Quote:Prokhorovka and the Myth of the Largest Tank Battle

Published: 18 July 2017 by Ian Hudson

For decades the Battle of Kursk has been widely believed to be the largest tank battle in history.

In particular the fighting at Prokhorovka on the 12th July is often reported to have involved anywhere from 1200 to 2000 tanks clashing at point blank range, resulting in the destruction of up to 1200 vehicles.

However since the end of the Cold War extensive research by historians in the Soviet and German archives have analysed records of the units that took part.  As a result it’s now generally accepted that these numbers have been greatly exaggerated and that Prokhorovka wasn’t the largest tank battle.

This post gives a very brief overview of the results of this research.  The numbers presented here are taken from ‘Kursk 1943:  A Statistical Analysis’ by Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson and ‘Demolishing the Myth’ by Valeriy Zamulin.

...
This research has also led to the numbers of lost tanks being revised drastically downwards.  Soviet records suggest that the 5th Guards Tank Army lost 359 tanks and assault guns on the 12th, of which 207 couldn’t be repaired.  German records suggest the equivalent figures for II SS Panzer Corps and III Panzer Corps are 193, with just 20 completely lost.  However different definitions of ‘lost’ between Soviet and German records make a direct comparison difficult.

Human losses are similarly difficult to determine.  The 5th Guards Tank Army lost 2240 men killed and 1157 missing (who would most likely have been killed) between the 12th and 16th July.  During the same period II SS Panzer Corps lost 503 killed and 57 missing.

Why then, did such exaggerated figures appear and take root?

They can be traced back to Soviet propaganda.  The Soviets knew they had taken heavy losses during the fighting.  Although the exact numbers were classified, there was still a need to make sure the population believed the casualties were justified.  Exaggerating the size of the German forces and their losses accomplished this and boosted morale.
....

So if Kursk wasn’t the largest tank battle in history, what was?

It’s now generally accepted that it was the fighting around Brody and Dubno between the 26th and 29th July 1941, rather than Kursk.  This was part of the border battles fought at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.  It involved up to 3500 Soviet and 750 German tanks.  The battle was a heavy Soviet defeat, they lost hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers.  Indeed by early July most of the units involved had been reduced to less than 10% of their tank strength.

Quote:THERE is no North Korean embassy in Canberra the reason has been the topic of speculation and myth for more than 40 years.

Most explanations centre around a shortage of vehicles on the showroom floor of a local car dealership, and one rebel theory highlights a thrown axe.

North Korea had a diplomatic post here from 2003 to 2008, when five staff were packed up and the offices in the Canberra suburb of O’Malley shut.

An official explanation was that the post, with a rent of $2000 a week, was too expensive for then-President Kim Jong-il’s liking. An unofficial explanation was that the expected revenue from smuggling drugs and other contraband into Australia through diplomatic channels wasn’t paying off.

The first North Korean embassy, opened in 1974, lasted just a year.

Famed Canberra Times columnist, the late Alan Fitzgerald, reported that in 1975 the envoys of the North had wanted to buy a stately Mercedes Benz for official business.

They went down to the local Merc dealer and found just what they were looking for on the showroom floor. However, there was a catch.

The dealer had to tell them the car had already been sold — to the Embassy of South Korea.

This was an insult too great for the men serving President Kim il-Sung and they swiftly left.

There is another account of the Mercedes story involving a road accident. A variation is that the original North Korean vehicle had been damaged in a crash and that’s why they needed a new one.

In 2000 the ABC’s Philip Williams outlined a different story with even greater diplomatic farce.

In 1975 the North Koreans packed up and were so reckless speeding to the airport they crashed their Mercedes. This happened outside the South Korean ambassador’s residence, or so goes the story, adding to the humiliation.

Why the haste?

According to Williams, a short time before the diplomatic departure, American troops just outside the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea wanted to remove a tree blocking their view of opposing forces.

Someone was sent in with an axe to do the job, but things got out of hand as, apparently, did the axe. The North Koreans accused the woodsman of attacking their soldiers with the implement, and in turn they hacked him to death.

Part of this story is a claim the ill-fated woodsman threw the axe at the Northern folk, and that it was marked, “Made in Australia”.

Thus a major military and diplomatic incident involved Australia.

However, after some consideration a translation error was admitted. The axe had been made in Austria, but it was too late to halt the trail of North Korean envoys and wrecked vehicle in Canberra 10,000 kms away from the DMZ.

News & Views Down Under

Quote:The Silent Swarm

For five years, they moved in shadows, unnoticed. China’s Ministry of State Security had orchestrated a plan so subtle, so insidious, that even the NSA’s vast surveillance network missed it. Drones—small, unassuming, and disguised as commercial tech—trickled into the United States through ports, warehouses, and even hobbyist supply chains. They were smuggled in shipping containers, mislabeled as consumer electronics, or assembled in covert factories hidden in rural America. Each drone was a marvel of engineering: lightweight, modular, and equipped with AI capable of autonomous operation. They lay dormant, waiting for the signal.

By 2025, the U.S. was a house of cards, its infrastructure brittle from decades of underinvestment and political gridlock. The electrical grid, a patchwork of aging transformers and outdated substations, was a prime target. Pipelines crisscrossing the continent, carrying oil and gas, were equally vulnerable. The Pentagon, distracted by domestic unrest and geopolitical posturing, had underestimated China’s long game.

Phase One: The Blackout

On July 13, 2025, at 2:00 AM EST, the signal went out. Thousands of drones, hidden in forests, abandoned warehouses, and suburban garages, activated simultaneously. They swarmed power substations across the Midwest, Northeast, and West Coast. Each drone carried a small electromagnetic pulse (EMP) device, designed to fry transformers without explosives. By 3:00 AM, 60% of the U.S. electrical grid was offline. Cities plunged into darkness. Hospitals scrambled for backup generators. Communication networks faltered as cell towers lost power.

The drones didn’t stop there. Pipeline control systems, reliant on SCADA networks, were next. Drones equipped with hacking modules infiltrated these systems, overriding safety protocols. Valves shut down, pumps failed, and pressure surges triggered explosions along key pipelines in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota. The U.S. energy supply chain was crippled in hours.

Phase Two: Crippling the Military

While civilians grappled with blackouts, China’s drones turned on U.S. military assets. AWACS planes at Tinker Air Force Base and C-17 Globemasters at Dover and Travis were targeted by swarms of kamikaze drones. These weren’t the crude explosives of past wars but precision machines that burrowed into avionics bays, detonating charges to disable critical systems. Tankers at Fairchild and McConnell Air Force Bases suffered similar fates, their fuel lines severed by drones that had infiltrated base perimeters months earlier, posing as maintenance bots.

Naval bases were hit hardest. Norfolk, San Diego, and Pearl Harbor saw coordinated attacks. Drones, launched from offshore containers disguised as fishing vessels, targeted radar arrays, communication hubs, and docked warships. The USS Gerald R. Ford, America’s prized carrier, was rendered inoperable when drones destroyed its satellite uplinks and fire control systems. The Navy’s Pacific Fleet, already stretched thin, was effectively blind.

Phase Three: The Taiwan Gambit

With the U.S. reeling, China moved. On July 14, 2025, the People’s Liberation Army Navy launched a full-scale invasion of Taiwan. Amphibious assault ships, supported by hypersonic missiles and fifth-generation fighters, overwhelmed Taiwan’s defenses. The U.S., unable to project power without its logistical backbone, could only watch. AWACS and tankers, critical for coordinating air operations, were grounded. C-17s, meant to ferry troops and supplies, sat useless. The Pacific Fleet, hamstrung by the loss of its bases, couldn’t deploy in time.

Taiwan’s air defenses held for 72 hours before collapsing. China’s drone swarms, now battle-tested, dominated the skies, overwhelming U.S.-supplied Patriot systems. By July 20, Taipei was under PLA control.

The Aftermath

The U.S. scrambled to respond, but the damage was done. The grid outages persisted for weeks, crippling the economy. Fuel shortages grounded civilian and military transport. The Pentagon, humiliated, faced a public demanding answers. China, meanwhile, consolidated its hold on Taiwan, presenting the invasion as a fait accompli to a fractured UN.

The drones, China’s silent army, had been the perfect weapon—cheap, deniable, and devastating. For five years, they’d hidden in plain sight, a testament to patience and deception. The U.S., once the world’s unchallenged superpower, now faced a new reality: its vulnerabilities had been exposed, and the cost of rebuilding would be measured in decades.

********

Notes: This is a fictional scenario, grounded in plausible but speculative tactics. Real-world cybersecurity, military preparedness, and international dynamics are far more complex. If you’d like me to explore specific aspects—like technical details of drone tech, U.S. countermeasures, or geopolitical fallout—let me know!

Quote:Harry Kellar’s “Blue Room” illusion is one that exemplifies the affinity between science, stage magic, and some of the prominent issues circulating within Victorian culture. It involves a series of appearances, disappearances, and transformations that occur within a small, curtained chamber.

The Blue Room and Metempsychosis transformations were created by employing a carefully-choreographed series of undetectable stage reconfigurations centered around a partially-mirrored pane of glass. The mirrored glass was carefully prepared with the silvering gradually scraped away so that the pane, from one end to the other, went from entirely transparent to entirely reflective.

Quote:Centering around the creation of a substance called "apergy", a form of anti-gravitational energy, Percy Greg's novel details a flight to Mars taken in 1830. They discover the planet to be inhabited by diminutive beings who, convinced that life couldn't exist any where else apart from on their world, refuse to believe that the unnamed narrator is actually from Earth - deciding instead he is an unusually tall Martian from some remote corner of their planet.

The book is notable as containing what is probably the first alien language in any work of fiction to be described with linguistic and grammatical terminology. It also contains what is possibly the first instance in the English language of the word "Astronaut", which features as the name of the narrator's spacecraft. In 2010 a crater on Mars was named Greg in recognition of his contribution to the lore of Mars. Volume 2 available here.

Quote:“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) requires an ultra-long-range business jet aircraft to support rapid global transportation of Department of Justice (DOJ) personnel in response to counterterrorism, high-risk operations, and other sensitive missions. The aircraft will also support executive transportation requirements for the FBI Director and the U.S. Attorney General".”

The solicitation was posted on July 11, the same day FBI deputy director Dan Bongino allegedly refused to show up to work after a blow out fight with Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel. According to widespread reports, the dust up resulted from the DOJ’s botched roll up of Jeffrey Epstein’s dirty laundry.

The order is curious, given the FBI directors past disdain for top DOJ officials flying private on the Tax Payer’s dime. The FBI should "ground Chris Wray's private jet that he pays for with taxpayer dollars to hop around the country," Patel said during an episode of "Kash's Corner" podcast in 2023.

According to a report by CBS news, the FBI has refused to confirm “Patel's flight schedule and would not confirm his presence on a number of flights to destinations where he later appeared. During the first weekend in April, for instance, a Boeing 757 owned by the Department of Justice made two round trip flights from Washington to New York.”

As voters of all stripes scream for more disclosures regarding the death of Jeffrey Epstein and the guests that flew on HIS private jet, it looks like America’s top law enforcement officials will continue a long tradition of flying private, away from the maddening crowd.

Quote:Janet Blair (April 23, 1921 – February 19, 2007) petite strawberry-blonde who could range from sweet and demure to sharp and peppy, Janet Blair had an ability to outshine stars on occasion but never quite became a star herself. She hoofed her way through Broadway (1942), a gangster story about the Great White Way with George Raft, and was cast opposite Cary Grant in his role as a luckless producer who hires a dancing caterpillar in Once Upon a Time (1944). She played second lead to Rita Hayworth in Tonight and Every Night, a ludicrous tale of the saucy Windmill Theatre in London.

Janet Blair proved a stalwart supporter of the Allied cause, posing in tight sweaters to aid the war effort, and presenting Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, with a bronze plaque commemorating the entertainers who worked on during the Blitz. When she crossed the Atlantic in 1945 to publicise Tars and Spars, the story of a wartime revue, wan Londoners were struck by her healthy complexion, which had earned her an award for wearing the least make-up in Hollywood.

Back home again she earned plaudits for her part in The Fuller Brush Man, a murder comedy with Sid Caesar (1946) and provided the love interest in The Fabulous Dorseys, about the bandleader brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey (1946). But after The Black Arrow (1948), a disappointing swashbuckler in which she played a haughty Lady Joanna, she was not entirely sorry to have her contract with Columbia ended. "All I got were princess parts," she recalled. "A girl gets tired of being a princess all of the time."

Janet Blair's later work included the television series Smith Family, in which she played the wife of a detective played by Henry Fonda, and such films as Walt Disney's The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, with Buddy Ebsen, and Won Ton Ton, a spoof on the canine star Rin Tin Tin.

Her best film was Night of the Eagle (1962), a supernatural thriller made with Peter Wyngarde in Britain, in which she played a wife who dabbles in witchcraft.

Janet Blair Obit

Quote:Eureka Daily Sentinel, Eureka weekly sentinel, and The Eureka sentinel

The small mining camp that eventually became known as Eureka was established in 1864 by prospectors who had discovered rich lead-silver deposits in a canyon 70 miles east of Austin, Nevada. At first, smelting the mixed ore proved difficult, and mining languished until the construction of new local furnaces that were adapted to lead-silver smelting techniques. When the news of this success reached the neighboring districts there was a rush to the camp, and a flurry of new mining activity followed.

In 1871 the Eureka Daily Sentinel reported that Eureka mining stock was on the rise in San Francisco (despite the financial dislocation caused by the Chicago Fire): “at no time in the history of the district has property looked so well on the San Francisco market . . . though long delayed this appreciation of the actual worth of our mining interests  is none the less welcome . . .  Soon we may hope to see Eureka stocks of all kinds attract the attention of speculators they so well deserve, and rival the famous ones of the Comstock lode.”

In 1873, the new county of Eureka was carved out of the three neighboring counties with the town of Eureka serving as its seat. With the consolidation of mining operations into two large companies, the construction of new furnaces, and the completion of the Eureka & Palisade and Eureka & Ruby Hill Railroads, Eureka by 1878 had become the second largest city in Nevada. 

The Eureka Sentinel was first established in 1870 when Archibald Skillman moved his press from Shermantown, where he had very briefly published the Shermantown Reporter, to the new booming camp of Eureka.  With his partner and editor, Dr. L.C. McKenney, A. Skilman and Co. published a weekly paper that prospered with the town.

In 1871, the Eureka Sentinel was bought by Fred Ellott, a printer and writer, and George W. Cassidy, the late editor of the Hamilton Inland Empire, who expanded the Sentinel to a triweekly with an actively Democratic editorial policy. Cassidy, a senator and later congressman from Nevada, turned over the editorship to John H. Dennis in 1874 to concentrate on his political career. Dennis published the Eureka Sentinel as a daily.

In 1876, Archibald Skillman returned to Eureka from Hamilton, where he had published the White Pine News. He bought out Dennis’s interest in the Eureka Sentinel andran the paper with Cassidy until the latter’s death in 1892. In 1879, Skillman and Cassidy added a weekly addition to the daily, and ran both editions until 1887 when they suspended the daily.

The Eureka Sentinel survived a number of disasters: in 1873, a fire burned down most of the town and totally destroyed the printing plant. While the publishers waited for new equipment and supplies to arrive from San Francisco, they launched the Eureka Daily Sentinel Supplement to meet their requirement of publishing the new county’s legal notices. The next year flash floods swept through the canyon inundating the town of Eureka and its newspaper.

By 1885, the district’s ore deposits were exhausted, and by 1890, the smelters had closed down. When the two competing mining companies merged in 1906, there was a brief recovery, but the local railroads were washed out by flash floods in 1910.  Eureka never fully recovered from these losses despite sporadic mining activity.

Archibald Skillman managed the Eureka Sentinel as sole owner and editor until his death in 1900. The Sentinel passed to his son, Ed Skillman who ran it until his death in 1940, and his son after him, until the paper was finally sold in 1944.

Quote:Eureka Sentinel Museum, "Battle Born" Nevada

The Eureka Sentinel is still active today. The following is a historical excerpt from there website: "Following the death of his partner at the Shermantown Reporter in the Hamilton area in 1870, G.A. Brier moved his press and equipment to the new camp town of Eureka. Together with Dr. L.C. McKenney, a former journalist, they began publishing the Eureka Sentinel July 16, 1870.

It became a daily in 1871. A weekly paper was added to the daily August 20, 1879, and the two editions ran concurrently until the daily was suspended in 1887." Both Shawn Hall and E Clampus Vitus list a man named A. Skillman or Abraham Skillman as a founding party. The following is an excerpt from the historical plaque on the old sentinel building. This plaque was put up by the Lucinda Jane Saunders 1881 Chapter of E Clampus Vitus (Elko).

"When A. Skillman closed the Shermantown Reporter at Hamilton he moved his printing press to Eureka. Together with Dr. L.C. McKenny they started the Sentinel as a weekly paper in July 1870. It became a daily in June 1871 reporting local and international news via telegraph dispatches. The Sentinel's reporting of mining and other opportunities helped bring people and investors to this once great Nevada mining district. Originally located at No. 5 Buel Street it relocated here in August 1879.

Last published on June 12, 1960 by editor. Publisher and owner Edward James Mowle who died two days after the last issue." The two stories are almost identical, with one exception. One version calls the man G.A. Brier. The other version calls him Abraham Skillman. I found a website called skillmansofamerica. This appears to be a multi-generational, genealogical website for the Skillman family. They claim that Skillman was an editor (but not a co-owner or founder) at the Eureka Sentinel from 1870-1900. They also list him as a co-owner of the White Pine News in Hamilton between 1873-1878. They also state that he emigrated to Virginia City in 1868. They do not list anything about him spending time in White Pine County prior to 1870.

According to their website, Skillman would have been in Virginia City during the immediate time period prior to 1870. With that said, I have no idea how accurate the Skillman website is. A written description of the Eureka Sentinel from the University of Nevada Las Vegas also uses the version with Abraham Skillman. I'm just putting the information out there. I'm not taking a side on which version is correct. Today, the building that was utilized by the Sentinel starting in 1879 is an active museum. There are all kinds of artifacts from the early days of Eureka. The old lodge regalia from the Masons, Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias is very impressive. There are also some very cool, original era artifacts from the Eureka Fire Departments. It is well worth the visit.

• Pair-O-Dice opened on July 4, 1931.
  
• Became Ambassador Night Club in 1936.
  
• Became 91 Club in 1939.
  
• 91 Club is integrated into the Hotel Last Frontier.
  
• Hotel Last Frontier opened on October 30, 1942.
  
• Little Church of the West opened on May 22, 1943 on the north side of the property.
  
• Last Frontier Village opened in 1948.
  
• Golden Slipper Saloon and Gambling Hall opened in 1950 within the Last Frontier Village.
  
• Golden Slipper Saloon and Gambling Hall renamed Silver Slipper in 1950.
  
• Little Church of the West relocated to the south side of the property in 1954.
  
• A new casino is built and renamed New Frontier in 1955.
  
• Hotel Last Frontier is demolished in 1966.
  
• Last Frontier Village demolished in 1966.
  
• A 7-story hotel tower is built in 1967.
  
• A second 7-story hotel tower is built in 1967.
  
• Hotel Last Frontier became The Frontier in 1967.
  
• Little Church of the West relocated to the Hacienda Hotel Resort and Casino in 1979.
  
• Silver Slipper closed on November 28, 1988.
  
• Silver Slipper demolished in 1988.
  
• Atrium Tower is built in 1989.
  
• On September 21, 1991, the Culinary Workers Union 226, Bartenders 165, Teamsters 995, Operating Engineers 501, and Carpenters 1780 staged a strike against the Frontier. The strike ended on February 1, 1998.
  
  
• The Frontier became New Frontier in 1998.
  
• New Frontier closed on July 16, 2007.
  
• New Frontier imploded in 2007.
  

Quote:Basic Magnesium, Inc. (BMI) formed in June 1941 as a joint venture between Basic Refractories, Inc. of Cleveland, Ohio and Magnesium Elektron, Limited of England. Basic Refractories, Inc. owned mining claims in Gabbs Valley, Nye County, Nevada, which produced the magnesite and brucite needed to produce magnesium metal. Magnesium Elektron, Limited owned the patent for the electrolytic process of extracting metallic magnesium from these minerals. The United States Federal Government required magnesium, a lightweight metal, for the creation of an aluminum alloy used in the production of incendiary bombs, munitions casings, and airplane parts during World War II. In August 1941 the Federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation’s Defense Plant Corporation (DPC) granted BMI a contract to build a magnesium manufacturing complex codenamed Plancor 201. The contract also allowed BMI to extend mining operations in the Gabbs Valley.

Quote:Battle-born Henderson now ‘A Place to Call Home’

The city of Henderson was born during War World II to produce adequate amounts of magnesium for military supplies, such as airplane parts. The Basic Magnesium Plant was built in 1943 in Southern Nevada, creating Henderson. The city was comprised of workers and engineers from the plant as well as their families.

But in 1947, less than two years after War World II, there was no need for the production of magnesium and a majority of the plant workers moved away, leaving the town nearly vacant.

Seeing a purpose for Henderson, the U.S. War Asset Administration offered it for sale as a war surplus property.

With strong efforts to save Henderson, the Nevada Legislature took a weekend to assess the potential of the city. The Legislature passed a bill, signed March 27, 1947 by Gov. Vail Pittman, giving the Colorado River Commission of Nevada approval to purchase the industrial plants, saving Henderson.

On April 16, 1953, Henderson was officially a city, electing its first mayor, Dr. Jim French, on May 23. The city was only 13 square miles and had a population of 7,410 people. The city slogan soon became "A Place to Call Home."

The city began to develop into what President John F. Kennedy called a "city of destiny" on his visit to Henderson. But on May 4, 1988, the peaceful city was shaken by the explosion of the Pacific Engineering and Production Co. of Nevada, PEPCON.

The rocket fuel factory caught on fire and caused several explosions. The explosions, comparable to 250 sticks of TNT, measured as a three on the Richter scale. People from miles away were able to feel and hear the explosion. The explosions killed two, injured 300 people and left the surrounding schools and businesses closed and the people of Henderson trembling.

Quote:LHC: The First Band on the Web

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"

Silvano de Gennaro

Quote:Mrs Marx-Nielsen, now a 50 year-old voice teacher based in Nice, in the south of France, said that despite the photo’s history, some friends have failed to realise its significance.

“I kinda put it out sometimes and say, ‘well, I’m in the first photograph on the World Wide Web’ (but) people don’t really care,” the former Colette Reilly, who worked in finance at Cern, told Motherboard, a New York-based online magazine website.

“I suppose it had to be somebody and it just happened to be us.”

Neither Mrs Veronneau, who now lives in Washington and is believed to work in banking, nor Mrs Higney, in her 50s who worked for the Red Cross in Geneva, were available for comment.

Mr de Gennaro, now the head of multimedia productions at CERN, said that he had been waiting backstage with the “Cernettes”, whom he managed and whose songs he wrote.

Wanting a picture for a CD cover, he asked the four ladies to “lean in and smile” and took the picture on his Canon EOS 650.

“When history happens, you don’t know that you’re in it,” said Mr de Gennaro, who is due to take early retirement shortly and move to Mauritius.

Sir Tim, said to have been a "pantomime cross-dresser", became friends with Mr de Gennaro after discovering they who shared a love of drama.

He approached his colleague for a “guinea-pig image” which he could use to test his recent upgrades to the web.

Mr de Gennaro, 59, said he had been experimenting with a “scanned .gif version” of the photo using version one of Photoshop on his colour Apple Mac.

The format was half a decade old but he said its “efficient compression” was the best way to edit colour images without affecting his computer.

He added: “The web, back in ’92 and ’93, was exclusively used by physicists.

“I was like, ‘why do you want to put the Cernettes on that? It’s only text!’ And he (Sir Tim) said, ‘no, it’s gonna be fun’.”

Sir Tim, who would become a “big fan” of the group, passed the file to Jean-François Groff, a programmer on the web project.

It was slightly altered, with a pale blue background superimposed, and was later uploaded without any problems before being posted on a page about the musical acts at CERN.

How the first photo was posted on the Web

Quote:She was young at the time, but who could forget the flash of an atom bomb beaming through the windows of their school.

It became a local spectacle, entertainment for the children of Goodsprings isolated from the rest of the world by desert and treeless slopes, remembers Bobbie Poole, now 72.

Students would stand outside Goodsprings School, Celluloid 3D glasses protecting their eyes, to watch the mushroom cloud eclipse Mount Potosi in the not too far off distance.

Army officials said it was safe for the town 33 miles southwest of Las Vegas, but they also tested the children’s blood and gave them dog tags to wear.

“We wore them religiously,” Poole said. “We were so innocent.”

Her thyroid was removed in her 20s because of tumors. Others, like her grandfather, who got cancer and died, blamed it on the bomb tests.

Good memories of Goodsprings

Quote:Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
July 17, 2012

They weren't crazy. They weren't being punished. All but one volunteered to do this (which makes it all the more astonishing).

On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They'd marked the spot "Ground Zero. Population 5" on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead.

They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he's wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.



Who are these guys? And why is the narrator joyously shouting, "It happened! The mounds are vibrating. It is tremendous! Directly above our heads! Aaah!"

This footage comes from our government's archives. It was shot by the U.S. Air Force (at the behest of Col. Arthur B. "Barney" Oldfield, public information officer for the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs) to demonstrate the relative safety of a low-grade nuclear exchange in the atmosphere. Two colonels, two majors and a fifth officer agreed to stand right below the blast. Only the cameraman, George Yoshitake, didn't volunteer.

The country was just beginning to worry about nuclear fallout, and the Air Force wanted to reassure people that it was OK to use atomic weapons to counter similar weapons being developed in Russia. (They didn't win this argument.)

The Silence

Watching this film, there are many things to wonder (and worry) about, but one of the stranger moments is how the bomb bursts in complete silence. We see a sudden white flash. It makes the soldiers flinch. Then there's a pause, a pregnant quiet that lasts for a beat, then another and then — there's a roar. ("There it is! The ground wave!"), after which the sky above seems to go black and the air turns to fire.

Basic physics explains the pause. Because light travels quicker than sound, you see light first, you hear sound later. In most movies (even in government-released atomic bomb blast films), the sound is artificially time shifted to make the flash and the sound appear simultaneous.

'A Long, Thundering Growl'

But that's not what it's like if you are actually there. Science historian Alex Wellerstein has found an undoctored and deeply frightening recording — which he just posted on Restricted Data; The Nuclear Secrecy Blog.

He got it, he says, from "a Russian correspondent" who was searching the U.S. National Archives. (Why not? Our past is open to all.) The Russian found a recording of an American atomic test in 1953, which shows an enormous flash of white, so white it blanks out the entire sky, then thick clouds of ash (or maybe dirt?) tumble up, a fireball appears -- all of this in total quiet. Thirty seconds pass. And then, says Wellerstein,

Quote:    Put on some headphones and listen to it all the way through — it's much more intimate than any other test film I've seen. You get a much better sense of what these things must have been like, on the ground, as an observer, than from your standard montage of blasts. Murmurs in anticipation; the slow countdown over a megaphone; the reaction at the flash of the bomb; and finally — a sharp bang, followed by a long, thundering growl. That's the sound of the bomb.

It's a sound you would never want to hear in real life, but this a safe way to eavesdrop. Just one warning: For the first two minutes of this video, nothing happens, nothing I could hear, anyway. Then there's a countdown, and at 2:24 from the top ... the bomb bursts; at 2:54 the blast hits.

A Postscript: What Happened To The Guys In The Bomb Video?
By ROBERT KRULWICH & ALEX WELLERSTEIN

A lot of you wrote in to ask what happened to the five men in the blog post above, who, in 1957 stood under an exploding atomic bomb. Did they get cancer? Did they suffer later on? Are they still with us?

We checked, of course. I did find a list of the people who were in the film.

    Col. Sidney Bruce
    Lt. Col. Frank P. Ball
    Maj. Norman "Bodie" Bodinger
    Maj. John Hughes
    Don Lutrel
    George Yoshitake (the cameraman, not seen)

Googling through the list, we quickly discovered (as did many of you) that George Yoshitake, the cameraman, was alive, at least as of two years ago. In 2010, he was interviewed in the New York Times and talked about his fellow cameramen who took pictures of atomic bombs. "Quite a few have died from cancer," he told reporter Bill Broad. "No doubt it was related to the testing." Yoshitake's nephew also wrote in and didn't mention his uncle's passing, so I'm guessing that he's now 84 years old and still with us.

As for the others, that's trickier. It's hard to know if a match in names is a real match and I didn't want to make an awkward mistake. I turned to my sleuth friend, science historian Alex Wellerstein (now at the American Institute of Physics) for help here. He told me "Military folks who have died can be found in the Department of Veteran's Affairs Gravesite Locator — and since we think all the video guys were Army and all World War II veterans, we might find some matches.

Alex looked, and here's what he found:

    Col. Sidney C. Bruce — died in 2005 (age 86)
    Lt. Col. Frank P. Ball — died in 2003 (age 83)
    Maj. John Hughes — very common name, but I'm guessing he is Maj. John W. Hughes II (born 1919, same as the above) — died in 1990 (age 71)
    Maj. Norman Bodinger — unclear (not listed in the database), he may still be alive?
    Don Lutrel — I think this is a misspelling of "Luttrell." There is a Donald D. Luttrell in the DVA database, US Army CPL, born 1924, died 1987 (age 63). Seems like a possibility.

If any of you reading think we've messed up, and someone we call dead is alive or alive is dead, please write me immediately. But this is our best effort.

Then there's the matter of perspective. It's a mistake, I think, to focus on six people as if they represent everyone who was exposed to bomb radiation. As Alex said in an email to me, it's more complicated than that.

Quote:    ...lots of people associated with Nevada Test Site operations got cancer over the years, some $150 million has been paid out in compensation to 2,000+ "onsite participants" of nuclear testing, under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

    The thing is, in that particular explosion, those guys would have been in a pretty safe position. The bomb itself was a small one (by nuclear standards — 2 kilotons) and it was way, way above their heads. They weren't in a zone to be too affected by the immediate radiation. The bomb was small enough and high enough that it wouldn't have sucked up dust to produce much fallout. The remaining cloud would have been full of (nasty) fission products, but it would have been extremely hot and most of it would have stayed aloft until it cooled down, by which point it probably would have been spread more diffusely.

At least the folks in the films volunteered to be there (George excepted) and were given some pre-film training (not terribly useful, but still). That was not the case for a little community downwind from the Nevada Test Site, a place called St. George, Utah.

The folks in St. George were repeatedly hit by uninvited fallout. Alex wrote me that in 1953, one test, codenamed "Harry" actually deposited quite a lot of fallout on St. George, to the point where residents were forced to stay inside for many hours, and prohibited from washing their cars until they became less radioactive.

Over the years, says Alex, the U.S. government has paid some $813 million to more than 16,000 "downwinders" to compensate them for illnesses presumably connected to the bomb testing program. So it is clear that tests like these — often done to demonstrate the safety of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere — were not safe at all.

****

Some of you may have noticed the nuclear missile video says the explosion took place 10,000 feet above our group of soldiers. Apparently, the video is wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council checked the numbers and says the explosion, part of Operation PLUMBBOB, was actually at 18,500 feet. The second explosion can be found in its original form in the National Archives here.

Quote:The text explained that Volkswagen's watertight construction—a selling point in genuine VW ads—would have prevented the 1969 drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne. Volkswagen of America began receiving outraged letters from readers who thought that VW itself was responsible for the ghoulish idea ("I will be damned if I will buy another Volkswagen after seeing an ad like the attached," wrote one customer).

VW responded with a $30 million damage suit against Lampoon, charging violations of trademark and copyright laws and defamation. Last week Lampoon agreed to withdraw all unsold copies of the magazine by Nov. 15 (450,000 were printed), to destroy the plate of the ad, and to run Volkswagen's statement on the incident in the magazine's January issue. It seemed only fitting that the Lampoon, which has thrived on necrological humor, would at last find itself forced to kill one of its own items.

Lampoon's Surrender

Quote:MOSCOW, July 21 (Reuters) - A Russian factory, described by its director as the world's biggest maker of strike drones, has been shown on the Russian army's TV channel with teenagers helping make kamikaze drones to attack Ukraine.

The footage, in a documentary film broadcast by the Zvezda channel on Sunday, showed hundreds of large black completed Geran-2 suicide drones in rows inside the secretive facility, which has been targeted, opens new tab by Ukrainian long-range drones.

Ukraine says Russia has used the Geran drones to terrorise and kill civilians in locations including the capital Kyiv, where residents often shelter in metro stations during attacks.

Russia says its drone and missile strikes target only military or military-related targets and denies deliberately targeting civilians, more than 13,000 of whom have been killed in Ukraine since the war began in 2022, the United Nations says.

Zvezda said the Alabuga factory, in Russia's Tatarstan region, invited school pupils to study at a college the factory runs nearby once they had completed ninth grade (aged 14-15) so that they could study drone manufacturing there and then work at the factory when they had finished college.

Young workers, including teenagers, were shown with their faces blurred out, studying computer screens or making and testing individual components, or assembling drones.

Timur Shagivaleyev, the factory's general director, did not disclose detailed production figures. But he told Zvezda the initial plan had been to produce "several thousand Geran-2 drones" and that the factory was now producing nine times more than that. He did not say what period the figures referred to.

A Russian think tank close to the government last month suggested Russia's drone production had jumped by 16.9% in May compared to the previous month after President Vladimir Putin called for output to be stepped up.

Putin said in April that more than 1.5 million drones of various types had been produced last year, but that Russian troops fighting on the front line in Ukraine needed more.

HUGE-SCALE USE OF DRONES

Both sides have deployed drones on a huge scale, using them to spot and hit targets not only on the battlefield but way beyond the front lines.

Zvezda said the Alabuga factory had its own drone testing ground and showed rows of parked U.S. RAM pickup trucks carrying Geran-2 drones.

It also showed one of them launching a drone.

In May, Russia paraded combat drones that its forces use in the war in Ukraine on Moscow's Red Square in what state TV said was a first.

The design of the Geran-2, which has a known range of at least 1,500 km (932 miles), originated in Iran where an earlier version was made. They have been used to target Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

Zvezda set the documentary to upbeat music, part of its mission to keep Russians interested in and supportive of the war. The factory is part of the so-called Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is near the town of Yelabuga, which is over 1,000 km from the border with Ukraine.

Russian TV shows teenagers at 'world's biggest drone factory' making arms to hit Ukraine