This photo looks like a shot of the northern lights, but it’s actually an image of the Starfish Prime nuclear test, which was conducted today in 1962 as part of the test series codenamed Operation Dominic. The photo was shot from a high flying airplane, which just goes to show that at a sufficient distance anything can look beautiful. You can just see the wing of the aircraft at the lower right of the shot. This test was unique in U.S. history up to that point because the warhead was mounted on the nose of a Thor rocket launched from Johnston Atoll, and the subsequent suborbital nuclear blast occurred two-hundred fifty miles above the Pacific Ocean. People from Hawaii to New Zealand saw the sky turn red. The electromagnetic pulse from the blast knocked out electrical service, telephones, streetlights, set off burglar alarms as far as a thousand miles away, and damaged satellites.
The test alarmed many, and had been protested in advance in various cities around the world, yet those protests achieved nothing. As the decades have worn on treaties have been signed and broken, hopes for abandoning these weapons raised and dashed, even as they’ve been steadily upgraded. Today there are nukes that make Starfish Prime look like a bottle rocket, including hypersonic missiles developed by both the U.S. and Russia that fly at up to 15,000 mph, which is too fast to be shot down or even reliably detected due to the incredible speed creating a plasma cloud that baffles radar. Of course everyone knows that there’s no way to win a nuclear exchange, and the only outcome of even a half dozen nuclear blasts would be the destruction of civilization in its current form, yet the race to build planet killers goes on because of the immense profits involved. Humans are truly a mad species.
