Reminds me of nuclear tests with real soldier close to ground zero in the 40’s, or so the legend goes.
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From Perplexity.ai:
Desert Rock was the code name of a series of exercises conducted by the US military in conjunction with atmospheric nuclear tests
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. They were carried out at the Nevada Proving Grounds between 1951 and 1957
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. The purpose of these exercises was to train troops and gain knowledge of military maneuvers and operations on the nuclear battlefield
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. Camp Desert Rock was established in 1951, 1.5 miles south of Camp Mercury, and was home for the nearly 60,000 soldiers that participated in military maneuvers held during atmospheric nuclear weapons testing
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. In total, over 50,000 U.S. soldiers were exposed to 69 radioactive blasts during Operation Desert Rock
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.
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It’s NO legend!
I’m going to date myself (I might have been just a few years old at the time), but I remember seeing the color newsreels in the late '50’s that were prevalent at that time of the soldiers w/o any noticeable protective gear - just their helmets and rifles (I know, I know … what the hell are rifles doing in an atomic blast test … to this day I have NO idea).
The soldiers were lining open trenches as the blast went off … almost unbelievable given today’s sensibilities ! The newsreels were meant to show our military was working on our ‘preparedness’ … even as a pre-adolescent I thought - what a joke!
Who of us remembers the little ‘bags of rice’ ( Food not nukes ) that people sent to Eisenhower when the military was considering nuking the starving communists in China?
It wasn’t until later that movies like ‘On the beach’ et al. started to wake people up!
It was such a crazy world then … we were doing atomic blast drills in schools well into my junior-high days, until a student pointed out that there were glass windows at each end of the hallways where we ‘sheltered’, which (finally) led to the end of the drills.
This was all just a few years before we started seeing those small flags with the single stars hanging in the front windows of the homes in our neighborhood as we walked home from school, indicating that a member of the family had died in Vietnam. Crazy times …
Now we’re staring down another (manufactured) crisis that may take us over the cliff as soon as June … I’m retrenching for a possible drag-down fight, by men acting like immature teenagers … that none of us have any idea of what may happen as the ground disappears beneath us …
Insanity begets insanity … it never seems to end!
(There’s a story that needs to be written somewhere in here …)
scrive
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There were 24 nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands) between 1946 and 1958. My uncle was one of the “test subjects” intentionally exposed to the radiation.
The islands themselves, of course, were stolen by the US.
US post-WWII behaviour was (or has been) truly execrable.
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“It’s like standing at the edge of nothing, completely out of control.” – Eric Clapton, et al, Pilgrim.
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Re:
In an effort to double check what I may have heard or read, versus what I experienced firsthand, I checked and found one reference that unequivocally states that the Claim: Bags of rice sent to President Eisenhower helped dissuade him from launching an attack against China. is Status: False.