re: Feds declassify hundreds of nuclear weapons movies

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Peazey

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would be nice to have a map of where all of these were detonated.

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Question for someone smarter than I. Vertical contrails like the ones below show up in a lot of this footage. Warning flares? Some weird byproduct of the blast?

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When developing new hardware, they'd usually just build a tower to set the device on top of before they'd detonate it. The tower, like any tower, had guy wires to stabilize it. What you're looking at in that video is an ultra high speed (I mean ULTRA) slow-mo. The spherical front you're seeing is the actual shock wave from the blast that's visible and defines the boundary of the fireball. Now, that fireball is EXTREMELY bright because thermonuclear detonation. The shock wave is travelling outward and shining bright enough to vaporize material in front of it. So, that finger you see coming out of the fireball is the fireball's light explosively ablating the guy wire from the tower before the fireball even reaches it. Essentially, the light from the fireball is intense enough to heat the surface of the guy wire so quickly that it violently expands and is blown outward from the center because the metal can't transmit the heat to the center as fast as the fireball pumps heat into it; the outermost layer just gets hotter and hotter and essentially explodes. On the far right of the video, you can see the tower doing the same thing beneath the shot.

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