Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Indiana State Board of Health. Monthly Bulletin, 1912.
Remember: coffee in moderation... and don't neglect them.




August 9, 1945: 11:02am Nagasaki time, the B-29 "Bockscar" bomber callsign "Dimples 77" dropped "Fat Man" a 21-kiloton implosion-type with a solid plutonium core weighing approximately 13.6 pounds detonated 43 seconds later at an altitude of 1,650 feet above a tennis court situated midway between the Mitsubishi Steel & Arms Works to the south and the Nagasaki Arsenal to the north. By a bizarre coincidence, Fat Man detonated almost directly over the factory that had made the torpedoes used in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The original target was the city of Kokura, but weather prevented its doom.

The explosion released energy equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. Within milliseconds, a blinding fireball erupted, unleashing searing heat, a violent blast wave, and an intense burst of gamma and neutron radiation. The population at ground zero was subjected to radiation doses approaching 200,000 rad. The bomb’s total energy output was distributed roughly as 35% thermal radiation, 50% blast energy, and 15% ionizing radiation. The human toll was catastrophic—approximately 70,000 people were killed, with as many as 30,000 of these deaths linked directly to radiation exposure, and some 75,000 additional injuries were recorded.



The mushroom cloud depicted here was originally captured in a photograph taken by one of the mission’s B-29 bombers. William L. Lawrence, the Manhattan Project’s official correspondent, witnessed the detonation from The Great Artiste and later described “a pillar of purple fire” surmounted by "a giant mushroom" that climbed to 45,000 feet.

In this reimagined artistic rendering, the Nagasaki mushroom cloud is transformed into a vivid, spectral vision—its blazing yellows, deep oranges, and spectral purples conveying the unseeable reality of the event. Embedded within the roiling column is an invisible, deadly "radioactive soup," a complex fission-product mixture of short- and long-lived isotopes that would haunt Nagasaki long after the cloud itself dissipated.




This artwork reinterprets a rare historical artifact, the warning leaflets dropped by American aircraft over Japanese cities in the final days of World War II. These leaflets, part of a psychological warfare campaign, urged civilians to evacuate in advance of impending air raids. In this composition, the central image is not Nagasaki, but the Hiroshima mushroom cloud, the most recent and, at the time, unprecedented display of atomic destruction, rendered in a searing thermal palette of incandescent yellows, molten reds, and deep purples.

Surrounding the image, columns of Japanese text are preserved from the original leaflet design. In their original context, these words carried a charged duality: a humanitarian warning entwined with an unmistakable threat. By framing the Hiroshima cloud within this textual grid, the work underscores how the leaflets sought to project the fate of Hiroshima as both a cautionary example and a psychological weapon, an implicit warning of what could come next.

The reimagined color treatment strips away the archival detachment of black-and-white photography, thrusting the viewer into the heat and violence of the blast. The glowing spectrum suggests the overwhelming thermal radiation of the detonation, while the darkened border evokes the deep shadows of destruction that followed. In this way, Nagasaki Warning Leaflet becomes a work of visual testimony, capturing the grim reality that, even as such warnings fell from the sky, they could not avert the devastation that soon followed in Nagasaki.


"NAGASAKI WARNING LEAFLET" by David A. Wargowski, April 12, 2019.



August 9, 1945: Samuel McCrea Cavert [1888-1976], the general secretary of Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, sent a telegram to President Truman stating that "many Christians are deeply disturbed over the use of atomic bombs on Japanese cities." Truman's reply follows...




Atomic Power short docu film produced by The March of Time, released to theaters August 9, 1946, one year after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.



"Atomic Power" narrated by Westbrook Van Voorhis (1903-1968)




Apparently, in a bizarre twist, the weather gods had other plans for Dr. Tetsuya Fujita which created his moniker, Mr. Tornado...

Fujita was residing in Kokura during World War II. The city of Kokura was the primary target for the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, but on the morning of August 9, 1945, the city was obscured by clouds and smoke from the neighboring city of Yahata, which had been firebombed the day before. As a result, the bomb was dropped on the secondary target, Nagasaki. Studying the damage caused by the nuclear explosions contributed to Fujita's understanding of downbursts and microbursts as "starbursts" of wind hitting the Earth's surface and spreading out.


Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Spotlight: Dr. Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita

Dr. Ted Fujita's Presentation At The Third Tornado Symposium, Norman Oklahoma April 4, 1991.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XVT-ovzRo0



Nagasaki’s twin bells ring in unison for first time in 80 years to mark atomic bombing



August 9, 1965: at Titan II launch complex 373-4 11 miles north of Searcy, Arkansas, as 55 civilian contractors were modifying the missile silo to better survive a nuclear attack, a flash fire and dense smoke asphyxiated 53 men, the deadliest accident involving a US nuclear weapon system. Only two of the 55 workers who were inside the silo at the time survived.


The missile’s massive 6,200-pound 9-megaton W53 warhead had been removed for the duration of the modifications, which is why the Strategic Air Command did not consider this a Broken Arrow, per se, and why it is not included on official lists of US nuclear weapons accidents.

The 103-foot tall, 330,000-pound Titan II ICBM, however, remained in the silo, fully loaded with volatile liquid fuel and oxidizer. Had the fire caused temperatures and pressures to rise too high, it could have exploded.

The Titan II in silo launch complex 373-4 was one of 18 built in Arkansas. First deployed in 1962, 54 Titan IIs were kept on constant alert in Arizona, Arkansas, and Kansas. Because the ICBM in Searcy was undamaged by the fire, it was put back into service about a year later.

Survivor recalls 1965 Titan II missile silo fire that killed 53

Human error in a nuclear facility nearly destroyed Arkansas


Panther's distinctive range of James Bond covers (1977-85).


The cover photos were taken by Beverley le Barrow, who made the best use she could of the huge prop gun (with a different grip colour on each side) Panther had purchased for the shoot.

Panther Books Ltd was a British publishing house especially active in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, specializing in paperback fiction.

Triad/Panther UK Paperbacks 1977-1985