Today in 1986, Barbara Donachy’s art installation “Amber Waves of Grain”—depicting in ~35,000 ceramic miniatures every bomber, missile, submarine, warhead, and bomb in the US nuclear arsenal—opened in Boston after prior showings in New York, Washington, DC, Colorado, and Berlin.
Here is a short video about the installation:
And here is an article about it in the New York Times:
Additional coverage (including of prior showings) includes washingtonpost.com/archive/lifest…, csmonitor.com/1986/0128/lamb…, and upi.com/Archives/1986/….
At the time the installation opened in Boston in early 1986, the US nuclear stockpile consisted of “only” about 23,350 nuclear warheads, but that fact would not be declassified by the US gov't until 2010. In addition, there were 312 bombers, 1,005 ICBMs, 616 SLBMs, and 35 SSBNs.

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More from @AtomicAnalyst

15 Jan
Today in 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, publicly issued a bold and unprecedented three-stage proposal for eliminating all nuclear weapons worldwide by 2000. Most of President Reagan’s advisers rejected it as propaganda. Image
Twenty-one days after first putting out his detailed proposal, Gorbachev purchased a full-page advertisement in the February 5 edition of the New York Times (see above) to help get the word out, because—as far as he could tell—no one in the US government was taking it seriously.
Here is Gorbachev’s January 14, 1986, letter to President Reagan laying out the the rationale and objectives for his sweeping nuclear disarmament plan, sent one day before the proposal appeared as an advertisement in the New York Times: nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/22092… Image
Read 6 tweets
15 Jan
Today in 1965, the USSR conducted the Chagan test, its first “peaceful nuclear explosion,” detonating a 140-kiloton device 584 feet beneath the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan that blasted a crater 1,339-feet wide and 328-feet deep, which it turned into a lake. ImageImage
This official Soviet-era film documented the preparations for and execution of the Chagan test and the subsequent filling of the artificial lake. Be sure to watch for a close-up view of the device (at 0:21-0:42) and a man jumping in for a swim (at 4:00).
Here is a captioned HD excerpt of that same film courtesy of @atomicarchive.
Read 4 tweets
13 Jan
About 1:40am today in 1964, a B-52D flying from Westover AFB, MA, to Turner AFB, GA, following a diversion from a CHROME DOME airborne alert mission, encountered severe turbulence in a blizzard, lost its tail section, and crashed on Big Savage Mt., ~17 mi. SW of Cumberland, MD. Image
The aircraft carried two war reserve 9-Mt B53 thermonuclear bombs. Pilot Maj. Thomas W. McCormick (42), ejected and trudged six hours through deep snow to a farmhouse. Co-pilot Capt. Parker Peedin (29) also ejected and was found by searchers more than 36 hours after the crash. ImageImage
Navigator Robert L. Payne (41) and tailgunner Melvin Wooten (27) also ejected but succumbed to sub-freezing temperatures attempting to find shelter. Bombardier Robert. L. Townley (42) did not eject and died on impact. The two bombs were recovered damaged but relatively intact.
Read 5 tweets
29 Dec 21
A view of the “Big Board” at Strategic Air Command, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
You can see the “Big Board” in action in the special 1958 USAF film “Power of Decision” (starting at 4:06), which may be the first and only government film depicting the devastating mechanics of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union:
Read more about this unusual and little-known film here: nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb3…
Read 4 tweets
24 Dec 21
53 years ago today, astronaut and lunar module pilot Bill Anders took this photograph as Apollo 8 orbited the Moon. “Oh my God. Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth comin’ up. Wow, is that pretty!” (This is the original B&W image that NASA remastered into color.)
Here's the story behind the photograph, and how it was remastered in 2018 for its 50th anniversary: jw9c.blogspot.com/2018/01/earthr…
The second “Earthrise“ photograph is the more well known (and more frequently reproduced) image, which Anders shot in color. However, for decades it has been incorrectly rotated 90 degrees so that the lunar horizon is nearly horizontal with Earth rising above it.
Read 5 tweets
23 Dec 21
Today in 1963, “Ladybug Ladybug” opened in US theaters. Set in rural Pennsylvania, and based on an actual incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tense film follows a group of young schoolchildren and their teachers as they react to a warning of an imminent nuclear attack.
Watch here:
Fun Fact 1: Kathryn Hays, who plays school secretary Betty Forbes, portrayed the mute Gem in the Star Trek original series 1968 episode “The Empath.”
Read 5 tweets

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