Posted by Curmudgeon on February 03, 2013 at 11:58:39:
Dear Dr Janson,
I have just read Stephane Groueff’s 1967 book about the Manhattan project. You may be familiar with it from your days of writing your Ph.D thesis on the SA nuclear industry.
Is it possible that the ‘Abomination That Causes Desolation’, that is referred to in the Bible, is a reference to nuclear weapons?
Below are descriptions of the first atomic bomb blast carried out during the war at Alamagordo in the deserts of the southern USA in June 1945. The witnesses were instructed to lie down on their faces with their hands over their eyes and their feet pointing towards the bomb twenty miles away.
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“At 5.29am, Allison shouted ‘Now!’.
The fierce light that followed, almost blinding in spite of their closed eyes, was impossible to describe. There was no frame of reference from anything the observers had experienced before. In a brief moment, the light within twenty miles was as bright as several suns at midday. It was seen in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, El Paso and other points as far as 180 miles away. As Brigadier General Farrell wrote later in the report for the secretary of War, it was ‘unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with an intensity of many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet grey and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.
“Thirty seconds after the explosion came, first, the air blast pressing hard against people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty”.
William L. Laurence, the New York Times reporter, was to write:
“It was like the grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements; fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of great promise and great foreboding.......On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies split. One felt as though one had been privileged to witness the birth of the world – to be present at the moment of creation when the Lord said ‘Let there be light’.”
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This bomb had the effect of ten thousand tons of TNT. Today’s bombs,