Amazing nuclear bomb tests carried out 60 years ago show how little was known about deadly weapons via Mirror

Soldiers are seen running towards the bomb minutes after the blast in the Nevada desert – seemingly unaware of the danger it posed

An amazing video of an early nuclear bomb test in the 1950s shows how little was known about the deadly weapon sixty-years ago.

Produced as a promotional video for the American military in 1955, video shows soldiers taking shelter in trenches as the bomb is dropped less than five miles away from them.

And just a few minutes after the initial explosion and debris has cleared the soldiers begin marching toward the bomb site.

Soldiers can be seen being told that “radiation hazard on the ground is over 90 seconds after the bomb goes off.”

[…]

Indeed, such was the volume of tests in the Nevada desert in the 1950s that residents from hundreds of towns downwind of the fallout soon began to report a range of medical conditions, from unusual skin conditions to leukaemia.

And, in 1982, more than 1,100 people filed a class action lawsuit against the federal government, claiming they had lost relatives to leukemia and other cancers or were suffering from such diseases themselves as a result of exposure to radioactive fallout from the testing program.

[…]

‘Ivy Mike’, the codename of America’s first hydrogen bomb which they tested in 1952, was thought to be approximately 450 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

But, other than the fact that it could be deadly, little was known about the impact of nuclear weapons and the effect of radiation poisoning on the human body at the time.

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