The first license plate to remember Nevada’s history as the host of the US’s nuclear testing grounds drew criticism for featuring a mushroom cloud (see the plate on the right, above). Now it appears folks are at it again, this time with a plate that depicts the site’s area and includes the classic illustration of an atom’s electron cloud.

All of this generated enough interest to bring the local media out to the Atomic Testing Museum to gawk at the proposed plate, including an actual-sized rendition being shown off on a Lincoln Navigator.

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I guess not everybody in Nevada loves the Test Site as much as this postcard might suggest, but hey, what do tourists know? The image comes from _roberta’s Flickr photostream, and she doesn’t seem too critical.

About 850 miles southeast today, the Trinity Site — where the world’s first atomic weapon was detonated in a test on July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45 a.m. — is open to the public.

It’s said that visitors have already scavenged all the atomic glass from the desert floor under ground zero. Though it’s not the sort of thing you really wanna have in your pocket anyway.

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Boing Boing has an exclusive profile of neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen by Charles Platt. All the reports so far are that it’s a 10,000 word “must read.”

The article, Profits of Fear, is available in PDF, plain text, and Palm doc versions at Boing Boing.

Thanks to David Rothman for the heads up. Extra: Rothman asks what it all says about mainstream media when respected authors eschew traditional media for blogs.

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While looking for a picture for my memorial to the bomb, I found a number of related links. This blog is sometimes nothing more than an annotated bookmark list, and this is why….

The Bomb Project describes itself as:

a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation. It is intended specifically as a resource for artists, and encourages those working in all media, from net.art, film and video, eco-intervention and site-specific installation to more traditional forms of agitprop, to use this site to search for raw material.

Google, however, pointed me to their old index. It’s there that I found links to Bruce Conner’s Bombhead and Robert Longo’s Nagasaki, part of his Sickness of Reason gallery.

Gregory Walker at Virgina Polytechnic’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture maintains pages of information on the effects of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It’s here that you’ll find three videos of nuclear tests, including a house blown away, planes destroyed, and trees snapped like matchsticks. These things are scary, even rotten.com has a page on atomic bombs.

Carey Sublette’s The Nuclear Weapon Archive is included in this list mainly because it quotes H.G. Wells:

…And these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.

Finally, Animation World Network has an interesting story on Walt Disney’s nuclear propaganda. More amusing than that, however, may be this 1957 atomic revolution comic book, from which the image above is taken.

Extra: don’t forget Blondie’s Atomic.

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George Weller won a Pulitzer Prize, a Polk Award, and was named a Neimann Fellow during his fifty-some-odd year career during which he covered much of Europe and Asia for the New York Times and Chicago Daily News. Weller died in 2002 at age 95, leaving behind a body of work that tells much of the 20th century’s events. His 1943 story about an appendectomy performed by navy pharmacist’s mate Wheeler Lipes in a submarine 120 feet below Pacific waters amid the concussive blasts of depth charges is legendary. But Weller also left mysteries, like his early reports from the ground in Nagasaki (geolocation) shortly after the US bombed it with the second nuclear device used in war. From his obit:

As U.S. forces neared Japan, MacArthur forbade correspondents to go ashore. Mr. Weller hired a Japanese rowboat to take him to Nagasaki, and the general retaliated by killing all 30,000 words Mr. Weller filed.

Others (one, two, three) are less generous and claim a government cover-up of the facts of nuclear weapons and fallout was the motive for burying the story. Whatever the reasons, Weller’s stories about Nagasaki never saw publication, and were thought lost until now.

Japan’s Mainichi Daily News reported yesterday that Weller’s 60-year old report has been discovered by his son who is still researching the files in Weller’s old apartment in San Felice Circeo, Italy (geolocation).

The stories had been typed and carbon-copied. The paper on which they had been printed had browned. The stories were typed out on about 75 pages and comprised some 25,000 words. There were also another 25 photos taken of Nagasaki soon after the bombing.

Weller’s reports included some of the first descriptions and photos of the then unknown effects of radiation.

“These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever. Unfevered patients with as much as one-third of the skin area burned have been known to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse. They come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burns victims,” Weller wrote, adding that most of these patients died after no longer than five days.

– – –

Context: Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion tells of how the US government and military became very crafty with their use of the media to shape public opinion during the 20th century. According to Simpson, censorship and “information” campaigns were common and often leveraged the complicity of those in the media and academia.

tags: censorship, chicago daily news, george weller, governement censors, hiroshima and nagasaki, information campaign, nagasaki, new york times, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear device, nuclear weapon, radiation, radiation poisoning, radiation sickness