How the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles

Title wording and language evolution

• Large subthread on the title’s “How X Looked Like” construction. Native speakers find “how … like” grating; explanations given:
  • “How” already encodes manner; “like” is redundant when used with “what.”
  • Heuristics: “What does it look like?” and “How does it look?” are fine; “How does it look like?” is not.
  • Distinctions drawn between “how” (expects adjective), “what” (expects noun), and “like” (invites comparison).
• Several non‑native speakers say they learned something; others note this pattern is common in Indian and other non‑Western Englishes and may become standard through sheer numbers.
• Debate between descriptivist “language evolves, majority wins” and people who still feel personal attachment to older norms and “itches” when seeing such constructions.

Photography and what the images show

• Some find the test photos “neat but indistinct,” resembling ordinary long‑exposure night shots without clear atomic-specific features.
• Discussion that modern digital cameras (including phones) are far more sensitive than eyes, with long exposures and stacking making phenomena (aurora, blasts) look more dramatic than in person.
• Question whether handheld phones can really do multi‑second exposures; others describe computational “astro modes” and stacking plus stabilization.

Yields, testing, and Cold War context

• Nevada tests visible from LA were relatively small; largest cited Nevada atmospheric test ~74 kilotons.
• Debate why much larger warheads were built: one explanation is compensating for poor delivery accuracy against hardened targets.
• Mentions of modern US ICBM yields (conflicting numbers), and extremely large historical devices (on the order of tens of megatons).
• Long comment summarizes known warhead counts and yields in Cuba during the Missile Crisis and notes Soviet deployments were partly a response to US Jupiter missiles in Turkey/Italy.

Culture, spectacle, and Fallout‑era aesthetics

• People recall casinos marketing “atomic dawn parties” and cocktails; some link this aesthetic strongly to the Fallout games and films/books like Mad Max and A Canticle for Leibowitz.
• Commenters note that many “retro‑atomic” songs in Fallout are real period pieces, underscoring how pervasive the atomic craze was.
• Some find the photos “haunting” and speculate we’ll later see today’s blind spots similarly.

Radiation exposure, health impacts, and downwinders

• Discussion of John Wayne and The Conqueror: many cast/crew got cancer. Links provided argue the rate is roughly in line with population averages, with smoking as a major confounder.
• Broader contamination around the Santa Susana Field Lab and Nevada Test Site is described: multiple reactor incidents, burn pits, fallout plumes into Utah, Montana, etc.; thyroid issues and “downwinder” communities mentioned, but causal quantification is called very hard.
• Estimates for those who have seen nuclear explosions: hundreds of thousands of “atomic veterans” participated in tests, with perhaps ~10,000 still alive; others add Japanese survivors and civilians who watched tests from Vegas/LA.
• Reference to Kodak discovering fallout via film fogging and staying quiet; Sedan underground test cited as a notorious fallout event whose crater is now a tourist site.

Ethics, “morbid fascination,” and nuclear politics

• One commenter rejects characterizing 1950s spectators as “morbid,” arguing they were excited about a powerful new technology and “clean, limitless” nuclear energy, not mass killing.
• Others counter that period media shows deep fear of nuclear war, drills, and shelter-building; fascination and dread coexisted.
• Some black humor about it being “fine” to nuke oneself or allies but unthinkable to nuke adversaries; mentions UK tests in Australia and the US and Cold War exercises revealing air defense weaknesses.
• A wish to see how future tests would look on modern cameras is met with pushback: better never to have more tests; hope that any future detonations are only tests.

Nuclear-weapon denial and responses

• One participant poses “rhetorical questions” implying doubts about nuclear weapons’ existence (where did radioactivity go, could TNT mimic the blasts, were Hiroshima/Nagasaki just firebombed harbors, etc.).
• Another commenter answers in detail:
  • Fallout mostly decays over time; atmospheric tests disperse radioisotopes globally at low concentrations; close‑in materials (like trinitite) can remain mildly radioactive for decades.
  • Nuclear blasts produce far more heat/light than equivalent TNT; bomb design and altitude explain limited long-term contamination in Japan versus reactor accidents.
  • Carpet/firebombing is defined and distinguished from a single high‑yield device.
• Multiple replies criticize the denial as trivially disproven given physical evidence, survivor accounts, and global radionuclide signatures; some note this conspiracy line is unusual even among typical theories.
• The skeptic ultimately pivots to broader distrust of US narratives and a religious warning; others note this isn’t aligned with the observable realities of controlled nuclear power versus weapons.

Miscellaneous reactions

• Brief mentions of Twin Peaks Season 3’s famous nuclear-test episode.
• Comments that “humans are weird” for turning such events into spectacles.
• One person wishes the historical photos were professionally colorized.