# The Beautiful Nuclear Explosion Thread



## Scar Symmetry

So while on principle I completely disagree with nuclear testing, I do appreciate pictures of the blasts for purely aesthetic reasons.

Here are some pictures I thought were beautiful and wanted to share with you:

Canopus, French testing, 1968







Licorne, French testing, 1970
















Castle Bravo, US testing, 1954






enjoy.


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## TomasO

somebody made a music video to demon burgers puritania with some interesting nuclear footage  im diggin the atomic cannon

Btw Licorne is my new desktop lol


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## Scar Symmetry

Ivy Mike, US testing, 1952


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## defchime

They look so tantalizing...


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## GazPots

The 2nd photo in this thread is truely breathtaking.


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## ralphy1976

ok...at this point i will have to say that i do work for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for those of you who know what that is (or you can always google it!!) and i do have "a littel bit of" an interest in the matter.

if you want to get shivers down your spine, google out "the tsar bomb" or "tsar bomba" i even think there is a picture around....

by the way, those pictures are really nice but i think the French ones have been "re-worked" as the colours are far too bright for the kind of explosion we are talking about and the time they were taken at (60s/70s) and they were underwater (France only carried out 1 or 2 in air tests)...my grandfather took part in building this testing center after the 2nd world war...

So Dave thanks for that post, you made my dad and brougth a massive grin on my face!!! +1 for you my friend!!!

EDIT : of course if you want to talk nuclear test......


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## MF_Kitten

Tsar Bomba, the world´s largest nuclear detonation (russians):














satellite photo of the crater it left behind: Virtual Globetrotting: Tsar Bomba Crater - largest nuke detonated (Google Maps)


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## ralphy1976

Indeed. 

As the story goes the tsar bomba was orignally supposed to be of 100 Megatons, but it seems that the engineers realised the enormity of such test and decided to "downgraded" to "only" half that power. Obviously this test was and is still the most powerful airborne test ever carried out (and i think the biggest nuclear test ever carried out)

...just read the caption of the graph...dooohh!!!

This test being airborne it meant that the bomb had to be dropped from a plane. So the tsar bomba was dropped frmo a very high altitude to make sure that the plane carrying it would be outrange of the blast. Well this was just about right, as it seems that the crew narrowly escaped being caught up with their own device...


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## ZeroSignal

Am I the only one that is utterly terrified by those photos? D:


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## ralphy1976

ZeroSignal said:


> Am I the only one that is utterly terrified by those photos? D:


 
well we are not glorifying them by no means, they have a kind of leathal beauty to them, but i am like you : the prospect of seing one "for real" isn't one of my most pressing priorities!!!!


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## ZeroSignal

ralphy1976 said:


> well we are not glorifying them by no means, they have a kind of leathal beauty to them, but i am like you : the prospect of seing one "for real" isn't one of my most pressing priorities!!!!



I'm not saying that anyone is! It's just that they really freak me out. Like I get the heeby-jeebies just looking at them.


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## ralphy1976

well, in a way it is good that you such reaction, and it more people should consider it too, so for this my friend you have earned yourself a +1.


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## ZeroSignal

ralphy1976 said:


> well, in a way it is good that you such reaction, and it more people should consider it too, so for this my friend you have earned yourself a +1.



Thank you! My dad grew up during the height of the MAD era so he always used to tell me how lucky I am growing up in a time when people don't have to be terrified that someone, somewhere is going to make a tiny mistake and doom humanity to atomic induced extinction.


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## ralphy1976

ZeroSignal said:


> Thank you! My dad grew up during the height of the MAD era so he always used to tell me how lucky I am growing up in a time when people don't have to be terrified that someone, somewhere is going to make a tiny mistake and doom humanity to atomic induced extinction.


 
Well you can tell your dad that he is a very wise man indeed. Yes we are born lucky or unfortunately not. One of my friend told me he was a schoolboy when the "cuban / russian nuclear missile" crisis occured and his teacher gathered them all at night and they prayed as they all believed it was the end of the world as they knew it.

Luckily it was not. Eventhough during the cold war both parties had ways beyond imagination to annihilate everything and anything, it seems with hindsight, that they feared to be the one to push the button. I am glad they did.

Nowadays the story is a little bit different but a lot of people are working to ensure that we never witness such thing, so as for now just take them as powerfully meaningfull shots!!


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## Scar Symmetry

MF_Kitten said:


> Tsar Bomba, the world´s largest nuclear detonation (russians):



yeah it's a shame that this is the only photo of this particular blast there is, I couldn't find any clearer shots which sucks seeing as it was in fact the largest explosion carried out on Earth.

thanks for posting though!


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## Scar Symmetry

found some vids


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## ralphy1976

ok 2nd video is obviously a computer generated one, but nonetheless, good. If you want to get an idea of what would happen to "anything" close to the point of detonation, i suggest you watch terminator 2. When Sarah conor dreams that she is in a ply ground and screaming but no-one can hear her...a bomb drops..watch that seen...

as for the tsar bomba, here are some points..

The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen and felt almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from ground zero. The heat from the explosion could have caused third degree burns 100 km (62 miles) away from ground zero. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (nearly seven times higher than Mount Everest) and 40 kilometres (25 mi) wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, breaking windows there and in Sweden. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage up to 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) away. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth.[7] Its Richter magnitude was about 5 to 5.25.[8] The energy yield was around 7.1 on the Richter scale, but since the bomb was detonated in air rather than underground, most of the energy was not converted to seismic waves.

and to me the craziest one : 
Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4 yottawatts. *This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of the power output of the **Sun*.[9] W00TTT!!!!


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## Scar Symmetry

I changed the 2nd vid as I immediately realised upon posting it that it was fake haha.



ralphy1976 said:


> *This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of the power output of the **Sun*


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## s_k_mullins

These explosion pics are beautiful, but a little scary too. 
When you think of the things that man can do with science, it is utterly astonishing...but fucking horrifying at the same time
Just the idea that we are capable of producing an explosion this massive and devastating is remarkable, in a scientific sense, but it also scares the shit out of me knowing that our world and civilizations could be wiped out by nuclear holocaust
I don't think anyone needs to have that much power.


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## GazPots

Whoever said the french pics were touched up is correct. But i feel it makes the photo that much more epic. It's desktop worthy (if only the rest were higher/high res).


If only there are more pics of other tests in a similar style. 



There is a strange beauty to them.


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## ralphy1976

GazPots said:


> Whoever said the french pics were touched up is correct. But i feel it makes the photo that much more epic. It's desktop worthy (if only the rest were higher/high res).
> 
> 
> If only there are more pics of other tests in a similar style.
> 
> 
> 
> There is a strange beauty to them.



indeed and it is why scar_symmetry posted them, it was not to glorify some quite evil weapon of mas-turbation (sorry i could not resist to crack this one!!)

if you want to see some truly interesting nuclear explosion shots google "trinity nuclear explosion". trinity was the 1st experimental nuclear bomb, tested in near Los Alamos in NM, USA. Considering those pictures are 50 years old their are very impressive.


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## Scar Symmetry

funnily enough, it was looking at the Trinity blast that made me start this thread


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## vampiregenocide




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## GazPots

I highly recommend watching the whole "Trinity And Beyond" movie. Completely awe inspiring footage if a little scary. 



Plus William Shatner narrates it.


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## ralphy1976

vampiregenocide said:


>




pretty cool video but i think a montage. You would not have enough energy to detonate a nuclear explosion just from the impact of a "regular" shell on the ground.

the other aspect is that you need a very precise timing instrument within bomb to make sure that "everything" within is compressed at the same time, unlike in a canon shell...

i love this video : everything is shredded to pieces except the camera which is filming everything!!! Pure WIN!!!


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## Bound

I like how in the 60's everyone was like "Fuck you, oceanic wildlife. Suck on some nukes."

I wonder what kind of wierd shit (if any) is growing inside the crater lake from the Tsar Bomba. And I wonder if anyone is like "hey there's a goddamn irradiated river of doom flowing out of that nuke crater."


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## Scar Symmetry

yeah there's probably some Godzilla shit going down in the Sea between Russia and Finland right now.


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## s_k_mullins

Scar Symmetry said:


> yeah there's probably some Godzilla shit going down in the Sea between Russia and Finland right now.


 
 so true


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## Sang-Drax

I need to share something with you.

A 22 year-old cousin of mine asked me the other day: "the cold war was waged by whom again?"


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## ralphy1976

and you should have told him : by the north pole Vs the south pole, that's why it was named "the cold war"


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## s_k_mullins

> and you should have told him : by the north pole Vs the south pole, that's why it was named "the cold war"


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## Sang-Drax

ralphy1976 said:


> and you should have told him : by the north pole Vs the south pole, that's why it was named "the cold war"


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## hufschmid

Fixed 





Scar Symmetry said:


> So while on principle I completely disagree that salad must not have any Mushrooms, I do appreciate pictures of gorgeous salads for purely aesthetic reasons.
> 
> Here are some pictures I thought were beautiful and wanted to share with you:
> 
> sorry I forgot the sauce


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## Scar Symmetry




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## Sang-Drax

Pure randomness!


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## SamSam

Very beautiful and ominous. Hope I never see one with my own eyes.


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## Despised_0515

Not real but totally my new background.






I'm thinking about making a myspace layout based on this for my band.
Not too sure if the band-mates would be too happy about me making a myspace yet though.
We wanna be 110% ready to play shows and have recorded tracks before we make it, to just kinda shit on every band here with one swift blow.


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## caughtinamosh

VicerExciser said:


> We wanna be 110% ready to play shows and have recorded tracks before we make it, to just kinda shit on every band here with one swift blow.


 
*cough* Periphery *cough*

Good luck with that!


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## Despised_0515

caughtinamosh said:


> *cough* Periphery *cough*
> 
> Good luck with that!



Not every band on SS 
I'd get pwnstomped in a heartbeat by Unearth, Periphery, Whitechapel, Necrophagist, Terrorhorse, and Traces all at the same time!

I meant every band in my area


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## caughtinamosh

VicerExciser said:


> Not every band on SS
> I'd get pwnstomped in a heartbeat by Unearth, Periphery, Whitechapel, Necrophagist, Terrorhorse, and Traces all at the same time!
> 
> I meant every band in my area


 
I fail. 

You, on the other hand, win, for getting a band up and running. My project-of-sorts in still on the runway.


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## budda

It scares the fuck out of me to think of how swift everything on earth can die, due to a few select paid government employees. Very small particles could be released into a breeze, and within a week a continent could be deceased.

I agree with whoever said that nobody needs that kind of power. Greed is ugly!

Even though some of them are enhanced, those are nice pictures


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## Sindwulf

ralphy1976 said:


> ok 2nd video is obviously a computer generated one, but nonetheless, good. If you want to get an idea of what would happen to "anything" close to the point of detonation, i suggest you watch terminator 2. When Sarah conor dreams that she is in a ply ground and screaming but no-one can hear her...a bomb drops..watch that seen...
> 
> as for the tsar bomba, here are some points..
> 
> The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen and felt almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from ground zero. The heat from the explosion could have caused third degree burns 100 km (62 miles) away from ground zero. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (nearly seven times higher than Mount Everest) and 40 kilometres (25 mi) wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, breaking windows there and in Sweden. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage up to 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) away. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth.[7] Its Richter magnitude was about 5 to 5.25.[8] The energy yield was around 7.1 on the Richter scale, but since the bomb was detonated in air rather than underground, most of the energy was not converted to seismic waves.
> 
> and to me the craziest one :
> Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4 yottawatts. *This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of the power output of the **Sun*.[9] W00TTT!!!!


 

My God, that is so monumentous everytime I read it. Still even, blows me away that these are the effects of half it's designed effects and just think, if they indeed dropped the full 100 Megatonner, the pilots would have perished.


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## Scar Symmetry

just found this:


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## Scar Symmetry

thinking about the Tsar Bomba, if they had dropped the 100 Megaton one, obviously it's just simple maths but that would've had 2.8% of the power output of the Sun, which is again, obviously nearly 3% which is fucking insane.


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## ralphy1976

careful dave..if you carry on like this you will end up enjoying physics a lot more and looking at your axe thinking maths, not notes...!!!

i think the picture you posted is a montage to make it look like you could witness this from a beach. However the blast is a real one, and at the beginning of airborne tests they used to put old ships (sometimes with animals) at different distances from the center of the blast to be able to analyze the aftermath effect.

my grand father took part in one of these in the french polynesia after the 2nd WW. 

overall, and unfortunately, those are tiny compared to what is thought to be around right now...quite scary to be honest...


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## Scar Symmetry

yeah I can see the boats.

scary stuff indeed.


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## lobee

Scar Symmetry said:


> just found this:



I'm pretty sure I have a poster of that one lying around somewhere. I bought it a few years ago along with a bunch of other random posters and still haven't gotten around to putting them up!


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## Scar Symmetry

Ralphy, what's the standard of nuclear weapons these days?

the most powerful WMD available to man, how much output of the Sun does that have?


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## Adam Of Angels

Its sickens me that anybody feels the need to have a Nuclear weapon.


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## ellengtrgrl

I have mixed feelings about this. While the power released by a thermo-nuke is awesome, and it has a certain lethal beauty to it, the results are beyond depressing. I have a degree in Nuclear Engineering (B.S. - Univ.of Wisconsin, Class of 1987). The US Nuclear industry has been moribund for decades, which makes it almost impossible to get a job in it f you're a Nuke Engineer (it was even worse when I got out of school in '87). In spite of that, I told myself, that I wanted NOTHING to do with building nuke weapons, even if it meant that I'd have a job. I couldn't live with myself, knowing I'd designed or built a weapon (or weapons) that could kill millions,or hundreds of millions of people (luckily I had enough of a basic engineering background, to get another degree in engineering [Manufacturing Engineering], and get a career as a Quality Engineer).

In spite of the above sttements, I am not anti-nuke. I still feel that nuclear fusion (if we ever get past the break-even point) is the way to go for meeting our future energy needs (both solar and wind power are limited in their applications IMO).



Scar Symmetry said:


> Ralphy, what's the standard of nuclear weapons these days?
> 
> the most powerful WMD available to man, how much output of the Sun does that have?


 
The Tsar Bomba is still the biggest nuke ever built to my kowledge, and while it's energy yield was huge, I don't think the energy output was (comparatively speaking) 3% of the sun's output.


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## Scar Symmetry

no, it had 1.4%.

please read my posts again.


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## Adam Of Angels

Does that mean that if roughly 72 of these nukes went off, it would have the ouput power equal to that of the sun? What would that even imply, realistically?


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## Scar Symmetry

intense Global Warming.


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## Bobo

SYL + Nukes


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## Stealthdjentstic

I want HD footage of a nuclear bomb exploding, and Discovery to film it


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## ralphy1976

@ellengtrgrl : Ellen, well firstly congrats for getting such a degree. in the 80s stuff much have been a lot "tighter" than in 1997 & 2000 when i got mine!!! It also nice to see that people who have such degrees. I do agree with you that developing / building and / or pro-actively working on such a weapon must be very strange. unless you purely look at it from a scientific / research point of view.

As for nuclear fusion, i have been foloowing this for soem years now, and i had the pleasure to visit the european research center in the UK, i am still not totally convince that we have the technology to harness such power. Also, i think the oil / gas / coal / renewable energy lobby is so strong that decent funding are always hard to come by when it comes to fusion / fission research, which is really sad.

@Scar_symmetry : Dave, well bomb power are a very guarded affair and any power quoted are always an estimate. For a start no country will say how powerful theirs are and will never compare an explosion to one of theirs, but the cmparison will always be to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So, to give you an idea, the last explosion test carried out by North Kore, which still claims was a nuclear test, couls have been achieved with 100,000 US$ worth of high speed explosives. Furthemore - and according to media (so to take with a pinch of salt) - this was comparable to Hiroshima...yada..yada..yada...

I think, we shoudl not be mistaken. If, and i truly hope that it will never happen, if we have to face a nuclear war, there will be no limit as to how devastating each bomb will be, and perhaps the tsar bomb will just be insignificant in size due to the fact that now you do not need a plane to "drop a bomb"

Not a pleasing idea i know, but one which should not be overlooked.


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## Bevo

My comment after reviewing this post (Great post by the way) is that while Nuclear energy and weapons have its place. The fear I or we should have is the Nuts out there that can get the experts to put something like this together.

On a grand scale it would take some serious money and an amazing amount of luck to get it built without the watchdogs of the world finding out.

On a lessor and way more scary scale is the dirty bomb, this would be a piece of cake for most nuts to put together. The worst part is I bet there are already a few of these out there ready to go.
A dirty bomb is deadly radio active material encased in a standard bomb, on explosion, the radio activity is sent into the air as dust covering a large area depending on wind. If you take one breath of it then its cancer or worse.

Going back in history we had many many events that were stopped without us knowing and will never will. If some of these events went through our lives would all be very different right now.

We should thank the people who are out there protecting us, its not the people you would think of as our military's.


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## ralphy1976

Bevo said:


> On a grand scale it would take some serious money and an amazing amount of luck to get it built without the watchdogs of the world finding out.



unfortunately this is not totally true, south africa got their weapon program in line to build a nuclear warhead but it got cancelled when Apartheid collapsed.

South Africa revealed it to the world..to the world atonement of course!!! and it got dismantled very quickly.

History is full of surprises like that, sadly!!!


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## Bevo

Wow, what were they going to do with it?

Back on topic..
Have any of you seen a good picture of the shock wave from the blast?
That would be a cool picture!


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## ralphy1976

i have not seen a picture of teh shock wave (yet) but i have seen a few films with decent footage.

maybe i can ask around and see what's available


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