3. No Nuclear Weapons

Posted on 21 October 2019

It was just before my sixth birthday when my mother hung this No Nuclear Weapons poster in our hallway.

I didn’t know at the time but it was a black and white reprint of Haywain with Cruise Missiles by the artist Peter Kennard.

I remember, together with my sister, we handed her blobs of bluetack as she proudly stuck it to wall.

Then, underneath the poster, she bluetacked a sheet of A4 upon which she had written the following words:

In point of fact it is possible to tell the difference between a small nuclear explosion and a large one by a very simple method.

The calling card of a nuclear bomb is the blinding flash that
Is far more dazzling than any light on earth – brighter even than the sun itself – and it is by the duration of this flash that we are able to determine the size of the weapon.

After the flash a fireball can be seen to rise, sucking up under it the debris, dust and living things around the area of the explosion and as this ascends, it soon becomes recognisable as the familiar ‘mushroom cloud’.

As a demonstration of the flash duration test, let’s try and count the number of seconds for the flash emitted by a very small bomb; then a more substantial, medium-sized bomb; and finally, one of our very powerful ‘high-yield’ bombs.

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