Atomic Bomb Parties and Nuclear Fallout

Martini's mobsters running the place. Uh. You know, it's the the the age of you know, of black suits and smoking everywhere and uh uh and and you know, everybody was caught up in this this cold war feeling that it's you know, arms arms race is post War War two. US is a big dog and and it's uh and it's up against some pretty stiff competition on the other side of the globe and U and these you know

war of idea, the cheese. But also you know, lots of good times and casinos, drinking martinis and smoking NonStop. And what would you add to that experience just to make it even more fantastic, Well, basically, you throw the ultimate party. I mean, you've got the mafia here, so we gotta go high, we gotta go big. Yeah, ultimate party thrown by the mafia with all of your you know, um, you know, whatever kind of music they had back in the day. I don't know if there wasn't electronics, I

don't know. I just see like awkward, like um, shifting to the right and left with the hips, you know. Yeah, that that kind of dancing. I don't know. I'm sure there's a name for that. Yeah, early early nineteen fifty stuff. But you're staying up all night, staying up all night, partying, doing that weird dance, drinking m d drinking those weird drinks. Yeah, smoking NonStop, and then right around dawn, an atomic weapon

goes off on the horizon for your pleasure, for your pleasure. Yeah, yeah, a a nuclear explosion, and everybody you know cheers, you know USA at drink a little more, smoke a little more, party a little more, and then I guess you have you have brunch and then go home and go to sleep. This is not fiction. This this this was happening for twelve years, for twelve years and something in the neighborhood

of Oh. I mean these parties ended, you know after a while, but um, you know, in between nine um, one thousand and twenty one nuclear detonations took place at the Nevada test site. So a lot of these are again, these are nuclear weapons. These are atomic bombs, the most powerful and dreaded uh weapon that we've been able to come up with yet. And you know, we'd previously dropped them to horrific results um in Japan on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was a like a third team kill

a ton and a twenty kill a ton bomb. But then they're like the the like some of the first ones we were dropping in a lot in just outside of Las Vegas at the Nevada Proving Grounds were thirty one kiloton bombs, right and and and you wonder if anybody's such m hmm, I wonder if this is a good idea. Well apparently you had some people that were like, I don't know if we should should maybe maybe it's

just a good idea. I don't But then but then the government was like, well, we're doing in two weeks, so make up your mind, uh, and know that it's an extremely patriotic thing for us to do. It's perfectly safe and uh, you know, so just you know, drinking Marquis Martiniz and keep smoking. The cigarettes are not going to kill you. And then I imagine them murmuring the side effects like sun effects include vomiting, headics, you know,

and I want to stay forth so there. Yeah, so people are, you know, having their martinis and going, well, okay, maybe it's not such a bad idea. It will bring a lot of money into the area and we really need it. And the parties actually remind me. I've never been to one of these because I'm not that cool. But uh, like in places like Ibiza, they have like these parties where people party all night somehow, um and uh,

perhaps through a natural means. And then when the sun comes up, like the DJ does like a a special mix so that his mix corresponds with the rising of the sun. Of course, they didn't have DJs back then, so weren't able to really get that that the same effect with the to correspond with the detonation. I'm sure Frank Sinatra probably did some little ditty DJ Frank Sinatra pick the old days. Um. But but this is just

part of like like Vegas was crazy with it. Like Vegas was ready to run with anything that would come along that they could market. So they're like, uh, They're like, oh, Atomic Bomble were the Atomic City. Wait, and you know they the Atomic Cocktail became big, which, according to Esquire magazine, is one and half ounces of vodka, one and half ounces of brandy, a teaspoon and sherry, and one and

a half ounces of dry champagne. My favorite UM was a still from that time of Miss Atomic Usa, I believe, and she's um, it just imagined an atomic plume. Yeah, the mushroom cloud. The mushroom cloud that is the actual like her her outfit, right, and it almost looks like it's a sandwich board. Maybe. Yeah, it's hard to say exactly what it is, um, but she she's made to look naked behind this atomic plume and she's you know, this um belonde with this big bouffant out in the

desert with clouds behind her. It's pretty great. And I think the show girls would have head dresses. It looked like mushroom cloud. Um. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce issued a calendar for tourists with the scheduled detonation times and the best places to view them. Right for this twelve years, right, Yeah, for twelve years. People would like the desert end marketed at Skyroom. It's the perfect place to you know, guzzle down some martinis and smoke and

watch a bomb light up the horizon. Um. Yeah, but of course the good times had to end, and they because you know, people in northeastern Nevada in southern Utah began complaining that their pets in their livestocks were suffering from beta particle burns. This is from a PBS documentary about the Strange Side of Las Vegas, and they suffered

other ailments. So by nine three, the limited test band was in effect and effectively that just shut down all above grown tests, which it was not a bad thing to do, as as exciting as these u little parties were. It's sort of horrific now thinking back now knowing what we know. Yeah, it's kind of like if you if you are or if you know somebody who's ever had like that crazy boyfriend or girlfriend and at the time they're like, this person is awesome. I want to spend

the rest of my life with this person. And then and then later they looked back, and then they look back and they're like, Wow, that person was crazy. What was I thinking? That was? That was? That was dumb? And you know, so the behindsight is sort of so you know, it's easy to look back now and say, wow, these people were stupid throwing parties and watching a nuclear weapon light up the horizon. But but like I said,

they were caught up in in patriotism. They didn't know what the effects were, and I guess they didn't, you know, really heed the whole uh anal I have become death at a story of world type thing. You know, they know it was this shiny atomic age, right, yeah, I mean it was it was just all new and exciting, new frontier. But you know there's there's the dark side of course, so so yeah, there's where the music doesn't right, Yeah,

that's the record scratching another detail reference. N This is we're of course talking about nuclear fallout, and I think everyone is at least familiar with the idea of nuclear fallout in the in the sense that it's it's just

become part of our our language. And you talk about the fall out of something about the uncomfortable or terrible um circumstances that can occur after an event has transpired, right, and of course especially after Japan, which is it's been a horrific event, um and it's been really heartbreaking, UM, and it's sad, but it's it's interesting to look at fallout and see how that's affected people, and also to try to understand UM Japan in the context of Chernobyl

and see if we've learned anything. UM. So you know, we should probably talk a little bit about thought exactly what it is and what that mushroom cloud is doing. Yeah. So yeah, this is what happens in a nuclear explosion. Just very briefly. You have a certain abount amount of

nuclear mass, and we transfer that nuclear mass into energy. Right, So you have an explosion, an enormous fireball, and inside that firebell everything is vaporized, and this fireball rises rapidly, uh, and it it ends up pulling in soil and water and then expands and cools and loses buoyancy and the radioactive debris and soil and all this stuff UH that's initially swept upwards by the explosion then disperses with the wind. UM. So you get this fallout, which is a fallout is

basically microscopic particles UM in the air. Uh. The end up being to posited on the ground or on buildings or on you know, just everywhere, and uh, and they're radioactive. So think of like a like you see footage of like a volcanic eruption where everything is coated in ash, and that's pretty destructive. But imagine if the ash in this case is radioactive and when I mean radioactive, like it doesn't even need to touch you to be harmful. Um.

But we'll get to that in just a second. Um. So you have this mushroom cloud radioactive um particles rising up, and that the as a cloud reaches its stabilization height, it moves down wind and and you have the things. You don't just have one wind speed or one you know direction, It varies with altitude. So you'll see you'll

look at that. There's some interesting charts out there that that show, um um, how nuclear fallout has moved, say just from from some of these test detonations in Nevada, and one in particular I was looking at looked at the fallout from a ninette kiloton test um of a bomb by the name of Simon in Nevada, and depending on the altitude, like, the course was drastically different. Like um, the particles that made it up to eighteen thousand feet they cut through New Mexico and Texas and then shot

north through Arkansas as far north is Pennsylvania. At thirty thousand feet, it cut through through the top of New Mexico. This is just this path of you know, radioactive materials traveling across the country. And then then it went down through Texas, Southern Louisiana, middle Florida. But then at forty thousand it goes more or less straight through Texas and then shoots north on a tour of New England on

up into Canada. So and then if it gets high enough, you get into the into the stratosphere and you have global fallout where it can these particles from can pretty much go all over the globe. Yeah. Yeah, and that's I think that's probably important to talk about. How you've got localized fallout, right, which is you know, by far that most dangerous. Yeah, we're talking this is a local faud is within fifty to five hundred kilometers from ground zero,

that's between thirty one miles. That's where all the large particles are gonna come down. And then you've got regional fallout, right, and that's five d three thousand kilometers, Okay, and then you've got the global, which you were talking. Yeah, and that's more than three thousand kilometers or more than one Yeah. And the CBTV, that is the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Um Treaty. They have a global network of air samples to which

detect traces of radiation. Uh. And they've actually detected traces from the Fukushima radioactive fallout as far Afield as Sacramento. And of course that's that's no reason for everybody to get up in arms and you know, start taking iodine because really these are just minute traces. But yeah, they basically played like these sensors are used to say, find out if somebody is doing a nuclear test somewhere in

the world, because that's the thing. You can't really have a secret nuclear test because the world is going to notice because it's that kind of activity is going to affect global radioactive levels, which again just nit drives home how destructive and irresponsible. Uh, these weapons are. Well, I mean, you can get into issues of of nuclear power, is it clean, is it dangers, um, et cetera. But but when it comes down to nuclear weapons, it's pretty I

think it's pretty cut and dry. Well, especially if you think about this storehouses of enriched uranium chickuling this of it union UM and the amount of thefts that we know have gone on also with plutonium. I mean, this is there are many other issues that spiral out from this UM. But yeah, I mean it's it's dangerous stuff at any level and hard to keep keep tabs on. But we should probably talk about some of the more specific dangers of fallout UM and actually, like what is

an acceptable amount of radigation? Which which I feel like I cannot get a firm answer on. Yeah, well, let's let's get into this right ature a quick break. This presentation is brought to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow and we're back. Hello, So what is an acceptable amount of radiation? Well, I mean it's kind of a moving target.

Jury's definitely still out UM. There's a mathematical model known as the linear non threshold dose response model LNT model for short, that helps agencies set levels of acceptable radiation level UM. So, for example, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets an acceptable level at one milli ram a year. And just to put that into context, there are actual cities where the background radiation level is really high, like Denver, and those citizens are exposed to fifty milli rams a year.

And as a side note though that the rate of cancer is pretty low there, so that's something to consider. Um. But um, you know, the average level of natural background radiation in the United States is about three hundred fifty milli ram a year. So that's that's everything in concert. So that's if you take a transatlantic flight, you're going

to be exposed to thirty five miller ram. If you get a full body scan, you're gonna have one or two Miller rams, so that you know, accumulatively, they're looking at more like three hundred and fifty milli ramps. So in theory, we're all getting zapped way too much with radiation. But you say that and that's just one agency's um thoughts on it, or you know, that's that's what they

think is acceptable. You can go to a multitude of agencies in a multitude of countries and everybody has a different goal or even moving the goalposts right now because they're not really sure, um, if radiation is that bad at low dostitches. So that's why I get a little bit frustrated because I don't feel like there's us that I still don't feel like people have a good grasp of of what radiation means and Chernobyl. Obviously, there were a lot of horrible things that went on in Chernobyl.

One of the biggest problems we've had long term is that there was no one foundation that got together and said, let's study this in earnest The results are Chernobyl. So while we know that there were six thousand cases of thyroid cancer as a result of fallout from there and exposure to to irradiated um iodine, we don't really know fully you know, the six thousand inhabitants around there, how that actually affected their lives because nobody really followed up

on it. Yeah, just to touch base on how this radiation ends up affecting the body, how the particles in nuclear fallout end up harming people. There are two ways that it enters the body through external and internal means. External. This mainly means, like like I said, um, the particles come down, they're laying everywhere, and they're emitting radiation, so they you end up absorbing it because it's emitted from the particles. And this is why um like shielding of

buildings becomes important. The idea of remaining indoors in the event of a nuclear detonation. Yeah, because because the particles are emitting this radiation and if you get if something is between you and the particle, then well that's gonna help. But then there's internal and this is when you're inhaling the particles or you're absorbing it through intact or injured skin or and this this is a big one, you're

consuming it um through contaminated foods. And this can be as simple as all right, I eat a carrot and the carrot has particles of radioactive particles on it from the fallout, or I eat um, I don't know, I eat the rabbit that ate the carrot. See, it ends up impacting the entire food chain of which we are apart um. It ends up and it gets involved in

like dairy too. I mean, there's just you know, because if you drink the milk that came from the cow that ate the grass that the fallout fell on, right, then you're you're going to have some possible health problems there. Yeah. And um, you should also again talk about Chernobyl when that happened, uh, when the fallout from that happened, that the government actually didn't say to its citizens quit eating UH contaminated food or telling them it's contaminated, or telling

them not to drink the water. Um. So again this is another reason why people were exposed to it so readily, and all that we know in Japan that they warn the citizens to quit eating and drinking UH water sources there. But I wanted to talk a little bit about two volatile elements cassium one thirty seven and iodine one thirty one.

Those we know bubbled off the damaged fuel in Japan, and iodine is rapidly absorbed by the thyroid and it leaves only as it decays radioactively with half life of eight days, while cassium is absorbed by muscles, where it's half life of thirty years means that it remains until it's excreted by the body. So it takes between ten and one days to excrete half of what has been consumed. So that's why these these two things are problematic because

they're they're absorbed very easily by the body. Um. Now we know that Japan's followed near chernobyls levels. But again we know that that there's a big difference here because Japan took you know, some precautions and warning their citizens

and also giving them iodine. And the whole reason that you would give someone an iodine is that if you were to take all the iodine, your body would absorb that and then in theory, absorbed less of that your radiated iodine, and then you know, your thyroid wouldn't be stuck there with a bunch of irradiated It would be like adding like eating eating a healthy dinner before going to the tow or the Twinkie factory. It's like fold up. You know, I couldn't possibly eat eight free twinkies. I'd

probably just eat one. I'll just have one, Yeah, the twinkie analogy. So that's that's what we know about some of the fallout and how it affects you. And of course we know that thyroid cancer is is a big one that develops as a result of exposure. And we should probably talk just a little bit about environmental fluid dynamics. Don't turn off the podcast. It's not really scary thing. We're going to call it e d F just to

make a little bit more edgy. It sounds like it doesn't sound edgy to me as much as it sounds like some sort of like digestion disorder like he's got to. Also, it wouldn't be e d F. It would be e f d oh e f d oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's all right. Well, I like, well e F D acronyms are not my strong point. Let's talk about the fluid dynamics a fallout, all right. So fluid dynamics is basically about how fluids moves, how the air moves, how the water moves, and these are complex systems. Uh. If

you if you've ever looked at how the weather work works. Um, and we have a really cool article on the side. How we write that, right, I wrote that, which I mean it's cool because you know I wrote it, so it's cool, but it's also I feel like it's good. Yeah, it's it's a good article, I feel like. But yeah,

the weather is a complex system, a very chaotic system. Uh. The whole idea of like the butterfly effect comes out and uh and uh and chaos theory comes out of studying the weather and realizing that how difficult it is to to predict what it's gonna do, even with complicated mathematical models. Um. I mean, and that's why you the farther off a a weather forecast, the less you can rely on it because it's just such a chaotic system.

So you have, you know, different movements that are like I said, one UH nuclear detonation, you'll see fallout move in like four different patterns UH, and it and and it just it gets so the distribution of fallout becomes very complicated when you're looking at how it affects UH

a regional or you know, global scenario. Yeah, and our understanding of fallout and the earlier years UM was modeled after flat terrain right where all the tests were taking place, so we thought the fallout would you act in a certain way, And then it was only until we started say, oh, but then there's this whole weather thing, and there's geography and there's urban environment. Yeah. Yeah, because like the city

example is pretty cool. UM. In fact, there was a study in two thousand nine UM from the Los Almos National Laboratory where they use computer models of cities and and use flood dynamic models to see how a large metropolitan area UH would tamper with local wind patterns and

effect the way fallout is distributed. And you have things like UM, I mean just the cities really messed with with climate anyway you know you have like like a sun heated parking lot creates a localized updraft, drawing in air from surrounding areas, and skyscrapers work like artificial mountains. So of a plume of radiated debris were to blow against a tall building, physicists predict that that the flow would launch skyword in what they call a fountain effect,

resulting in a wider distribution of radiated particles. Yeah. I just keep when whenever I think about the fountain fact, I think of it just like spraying off of the building. To Wright, like you can sort of think of it like a motorcycle hitting like a launch ramp, where it

just launches it straight up into the air. Yeah, isn't the idea to take these mathematical models and then try to use them to to predict real time to people so that if you were in this sort of situation that you might be able to communicate with people I don't like via their smartphones and say, you know, it's moving in this direction, take cover and move east, and just generally be able to plan better for one of

these scenarios. Because you know, this is especially relevant, is especially relevant, not just in the use of actual nuclear detonations, but also in the use of you know, so called dirty bombs, where you would have a you know, a standard detonation like a stick of dye to minor C

four spreading radioactive material. So yeah, I mean, and it does make it not only can you just warn someone, but you can also yourself probably use some of information and say, Okay, so I know that radiation is um shielded by tall building, so I'm gonna get behind this building, and I know the wind is coming this way, and so on and so forth. Um. So do you think

it's it's obviously you're really helpful. Um. And I did want to mention too that if you ever just want to scare the pants off of yourself, that you should check out a guy named Bruce Shiner s h and E I E er and he has a talk on ted dot com about how to survive a nuclear attack. And it's really helpful, but it's also just so frightening. I mean, just bring some popcorn and a blanket because you're gonna, you know, you're gonna want to hide under it off to I have to I haven't seen that

one off to look at it. UM, I have an old mutual of Omaha poster somewhere around here that you know from back in the fifties. It tells you how

to survive a nuclear detonation. Is this the turtle? No, there's something like yeah, there's some like um, there's some old film footage that they used to run, particularly like in the in the forties, right, that would show like the turtle duck and cover, and it's the The idea is that you would create a shell for yourself and get as small in in tiny and um as possible in order to survive a nuclear attack. But that was like the extent of the instruction that was who is

this turtle named duck and cover? I remember hearing to the idea of like covering yourself in wet newspapers. I'm not sure where I picked that one up, possibly from the nineteens fifties sci fi films, So that might not be yeah yeah that yet, that may not be uh full proof there. But the brooch liner is it's really interesting because it does. He talks a lot about this too, um in terms of mathematical models and where the wind is blowing and buildings and how all this factors into

someone's ability to perhaps survive a nuclear attack. It's good times watching. Well, yeah, there you go. It's uh, this is a good podcast because we start with the party and then we end with the downer, you know. So I hope that you know, if you're listening to this, congratulations because you stayed well past the point where the party ended and helped clean up a little. So hey, it's part of the cleanup, and it's part of the reward, I guess for making it through the dispressing stuff. We

do have some listener mail here. Um, let's see, we have a listener by the name of Eric. I think it's a different Erics, and I don't know someone who had an Eric and want to that. Oh yeah, yeah, the the knocking boots kicking boots area. Maybe it's the same Eric. Maybe it's a different Erica. Don't let me see. Oh it might be the same moment, it might be. Oh well, now I feel weird like we're giving preferential

treatment to our Erics. But at any rate, Eric writes in with some interesting comments on our pulsebo podcast, and let's see, I'm gonna be a little a nice, long, thoughtful email, but I'm going to skip in part which is a real cool nugget of thought provoking material. Uh, he says. Julie said that placebos can't shrink a tumor, but there are cases of this happening. Along with spontaneous remission.

A lot of the traditional medicine seems to work because in the vast majority of cases, a sick person will get better no matter what you do, assuming you don't hurt them. Further, I heard a story that said many Chinese people will bang pots during a solar eclipse to scare away the dragon that is eating the sun. It works perfectly every time, even when the dragon completely swallows the sun, as long as everybody bangs their pots loudly enough,

the dragon will always fit it out again. So it's uh, I mean, you know, a very simplified example, but you know, that is something to keep in mind. I think it's an incredible example of how we fictionalize our reality, right. And that's what it was so interesting about finding out about the plus, because again, it came down to that whole thing like, do we have to tell ourselves a story in order to survive life? Um? Where can we just sort of peel away the layers and and um

and not have to trick ourselves into healing. Is it possible on a sort of like evolutionary level that we've

been hardwired to do this? Tell ourselves stories and um oh, and then the second part is not actually a a letter from anybody, But I just wanted to follow up on our Bone Wars podcast because I forgot to mention on like one particularly cool example that I came across, which is another weird example of um, like life imitating Mortal Kombat or something, because you had this guy by the name of paleontologers by the name of Gideon Mantell who named the Iguanadon. That's his big, uh, you know,

contribution contribution to paleontology. But in eighty eight, uh he, like some of these other guys, he fell into poverty. It sells fossil collection to the British Museum, and he had a long illness and sadly ended up communic suicide in two um. But weirdly enough, one of his rivals, like I'm in the name of Richard Owen, managed to get ahold of Mantell's spine, his pickled spine after his death. Now that I don't have the details on that, but how how does that happen? How do you just like,

how did your spine end up pickled? And then in the public market. I don't know. I think that while you're picking up a body, perhaps to do some experiments on, you just slip that other person twenty box and say, hey, can I have that spleen? So Owen has Mantel's pickled spine and and then displays it in his own museum next to his various fossil exhibits, which is pretty brazen and kind of insane. I would love to see the label on it. I mean, does it say like my

nemesis is spine? Yeah? I mean how does he explain that? Or maybe he doesn't and it's just always his little secret, like that's spine was my nemesis? Would have you incorporated into a dinosaur? In speaking of you saw a Fiji mermaid? Yeah? I did. I was. I was out of town went to this uh little museum in Louisiana and they had all these weird freak show things and they had a

Fiji mermaid, not asid Fiji mermaid. I don't know. This may have been a very recent creation, but it was still interesting to see one and I also ran I went to a wedding there and I ran into somebody who's a fan of the show. So just let everybody know that if you encounter me at a wedding, uh, you can approach me and talk to me and uh and then we'll discuss the show and then we can run into each other awkwardly throughout the rest of the

at the wedding. So um, but anyway, but it was great to run into somebody who to run into a listener. So yeah, and see the Fiji Mermaid and see the Fiji Mermaid. Yes, a good weekend if you ask me. Yeah. So hey, if you see the Fiji Mermaid in reality or in your dreams or or wherever, you can let us know. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

We're blow the mind on both of those. And and I'm very interested to hear uh, you know, if anybody has any uh like family history from from Las Vegas, uh in the Broada area, like any like personal accounts of what or maybe not personal account but at least you know, family family tales of what it was like to live in the Vada in the fifties. I mean, we'd be very interested to hear about that, you know, read your account on the air and all unless you're

in a witness relocation program. Yeah, you know the hold the Mafia times. We don't want you to, but I guess you could go understood in. And you could also send us an email. Yes, yeah, and hey, you can send that email to blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how stuff

Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.