How the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles
15 comments
·November 21, 2025marssaxman
brettermeier
Thanks for pointing that out. As a non-native speaker, I have learned something new.
noman-land
This is a pretty common construction among some non-native English speakers.
hydrogen7800
>Casinos, hotels and inns flaunted their north-facing vistas, offering special “atomic cocktails” and “Dawn Bomb Parties.”
What a time...
CalRobert
If you’re in to this period Atomic Cafe is a great watch
kmoser
These are neat images, but it's hard to tell how they differ from long exposures taken without any illumination by atomic blast. I've taken long exposures at night that look very similar.
johnnienaked
Nevada tests, done north of Las Vegas, were all pretty small, and they produced flashes visible from LA. Imagine a big one.
delichon
In his latest podcast Joe Rogan claimed that John Wayne and others died from cancer caused by radiation from a nuclear test upwind of a movie set for "The Conquerers". Wayne was also a heavy smoker so nobody really knows. Nobody knows how much death and misery the tests caused, or how much war was avoided by nuclear deterence.
By the early 1980s around 40% of the cast and crew had developed cancer, also including Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. And the movie nuclear bombed at the box office.
HeinzStuckeIt
Reminiscent of the shooting of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where there was a toxic-waste-producing facility right nearby (and you can supposedly see toxic waste on camera) and some of the cast and crew got ill or died from horrible cancers.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)#Filming
defrost
From the atomic test annals: The DIXIE Showgirl (1953)
This is an official government photo in an official government archive.
That little cloud under the dancer’s right foot is, of course, the DIXIE cloud
From Restricted Data nuclear history blog: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/05/18/friday-image-the-...
andrewstuart
Nuking yourselves is fine.
Now if some other country was to, well that’s end of the world.
Of course the British nuked Australia and we don’t hold that against them so maybe ….
arethuza
The UK also nuked the US 24 times
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_testing_in_the...
Then there was that thing where RAF bombers pretended to bomb US cities... which had to be hushed up as it made it clear that US air defence systems weren't nearly as good as the public had been told.
FridayoLeary
>There are also pictures of people enjoying the spectacle that demonstrate the morbid fascination that many Americans had with nuclear weapons at the time.
Was this written with ai? No person in any time period wouldn't be interested. Big explosions are never boring.
ricardobeat
I don’t think “fascination” is what you’d get if you started detonating atomic bombs on the regular near any major city today.
NoboruWataya
The article doesn't generally read like AI to me, though I can't discount the possibility that I have been fooled by a new and more advanced slop machine.
I think HN is probably biased towards a subset of the population that is perennially interested in nuclear explosions. They surely occupied a much greater part of the public consciousness in the 50s than they do today (and certainly much greater than a few years ago, before a nuclear power invaded Europe).
pet peeve - pick one:
"How the Atomic Tests Looked from Los Angeles"
or
"What the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles"
just don't mash them together like this.