From Argentina to Vietnam, from Nepal to Luxembourg… 🗺️✨ 20 new countries (and Puerto Rico!) have joined the #InfectiousDose community. Wherever you’re tuning in from, thank you for being part of this global conversation. 💚🎙️ #PublicHealth #SciCom infectiousdose.com

The last US nuclear test was Operation Julin – Divider, 23 September 1992 Let’s ensure we keep it the last! #nukesky

Unesco launches virtual museum of stolen cultural objects ...it will use #3D modelling and virtual reality techniques to recreate stolen cultural objects selected by Unesco member states, raising awareness about illicit trafficking. #xr #vr #mr www.museumsassociation.org/museums-jour...

Many people believe this is another test of Russia’s nuclear powered nuclear tipped cruise missile. What some have dubbed the flying Chernobyl.

Tune in to @tcmtv.bsky.social Saturday at 4:00 PM EDT to watch “Fail Safe,” the second and less-well-known film from 1964 dramatizing the colossal risks of relying on the threat and ability to start a nuclear war at any time to—in theory—forever prevent the outbreak of such a catastrophic conflict.

This is probably the most frightening accident involving a US nuclear weapon, although the accidental drop in South Carolina is close. US missiles today rely on solid fuels, which are much less likely to result in this kind of disaster. The guy who found the warhead was a colleague at Los Alamos.

A museum has acquired a treasure trove of scientific items, including Rosalind Franklin’s original Photo 51, the x-ray diffraction image made in 1952 that launched our understanding of the structure of DNA. The collection was developed by a fake scientist, & has spent years languishing in a vault.

Kelly Johnson of Lockheed Skunkworks fame, has an autobiography co-written with Maggie Smith in 1985. Fascinating read about the more mundane parts of his life and career (U-2 and SR-71 lol) ***SPOILER ALERT*** Chapter 19 is an absolute banger!

A few thoughts.

Still intrigued by plutonium core case canvas cover w/ atomic logo that @atomicanalyst.bsky.social notice in Tinian photos I posted. @wellerstein.bsky.social @nuclearanthro.bsky.social @cherylrofer.bsky.social any clue? Have Alan Carr looking into it too..

45 yrs ago tonight at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, the number five engine on the right wing of a B-52H on ground alert caught fire during a drill. The B-52H was loaded with 8 Short-Range Attack Missiles (each armed with a 170-200-kiloton W69 warhead) and 4 B28 bombs (70 kilotons to 1.45 Megatons).

US Army shows off Typhon missile system at Marine Corps base in Japan

Informer antennas for Mark III Fatman test units. Used for drop testing units to transmit telemetry of test unit’s operations during free fall to monitoring receivers. Different from Yagi antennas used for height of burst detonation control.

Rollout of #Ebola vaccine has begun in DRC in response to the country’s most recent zairevirus outbreak. It is still thrilling to know a vaccine for this scourge has been licensed and can be rapidly deployed. Vaccines save lives. www.afro.who.int/countries/de...

Fuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkkk yes!

We are deeply saddened to share that Natalie Crawford, a RAND analyst and leading authority on U.S. air and space power, has died. She was 86 and had worked at RAND for more than 60 years. https://bit.ly/46139rC

If you haven't been following this situation, then the statement from Dr. Dylan Spaulding in and of itself would be insufficient to form a coherent opinion. (Note to @ucs.org: links would have been helpful to provide needed context). Danielle Prokop with Source NM does a better job here:

In the third photo, that’s the “Fat Man” core in its yellow-painted magnesium box, designed by Philip Morrison, with rubber bumpers fashioned out of test tube stoppers (for safety!), sitting on the table in the foreground at left under a (canvas?) cover with a telltale atomic design stenciled on it.

Outside Quonset hut on Tinian, 1945, Harold Agnew and Luis Alvarez (standing) with Bangometer (bangmeter), instrument used for scientific measurements on first Atomic bomb drop over Japan. Inside Quonset hut: bangmeters stored against wall.

We’ve all seen outside images of the Quonset huts on Tinian, so how about a sneak peek inside…

A few years ago @wellerstein.bsky.social got a hold of the Fatman Mark III maintenance manual. Think maybe from John Coster-Mullen if memory serves me correctly. The photo quality was poor so I have been piecing together original photos to match images in manual. Here’s a thread with a few examples.

President Lyndon Johnson’s controversial “Daisy” ad—implying his (unnamed) Republican opponent Senator Barry Goldwater would start a nuclear war—first aired tonight in 1964 on NBC. Although broadcast only once as a paid political advertisement, TV news programs frequently replayed and discussed it.

A pair of little boy gun type nuclear weapons.

Trinity site, radar station. 1945 Radar images from Trinity site but not of the test shot. But apparently they must have had radar of test too!

Neat photograph of Trinity Test Tower with sun in background!

Trinity 0‐5 second N, commercial negative 145, LA531, #1. 8x10 commercial film 1 second to +4 second, aperture ‐ between f-1280 and f‐2200 on 2‐meter achr [achromatic]. Developed 11 minutes in glycine‐borax ‐ 70 degrees. 1945-07-16.

Trinity Test 60 sec N, 3" Mitchell [camera] ,Frame 1424. A halo forms about the cloud which is illuminated by photoflash bomb. 1945-07-16.

100-Ton Pretest at Trinity site had Hanford irradiated slug dissolved in tubing throughout explosives. Some neat photos of them loading the slug via mirrors and long tongs

Balloon used at Trinity Test has Barbara Anne on it. Any clue what that refers to? @wellerstein.bsky.social

Our contribution to #Caturday

Maybe not, but the NNSA’s Office of Defense Programs could become the Office of War Programs. Which would absolutely, positively send just the right message to our adversaries and allies.

So, do we now start calling NNSA the Manhattan Project once again?

I received a pair of interesting documents last week from a FOIA request, wherein Los Alamos scientists in 1947 and 1949 tried to answer the question: “How many nukes would it take to make the atmosphere dangerously radioactive?” You can read the reports here: doomsdaymachines.net/p/irradiatin...

Yikes! It is the blue screen of death!

A detailed new article in Fusion Science and Technology by Los Alamos weapons scientist Jonathan E. Morgan examines the design, construction, and testing of the 1952 10.4-Mt MIKE thermonuclear device tinyurl.com/y3jd5an4. Attn: @wellerstein.bsky.social, @casillic.bsky.social, @saftergood.bsky.social

Zunar wishes everyone peace. But thinks we humans can and must do better!

A #WWII Imperial Council was held the night of Aug 9-10, 1945 and the vote on surrender was a tie, 3-to-3. For the first time in a generation, the emperor stepped forward from his normally ceremonial-only role and personally broke the tie, ordering Japan to surrender. www.osti.gov/opennet/manh....

🚨FOIA RELEASE🚨 "Nuclear Weapon Safety from Production to Retirement," Stanley D. Spray, SAND2001-060" is now FOR THE FIRST TIME available for you to view & read. osf.io/73gtp You can enable my work (& ability to feed the cats, pay rent, etc!) patreon.com/nuclearanthro paypal.me/nuclearanthro

Excellent English-language ed. of the Hiroshima News documentary, ABOVE AND BELOW THE MUSHROOM CLOUD. Featuring atomic bomb survivor Koko Kondo and Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay. They met on the TV show THIS IS YOUR LIFE. www.youtube.com/watch?v=urPZ... cc: @vermontgmg.bsky.social

OTD 75 years ago, a B-29 ferrying an unarmed Mark-4 atomic bomb (without its plutonium capsule) to Guam for potential use in the Korean War crashed and burned attempting an emergency landing 5 minutes after takeoff from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base, CA, killing 12 crew/passengers and injuring 8.

Sad to see him go, but his music lives.

This is a really big deal, especially for communities that struggle to maintain daily dosing.

In other FOIA news... in 2012 I filed a FOIA request with NNSA for reports relating to their work on the GNOMON, a gigaton-range weapon concept from the 1950s. In 2015, they gave me a response where they redacted everything, including the names of the report authors, on the grounds of "privacy."

Classification of Laser-Induced Thermonuclear Explosives www.osti.gov/opennet/serv...

Copy of the Atomic Pioneer medal Nixon gave to Groves, Conant and V. Bush in 1975. Set in acrylic designed by Charles Caldwell/ORNL. I've never seen one and info was hard to find. Anyone know what the copies were for? @wellerstein.bsky.social @conelrad6401240.bsky.social @atomicanalyst.bsky.social

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test — there are many more important takes one could do for this, but for DOOMSDAY MACHINES I put together a small compilation of attempts to capture its spectacle in film: doomsdaymachines.net/p/trinity-go...

2. "The First Light of Trinity" www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-...

For this 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, I was able to get a much higher-resolution version of the map that was created of the test's fallout contours, on July 21, 1945. For full resolution (20MB): files.nuclearsecrecy.com/1945-07-21-t...