My interest is the “peaceful atom,” not nuclear weapons, but I’m eternally grateful for the deep nuke-related research of Alex Wellerstein. His recent newsletter, “The clouds of Hiroshima,” hammers home the obscene destruction wrought by the Americans to end World War II. In the newsletter, he dissects thirteen photos, from high up or (horifically) from the ground, of the atomic bomb explosion. They’re a stark reminder to me of the philosophical legacy of horror and remorse inherited by the power reactor pioneers. Here I’ll showcase only one of Wellerstein’s gathered photographs, see this and gasp:
Then read Wellerstein’s impassioned yet dispassionate analysis:
The above photograph is really perhaps the most amazing photograph of the cloud that I have seen. The immensity is obvious. The houses give it an immediacy and some sense of scale. Anyone who has tried to photograph large clouds or buildings knows that it is very difficult to really capture the lived sense of scale, so if this is what the photo looks like, the reality must have been even more awesome. We are, I think, looking up at the mushroom stem, with the separated mushroom head much further above and harder to make out.
I urge you to tackle the whole article/newsletter.