Trinity Day,...

...am I the only one who missed it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_test

Yes...it's true...we used nu-clear weapons on Japan. :lol:

Um, that's not Trinity Day.

Nice try though.

I am wearing my tee shirt today.



Trinity Day gets marked on my calendar.

Oppenheimer was very much in touch when he thought of the Hindu scripture:["Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds.".....]
..But Bainbridge hit the nail on the head when he said: [" Now we are all sons of bitches"].
Hard to believe its been that long ago. This bomb was a joke compared to what could happen now. Really scary. :worried:

Nice.

I really need to get that shirt.

National Atomic Museum

I ordered from the website, although when I finally get to the Southwest I am SOOOO going there.

I wanted the colored one but they were out of it. I also have the Fat Man and Little Boy shotglasses.

Who declared it Trinity Day? :question:

capnhowdy wrote:

This bomb was a joke compared to what could happen now. Really scary.

True.

To put it in a perspective from my personal experience:

1) the weapon used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now used as the detonators for our present weapons

2) today's weapons are so prodigious that a Trident ICBM submarine, one vessel in the whole fleet carries twice the firepower expended in all of WWII, including all of the nuclear weapons dropped as well as the test detonations.

The Trident II missile carries 8 MIRVs with 100 kt of explosive capacity, whereas Little Boy yielded 13 kt.

And just to add to the :tinfoil: factor, any submarine can launch a Tomahawk (TLAM-N) with a payload of up to 200 kt, not to mention air launch, surface craft and so on.

xoxoxoBruce wrote:

Who declared it Trinity Day? :question:

Bomb geeks.

:question:

xoxoxoBruce wrote:

Who declared it Trinity Day? :question:

Evidently a man of the cloth there was looking out the window and said "the Father, the Son, and the Holy shit!!"
:ipray: :shocking:

I have some fused sand, called Trinitite, from the Trinity site.

It is my understanding that I'm not supposed to, but I do.

Just don't handle it for the next 100,000 years or so. It'll be fine.

Uh, Els... you really sure that's healthy for your family to have that just lyin' around? :worried:

When I was a kid, we had this old wind-up alarm clock that had hands that would glow in the dark without holding it up to the light first. Really cool. My dad took it away from us though. He's a physicist, and brought home a geiger counter one day from work. The thing went absolutely nuts when he held it close to the clock. Cool. Never saw that clock since then.

There's a house in Lansdowne, PA that the government finally had to cart away in lead lined barrels because the family that lived there in the 30s had done some piecework for the radium factory ... I remember something about filling needles with radium.

It's mentioned in this superfund cleanup report, as well as in this PDF file which details another superfund site in the area.

There's also the kid who scraped enough radium off of old clocks to make a nuclear breeder reactor in his garage.

Not quite. He dismantled current production Smoke Detectors.

I knew I shoulda found the link...

edit:

Wanting radium for a new gun, David began visiting junkyards and antique stores in search of radium-coated clocks. He'd chip paint from them and collect it.

He did clocks, too.

Don't sweat it. After all, you've blundered into one of my areas of interest. I knew it wasn't old clocks, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what he had used, which is why I had to go find the link.

See my edit - he did both!

Cool, we're both right.

Either way, YIKES!!

Elspode wrote:

I have some fused sand, called Trinitite, from the Trinity site.

It is my understanding that I'm not supposed to, but I do.

DHS is currently en route to your house.

wolf wrote:

There's a house in Lansdowne, PA that the government finally had to cart away in lead lined barrels because the family that lived there in the 30s had done some piecework for the radium factory ... I remember something about filling needles with radium.

Dr. Kabakjian's house was where he radium coated needles they were using in several local hospitals. It was a medical technique he had invented.
He and his whole family died of cancer.
He wasn't entirely stupid though, he had tons and tons of sand he used for shielding. Unfortunately that same sand was sold to masons and used in the cement, stucco and brick mortar of many local projects. :smack:

The history of the Austin Avenue Radiation Site is intertwined with that of the former Superfund Site, the Lansdowne Radiation Site, which was a twin house located at 105-107 East Stratford Avenue in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. A former University of Pennsylvania professor, Dr. Dircran Hadjy Kabakjian, owned the house at 105 East Stratford Avenue, and also worked for Cummings while the company conducted its radium refining operation at the warehouse. While a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Kabakjian developed a crystallization process for the refining of radium, and then sold the process to Cummings. He worked as a consultant to Cummings until 1924, when he set up his own radium processing business in the basement of his home at 105 East Stratford Avenue. The major product of hi s home business was radium-filled implant needles which were sold to medical professionals for the treatment of cancer. The radium refining process developed by Dr. Kabakjian and practiced at Cummings? warehouse used yellowish, shale-like material known as carnotite ore which was mined from deposits in Utah and Colorado. One ton of carnotite ore could produce approximately one-tenth of a grain of radium. During Cummings? years of operation at the Union Avenue warehouse, its radium output is estimated to have been three grams per year. The radium extraction process generated waste tailings. These tailings contained two residual radionuclides--radium 226 and thorium 230. The tailings, which are sand-like waste materials, were either given or solid to local building contractors and others. During the seven years that Cummings operated at the warehouse, those persons used the tailings in mortar, stucco, plaster, and concrete used to build or renovate houses in the area.

.

wolf wrote:

Cool, we're both right.

No, you're both wrong. He really bought uranium from Africa, but Rove, with W's blessing, outed Wilson's wife before she could expose the deal.

[SIZE=1]Sorry, I couldn't help it.[/SIZE] :lol:

Hey, I was pretty close from memory, Jinx. :blush:

Wait a minute, did this kid have Judith Millers aluminum tubes?

xoxoxoBruce wrote:

Hey, I was pretty close from memory, Jinx. :blush:

Very. I didn't know anything about it at all, that's why I went lookin'
Some crazy shit...

A friend of mine lives on Stratford. There's been a number of huge articles in the Sunday Inquirer over the years. :)

The wife and I went to the Atomic Museum while traveling cross-country some years back. Man, do they have some exotic shit on display: one B-52, one 280mm Atomic Annie cannon with transporter, bomb casings of about all the types from Fat Man and Little Boy to the enormous thermonuclear fission-fusion (I don't think it was three-stage fission-fusion-fission) bomb that needed the B-36 to carry it, and then the more modern guys -- the B61 bomb casings that I think take the W88 nuclear warhead, or variations on it. They can get clever and adjust any given bomb to deliver any of a range of yields. There's a model of Yucca Mountain, and an exhibit where you can lift a piece of depleted uranium from its radiation sleeve with a T-handle -- very heavy, like you wouldn't believe. I don't remember seeing very much on ballistic missiles.

B61s look -- well -- ordinary. Not quite as pointy as the low-drag Mk80-82-84 series bombs. Often painted silver, though Marine ordnance guards emphatically discourage anybody gawking at ordnance evolutions involving these aboard carriers. You don't have to be there, they will run you right off. An Aviation Ordnanceman 2nd Class of my acquaintance mentioned to me once that these weapons smell of ozone.