Above, an eerie shot of the French nuclear test Betelgeuse, one of more than two-hundred tests conducted by France over the course of thirty-six years. This one is from 1966, and took place on September 11, but we posted it today rather than in September because it’s incorrectly listed on many websites as occurring today. The location is French Polynesia and the event was strongly protested by the potentially downwind nations of New Zealand, Australia, and Japan, but those complaints were ignored. This exposure was made near the instant of detonation, and the brightly lit protrusions are stabilizing wires attached to the bomb platform vaporizing. You can see a better example of the same phenomenon here. 

This is the mushroom cloud generated by the French nuclear test Canopus, detonated at Fangatafoa Atoll, located in the Tuamotu Archipelago, part of French Polynesia. The blast occurred today in 1968, and if you happen to search for images of the explosion online you will probably not find the one above. What you will find is many photos of the Licorne burst from Mururoa Atoll, 1970. But they are all wrongly attributed. How do we know? See here. And if you’re inclined, you can watch a film of the Canopus explosion here.

We rarely explain anything about Pulp Intl., preferring instead to let you wander through the nearly 1,800 scattered posts the same way you might wander through the clutter of a used bookstore. But today we’re making an exception, because while searching the internet for Canopus images we came across a site—which we won’t soil our webpage by naming—that was populated by the most depraved sub-humans we’ve encountered online in a long time. It was a forum, and on this forum the participants unanimously agreed that either Mecca or Teheran—or both—should be nuked. Reading these idiotic tirades, it occurred to us that an occasional visitor to Pulp Intl. might see our nuke postings as some sort of endorsement of their existence or usage. So for the record, we think nuclear weapons are self-evidently bad, but we post these explosions because, from Hiroshima to Kiss Me Deadly to Harlan Ellison, they are an inextricable part of the pulp and post-post eras. 

French nuclear test Licorne, Mururoa Atoll, French Polynesia, July 3, 1970. Note: this explosion in its many stages appears all over the internet misidentified as the Canopus blast from August 1968. However these photos are from Atolls de l'atome, a definitive book about French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and are there identified by author Bernard Dumortier as Licorne.