on Tuesday the 21st, both used the same plutonium core, and both died in the same room at the same hospital. The plutonium core was later named the "Demon Core" and was put to use in the Able test of the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon test at the Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946.
The Able test of Operation Crossroads, July 1, 1946.
Photo: Office
of History & Heritage Resources
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