atomic bomb

Mushroom Cloud in Iconic Photo of Hiroshima Is Not Actually a Mushroom Cloud

Nuclear experts say this famous photo of an apparent mushroom cloud rising above the city of Hiroshima is not what it appears to be. The towering plume is actually billowing smoke rising up from the raging firestorms that followed the explosion. This photo has been misidentified as a mushroom cloud for decades. The Pulitzer Prize…

Why Does This Nuclear Reactor Have a National Park Sign?

This is the historical X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Weirdly enough, it now has a National Park Service sign—but why? In fact, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz signed a memorandum of agreement on November 10th, establishing the Manhattan…

Watch previously unreleased footage of 1955 atomic bomb testing in glorious HD

Atom Central recently published these four unreleased videos of atomic bomb testing in 1955. The footage, taken from Operation Teapot at the test site in Nevada, is in glorious HD so it’s pretty incredible but watch out for the blinding light. Even in a small little YouTube window, it hurts. SPLOID is delicious brain candy.…

The Deep Influence of the A-Bomb on Anime and Manga

At the end of Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian Japanese anime film Akira, a throbbing, white mass begins to envelop Neo-Tokyo. Eventually, its swirling winds engulf the metropolis, swallowing it whole and leaving a skeleton of a city in its wake. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – along with the firebombings of Tokyo – were…

How the Associated Press covered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The AP has posted three articles from its archives about the US dropping two atomic bombs in August 1945 and the subsequent surrender of Japan, so we can see what many Americans read in the wake of the destruction. [via MetaFilter]

Dragons in Game of Thrones Are Like Nuclear Weapons in the Real World

Because we all need a good dose of geopolitics in between sword fights, White Walkers, and boobs, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientistshas a thorough analysis of all the ways dragons are just like nuclear weapons. It’s actually a stunningly obvious comparison once you get down to it. Here be spoilers. And dragons. George R. R.…

Incredibly clear footage shows the blast effect of 1953 atomic bomb

Kaboom. And fireball. And ground shake. And shockwave. And boom. AtomCentral shows us some amazingly clear HD footage restored from 1953 of the Atomic Cannon test from Upshot-Knothole Grable. In the video below, you can see cars, jeeps, buses and tanks against the backdrop of the ginormous blast’s initial burst and shockwave. The blast eventually…

What H.G. Wells Got Wrong When He Predicted the Atomic Bomb

What science fiction writers get wrong is at least as important as what they get right, argued legendary physicist Lawrence Krauss in his talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago. In particular, H.G. Wells predicted the atomic bomb — but he made a crucial error. According to Red Orbit,…

What the atomic tests of the 1950s looked like from Los Angeles

Even though the Nevada Proving Grounds were about 270 miles from Los Angeles, the eerie glow of the atomic tests could still be seen from the City of Angels. Top image: A disturbingly cheery postcard-like photograph courtesy Los Angeles Public Library. These pictures were taken between 1951 to 1955. No photographer name has been credited…

Extraordinary sleuthing connects Rita Hayworth and the atom bomb

Rita Hayworth was one of the most celebrated celebrities of all time, and a favorite wartime pin-up. But she became an infamous pin-up when a picture of her was rumored to have been put on an atomic bomb. Thanks to some amazing detective work, we now know the rumors were right. Orson Welles, who was…

The Hiroshima Bombing, Visualized

Graphic designer Mathew Lucas’ Hiroshima series depicts the staggering numbers and figures associated with the nuclear bombardment of the ill-fated Japanese city – the world’s very first target of a nuclear weapon. The bombing took place sixty-eight years ago today. The second in a three-piece series, the infographic seen above features a line for every…

The report that could have made our world an alternate timeline

Just before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, a report went out to people at the highest levels of power. It predicted an arms race, a policy of mutually assured destruction, and it recommended that we keep the bomb secret. What if we had? This report was given by physicist and now-Nobel-Laureate…

Would You Visit Atomic Bomb National Park?

Maybe you’ve seen the buffalo at Yellowstone, hiked Half Dome at Yosemite, and gotten one last look before everything melts at Glacier. So what’s next? If lawmakers have their way, it could be splitting the atom at Atomic Bomb Park. Recently the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would allocate $21 million to…

This experiment proved that anyone could design a nuclear weapon

Do you have, say, ten years to spare? Then you could probably design a functional nuclear weapon. We know that, because of a very odd experiment conducted in the 1960s by the United States government. In the 1960s World War II was well over, and the United States and the Soviet Union were both settling…

Here’s how radiation from this atomic bomb test got to San Francisco

This nuclear blast went off in 1946 at Bikini Atoll in Micronesia. How did some of the radiation get back to the United States? Why, we imported it, of course! Has the radiation from nuclear testing abroad come back to haunt the United State via ocean currents and wind patterns? Probably. But we found a…

Rare ground-level photo of Hiroshima bombing found in former Japanese elementary school

One can only imagine what was going through the mind of the person who took this photo. Taken a mere two to five minutes after its detonation, it’s a ground-level perspective of the atomic explosion that decimated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The original print of the photograph recently surfaced in the archives at Honkawa…

This Is How Hiroshima Looked From the Ground

This picture, found in a Japanese Elementary School, depicts the mushroom cloud which formed when the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was taken just minutes after the bomb fell, from the location where modern-day Kaita is situated, six miles east of Hiroshima’s center. On the back of the photo (click above to…

Photos of Mushroom Clouds as Seen from 1950s Las Vegas

Once upon a time, Las Vegas wasn’t merely a place you could go to enjoy a few games of chance in a glamorous setting. It was also a place where, quite frequently, you could enjoy the view of a distant mushroom cloud. The Nevada Test Site (now the Nevada National Security Site), was a mere…

Photos imagine atomic bomb tests as a modern tourist attraction

What if iPhones and Facebook already existed by the dawn of the Atomic Age? Would your news feed be clogged with photos of vacationing friends staring out at not-too-distant mushroom clouds? That’s the alternate history imagined by Clay Lipsky’s Atomic Overlook photos. Lipsky explains that his photos offer a view of a population desensitized to…

Rare photographs of atomic bomb testing at Bikini Atoll

When io9 reader Chris Carey’s grandfather, a WWII veteran, passed away, he took it upon himself to assemble a slideshow for the funeral. While searching through a dusty photo album that he’d found in the attic, Carey made an incredible find: numerous photographs of the atomic bomb testing conducted at Bikini Atoll. Carey recounted his…