The eyes of two networks' television cameras will be turned toward Ground Zero, Yucca Flat, Nevada. At approximately 20 minutes after the hour, they will pick up the great nuclear explosion there, "designed to show clearly the effects of the blast on the largest collection of men, buildings and materials ever assembled for an atomic test."
Actually, an entire village has been assembled in the bomb area. Among the structures to be tested are homes, factories, ground-level and underground shelters, a power station and a radio tower.
Volunteers compose a Civil Defense team which will be stationed only two miles from Ground Zero, at which point there will also be television coverage. TV newsmen assigned to the event include Morgan Beatty, Jack Beck, Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Hugh Downs, Ben Grauer, Dave Garroway, Grant Holcomb, Herb Kaplow, Robert Trout and Dallas Townsend. Most of them will be stationed on Media Hill, 8 1⁄2 miles from Ground Zero.
The Defense Dept. is collaborating with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Civil Defense Administration in the tests.
In the event of bad weather, the explosion and the telecast will be postponed 24 hours.
The Japanese, who well know the deadly aspects of atomic energy, have been getting their first look at its beneficial side. By tens of thousands they crowded into a traveling Atoms for Peace exhibit, cosponsored by the U.S. Information Service and Japanese newspapers, to gape at Geiger counters, a nuclear reactor model and tall stalks of wheat nourished by irradiated fertilizer. For all the novelty, the Japanese seemed to feel at home in the peacetime atomic age. One of the exhibits (above), a model of a cancer therapy unit, stood in front of a screen with flashing orange lights which represented fissioning uranium atoms. When two pretty attendants grouped themselves around a dummy under the unit's arch-ing drum, they transformed the scientific setting into something as poetically graceful as a Japanese bridge against a sky of gently glowing moons.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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Licking their platters and skillets clean, six crew-cut young men at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver have been thriving on an atomic age diet. The young men, all conscientious objectors to military service, are volunteers helping doctors discover the nutritional value and the possible dangers there may be in food that has been preserved by nuclear radiation. Since every ounce of the irradiated food is painstakingly measured, the test subjects must eat every edible drop or crumb left on the utensils.
So far, frequent medical examinations of the six subjects have un covered no harmful effects from their atomic diet, a result that matches conclusions previously reached in extensive tests with animals. While some foods, such as gelatine and strawberries, do not seem to stand up well under radiation, most others are preserved for months by the sterilizing action of the rays. Medical proof that the process is harmless to eaters would open the way for commercial use of atomic preservation processes.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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Defense tests in the H-bomb age have been designed to prove force of ex. plosives and permanence of buildings. In Houston, Texas, civil defense workers decided to test the resilience of people. As part of the last nationwide exercise, they picked the family of John Christmas, a machinist, to spend three days in a steel-and-concrete shelter. Equipped with bottled water, food, cots, games and a chemical toilet, the family found humidity one of its big problems. With temperature in the 80s and humidity rising to 96, they moved about as little as possible. When Mrs. Christmas lighted the canned heat stove, her husband manned a hand air pump to keep the damp air tolerable. Another big problem was boredom; son Stanley found things so dull underground that he played both sides of a chess game.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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At the U.N. Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy which opens in Geneva this August the U.S. will exhibit a full-sized working reactor. Last month the $350,000 swimming pool reactor, built by Union Carbide and Carbon Corp. for the AEC, was turned on (above) for a final checkout at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Lying safely beneath 16 feet of water, the plates of uranium began slowly to disintegrate inside their aluminum boxes, making the sur. rounding water glow blue from the radiation. The engineers smoothly raised and lowered the rods of boron carbide which govern the rate of fission. Then they switched the reactor off and left it to "cool" for a few weeks before hauling it out of the water for the trip to Geneva.
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Last week (may 1955 - my annotation), the hundreds of Civil Defense observers who had watched the churning, violent ascent of a fiery atomic cloud into the Nevada sky were back home, trying to convey to their communities the enormity of the explosion and educate them on the ways to survival in atomic attack. They had seen the explosion from eight miles off and, next day, went in to compute the damage. But much nearer to Ground Zero were LIFE's lead-shielded robot cameras, which recorded in color what no man could see and survive: the awesome close-up effects of the explosion as it was going on.
The Civil Defense people had gone to Yucca Flat to see the effects of atomic attack on the normal surroundings in which Americans work, play and live. Placed atop a 500-foot steel tow. er was a nuclear device that would unleash upon a simulated town an amount of energy equivalent to the detonation of 35,000 tons of TNT nearly twice the strength of the Hiroshima bomb but only 1/500th the strength of the hydrogen thermonuclear weapon. On a clear, cool day after nine days of postponements due to bad weather, the device was set off at 5:10 a.m.
BLUE AFTERGLOW remains in the atmosphere surrounding the atomic cloud as the mushroom takes shape in the thin light of dawn. This weird effect, which persisted about seven seconds after the boiling mass lost its fiery hues, indi cates intensive degree of ionization (displacement of electrons) of the air by radioactivity and shock waves from within the cloud. In the foreground is the slope of Media Hill where most of the Civil Defense observers watched. The cloud reached a height of about 40,000 feet, a frosty white cap forming on its top as it moved into the cold upper atmosphere. There the winds began to disperse it.
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images and info provided by the LIFE Magazine / LIFE Magazine International / LIFE Magazine Atlantic ARCHIVE from the Zetu Harrys Collection
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