Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

One of the more eerie double exposure's of the cold war atomic age.


Sept 14, 1954, Ivan Sharonin walked out into the street to see a fireball. He grabbed the camera he had recently used to take a snap of kids, and took a photo. But in a rush he had forgotten to wind to the next frame, so the kids turned out to be superimposed on a mushroom cloud. The photo was taken from the village of Sorochinsk from a distance of about 30 km.

This was a top secret nuclear test, code name "Snowball" from a Soviet Tu-4 bomber (reverse-engineered Boeing B-29) dropping a 40 kiloton atomic weapon (RDS-4) just north of Totskoye village, ~600 miles SE of Moscow that detonated at 9:33am localtime. The purpose of this exercise was not to test the bomb itself, but the ability of using it while breaking through enemy defenses (presumably in West Germany). After the explosion Soviet jet fighters were sent to fly through the mushroom cloud while tanks and infantry were forced to move through ground zero. Some 45,000 people, all Soviet soldiers and officers that mostly had no protective equipment and were not warned about the dangers. Some who were issued gas masks removed them in the oppressive 115F (46C) heat.


The participants were carefully selected from Soviet military servicemen, informed that they would take part in an exercise with the use of a new kind of weapon, sworn to secrecy, and earned three months salary.

Exposures that day were reportedly ten times the maximum allowable level for US soldiers for an entire year. The 1,000,000 people who lived within 100 miles of the blast were given no warning at all.

Official Soviet film (brutal 10 min clip) of the test that was originally made public in the early 1990s. Unfortunately the full film is no longer available online far as I know.

SURVIVORS TELL OF '54 SOVIET A-BLAST (September 15, 1994)

Last week, Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, visiting the Totsk testing range to inspect the first U.S.-Russian joint exercises here, condemned the atomic test as "barbaric" and "monstrous." But even with that change in official line, one 74-year-old survivor, who has suffered from skin cancer and other diseases she attributes to the blast, refused to give her name.

"I had to swear an oath that I would never discuss it, for the rest of my life," the woman said.

During the 1950s, the United States conducted similar military nuke exercises in Nevada involving thousands of personnel and hundreds of live animals, including dogs, pigs, sheep, rabbits, and rats.



Downwind (2023) docu. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Mercury, Nevada? The latter was the site for the testing of 928 large-scale nuclear weapons from 1951 to 1992. Martin Sheen narrates this harrowing exposé of the government's disregard for everyone living downwind.


Happy birthday to the dean of U.S. Continuity of Government (COG) research, journalist/author Ted Gup. To this day they still use his name in vain on the Greenbrier Bunker tour. Well done, sir!





Edward Hume, Emmy-Nominated ‘The Day After’ Writer, Dies at 87


Sept 14, 1812: After Napoleon's capture of Moscow, a massive fire engulfed the city, destroying nearly three-quarters of it. While the exact cause remains debated, it is generally believed the Russians intentionally set it to deny the French resources. The devastation and lack of supplies forced Napoleon's retreat, which proved disastrous for the Grande Armée. The fire, combined with the Russian winter and guerrilla attacks, decimated Napoleon's forces, setting the stage for his eventual downfall.




Sept 14, 1994: USS Eisenhower (CVN-69) left Norfolk loaded with 58 Army helicopters and 2000 soldiers to take part in Operation Uphold Democracy to remove the military regime installed by the 1991 Haitian coup d'état. It would be the largest Army air operation from an aircraft carrier since the Doolittle Raid in 1942. Officially ended on 31 March 1995, when it was replaced by the United Nations Mission in Haiti.




Happy 76th birthday to Sam Neill.




Three new spider species Kirk, Spock and McCoy

"Damn it, Jim. I’m a doctor, not an arachnid!"