Rising over the Pacific… a vision of Armageddon
BALLOONING over the Pacific Ocean, this vast mushroom cloud is an epic and terrifying vision of military might.
The explosion captured in this stunning picture was taken in 1958 – at the height of the nuclear arms race, as the world’s Cold War adversaries tested their increasingly powerful atomic weapons.
But for nearly 60 years the picture has remained a secret, the film it was captured on slowly decaying. It shows the so-called Nutmeg test that was conducted on May 22, 1958, on Eneman Island, part of the Marshall Islands, which lie between Hawaii and the Philippines.
During the nuclear arms race between America and its allies and the Soviet Union, between 1955 and 1989 there were an average of 55 such tests around the world each year. In 1962 alone there were 178 – the same year that the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world close to nuclear Armageddon.
These images are taken from 750 official movies of US nuclear detonations which have been declassified by Washington.
Scientists wanted to show the fearsome power of the weapons and they were released by America’s National Laboratory this week. Each was filmed at 2,400 frames a second with multiple cameras capturing mankind’s ultimate weapon of mass destruction from above, below and from terrifyingly near. The footage includes atmospheric explosions such as Operation Dominic, a series of 31 tests in the Pacific Ocean in 1961. There is also film of Operation Plumbbob, the most controversial nuclear test on the continental US, which took place in 1957 in Nevada and exposed 16,000 American troops to high levels of radiation.
The campaign to declassify the films was led by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. They feared that the films were decomposing and would be beyond repair unless they were digitized soon.