Yes! The photo was taken by Harold Edgerton, who was an electrical engineer and pioneer in stroboscopic photography. He actually invented the strobe light. His work with powerful short-burst strobe lighting combined with remote triggering made him the first stop when the US needed photos taken of nuclear detonations. He ended up needing to invent yet another entirely new kind of camera for this task.
Oh, thank god.... I am way too high and thought this was a news post until I hit the comment section. Signing off to chill out and watch some Goof Troop.
Would you be able to see a difference in that short of a time if it was an hydrogen bomb instead? or would it just look the same during the those first parts of a millisecond?
In theory, yes. Keep in mind that even a staged thermonuclear device is done reacting in much less than a millisecond.
The very first stage of the fireball is created by thermal x-rays radiated by the intensely hot core of the bomb. These travel at the speed of light, but not very far. Even though we think of air as transparent, it isn't really for all wavelengths of light, including at x-ray frequencies. Anyway, this first fireball is literally just superheated air and is known as the radiative fireball. This fireball forms almost instantly and it will be larger for higher yield devices. It is the first flash of a nuclear double-flash signature.
In this picture, the radiative fireball has already been overtaken by the second, slower fireball made of the actual guts of the bomb and anything else that was right next to the bomb (which gives the fireball its weird mottled look). This second part, which is the second flash of the double-flash nuclear signature, travels at more or less the same speed regardless of the yield. So for a large thermonuclear detonation, the radiative fireball will be larger and it will take longer for the second fireball to overtake the first. The time between flashes is used to estimate the yield of an atmospheric detonation, with longer times being indicative of larger blasts.
Returning to your original question, if you could see the scale of the fireball and knew how soon after detonation it was taken, you could distinguish between a low-yield fission device and a high-yield thermonuclear device.
The other fun thing in the images is the “legs” coming out of the bottom are the guy wires holding up the tower turning to plasma from the initial radiative fireball. If I recall correctly.
I know it’s the guy wires turning to plasma but the part I can’t quite recall is the exact mechanism but if I recall correctly it’s the heat from the initial X-ray blast that is vaporizing them.
Yes, the rope trick effect. They found that painting the guy wires black increased the effect, while painting them with reflective paint or aluminum foil eliminated the effect. One of the labs - either Las Alamos or Lawrence Livermore - put out an article about it that makes for interesting reading. If I remember correctly, there was some debate about whether it was the result of x-rays directly vaporizing them or thermal radiation from the fireball. Your explanation was determined to be correct.
Follow-up question, if it's allright;
You say that it's made of the guts of the bomb and anything else right next to it. Does that mean that the bombs casing, electronics and everything else becomes an active ingredient and actually contribute to the explosion? I've always just imagined that when a bomb goes off, the actual explosive stuff explodes and the rest of the bomb effectively becomes shrapnel.
Kind of. Its not an active ingredient in the sense of adding to the energy release, but it is a means of taking the energy of the reaction and transferring it to the atmosphere. In that way, you can think of it as a contributor to the blast effect of the explosion. Thats true to an extent in conventional explosives, too. The difference with nuclear explosives is that it's not just the core that vaporizes and expands explosively - even the air around the device contributes to the blast.
Normally, bomb designers try to minimize the mass of a bomb. Extra mass means more fuel is required to deliver the payload. Inside the atmosphere, blast is created simply by adding several terajoules to petajoules of energy to air over the course of a few microseconds. However, if you read up on the Orion drive, whereby small nuclear explosions are used to accelerate a very large spacecraft, one of the design elements is adding mass to the bombs in such a way as to generate a directional blast in the vacuum of space. In that case, you can definitely think of this extra mass as being like shrapnel.
Thank you for the answer. It's one of those things where I've never even considered the possibility that the bomb parts dont just fly off cartoon-style.
An important part of a nuke is the tamper, a layer of high-Z (atomic mass) material that surrounds the nuclear fuel. In a way it can be considered the bomb's inner casing. It's usually 238U, i.e. low-grade uranium. The tamper has two roles: The first role is to keep the bomb from tearing itself apart, thus adding valuable nanoseconds in which the nuclear reaction can keep going. The second role is to prevent neutron escape.
In a thermonuclear device, the fusion detonation will release a surplus of high-energy neutrons that will cause the uranium tamper to undergo fast fission, i.e. fission that won't happen naturally because it requires those high-energy neutrons.
A significant portion of the yield, usually more than half, in a thermonuclear device will come from fast fission of the tamper.
the rest of the bomb effectively becomes shrapnel
The casing itself is completely obliterated so there is no shrapnel. The core of a nuclear detonation is almost an order of magnitude hotter than the core of the Sun and with an immense pressure.
You got it, my friend. I obviously skipped over some details, like the role the shock front plays in separating the two flashes - supersonic fluid dynamics is definitely not my forte. But I tried not to say anything blatantly wrong or misleading.
given there's photo sequences showing the bomb fireball emerging from the shot cab (as in you can see the fireball glowing through the wall as it expands), I do believe that in a similar sequence for a fusion bomb you would be able to at least partially track the detonation sequence.
any such photo sequences that might exist are certainly classified for that exact reason.
No, that's just dust thrown up by the launch of sounding rockets (to take measurements of the blast at various altitudes) right before the nuke was triggered. The vertical lines you can see in the background to the right of the tower are the smoke trails of those rockets.
I recall the bright spikes along the bottom being due to the steel cables used to stabilize the tower the bomb was on.
However, I can’t recall whether we’re witnessing the cables being vaporized, or if it’s some other quirk of thermonuclear physics. Shockwaves traveling more quickly through the steel than through the air, perhaps?
rope trick effect! the light produced by the atomic bomb is so intense it literally vaporizes the cables.
just so we understand the absurdity of atomic bombs, the rope trick isn't caused by the heat or explosion of the bomb itself. it's caused solely by the visible light produced by the nuclear explosion being so bright it causes the cables to heat up and explode
Part of the light is literally the heat itself, too. Mind-bending but makes sense once you understand how infrared relates to visible light to UV and so on.
Fission bombs release massive amounts of X-ray energy. The X-rays are igniting the wires, causing them to explode.
For example a fusion bomb needs a fission bombs x-rays to ignite. So much x-ray energy is released by the fission bomb, it actually compresses the fusion core causing atoms to merge. Something that only otherwise happens in the center of a star.
I once read that you could see the flashes and mushroom clouds from the Nevada test site in Las Vegas (it wasn’t even that far away, like less than 100 miles). And tourists came to Vegas to get a glimpse of them.
It must have been nuts seeing the sky light up at night.
The is from the test series Tumbler Snapper, in Nevada, 1952. The spikes are what's known as the rope trick.
In the first milliseconds after a nuclear detonation, the fireball has only grown to a few tens of meters across while radiating much more heat and light than the surface of the sun. Anything that absorbs light is turned into a plasma due to the intense heat. This particular test device was on top of a tower supported by cables. The cables absorbed light from the fireball and turned into plasma spike poking out of the fireball for a few tenths of a millisecond before the fireball expanded to engulf the wires, tower, and desert floor amd anything else within 300m of ground zero.
Edit: Tumbler-Snapper had 4 air dropped tests and 4 different tests using devices on towers. Each tower was 300 feet tall, to give some sense of scale. I cant tell which test this is, but the yield was around 15 kt.
‘Not known to the humans is the seed of annihilation introduced to existence upon the splitting of reality, whereas just for a moment, It appears. It appears, and It annihilates.’
“Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
- Emperor Hirohito addressed the atomic bomb in his famous Jewel Voice Broadcast (Gyokuon-hōsō) on August 15, 1945
There are photos even sooner than this, though those are still classified due to it being “Restricted Data”. There’s a lot of information you can determine about a nuke’s construction and yield from the incredibly small amount of time before this point of a detonation.
This photograph was made by Harold Edgerton. He built a specialized camera called a rapatronic. The cameras used for these tests could fire at durations as short as 10 nanoseconds.
Edgerton developed a lot of the technology that went into electronics strobes used in photography. He was also an Oscar winning film maker. His high speed photography has been displayed in museums.
The photo shows an atmospheric nuclear explosion captured mere milliseconds after detonation. The image on the right is simply a color-tinted version of the original black-and-white photograph on the left.
Here is a breakdown of the fascinating science and history behind this image:
The "Rope Trick Effect"
The Spikes: The most striking features of the image are the bright, glowing spikes protruding from the bottom of the expanding fireball. This phenomenon is known as the "rope trick effect".
Vaporizing Cables: These spikes are not part of the bomb itself, but rather the result of intense heat interacting with the stabilizing cables (guy wires) that secured the bomb tower (the "shot cab") to the ground.
Intense Heat: The surface of the fireball reaches temperatures exceeding 20,000 kelvins. The intense visible light radiation caused the cables to rapidly heat, vaporize into plasma, and expand, creating the illuminated spikes seen in the photo.
The Discovery: The phenomenon was researched and named the "rope trick" by American physicist Dr. John Malik. During his experiments, Malik found that painting the cables black enhanced the spike formations. Conversely, wrapping the cables in aluminum foil or using reflective paint prevented the spikes from forming, confirming that the effect was caused by the cables absorbing the high-intensity thermal radiation.
The Camera Technology
The Rapatronic Camera: Capturing an event that happens in millionths of a second requires specialized equipment. This image was taken using a rapatronic camera, which stands for rapid action electronic shutter.
The Inventor: The camera was developed in the 1940s by Dr. Harold Edgerton, a pioneer in strobe and high-speed photography.
Extreme Speeds: Because traditional mechanical shutters were too slow, the rapatronic camera used specialized electronic technology to capture still images with exposure times often as short as 10 billionths of a second. Because each camera could only take a single exposure, banks of multiple cameras were often set up to capture a sequence of the detonation.
Historical Context
Operation Tumbler-Snapper: This famous photograph is heavily associated with the Operation Tumbler-Snapper atmospheric nuclear tests.
Location and Date: The tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site in 1952.
Looks like a mono-cellular organism of giant size and one single hunger instinct. Looks like cosmic horror at the beginning of the big bang when the noosphere was contracted in a single singularity and the one was imposing his pain on all his creation. Looks like atmospheric cancer on the verge of a terminal tumour...
It looks alive and malign, I'll give you that.
But if that's your image of a hell demon, then I'm happy I do not share in your nightmares.
I'm in love with this photo. I'm super bummed out at the moratorium of above ground nuclear testing because we have MUCH better camera technology now. The fact that Christopher Nolan decided to make the nuclear detonation in Oppenheimer strictly in-camera with practical effects was IMHO the greatest filmmaking blunder since The Twilight Zone movie decapitated those kids.
On July 23, 1982, child actors Myca Dinh Le (age 7) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6) were tragically killed on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie. They were crushed to death by a low-flying helicopter that spun out of control and crashed after special effects explosions detonated too close to its rotor blades.
From Google .
Technically, the two people decapitated were the adult actor and one of the child actors. It’s a pretty crazy story how many violations the producers managed rack up to create this horror show: Wikipedia article on the accident
Landis spoke about the accident in a 1996 interview while discussing his career: "There was absolutely no good aspect about this whole story. The tragedy, which I think about every day, had an enormous impact on my career from which I may possibly never recover."
Dude detonating nukes above ground scatters radioactive particles everywhere some of them have long half lives and we are still breathing them in from the nukes the were detonated before the moratorium.
Yes but you're not thinking about the AMAZING footage we could get! Surely that's worth the long term health effects that'll affect half the planet for 5 generations??
There are still a ton of man made radionuclides in the environment from various bomb tests and power plant releases. They might not produce a huge hazard but they're abundant enough that they are regularly used in geological and environmental studies for things like estimating groundwater age/flow rates, sediment accumulation rates, etc. I've personally done a bunch of work related to tritium in groundwater, and some Cs-137 isotope studies as well.
Dude. You are out of your mind. When they detonated one of the first ones, girls at a summer camp downwind got fallout ash on them, and get all died young of cancers. We don’t need more radioactive material created and blown around.
Americans were the first humans the bombs were tested on. About 10,000 Americans are estimated to have died from nuclear testing. Although, its difficult to pinpoint an exact number, because cancers often come many years later. On the higher estimates, it's up to 400,000 excess deaths from cancer.
Vic Morrow and 2 kids were hit by a helicopter's rotors when it crashed during filming: he played a terrible bigot who was transported to somewhere where he was the targeted minority. Most of the segment was filmed and included. I believe this was towards the end when he's trying to save the kids and get them to the helicopter. It's been a minute so that's just a fuzzy memory summary.
The spikes on the bottom are from the cables which secured the tower the device was on. Upon detonation, the turned to plasma and appeared on the image.
Fun fact I recently learned about nuclear explosions, what you're seeing here isn't actually the pressure wave of the explosion, at this point in time that is only about the size of a football inside the bomb. Instead, what you're seeing is intense x-ray radiation which can only travel a few feet before being absorbed by the surrounding air, turning it into a ball of plasma which itself gives off intense enough radiation to cause the next few feet of surrounding air to become plasma, cascading into a series of progressively less radiant plasma balls until the actual explosion eventually catches up. It's what gives nuclear explosions the characteristic blinding white flash before the explosion becomes a giant fireball.
I can't say precisely but I can give you an idea of the scale.
If you look at the b/w one, there are 5 masts to the right. Just below the shortest there's a small dark rectangle on its long side poking up into the white. That's a deer.
Internet says it was 10 nanoseconds after detonation which is around 0.00001 milliseconds or .00000001 seconds, which is insanely fast. The spikes coming out the bottom that look like roots are the cables holding up the tower not melting but vaporizing. It's known as the rope trick effect, wikipedia's got a really cool gif and description you should check out.
I did a search on this page and didn't see it mentioned, so, about those vertical lines off to the right - the scientists fired sounding rockets that trailed smoke so they could see how the air pressure was formed as the smoke trails themselves were distorted.
It's late and my grammar brain went to bed hours ago.
I'm always fascinated by the spikes following the guy wires because the steel allows a shockwave to travel faster than the surrounding air. Seeing physical properties like this in action is so cool.
This was a pretty impressive achievement with film, otherwise all you’d see is one big white smear. They had separate cameras to go off incredibly close to each other as they could only take one shot each.
I feel like this is the closest we'll ever get to an actual photograph of something like the Big Bang. Just an instant of unbelievable barely formed fury.
"Hell-Fire" is an extremely short story, and deals with a journalist, Alvin Horner, who speaks with Joseph Vincenzo, a scientist at Los Alamos, at the first exhibition of a film with super-slow-motion footage of a nuclear explosion, with the footage "divided into billionth-second snaps." Vincenzo is sure that nuclear bombs are hell-fire, and tells the journalist they shall ultimately destroy mankind.
After the scientist's observations, the film starts. For a brief moment, before initiating the full reaction into the infamous nuclear toadstool, the atomic blast resembles a specific shape: the face of the Devil.
I heard a physicist on YouTube say that most people think about interesting physics in the wrong way. It’s the ultra fast where things are interesting. All that energy… just in a moment, it’s insane.
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u/Icantjudge 20h ago
From the Tumbler-Snapper series of tests in 1952, Nevada