Nobel Peace Prize for Nihon Hidankyo

The above video comes from military archives documenting the nuclear testing program. It began on July 16, 1945 at what is now called the Trinity Site in New Mexico. The footage was declassified ca. 1995. Included are additional explosions at Trinity Site itself, as well as on and around uninhabited atolls in the South Pacific. The final blast shows a hydrogen bomb being detonated in outer space … but more about that later.

In October of 2024 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots organization in Japan formed in 1956 by survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They estimate there are 180,000 survivors still living in the country. Nihon Hidankyo was awarded the Prize for their unrelenting efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions were not in the video (you can find them online if you’re interested), but this is what they looked like from the aircraft that dropped them. The plumes of the mushroom cloud rose to 20,000 feet, and the immediate blast radius was 6–7 miles:

The awarding of this year’s Peace Prize, not to mention Putin’s incessant saber-rattling, inspired me to post this media as a reminder of just how destructive nuclear weapons are. And weapons in the current nuclear arsenal are 10s of times more powerful than what you see in the video. I share Nihon Hidankyo’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons, and pray that we get there some day.

There are currently 12,512 nuclear weapons on this planet, with a total yield of 4000 megatons of TNT. That works out to 9.3×10¹² kilowatt hours of electricity —  enough to power 900 million homes for a year! The nuclear material in these weapons can be recycled and used in existing fission reactors to produce carbon-free energy. The Megatons To Megawatts program demonstrated the feasibility of such recycling, but the de-enrichment process is complex as you’ll read if you follow that link.

I said I’d speak more about that last blast in the video. It’s spherical shape was a consequence of detonating in outer space — the typical mushroom cloud is a result of the blast vaporizing material on the ground and the fireball creating strong updrafts by heating the air around it. The test was code-named Starfish Prime, and it was a thermonuclear weapon (aka “hydrogen bomb”) with a yield of 1.4 megatons. Here’s a frame from the video showing that blast:

Launched from Johnston Atoll in the south pacific, it has gone down in history as the “Rainbow Blast” —radiation from the blast excited Earth’s upper atmosphere producing artificial auroras visible as far east as Hawaii. It disrupted power and communications networks for several hours. The Soviets followed with their own outer space detonations and observed similar effects. By the 1960s, radiation levels had risen around the globe.

Fortunately, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned any further testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, the atmosphere, or underwater, though it did permit underground testing. It was ratified by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, and signed by 123 other nations.

So that was my refresher on nuclear weapons. There’s a lot of people alive today who never went through the “duck and cover” exercises (not like they would have made a difference). And there’s many who’ve never seen the full range of nuclear testing as captured on this video. The occasional mushroom cloud in an action movie doesn’t have quite the same impact.

Next Week in Sky Lights ⇒ Why Fusion Power Is So Difficult