I’ve been tough on @US_Stratcom for their ridiculous “Myth Monday” posts, but allow me to say something that comes close to agreeing with one of the points they sought to make this Monday (but not exactly). It concerns this tweet (and others like it from today). 
Presumably this person (and others) who saw the footage and were *absolutely convinced* it was a nuclear weapon have received their sense of what a nuke looks like (or should look like) from certain sources.
And there’s a strong human tendency to refer to known examples of things (real and imagined) to explain new, possibly uncertain phenomena (see: availability heuristic).
Now, of course, the person in the screenshot above has a lot of followers, is an author, is not an expert on any nuclear, and should know better than to tweet what he did, but his received ideas of nuclear weapons ... probably come from poor representations in TV/movies/fiction.
You can find out what actual nuclear explosions look(ed) like; there’s plenty of footage (in color too!) of actual atmospheric, undersea, and underground nuclear tests. But most people aren’t exposed to these.
So—insofar as @US_Stratcom gets close to a point here—there’s a case to be made for better popular representations of nuclear weapons and their effects. It’ll be educative and hopefully prevent this kind of misinformation.
Forgot to link this in the above tweet. Of course, my primary prescription for where people should start with nuclear effects is John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” (the effects on real people). I don’t think @US_Stratcom would like that though.
This is a good resource on other, physical effects, however. Another hopeful corollary of making representations of nuclear effects better in fiction is it should ward away some of the EMP quackery. (That’s probably too optimistic.) atomicarchive.com/science/effect…
Let’s do more mycology documentaries while we’re at it!
