[eventusstultorummagister]

Five men at atomic ground zero - YouTube

Though we know a lot about how dangerous nuclear radiation is today, back in the earliest days of the "Atomic Age" people were simply oblivious to the cancer risks. Ignorance is really the only excuse for this July 1957 footage showing a group of five Air Force volunteers standing directly below a detonating nuclear bomb.

[dynimagelv]

and we survived in spite of our own stupidity

[MSchu]

that's a great video... I'd have braved a few rads to be there.

[aitchem]

I heard they all died from cancer

[m73m95]

Originally Posted by MSchu

that's a great video... I'd have braved a few rads to be there.

Now you can say you absorbed a few rads while in Vegas

[macgeek]

Now THAT'S Macho, one guy stood at ground zero, just to light up his cigar from the heat blast.

Jonathan

[macgeek]

Here a picture of one of the men, That evening.

[lvoc]

Originally Posted by aitchem

I heard they all died from cancer

Two and the photographer lived to be old. The photographer said most of the guys who took the pictures of this stuff died of cancer.

[SportyandMisty]

Atomic Tourism was all the rage back then. Tourists flocked to downtown Las Vegas to see the explosions & mushroom clouds in the distance.

[Buzz123]

There have been about 2100 nuclear tests on this planet, about half of them done by the US, and most of those were done at the Nevada Atomic Test Site with the entrance at Mercury, NV, 65 miles up the road from Las Vegas. If you tour the site you will see the old dried up bleachers sitting out in the sand where many famous people sat and watched the bombs go off. When they point out how close the bombs were from those bleachers you gotta wonder how many of those people died from it eventually. Actually, you gotta wonder how they weren't killed outright it was so close.

The Crotch sent me to what was then called ABC Warfare School for a week or two. They showed us the now famous film of the aerial detonation where all those soldiers were marched to ground zero minutes later. They were "proving" that all the radiation went up in the air and it was safe to go in right afterward. It wasn't. All those soldiers finally got compensation decades later. Most got cancer.

My wife did a news story on Ch-3, in about 1979, on all the families up in Southern Utah that were suing the government. I believe it amounted to several hundred who died of cancer from the fallout that drifted upwind. I worked with a lady at Ch-3 whose son was a victim. They had lived in Pioche, NV, about 175 miles north of Las Vegas, and maybe 100 air miles or less from the detonations.

John Wayne and 91 people who worked on "The Conqueror" up in Southern Utah got cancer which has been attributed to the nuke tests in the 50's. The Straight Dope: Did John Wayne die of cancer caused by a radioactive movie set?