Partial List of US Scientific Nuclear Tests

I'm posting this as a separate post, prior to posting Part 3 of The Philosopher's Bomb, because there's a very common misconception about how many nuclear shots the Plowshare program fired off.   Most lists of Plowshare tests do not include most of these tests, because they were officially sponsored by the AEC's Division of Military Applications as military tests, and the incorporated experiment was only an add-on.   Nonetheless, if we ignore them - which almost all histories of the Plowshare program do - we're missing an important part of the story.

War in the Atomic Age?

So, last week I snagged a rather entertaining little item through interlibrary loan.

 Figure 1: War in the Atomic Age? Cover

(Public Domain)

A Friendly Shout-Out to the Neighbors

I don't often make posts that are just links to something else.   That's very deliberate, both because I want to maintain a high quality:quantity ratio, and because I think relatively few sites are really working in the same specific niche I'm trying to work in.   I'm going to make an exception today: check out Atomic Annihilation, "the internet's most complete guide to the end of the world".   I particularly recommend 1952...destruction and 1946...wacky!

Learning from the Storm

 On March 21^st, 1952, a cluster of tornadoes struck the Mississippi valley. The damage stretched across nine states; 231 people died and 1,829 were injured. In White County, Arkansas, a pair of cyclones leveled the town of Judsonia, destroyed 650 buildings, and killed 46 people.^[Qu5]

Thirteen days later, as the townsfolk were still picking through the wreckage, twenty-six scientists arrived in Judsonia from Chicago. Instead of first aid kits and blankets, they carried tape recorders and notebooks. They fanned out across White County, picked a representative cross-section of homes, and asked their inhabitants if they could interview them.

To their own surprise, most of the people they asked said yes.