Comments on: Description of a flight through a nuclear mushroom cloud

By: Chang Terhune

Chang Terhune — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 02:03:00 +0000

1) This is horrific.

2) Grapple Z is my next band name.

By: bzishi

bzishi — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:59:00 +0000

Wow, a time bar for radiation induced cancers. The court is saying that it is too bad the soldiers didn’t recognize the risk of radiation induced cancers before the science was established. Now that they are getting cancer, it is too late. Sad.

By: bzishi

bzishi — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:55:00 +0000

Ah yes, octarine. It is typically only seen by wizards or cats.

By: iCowboy

iCowboy — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:42:00 +0000

The British government has been defending itself in a long series of court cases with nuclear test veterans. The case was taken all the way to the Supreme Court which heard the case earlier this year. Rather than make a judgement on the subject of exposure to radiation, the court made a majority ruling that cases against the MoD were subject to a time bar and this time had expired.
The British government also does not recognise the test veterans as an official veterans association and therefore does not offer to support their specialist medical needs that cannot be met by the NHS. The Canadian and Isle of Man governments who have veterans of the same tests both recognise the veterans and helps their medical bills.

The treatment of the veterans is a pretty shabby epilogue to the British delusion that it was a great power in the post War era that included everything up to and including telling the world we had an H-bomb when we had no such thing.

By: kongjie

kongjie — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:22:00 +0000

I have the feeling that they weren’t a group he was particularly close with–he didn’t fight with them. He didn’t even stay very close with those he fought with, and of course now they’re almost all gone.

By: niktemadur

niktemadur — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:20:00 +0000

Your uncle could be one of the extremely lucky ones, it would be enlightening to inquire what happened to his colleagues, see what the cancer statistical curve looks like.

By: niktemadur

niktemadur — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:18:00 +0000

…the British government does not acknowledge that veterans of nuclear tests are at any elevated risk of cancer.

In 2012? Something like this should be regulated in The Hague and imposed as science-based law in all NATO-affiliated nations, since the 1970s at the very least.

By: Dr. Chronobiologist

Dr. Chronobiologist — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:19:00 +0000

Similar – American H-bomb observers: http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/Into-the-Mushroom-Cloud.html?c=y&page=1

Includes ripe for conspiracy theory material of pilot flying into the cloud and his plane going down. The plane was found but his body wasn’t.

By: kongjie

kongjie — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:24:00 +0000

My uncle, who is 91, is a WWII and Korea vet, and career Army. He was part of a group of soldiers who were assigned to witness a nuclear test in the desert. He said that in the detonation he saw a green color that he has never seen again in his life. I suppose that he wasn’t positioned too close to the detonation as he never came down with radiation-related health issues.