Today in 1966 France tested a nuclear bomb codenamed Rigel, a 150-kiloton device detonated on oft-blasted Fangataufa Atoll, and above you see a photo of the pyrocumulus debris cloud from that event. We’re aware this is the third French nuclear test we’ve posted in a row, but we aren’t singling them out—it’s just that the French, artsy as they are, take such interesting photos, even of the horror that will one day bring about the end of civilization. But there’s a silver lining to all this. When the scabby old men who have their fingers on the nuclear buttons finally unleash these terrible weapons, the male survivors roaming the frozen landscape of nuclear winter can take solace in the fact that genetic mutations will have made actual, authentic tri-boobed women the norm. As for any benefits for women, well, we figure humanity will have finally learned that males should not be—and should never have been—in control of anything important. Oh, and double penises. Plenty of those. 

We shared an interesting photo of the French nuclear test Canopus a few years ago, and today we have another image showing the blast from many miles away. Even more than the numerous close quarters photos we’ve posted here, this really shows the titanic and awful power of the weapons that may eventually destroy us.

This is the mushroom cloud generated by the French nuclear test Canopus, detonated at Fangataufa 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-pulp eras.