From 1945 till 2008, over 2,000 nuclear tests have been conducted worldwide. The United States of America alone accounts for 1054 of these tests, according to an official count. Many of these atmospheric tests, the ones in which the nuclear device is detonated above the ground, were watched by thousands of spectators and volunteers. Radiations and fall-out from these tests were later found to have claimed the lives of more than 11,000 Americans, according to a report by New Scientist. The guys in the following pictures had no idea of what they were getting into.
VIP observers watching the spectacle during Operation Greenhouse at Enewetak Atoll, 1951.
Soldiers being exposed to a nuclear explosion at the Nevada Test Site in 1951
Believe it or not, these five volunteers were standing at ground zero when a 2KT nuclear war headed air-to-air missile, Genie, was exploded 15,000 feet above their heads, to demonstrate that the weapon was safe for use over populated areas. Whether this affected the health of the officers is unknown.
The testing of "Small Boy" in 1962
Cameramen at the Nevada Test Site, May 25, 1953
Troops watching during Operation Tumbler-Snapper. Twenty-one hundred marines participated in this test on May 1, 1952
Crew of the USS Fall River watching the atomic blast during Operation Crossroads in 1946
Casual observers of the Baker blast during Operation Crossroads
The origin of the next two pictures is unknown, though the last one could be from Operation Tumbler-Snapper.
Update: Watch this video (it's worth it)
6 comments:
monkey
I feel radioactive.
In most of these pictures the people were far enough away than the amount of Gamma they received was less than a walk through a graveyard (lot's of marble and granite are radioactive, in case you didn't know, so watch your granite counter top). Tissue stops Alpha and Beta, so the 11000 must have bathed in fallout and eaten crap off the ground after the events.
(I built nukes for 4 years, so I know what they can and don't do.)
Just a guess, but marching them through ground Zero might have had a little bit to do with that. And nukes built today have about as much in common with the early nukes as your microwave. Early nukes were more dirty bombs than the ones of today.
Wow - like they are watching a movie or something. Little did they know what they were about to unleash and how this weapon has chaned the way we rage war...
If you watch footage of tests in which soldiers participated you'll see that many were in slit trenches close enough to the blast that sandbags above the trenches caught fire, also as soon as the light began to fade the soldiers were ordered to stand up and look at the event at which point the dirt cloud arrives pushed along buy the mach front, and indeed these unfortunate witnesses got mouth, lung, eye, and ears full of highly radioactive particulate. So while they may have been protected from the immediate thermal effects they were exposed to hazardous amounts of radiation even before they were ordered to march toward ground zero