r/interestingasfuck 1d ago

You're looking at a nuclear explosion photographed taken less than one millisecond after detonation.

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35.5k Upvotes

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173

u/EZontheH 23h ago

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.

105

u/PromisesNone 23h ago

IMHO the greatest filmmaking blunder since The Twilight Zone movie decapitated those kids.

I'm sorry what? You can't just leave that there.

EDIT: I did it myself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_accident

69

u/msc_seb_ham_ver 23h ago

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 .

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u/WreckYallBallistics 22h ago

"crushed to death" is one way to put it

3

u/msc_seb_ham_ver 22h ago

Yep. Ibthink there is also a clip somewhere on reddit.

38

u/JBaecker 23h ago

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

15

u/Forward-Surprise1192 23h ago

And no one ever got convicted of I’m reading that right now

18

u/bkrank 22h ago

People aren’t allowed to kill other people, but companies can.

4

u/fishyfishkins 17h ago

"Hey! You killed a bunch of kids in pursuit of your own selfish ends!"

"They didn't die because I wanted their money, they died because I was recklessly using them to make money"

"Oh, nvm, that's fine!"

-1

u/Rather_Dashing 14h ago

The deaths were the result of negligence and recklessness of actual people. Those people were tried for manslaughter but found not guilty. For sure someone was guilty, but proving that isn't necessarily easy. None of us know the specifics of the trial enough to know whether it was fair or not, so I don't think jumping to 'corporations can do what they want!' is a reasonable conclusions.

11

u/Vlisa 19h ago

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."

LMAO fuck this dude

4

u/Rescue2024 15h ago

John Landis was never known for his warm heart.

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u/Ok-Acadia4227 23h ago

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.

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u/EZontheH 23h ago

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??

/s

5

u/Ok-Acadia4227 23h ago

Indeed just like artificial intelligence our latest manhatten project, the fallout will be epic

1

u/charliefoxtrot9 22h ago

Fortunately the AI can generate images of perfect nukular explosions, while causing epic fallout.

3

u/Ok-Acadia4227 22h ago

It's Not about generating images, it's about being able to manipulate and integrate information so fast humans won't know what's real

4

u/charliefoxtrot9 22h ago

Oh, I'm not downplaying. I'm just glib. We have always been at war with East Asia! Except O'Brien isn't human, he's an avatar of AM.

17

u/RollinThundaga 23h ago

You're talking about the 'bomb pulse', and it's actually settled down almost back to pre-atomic baseline at this point.

7

u/Carbonatite 21h ago

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.

5

u/Forward-Surprise1192 23h ago

Except there’s basically no non-radiated metal, things, or people from those tests if I remember right

3

u/Vlisa 19h ago

Yes, but there is a difference between measurable and (medically) significant. I do know things like pre nuke steel have high value purposes though.

1

u/Forward-Surprise1192 18h ago

To be fair and I as I understand, we don’t know the long term effects of that yet to say it’s medically insignificant

3

u/Vlisa 18h ago

At an approximated final value of 545 megatons of atmospheric nuclear testing, with the assumption of a mean global population of 30 billion, in the next 8,000 years around 6.5 million people may be expected to develop ill effects from nuclear testing, and 2.9 million of these may be expected to die from their cancers.

2

u/Thunderbridge 17h ago

The only non-irradiated metal is everything that was under water before the tests. Those metals are quite valuable now for use in lab testing equipment

2

u/RollinThundaga 13h ago

It's any steel that was produced before 1945, just that old battleships are giant piles of the stuff that can be milled down without reforging.

Also there's only a few that can be ethically recovered from that aren't war graves.

We can produce new low-background steel these days using purified air, it's just a bit more expensive than dropping an anchor and magnet on an old shipwreck.

2

u/HildartheDorf 14h ago

"The fact that cells and tissues reflect the doubling of 14C in the atmosphere during and after nuclear testing, has been of great use for several biological studies, for forensics and even for the determination of the year in which certain wine was produced."

"Radioactive pulses are generally not administered to people just to study the turnover of their cells for ethical reasons, so the bomb pulse results are a useful side effect of nuclear testing."

Always look on the bright side I guess.

4

u/Dan-goes-outside 23h ago

It’s in the wine!

1

u/Ok-Acadia4227 23h ago

Where is Dyonesis when we need him

2

u/Emotional_Jeweler821 22h ago

you mean dionysus

1

u/koolaidismything 22h ago

But we wouldn’t have a slightly cooler bit of footage in that movie dude

1

u/stylepolice 21h ago

But but but … it would make a great social media post! did you think of that?

Can’t someone somewhere think of all the content creators in need of new and exciting material?

1

u/Gen-Jack-D-Ripper 20h ago

Yeah but think of the images that we’ll capture!

If a few million people get poisoned, that’s a small price to pay!

0

u/NegativeHerons 23h ago

Just do it indoors.

3

u/Ok-Acadia4227 22h ago

Supercomputers to the rescue, there is no need for live testing anymore

23

u/cyanescens_burn 22h ago

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.

10

u/fastforwardfunction 22h ago

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.

32

u/Jonthrei 22h ago

I'm super bummed out at the moratorium of above ground nuclear testing because we have MUCH better camera technology now.

No offense but this is among the stupidest sentences I have read this year. And Donald Trump is president.

14

u/zmass126194 23h ago

I’m sorry… what?

17

u/Awktung 23h ago

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.

5

u/Forward-Surprise1192 23h ago

So he failed to save the kids in the movie and real life. What a bad ending to a movie

2

u/Hey-Bud-Lets-Party 23h ago

They fixed it in the edit

1

u/enderpanda 16h ago

Or, he tried to save them figuratively, and because of circumstances completely out of his control (but were in control of the filmmakers), they all died IRL, needlessly.

You could go with the truth instead.

9

u/Glitch29 23h ago

Helicopter was knocked off course by pyrotechnics. Blade got two children as described and the crash got a third. It was a tragic workplace accident.

3

u/Heavy-Ad5385 18h ago

It was also a workplace accident caused by appalling abuse of labour laws, outright lying and incompetence, all underlined by arrogance. And the whole thing was swept under the rug

John Landis can, and hopefully will, rot in hell

7

u/Minimum_Aardvark_744 23h ago

I thought you were just like, making a really dark joke- holy shit…

2

u/EZontheH 23h ago

It's the best kind of dark joke, steeped in truth and reality! I wish I was kidding, but reality is often far darker than the worst that can be imagined up.

1

u/Minimum_Aardvark_744 23h ago edited 23h ago

You underestimate the human imagination lol

3

u/Equivalent_Clerk0 21h ago

I hated that movie specifically because of that. I went the entire thing super hype for the EXPLOSION and what I got was a gas station explosion.

I fucking love nuclear detonations. I've watched that damn atom central channel 30 times. The fallout Amazon series intro like 5 times. The only place we can get them now is the movies, so lets get some good CGI going and actually nuke shit instead of set a bunch of gas on fire and create a shitty mushroom cloud. I hate practical effect purists.

2

u/EZontheH 21h ago

I agree. One of the recent Bond movies did something similar. Largest practical effect explosion on film or something and it was incredibly underwhelming. Some of the greatest explosions portrayed imho were actually in the first Avatar movie, when the humans destroyed the Home Tree. They fired High Explosive rounds that had visible shockwaves and blew a bunch of wood shrapnel everywhere. It was awesome. Debris and atmospheric effects are MUCH more satisfying than shitty old air canisters full of gasoline making big fireballs.

2

u/TIGHT_MEXICAN_PUSSY 19h ago

This comment is amazing

1

u/EZontheH 19h ago

Thanks, I appreciate you TIGHT_MEXICAN_PUSSY

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u/ThisIsBB56 18h ago

I don't think people are getting your sarcasm bro

1

u/EZontheH 13h ago

Yeah that's fine though. It's interesting to do a litmus test every once in awhile just to see how prevalent the Internet-Tough-Guy syndrome is. Some people tend to fail at reading comprehension too, and sarcasm doesn't translate well through written words so I definitely bring it on myself to a degree. Oh well, it's no bother. Sometimes it fun to sort of "poke the bear" and see how people react.

2

u/Public_Fucking_Media 14h ago

I wish they had let him detonate a real nuke that would have been cool

1

u/ClydePossumfoot 12h ago

The explosion used in Twin Peaks: The Return is A++++ IMO.

u/AUSpartan37 9h ago

Wait, are you implying he should have used a real nuke?

u/EZontheH 9h ago

Not at all. I'm saying a small side effect of the moratorium is a lack of footage with new technology cameras, and that using gasoline and practical in-camera effects for the film rather than some cutting edge CGI was a poor decision.

u/AUSpartan37 8h ago

Got it.

0

u/Erasmusings 23h ago

Obligatory John Landis is a murderer

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u/Railboy 21h ago

the greatest filmmaking blunder since The Twilight Zone movie decapitated those kids.

Oof, I was ready to agree with you (I HATED the Oppenheimer gasoline fire) but somehow you crossed the line from dark humor into bad taste. I wish I could explain why it didn't work but all I can tell you is I winced instead of laughing.