The eyes of two networks' television cameras will be turned toward Ground Zero, Yucca Flat, Nevada. At approximately 20 minutes after the hour, they will pick up the great nuclear explosion there, "designed to show clearly the effects of the blast on the largest collection of men, buildings and materials ever assembled for an atomic test."
Actually, an entire village has been assembled in the bomb area. Among the structures to be tested are homes, factories, ground-level and underground shelters, a power station and a radio tower.
Volunteers compose a Civil Defense team which will be stationed only two miles from Ground Zero, at which point there will also be television coverage. TV newsmen assigned to the event include Morgan Beatty, Jack Beck, Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Hugh Downs, Ben Grauer, Dave Garroway, Grant Holcomb, Herb Kaplow, Robert Trout and Dallas Townsend. Most of them will be stationed on Media Hill, 8 1⁄2 miles from Ground Zero.
The Defense Dept. is collaborating with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Civil Defense Administration in the tests.
In the event of bad weather, the explosion and the telecast will be postponed 24 hours.
The Japanese, who well know the deadly aspects of atomic energy, have been getting their first look at its beneficial side. By tens of thousands they crowded into a traveling Atoms for Peace exhibit, cosponsored by the U.S. Information Service and Japanese newspapers, to gape at Geiger counters, a nuclear reactor model and tall stalks of wheat nourished by irradiated fertilizer. For all the novelty, the Japanese seemed to feel at home in the peacetime atomic age. One of the exhibits (above), a model of a cancer therapy unit, stood in front of a screen with flashing orange lights which represented fissioning uranium atoms. When two pretty attendants grouped themselves around a dummy under the unit's arch-ing drum, they transformed the scientific setting into something as poetically graceful as a Japanese bridge against a sky of gently glowing moons.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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Licking their platters and skillets clean, six crew-cut young men at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver have been thriving on an atomic age diet. The young men, all conscientious objectors to military service, are volunteers helping doctors discover the nutritional value and the possible dangers there may be in food that has been preserved by nuclear radiation. Since every ounce of the irradiated food is painstakingly measured, the test subjects must eat every edible drop or crumb left on the utensils.
So far, frequent medical examinations of the six subjects have un covered no harmful effects from their atomic diet, a result that matches conclusions previously reached in extensive tests with animals. While some foods, such as gelatine and strawberries, do not seem to stand up well under radiation, most others are preserved for months by the sterilizing action of the rays. Medical proof that the process is harmless to eaters would open the way for commercial use of atomic preservation processes.
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Defense tests in the H-bomb age have been designed to prove force of ex. plosives and permanence of buildings. In Houston, Texas, civil defense workers decided to test the resilience of people. As part of the last nationwide exercise, they picked the family of John Christmas, a machinist, to spend three days in a steel-and-concrete shelter. Equipped with bottled water, food, cots, games and a chemical toilet, the family found humidity one of its big problems. With temperature in the 80s and humidity rising to 96, they moved about as little as possible. When Mrs. Christmas lighted the canned heat stove, her husband manned a hand air pump to keep the damp air tolerable. Another big problem was boredom; son Stanley found things so dull underground that he played both sides of a chess game.
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At the U.N. Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy which opens in Geneva this August the U.S. will exhibit a full-sized working reactor. Last month the $350,000 swimming pool reactor, built by Union Carbide and Carbon Corp. for the AEC, was turned on (above) for a final checkout at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Lying safely beneath 16 feet of water, the plates of uranium began slowly to disintegrate inside their aluminum boxes, making the sur. rounding water glow blue from the radiation. The engineers smoothly raised and lowered the rods of boron carbide which govern the rate of fission. Then they switched the reactor off and left it to "cool" for a few weeks before hauling it out of the water for the trip to Geneva.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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Last week (may 1955 - my annotation), the hundreds of Civil Defense observers who had watched the churning, violent ascent of a fiery atomic cloud into the Nevada sky were back home, trying to convey to their communities the enormity of the explosion and educate them on the ways to survival in atomic attack. They had seen the explosion from eight miles off and, next day, went in to compute the damage. But much nearer to Ground Zero were LIFE's lead-shielded robot cameras, which recorded in color what no man could see and survive: the awesome close-up effects of the explosion as it was going on.
The Civil Defense people had gone to Yucca Flat to see the effects of atomic attack on the normal surroundings in which Americans work, play and live. Placed atop a 500-foot steel tow. er was a nuclear device that would unleash upon a simulated town an amount of energy equivalent to the detonation of 35,000 tons of TNT nearly twice the strength of the Hiroshima bomb but only 1/500th the strength of the hydrogen thermonuclear weapon. On a clear, cool day after nine days of postponements due to bad weather, the device was set off at 5:10 a.m.
BLUE AFTERGLOW remains in the atmosphere surrounding the atomic cloud as the mushroom takes shape in the thin light of dawn. This weird effect, which persisted about seven seconds after the boiling mass lost its fiery hues, indi cates intensive degree of ionization (displacement of electrons) of the air by radioactivity and shock waves from within the cloud. In the foreground is the slope of Media Hill where most of the Civil Defense observers watched. The cloud reached a height of about 40,000 feet, a frosty white cap forming on its top as it moved into the cold upper atmosphere. There the winds began to disperse it.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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If you like what I do support the project with a coffee
The initial outlay for the uranium prospector can vary widely. The ultimate in equipment (image above) begins with a four-wheel drive jeep ($1,685). Other gear on the ground from left foreground includes an Army surplus knapsack ($3), ore sample sacks (25c each), green-topped scintillation counter ($647), an assay kit ($12.50), a black Geiger counter ($350), wooden carrying case for Geiger counter and spare batteries ($25). Clustered around AEC geologic section drawing in right foreground are map portfolio ($10), ore pick ($4), portable drawing board ($7.50), 100-foot tape for measuring claims ($12.50), Brunton compass and case ($47), official AEC and AECB of Canada prospecting handbooks ($1.40 for all three) and claim notices (25c for pad of 100). At left rear is a probe and reel assembly ($655) for detecting radioactivity in drill-holes. Camping gear, from shovel against jeep fender to coffee pot at right rear, costs about $68.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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If you like what I do support the project with a coffee
Far out on the sagebrush plains of Idaho the Atomic Energy Commission gave, in august 1954, newsmen the first public inspection of one of its most magnificent research tools, an atomic pile that produces radiation faster than anything else on earth except bombs. The installation, an $18-million, concrete, graphite and metal structure called the Materials Testing Reactor, derives its intense radiation from a core of uranium "about the size of two suitcases." It is used to discover the exotic effects of radiation - usually destructive, but sometimes useful - on substances ranging from steel and plastics to food. Many metal, tested in the MTR for possible use in future atomic power plants, are badly damaged. But meat, after irradiation in a canal unde the reactor, strangely is preserved from spoiling.
Reactor itself which sits above canal, looms high over men on floor who with tractor are removing 30-ton cannon-shaped "universal coffin." The coffin is used for withdrawing test samples from reactor interior.
A treated sample is pulled out of reactor through hollow center of "universal coffin" by man using long handling pole. Second man with Geiger counter is measuring amount of stray radiation escaping from coffin.
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More electric power than all New York City used in 1954 was needed for a vast new development to expand America's atomic energy program, was under construction in Ohio, a conjoined effort of 15 electric utilities companies.
Combining their resources to form the $400,000,000 Ohio Valler Electric Corporation, these 15 companies were building two immense new generating stations along the Ohio River. One of the stations is shown above. Electricity equal to nearly three million horsepower - the largest amount ever produced under a single contract - will be supplied to the Atomic Energy Commission's new uranium-235 plant near Portsmouth, Ohio.
The major part of this electric power was made by huge General Electric steam turbine-generators, among the largest ever built. Switchgear and power transformers of record size, about half of which were supplied by General Electric, helped solving the many problems of controlling the enormous output of electricity and delivering it economically to the atomic project.
Just before the photo above was shot three Pennsylvania State University scientists fed a long list of numbers, mathematical formulas and measurements into their strange and awesome machine. Their problem: to analyze for the Navy the exact atomic structure of a new, insufficiently-understood explosive compound, a task that migh ordinarily take months or even years to complete. But inside the machine more than 4,000 tubes and switches swung into action, calculating with lightning speed, automatically sorting and resorting the numbers and solving the almost unmanageable formulas. Then, in a single second, the machine flashed the complete answer to the problem on a TV-like screen. There, for the scientists to look at, was a detailed picture showing what kind of atoms are in the compound and how these atoms are arranged.
The machine which solved this problem is called X-RAC, for X-ray Analogue Computer. Invented by Dr. Ray Pepinsky and paid for by the Office of Naval Research, X-RAC is a hybrid. It combines X-ray studies, television and a huge electronic brain, bringing them to bear on knotty problems of atomic analysis. Before X-RAC can get to work on a particular compound to unravel the mysteries of its structure, the scientists must sibject the material to X-ray analyses. The results are expressed mathematically, in a form that X-RAC can understand and work with. After juggling the symbols according to the formulas, X-RAC's circuits create electrical vibrations analogus to vibrations that would be produced by X-ray beams striking the electron shells of the original atoms. These vibrations produce the final pattern on X-RAC's screen.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
Following the color movie of the "Operation Ivy" H-bomb test, April 19th, 1954, the Civil Defense Administration released color still photographs of the explosion. The one above shows the fireball passing through clouds formed by the eplxion's shock wave. As it rises over the shock cloud, expanding gases from the fireball cool and dreeze water vapor in the air, covering the mushroom with an icy shroud, the still turbulent stem continues to carry up debris from the atoll below.
On the image below a dark filter was used, fireball boils brightly.
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At the University of California the biggest machine ever built for nuclear research has just begun to tear atoms apart with greater energy than any atom smasher has ever produced. In a vast room protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atomns, are shot from a locomotive-shaped accelerator into a vacuum chamber inside a gigantic hollow magnet. There they are speeded to 184.400 miles a second. When they have attained the fantastic energy of 6.25 BEV (billion electron volts), they can be spun against metal targets, smashing the metal atoms and releasing their nuclear particles. The least known of these particles are mesons, which in free form appear as cosmic rays and in the atom are associated with the energy that binds the nucleus together. Because the machine, called a Bevatron since it gets up into the BEV range, splits atoms with such tremendous power, it will create more types of mesons than ever before possible and will explore the mystery of their function.
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Most of the work in atomic plants is done by machines so that men will not be exposed to deadly radiation. But to do certain delicate repair jobs in those zones where radioactive dust is the only danger, men have to walk right into badly contaminated rooms. Up to now they have had to wear bulky clothing which had to be buried after one use, made working awkward and gave only uncertain protection, sometimes requiring the wearer to undergo decontamination scrubbings that hurt his skin.
Now a new airtight, paper-thin suit has been devised which gives a worker more freedom to move about and more protection against plutonium dust. Designed by Homer Moulthrop of the AEC-General Electric Hanford plutonium plant at Richland, Wash., it is made of polyethylene plastic which keeps the deadly dust off the workerțs skin and out of his lungs. With Moulthropțs new suit, a technician simply dons oridinary coveralls, straps on a face mask through which he gets fresh air, and crawls into the suit along its long tunnellike tail which opens into adjoining room.
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To help atomic engineers to reach into dangerously radiated chambers to assemble "hot" engine parts, The General Electric Company created the O-Man, a steel robot that combines the enormous strength needed for hoisting massive atomic aircraft motors with the gentle dexterity required for fitting their parts together (in the image above the arm carries and egg).
O-Man (a contraction of "overhead manipulator") is the world's biggest and strongest arm. It weighs 15 tons, can lift 7.000 pounds. Its "elbow" is a big geared box from which a retractable forearm extends. Its "hand", coming out of the "wrist", has two fingers so skillful that O-Man can screw asmall bolts in place, saw sheet metal, drill holes etc. Coordinated by remote-control levers, its every move is controlled by an operator in a shielded adjoining room.
Cutting cake, O-Man's twin claws manipulate knife to prove wrist motion compensates for stiffness of fingers.
Pouring milk, the hand shows that it can tilt a light object very slowly. It can also rivet, weld, solder, hammer.
Screwing nut on bolt, O-Man reveals wrist turns full circle. For atomic work, operator in shielded room would watch O-Man through binoculars.
Though farmers have plowed their fields in many peculiar patterns, few designs have been as strange as that cut on Long Island in the spring of 1953 for the scientists of Brookhaven Laboratories. Consisting of a series of perfect circles, the pattern was designed to discover how atomic radiation affects the growth of plants. At the center of the field is a pipe containing a piece of highly radiaoctive cobalt, and the Brookhaven scientists planted flowers, trees and crops in wedges around it. Bombarded all summer by the implacable radiation, the plants are now being harvest to see what effects it has had on them.
Plants nearest the cobalt source were almost invariaby destroyed. Those in the outer circles recieved little radiation and grew normally. Those between reacted in different ways. A moderate amount of radiation actually improved the growth of some. Heavier doses caused others to grow eccentrically. But the most improtant result of all was the production of many new variations in plants, which are normally procudec only by years of breeding. Since radiation accelerates variation, the Brookhaven scientists feel they may soon add a variety of desirable qualities to plants.
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This is a bit on the odd side of agriculture. A strange new kind of corn which glows with a cold blue fluorescence under ultraviolet light it is grown at the California Institute of Technology (1951- my annotation). The spectral seedlings are descendants of corn which was exposed to atomic radiation during the Bikini tests to determine the effects of A-bomb radiation on living things.
This unnatural mutation is the most recent of many genetic freaks (sic!) discovered in Cal tech's Navy - and AEC sponsored study of irradiated seeds. Acting on a hunch, geneticists H. J. Teas and E. G. Anderson examined a batch of nomral-looking green seedlings under ultraviolet light. Instantly a few of the plants stood out sharply from the rest. These gleaming sprouts represented a type of mutation different from any of the others produced by the A-bomb's rays. In form and size they are perfectly normal. Their only abnormality is a chemical one: the presence of flurescent substance that gives them their blue glow.
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photos and documentation: LIFE Magazine (US) | Zetu Harrys collection
In 1951 a couple of atom bomb tests in the Frenchman Flat of the Nevada desert caught the public's attention.
This amazing photograph shows for the first time (to the large public - my annotation) a detailed view of the explosion of what is probably a "small-size" atomic bomb. Recently released by the U.S. Atomic Energy Comission, it was taken during A-bomb tests the AEC held early this year (1951- my annotation) at Frenchman Flat in Nevada. Observers estimated the Nevada bombs were small in size, perhaps reduced in power for tactical use in artillery shells or fighter planes.
The AEC offered no information about the picture, but an estimate of what it shows can be made from the report on the effects of atomic weapons released last year by the comission (1950- my annotation). Because of its intense white heat the ball of fire probably was photographed less than a second ater the bomb's detonation. It has begun to rise and in a few seconds will be climbing at a speed of almost 200 mph. The reddish column beneath the fireball is formed by dust sucked up from the ground below. This dust, churning upward with the fireball, will later help form the familiar mushroom cloud of atomic explosions. Since only the fifth and final Nevada bomb appeared to produce such a cloud, this pocture may show an earlier stage of that explosion.
The bomb's fission products (fragments of plutonium or uranium atoms) are already so intensely radioactive they can cause air to glow. And since they were vaporized in the first instant of the explosion, they may have been carried even higher than the fireball itself to produce the mysterious violet haze at the top.
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photos and documentation: LIFE Magazine (US) | Zetu Harrys collection
