nuclear tests

Las Vegas, 1953: “Guests at the Last Frontier pool watched as a mushroom cloud rose from the Simon Test … ”

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Guests at the Last Frontier pool watched as a mushroom cloud rose from the Simon Test, part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole, at the Nevada Test Site outside of Las Vegas on April 25, 1953. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce issued a calendar for tourists, listing the scheduled times of the bomb detonations and the best places to view them.

When I saw this photo shared on Facebook by the National Atomic Testing Museum (Atomic Museum), I was thinking what a contrast from just eight years earlier when Enrico Fermi was taking bets ahead of the Trinity test about whether a nuclear detonation would ignite the atmosphere and possibly destroy the world. That’s an episode recounted in John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic which I saw at Lyric Opera in the 2007/8 season.

I knew Fermi wasn’tserious, but hadn’t understood that by that time that particular catastrophe had already been ruled out by scientists as even a remote possibility, but the idea that it at least might have been possible lived on in the more popular imagination for some time.

The Fear of Setting the Planet on Fire with a Nuclear Weapon

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The Fear of Setting the Planet on Fire with a Nuclear Weapon By the time Enrico Fermi jokingly took bets among his Los Alamos colleagues on whether the July 16, 1945, Trinity test would wipe out all earthbound life, physicists already knew of the impossibility of setting the atmosphere on fire, according to a 1991 … Read more