00:00 My name is Greg Spriggs.
00:01 I work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
00:04 Prior to that, I worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Critical Mass Lab.
00:09 Today we're going to be looking at nuclear explosions and trying to judge how realistic
00:14 they are.
00:15 This is a matter of life and death.
00:18 They were trying to hold all the cables in place.
00:20 This was a test.
00:21 They weren't certain that this particular design was going to work.
00:25 And so this was sort of the prototype.
00:27 They didn't go to great lengths to make everything really robust.
00:33 So they were just basically winging it with duct tape to hold things in place.
00:38 And the actual one probably was a little bit more structured and more engineered to be
00:43 a real weapon.
00:44 The reason they suspended the bomb from the tower, they wanted to get it above the ground
00:49 so they could measure the shockwave.
00:51 There was a lot of uncertainty, since it was the first one, there was a lot of uncertainty
00:55 as to whether this would work.
00:57 And if it did work, how much energy would be released.
01:00 And so they needed to be able to film this and they didn't want the shockwave interacting
01:04 with the surface.
01:06 They thought that if they suspended it up high enough that they would kind of suppress
01:10 the amount of nuclear fallout that would occur by all the dirt being lofted.
01:18 They had actually built several shelters for the scientists.
01:24 I think the closest shelter was about five miles away.
01:27 And of course, everybody was wearing goggles.
01:29 When the detonation goes off, it would look very bright, but it would protect their eyes.
01:33 Here are the glasses.
01:34 Very, very dark.
01:36 Right now, I can't see anything.
01:37 It's pitch black in here.
01:39 But if a nuclear detonation went off, I could see it.
01:47 They were all laying down, thinking that the shockwave might get to them.
01:50 And if they were laying down, that it wouldn't be a direct hit.
01:53 You don't want to have a big surface area.
01:55 If the shockwave is coming over, you want to be kind of laying flat.
01:57 There have been situations where we've had tests where the yield was a little bit higher
02:02 than what people thought or the wind blew the bomb a little bit closer to the observers
02:07 that people have actually gotten a little bit of a sunburn.
02:10 I don't think the sunscreen would have helped very much.
02:13 It's basically a heat flux that hits you.
02:16 I guess it would have helped a little bit, but not much.
02:19 For the accuracy of what the weapon looked like and how they hung it from the tower and
02:23 so forth, maybe a seven.
02:24 [BLANK_AUDIO]
