Above, two postcards showing a portion of the Las Vegas strip and a nuclear test in the background, about 75 miles away. For a time, yes, nuclear tests could be seen from Las Vegas, if only as a flash of light. Leave it to the Chamber of Commerce guys to think: Tourist attraction! These are from 1951. 

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. 

These two shots show two wider angles of the Ivy Mike nuclear test detonated 31 October, 1952 (1 November in some time zones) at Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific. We’re reposting this test not because we’re running out of nuclear images (that’s not even remotely possible), but because it’s the only test we can find that occurred on the scariest day of the year, Halloween. But if it doesn’t frighten you, consider this—an independent, non-partisan report released today reveals that the U.S., Russia, France, Israel, China, Pakistan, India and North Korea are all expanding their nuclear arsenals. 

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. 

The unusual image you see above, which probably has you just a rarin’ to book a hotel room in Los Alamos before they’re all gone, appears in authors John O’Brien and Jeremy Borsos’ recently published Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War. The book features a wide array of nuclear themed mid-century postcards, some of which were produced for educational purposes, some to influence political debate, and some—like this one—to boost tourism. All the images we’ve seen from Atomic Postcards are fascinating, and we have a feeling this will be the hottest nuclear coffee table book since Michael Light’s stunning collection of atomic images 100 Suns. Historical note: the above photo is actually from an atomic test at the Nevada Proving Ground in 1952, but as far as the Los Alamos chamber of commerce was concerned, any old mushroom cloud would do as long as it was irresistibly enticing. Mission accomplished, chamber guys. Our bags are packed. If you’d like to see more of Atomic Postcards, there’s a slideshow here, and if you’d like to see Pulp Intl.’s collection of nuke images, just click the fallout shelter icon in the sidebar. 

Above, a photograph of the superheated debris cloud of the American nuclear test codenamed Climax, part of the series Upshot-Knothole, detonated at the Nevada Test Site today in 1953. 

Above is an unusual war-themed cover of The National Police Gazette from May 1953. In addition to stoking up a little Soviet fear with an A-bomb photo illustration, editors play the Hitler card, telling us at upper right that Der Führer is still alive. They made this claim scores of times after the end of World War II, and it never seemed to get old (we documented that phenomenon here). And since the U.S. was embroiled in a proxy war against China in Korea when this issue appeared, that conflict gets a mention too, in the banner at the bottom of the cover. All in all it's three enemies for the price of one—and a small insight into the nuclear fears that shaped the post-war generation. Do you ever wonder what fears shape us that they'll study in the future? We could take a guess, but then we might get real scared, so let's not think about it.

Photo of a U.S. nuclear test conducted at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, the bomb having been dropped from a plane flying about 12,000 feet up, today 1956. 

Two photos of the American nuclear test codenamed Swordfish, which was a rocket launched atomic depth charge, detonated in the Pacific Ocean about 400 miles west of San Diego, today in 1962. 

Photo showing the detonation of Seminole B, a 13.7 kiloton nuclear device detonated June 6, 1956 by the U.S. as part of Operation Redwing, a series of nuclear blasts on Eniwetok and Bikini Atolls, Marshall Islands, South Pacific.