Telescope Reviews: The most phenomenal thing I have ever seen

Re: surviving a nuclear attack. I too, grew up with drop and cover drills, and drills where we would all hide in the school hallways. But mostly it was movies: Panic in Year Zero, with Ray Milland and Frankie Avalon--see him perform without a net! (Does anyone get that joke?)

Another movie, The Day the World Ended (1955). It really scared me. Roger Corman's 4th movie. It had a few couples who were living in a modern split-level ranch style house, hiding from the fallout. They were protected by lead containing mountains, of course. The older man who set up this escape brought out drawings of mutations he saw after US nuclear tests in the South Pacific, when he was a big shot in the military. Things like monkeys with lobster claws coming out on top of the shoulders.

Meanwhile, his tragically sad, very pretty blond daughter, was pinning for her fiance to show up. At night a creepy creature would lurk in the bushes and shadows peeping at her. It was unstated, but obviously the creature in the bushes was her fiance, now mutated!

Meanwhile, here is what would really happen if the Soviet Union had hit my area, Southern California, with a MIRV with 5 50-100 megaton bombs. The bombs detonate at thousands of feet in the air, causing a blast downward to crush things, affecting a much larger area than if detonated at ground level. If the blast didn't get you, then winds would. Winds of several hundred miles an hour would sweep from the Pacific to Las Vegas. Unless you were in a bank vault you would not survive.

Back to things in the sky some of us have seen: launches from Vandenberg around sunset are the most spectacular as the sun lights them up from behind. Sometimes they are white, sometimes all sorts or rainbow colors appear. Sometimes the would look like twisted trails of airplanes, sometimes a large plume that would just expand and expand. Usually the event would sustain for hours, well into darkness.

I wonder, did they chose to launch around sunset so they could see the pretty display?

LGM

Edited by Littlegreenman (10/29/09 05:26 AM)