Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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I wish I was old enough to have been involved with nuclear warhead design or, at least, testing during the above-ground testing era.Looks like a nice day at the beach, kicking' back in the lounge chair with Mai Tais and Piña Coladas, watching' the nukes go off. Don't forget sunscreen!
I'm glad they don't test nukes anymore, but it would have been an awesome thing to see.
In this book:
The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374515980/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20
Weapons designer Theodore Taylor describes lighting a cigarette from one of his designs using a small parabolic mirror he found in storage that had a hole in its center for a folded optics system. He used some wire to make a cigarette holder at its focal point. He took a drag after his successful test lit the cigarette. Found this written by someone else via a Google search:
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The name of the weapons designer in the story is Ted Taylor. This was the guy responsible for miniaturising nuclear weapons so that instead of weighing several thousand pounds and requiring large aircrafts to carry them to their targets, they can fit snugly into say, the cone of a Tomahawk cruise missile (e.g. the W80 nuclear device, itself a derivative of the B61 designed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory where Taylor worked).
According to McPhee, Taylor had come up with an idea for a nuclear device that could be made lighter by using unconventional materials in its construction. The device was called Scorpion and like any new idea it had to be tested to prove the concept.
So Scorpion was fabricated and hung on a tower somewhere in the Nevada dessert. Ted Taylor and the other observers watched from a safe distance away. The flatness of the dessert meant that this distance could be really, really large. The test was delayed for some technical reason or the other and during the wait Ted Taylor got bored. In an impulsive act he got hold of a parabolic mirror which happened to be lying around, aimed it at the test site where Scorpion was located and placed one end of a Pall Mall cigarette at the mirrors focus. When the nuclear device was finally detonated, the light emanating from the explosion bounced off the mirror and fell on the cigarette, its intensity such that it instantly burned the exposed end of the cigarette. Taylor reached for his smouldering Pall Mall and drew in a puff.
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Here's that test:
Series: Operation Tumbler-Snapper
Test: How
Time: 11:55 5 June 1952 (GMT)
Location: Nevada Test Site (NTS), Area 2
Test Height and Type: 300 Foot Tower
Yield: 14 kt
This device (code named Scorpion) was designed in part by Ted Taylor. Snapper How was the first test to use a beryllium neutron reflector/tamper, which would become standard in later weapons. The test device used the same 22 inch implosion system as Snapper Easy, but the lightweight tamper cut 80 pounds off the implosion system weight. Predicted yield was 11 kt.
I've read that during some of the very large operational test series at the National Test Site, TV/radio weather reports even as far away as Ohio had warnings about rain contamination levels. Don't drink the rainwater sort of things. That's not good...
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