Mushroom Cloud

Fallout Radioactive material that falls back to earth after a nuclear explosion. Contains highly radioactive materials from the original weapon, vaporized material from ground zero, and other materials pulled into the mushroom cloud. The amount of fallout and spread of radioactivity depends on weapon yield and meteorological conditions. 

Mushroom cloud Giant mushroom-shaped cloud extending from ground zero well into the atmosphere initially contains an immense fireball and highly... 

The final column presents the radius of 50% mortality from fallout 1 hour after the explosion. Of all of the threats described, fallout is the hardest to predict because of the influence of local, regional, or even global weather patterns. The mushroom cloud can rise into the atmosphere as far as 80,000 feet, where wind and rain influence the time and location for fallout to occur.2 Individuals several miles from ground zero and well outside any radius presented in Table 5.1 can receive significant or even lethal radiation doses from fallout. However, while the air blast, thermal burns, and initial radiation are threats in all directions, fallout is a threat downwind from ground zero. Wind speed and direction vary at different altitudes, and it is safest to assume that fallout is a potential threat in all directions from ground zero. Individuals outside the blast zone generally will have several minutes to an hour or more to seek shelter before fallout arrives. 

Time is precious for anyone within a few miles of ground zero. Such individuals have no time to watch the mushroom cloud, gather personal items, calculate the distance from ground zero, or estimate the weapon s yield. As a general rule, if an individual can see a mushroom cloud, he is exposed to the initial radiation and heat. 

By agreeing to write to President Roosevelt in support of Szilard s idea, Einstein unwittingly linked his name with the bomb for ever. The 1949 cover of Time magazine that juxtaposed Einstein s famously shaggy features against a mushroom cloud sealed in the public consciousness the notion that Einstein somehow invented the bomb. In fact, this ultimate weapon was the product not of his most celebrated abstraction, E = mc, but of a prodigious feat of chemical and mechanical engineering bankrolled by the US military. 

A mushroom cloud rises over Nagasaki after an atomic bomb was detonated there on August 8,... 

Plutonium is used to make nuclear weapons. Here, a computer-enhanced image shows the mushroom-cloud that occurred after the U.S. military released an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, in an effort to end World War II. SCOTT CAMAZINE/ THE NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY COLLECTION/PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC. 

You will know that you are in a nuclear attack by the bright flash, loud explosion, widespread destruction, intense heat, strong winds, and the rising of a mushroom cloud. 

B) Two test tubes are fixed in position and filled to a height of ca. 1 cm with ben-tuyl peroxide careful addition of 2 drops of aniline leads to the immediate formation of white mushroom clouds. 

The most ambitious and also least innocuous training devices are the ones which are meant to simulate an atomic bomb. The EX ModO Nuclear Air-Burst Simulator is an air-launched bomb weighing in excess of 500 lb and containing various flash, smoke, and sound charges. With a total of 300 lb of a modified magnesium flare mixture, red phosphorus, and high exPlosive, it produces an impressive fire ball and mushroom cloud. ... 

Parsons prepared to show a motion picture of the Trinity test. The projector refused to start. Then it started abruptly and began chewing up leader. Parsons told the projectionist to shut the machine off and improvised. He described the shot in the Jornada del Muerto how far away the light had been seen, how far away the explosion had been heard, the effects of the blast wave, the formation of the mushroom cloud. He did not iden-... 

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, photographed from the strike mission B-29. 105. The Enola Gay landing at Tinian after the Hiroshima strike. 

The apparent absence of lethal consequences from the fallout created by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was due to the relatively high altitude at which the bombs had been detonated. The explosions did not sweep up in the mushroom cloud vast quantities... 

Where did they get their resilience and courage 1 would find one answer when I met with the Mushroom Cloud Auxiliary, the Kinoko-kai. They are the mothers of children scarred for life by the bomb. 

Mrs. Kondo did not join the other members of the Mushroom Cloud Auxiliary at that meeting. She wanted to see me alone, to take me out into the city. She insisted. So all other plans for my last afternoon in Hiroshima were canceled. 

Today, a half century later, Nagasaki is barely remembered outside of Japan as the target of the other bomb. Hiroshima itself exists in memory, if at all, as little more than a towering, symmetrical, even aesthetically pleasing, mushroom cloud. In the United States there has emerged an almost pathological aversion to confronting what... 

In Japan, the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometimes is evoked in a manner that portrays the Japanese in World War II as mere victims. The bomb, in such usage, becomes a kind of nationalism—a way of forgetting or canceling out the great suffering the Japanese caused others. To most Japanese, however, the bomb clearly transcends nationalistic history. It is only natural that they focus not on the mushroom cloud but on the human agony beneath it, and feel compelled to offer cries for sanity and peace. 

Although for some the mention of nuclear technology is most likely to conjure up threatening images of mushroom clouds or out-of-control nuclear power plants, nuclear technology has become a daily part of the lives of citizens in much of the developed world. 

The most popular superheroes, such as Superman, and the Marvel family all discovered that the atomic bomb matched even their powers. This made for some rather awkward storytelling. In an October 1946 Action 101 story. Superman has been forced to swallow a drug that makes him temporarily insane. (He did this only to save Lois Lane s life.) In this befuddled state, he mistakenly flies into the Bikini atomic blast, which, fortunately, clears his mind. In gratitude. Superman borrows a camera to photograph the mushroom cloud from above. He does so as "a warning to men who talk against peace. 

From the 1950s forward, nuclear explosions appeared on literally thousands of comic book covers or large interior "splash panels." The niunber of comic book mushroom clouds far exceeded the over one himdred abovegroimd US nuclear tests in Nevada. By the mid-1960s, at the latest, the mushroom cloud had emerged as one of the dominant symbols of the age. ... 

A. Constandina Titus, "The Mushroom Cloud as Kitsch," in Zeman and Amundson, Atomic Culture, 65-81. 

The Mushroom Cloud as Kitsch." In Atomic Culture, edited by Zeman and... 

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