A Job Well Done
Posted by Ross Rosenberg
Admiral ‘Spike’ Blandy and his wife celebrate the success of Castle Bravo, the detonation of the world’s first practical hydrogen bomb — and the largest nuclear explosion ever set off by the United States — at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands on March 1, 1946. The fallout plume spread dangerous levels of radiation over an area over 100 miles long, including inhabited islands.
Records showing fallout levels from the cake are unknown. However, testimony from those who attended the event depicts a frosting that was nice to look at, but inedible otherwise. The raspberry filling was said to have been delicious. Five people fell ill, though this was attributed to excessive amounts of Scotch.
Update: Christ, have I been doing a lot of these lately or is it just me? Anyway, as wile_e_quixote points out in the comments, this photo does not depict the celebration after Castle Bravo, but a previous exercise involving atomic bombs. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Nuclear Cake [a near life experience]
Categories: 1940s, Alcohol, Atomic Bomb, Cake, Parties, Photography, Radiation, Science, Splosion, Vintage, War, World War II
Posted at 9:43 am on August 12, 2008
10 Comments -
I can’t decide what’s more spectacular, the mushroom frosting plume or the plume affixed the top of the admirals wife.
Comment by Narayana — August 12, 2008 @ 10:46 am
I like to think tha tthe fact that her head to bust area also looks like a mushroom cloud was a conscious and forward-looking fashion choice.
Comment by P — August 12, 2008 @ 10:48 am
The army also taught local atoll natives to sing “You are My Sunshine” and recorded them before detonating said bomb.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/Kucera.html
Comment by SM — August 12, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
The look on the face of the man in the background makes me wonder if something’s going to come out of that cake.
Comment by CJ — August 12, 2008 @ 2:54 pm
Wrong! Castle Bravo was March 1st, 1954, not 1946 and if Admiral Blandy was there it was in spirit only as he died on January 12th of 1954. This photo is from the postwar Crossroads tests, a completely different affair where the US set off a bunch of atomic, not hydrogen, bombs because we wanted to show people our cool new toy and blow a bunch of shit up.
The first hydrogen bomb wasn’t detonated until 1952 and, since it used liquid deuterium for the fusion stage and was the size of a house, wasn’t particularly practical (unless of course you could sneak into enemy territory with several thousand trained engineers and physicists, a few thousand pounds of uranium 238 and plutonium 239, a bunch of liquid deuterium and a sophisticated cryogenic apparatus). The first “practical” hydrogen bomb (practical meaning “easily used to kill millions and destroy lots of stuff without having to sneak several thousand highly trained engineers and physicists, a few thousand pounds of uranium 238 and plutonium 239, et al into enemy territory) was the Mk17, which was deployed in 1954.
The Castle Bravo test on March 1st, 1954, was a fuck up of a whole different order. The engineers and physicists who build the bomb were looking for a five megaton yield, but they made a bad assumption about certain properties of the lithium -7 isotope and ended up with a yield of 15 megatons. Whoops!
This was apparently rather terrifying because all of the people watching the bomb go off expected a nice, safe (if you’re outside of the blast area and not downwind) 5 megaton yield, you know, 5 megatons, 300 Hiroshimas, been there, done that, got the T-shirt, and instead got three times what they expected and much more fallout.
Richard Rhodes describes the Castle Bravo test in his book Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Read this and his other two books on the subject The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Arsenals of Folly and you’ll know everything that you need to about the nuclear arms race, including how the generals and politicians on both sides lied to justify increasingly more expensive, more destructive and more pointless weapons projects which bankrupted the former Soviet Union and nearly bankrupted the US.
Arsenals of Folly is especially good because it details how all of the guys who were making bad assumptions and policies to deal with the Soviet Union in the 1960, 70s and 80s came back in the late 90s and early part of the 21st century to make bad assumptions and policies about Iraq and the Middle East. If you can read Arsenals of Folly and not come away wanting to put a bounty on the head of every neo-conservative in America you’re a far better person than I am.
Comment by wile_e_quixote — August 12, 2008 @ 3:12 pm
Now that’s some extensive commentary!
I now return you to your regularly scheduled frivolity:
I wonder what the cake tasted like. Was it “atomic” flavored?
Comment by Caleb Monroe — August 12, 2008 @ 7:29 pm
“which bankrupted the former Soviet Union” …. and this was bad because … ?
Comment by Rick — August 12, 2008 @ 10:28 pm
I’ve been looking at this photo on the front of the tinyvices.com website for ages (it’s changed to a clown now, darn it). But anyway, thank god for your article–else I would think that they took it themselves!
Comment by Erica Stratton — August 12, 2008 @ 11:38 pm
If there is one thing I despise, it is a smarty pants that knows more about something than I do. That is why I hate almost everyone…anyway,
it would be cool if the cake was topped with little burnt chocolate men.
Comment by eltiburo — August 14, 2008 @ 12:18 am
You eat that cake, you get atomic ache.
Web
Comment by Web — August 17, 2008 @ 3:55 pm