I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that’s just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. Well, to be fair, the primary purpose was probably to test a prototype of the W30 nuclear warhead; the airship thing was just a bonus. The test, codenamed Stokes, was part of Operation Plumbbob, a series of 29 above-ground detonations carried out at the Nevada Test Site between May and October 1957. Statistically speaking, the radiation released into the atmosphere from Plumbbob would be expected to have caused 1900 civilian deaths from thyroid cancer — a small price to pay for the knowledge gained, I think we’d all agree.Read the rest of this story »
1 comment:
I would glad pay that debt to freedom---using someone else's currency, of course.
So, Cap'n, when are you going to unearth the files relating to the structural survivability rates of refrigerators in an atomic blast?
Get cracking!
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