Slate Magazine has an online set of “shots from nuclear graveyards and old rocket launch sites” taken from the collection of the Magnum photography agency.
The pictures, which date from the 1960s to the present, show the after effects of nuclear detonation and accident on the landscape; effects that range from post industrial ruin to tourist attraction.
Making the heavens glow
On July 9th, 1962, for a nuclear test called “Starfish Prime,” the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton hydrogen bomb in outer space. The explosion occurred 250 miles above the US military’s Johnston Atoll test site in the Pacific Ocean. Stories have it that, the night of the test, some Hawaiian hotels hosted “rainbow bomb parties” to for guests to watch the effects of the blast in space, which appeared similar to the northern lights. According to one scientist who saw the detonation from Canton Island “A brilliant white flash erased the darkness like a photoflash. Then the entire sky turned light green for about a second. In several more seconds, a deep red aurora, several moon diameters in size, formed where the blast had been. A white plasma jet came slowly out of the top of the red aurora (over Johnston Island) and painted a white stripe across the sky from north to south in about one minute. A deep red aurora appeared over Samoa at the south end of the white plasma jet. This visual display lasted for perhaps ten minutes before slowly fading. There was no sound at all.”
The Starfish Prime test was part of the larger “Operation Dominic” series of nuclear test detonations carried out by the US in 1962 and 1963 in the Pacific Ocean and Nevada. Starfish Prime was part of a sub-set of Dominic tests called “Operation Fishbowl”, which explored the effects of detonating nuclear warheads at very high altitudes. The purpose of the Fishbowl tests was to evaluate whether US nuclear tipped missiles could be used to shoot down incoming Soviet nuclear warheads in space, before they could reach their targets in the US. The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) caused by the blast knocked out electronics, including hundreds of streetlights, in Hawaii, over 930 miles away. This effect, which had been unexpected, helped to awaken US nuclear planners to the use/danger of EMP pulses in warfare.
Today, Johnson Atoll is a wildlife refuge, home to many species of birds.
A couple of weeks ago, Slate.com published a very interesting article on “the Letter of Last Resort“, a letter contained inside a safe inside a second safe in the control room of nuclear armed British SSBNs. This letter, hand written by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, contains instructions for the submarine’s commander on what to do in the event the British government is obliterated in a nuclear attack.
The article raises some interesting points about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the Cold War idea that one nuclear power would not attack another for fear of a retaliatory strike. Nuclear weapons systems were set up in a way that made it difficult/impossible for one power to destroy a rival’s capability to retaliate (think nuclear armed submarines hidden in the ocean depths, or nuclear bombers ready to fly at a moment’s notice). The threat always was: nuke us, and we’ll nuke you back. The letter of last resort is a relic of that idea; even if London was destroyed, the Prime Minister could order a counter-strike.
But would he/she? One particularly interesting point discussed by the article concerns the ethics of MAD: would leaders, knowing that their own country was about to be destroyed in a nuclear attack, be able to order a retaliation? And would doing so be ethical? A former British defence secretary is quoted as saying “I realized I would find it very, very difficult indeed to agree to use a nuclear weapon—and I think most people would.” After all, if a nuclear strike was incoming, MAD had already failed… would killing millions more people have a point?
Another interesting point addressed by the article concerns Christian and Jewish thinking on nuclear retaliation. Generally, both feel that threatening rivals with nuclear destruction as a means of preventing a nuclear attack is permissible; actually acting on that threat is not.
The paradox of MAD.
Cold War History 