Once the United States had built the first atomic bomb in 1945, it then improved it by building the first hydrogen bomb in 1952. It then began working on building more portable bombs, and since the Soviet Union had done the same, the United States also wondered about the bombs’ effects. So in the early 1950s, the government set up models of all the things that bombs could blow up—houses, bridges, cars, pigs, sheep—and exploded bombs near them. The government did this for at least a decade and didn’t stop until it and the rest of the world banned above-ground testing. The tests, many of them at the Nevada Test Site, were called “shots,” and they had names.The shot called Encore was on May 8, 1953, and among the many effects it tested was what a nuclear bomb would do to a forest. The Nevada Test Site wasn’t replete with forests, so the U.S. Forest Service brought 145 ponderosa pines from a nearby canyon and cemented them into holes lined up in tidy rows in an area called Frenchman Flat, 6,500 feet from ground zero. Then the Department of Defense air-dropped a 27-kiloton bomb that exploded 2,423 feet above the model forest. The heat set fire to the forest, then the blast wave blew down the trees and put out some fires and started others. Here’s the video.
I am really amazed the human race wasn't wiped off the face of the earth back in those days. I mean, there was this. And this. And this. And this. And this. Plus, the Cuban missile crisis. And God only knows what near disasters (or really well covered up disasters) the Russians had.
The funny part is that a commenter to Finkbeiner's post made a veiled joke about Indiana Jones hiding in the refrigerator in that terrible last movie, and Finkbeiner asked for a citation, to which the commenter posted a YouTube link. Finkbeiner commented again saying that it is a testament to the actual craziness that occurred that she thought they may have stashed an archeologist in a fridge to see if he'd survive. That won the internet for me today.
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