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Recent entries
some death-defying species from madagascar, my death defied and her extinction defied, yeah both in one trip - 2009-08-11
the borg - 2009-08-10
appearing soon in your hometown - 2009-08-10
tweet - 2009-08-09
don't be talking about me in front of my face, yall - 2009-08-06
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By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets.
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A bibliography of my published books and stories.
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Here's my card-counting FAQ. |
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| Visit my original website but I recommend putting pop-up/banner blockers on first. |
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| A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!!
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates
on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit
the localroger diary. |
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| Visit Peachfront's Cookbook, for recipes that are fast, cheap, and good. A work in progress. |
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| The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill blog by Mark Bittner about feral Cherry-Headed Conures in San Francisco. |
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national atomic museum
2004-11-25 - 9:06 a.m.
All photos © 2004 by Elaine Radford and Roger Williams
We've probably all met those irrepressible old gentlemen in the casino who, when asked a
polite "How are you?" like to exclaim, "I'm great. Any day that we wake up is a great
day!" In the spirit of those old guys, let's all agree that any day that we don't wake up
to nuclear annihilation is a great day, considering that, by all report, we were all
supposed to be history by this time. So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I thought
I'd post a few pictures from our recent visit to the National Atomic Museum in
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The small device is a 76 pound Davy Crocket bomb -- not quite a suitcase
model, but scary enough to meet the needs of generations of suspense fiction
writers.
By the way, I decided to play with some black/white photography in an effort to
recover the spirit of the age, so you'll have to excuse me if you find
b/w photography irritatingly arty. It actually cost more -- sometimes a lot
more -- to publish color photography well into the 1990s, so black/white photography
actually had a practical purpose in olden times. In any case, I wanted to play
with giving some of my photos that 1950s and 1960s feel.
The larger bombs below were accidentally dropped on Spain during a re-fueling mission
in the 1960s. Oops.
The conventional weapons went off in a third bomb involved in the same
accident, while a fourth bomb was actually lost for several weeks. Here's a close-up of
the banged-up tip of one of the two immediately recovered oopsies:
Even though the nuclear warheads did not go off, the Spanish government was un-amused
and blocked further re-fueling missions
over their borders.
Speaking of the 1960s, how would you like to visit the moon with this handy
dandy little calculating device in your wallet?
Younger readers may not recognize this instrument as the slide rule, a
slight improvement over the abacus that they may have seen in their
kindergarten days. They say that folks got pretty fast with it, but
I never really got the hang of it, and I'll just stick to my pocket
calculator and my palm pilot. Houston, beam me up!
Here's another reassuring artifact -- the remains of a Minuteman MK5 which
was blasted into space in order to test the heat shield on its return. I
think this one actually passed the test. Yikes.
Here's a graceful silver bomb, the B61, photographed mainly because I liked
its classic lines:
Oh, and if you were wondering about that alien spaceship that wrecked down
in Roswell? No one told the folks at the National Atomic Museum that Roswell
is trying to drum up some tourism down there based on the search for
UFOs and little green men. According to the museum, the wreck of one of these
guys in 1947 sparked
the whole Roswell myth, since the devices were classified and couldn't be
properly explained to the public:
Although for years for whatever reason I believed it to be a Skyhook balloon, it
was actually the ASH CAN sampling balloon which tested the atmosphere
for radiation signatures, and the particular balloon that crashed was
part of Project Mogul.
There's a large museum area in Old Town Albuquerque, but you can easily
locate the atomic museum because of the slim Redstone Rocket in front:
I have vague memories of these guys from childhood as those rockets that seemed
to blow up a lot, causing the Russians to get ahead of us for awhile in the
space race, but obviously at least a few of them survived the excitement.
And never let it be said that the museum lacks for a sense of humor:
In addition to the Up 'N' Atom gift shop, you will find a large collection of
atomic-themed comic books from the golden age of the 1950s and even a small
but sinister collection of radiation-themed quack medical devices.
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All Rights Reserved, Copyright © 2002-200- by Elaine Radford
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