ns savannah

Though following the first civil application of nuclear-power for civil maritime purposes after the atomic-fueled ice-breaker Lenin (see also), the first cargo and passenger liner, a flagship for the US president’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative (see previously), was launched on this day in 1959 by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. With several educational ports of call in US coastal cities, the vessel was a demonstration project on the safe and responsible harnessing of nuclear energy, including exhibits on the preservation of food through irradiation, x-rays and other medical diagnostics and other emerging technologies—like the microwave oven, and had the state rooms and galley and the other amenities of a regular cruise ship with swimming pool, promenade deck and lounge all decked out with Atomic Age styling. 

In 1964, the ship crossed the Atlantic for the first time, stopping in Southampton, Dublin, Bremerhaven, Hamburg and Rotterdam on an international good will tour. Ultimately decommissioned in 1971, the Savannah is now a museum ship moored at Pier 13 in Baltimore, Maryland and can be visited by the public.

the starlight barking

Via Messy Nessy Chic not only are we given an appreciated reading tip in the comforting writing style of I Capture the Castle and One Hundred and One Dalmatians author Dodie Smith (*1896 - †1990) we moreover learn that Smith also penned a sequel to the 1956 novel—which has nothing to do with the Disney adaptations. A bit reminiscent of the Jellicle cats, Lord Sirius (the Dog Star) comes to Earth after putting humans into a deep slumber and granting canines supernatural powers in order to prevent nuclear war.

queequeg

Though not critically received as well as a project of this stature and pedigree ought to have been afforded, the epic retelling Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (see previously), directed and produced by John Huston with screenplay by Ray Bradbury and starring Gregory Peck, Orson Welles and Richard Basehart (Ismael and the narrator for Knight Rider) debuted in theatres in the United States on this day in 1956. The cinematic poster for twentieth anniversary re-release anachronistically references its summer box office revival and the screenplay places the whale’s home waters in Bikini Atoll—which is not in the text—to address the massive nuclear tests being conducted in the Pacific at the time of filming.

aggregat 4

During a test launch taking place on this day from the proving grounds of the Peenemünde Army Research Centre (Heeresversuchsanstalt) of a V-2 / A-4 rocket, a manufactured object for the first time passed the Kármán line defining the edge of atmosphere and outer space (the after-the-fact boundary usually placed at one hundred kilometres above the surface of the Earth) and reached an apogee of one-hundred and seventy-six kilometres before falling back to the ground, not designed to attain orbital velocity. This particular achievement was the greatest vertical distance covered by a projectile thus far but the team of scientists, under the leadership of Werher von Braun, were more proud in with their 1942 feat of having penetrated the rarefied thermosphere—about eighty kilometres above and where ultraviolet radiation creates ions and the charged atmosphere allows radio wave communication to be transmitted and received beyond the horizon. Coincidentally one year later to the day, in 1945, the US Secretary of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a secret recruiting programme called Operation Overcast to bring scientists from Nazi Germany to America to assist in shortening the war with Japan and augment post-war and peacetime rocketry applications. Interviewing US Ordnance Corps officers would attach a paperclip to the files of those they wanted to be brought to the States for work, importing through 1990 more than sixteen hundred researchers as intellectual reparations claimed by the Allies (minus the Soviets that had their own recruitment campaign) with an attendant $10,000,000,000 worth in associated patents and industrial processes.

obverse

Whilst I’ve been the recipient of my share of military unit coins with varying levels of swagger, ridiculousness and bombast, outside of the prematurely issued commemorative one issued for Trump’s summit with North Korea, I was unaware of the minting of “victory coins” by US government agencies and so was intrigued by this artefact from the CIA (via Super Punch) for memorialising the over-throw of the regime of Fidel Castro in April of 1961 through the arming of exiles and dissidents. The abject failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion raised tensions significantly between the USA and the USSR and led to the Cuba Missile Crisis and inchoate nuclear war.

ws3

Via Waxy, taking some numbingly tedious (low-stakes) annual training and always failing to recall the difference between nuanced jargon—plus not paying close attention to the presentation before the post-test, I’ve encountered such flash cards and drills that promise the right answers if one types in the question verbatim but I never expected peers to help out one another (eyes on your own test) with the same crib notes for the safety and security of nuclear armaments. Responsibly redacted in the exposé, the practises and protocols of US weapons stockpiles overseas were breached through these tutorials, and while the existence of this forward operating bases and their host nations was somewhat of an open secret, spillage of alert procedures, security norms and panic words strikes as pretty grave and just as embarrassing as being outed by one’s pedometer.

9x9

segmentation and targeting: A/B testing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—see also 

light house customer: we appreciated the chance to revisit a new and improved version Lights at Sea—via Nag on the Lake—both times  

nice.walk.ruined: award-winning global addressing scheme what3words (previously) subject to some juvenile humour with locations mapped in smutty language, both real and bespoke  

isotopia: a high-brow 1950 ballet and pantomime presented to the steering committee of the Atomic Energy Association to extol nuclear power from Weird Universe  

apartment d3: seven printed homes around the world  

l’art de payer ses dettes et de satisfaire ses créanciers san débourser un sou: credit culture in nineteenth century France 

alpha version: drag and drop personal, old school websites from mmm—via Kicks Condor 

sovietwave radio: broadcasting a selection of the sub-genre’s best space age and syntho-pop—via Dark Roasted Blend 

the writers’ block: a suite in Chelsea Carlyle mansion home to Henry James, T. S. Eliot and Ian Fleming on the market

up and atom

Via Present/&/Correct, we are referred to a curated cache Nuclear Engineering Wall Charts and vintage reactor diagrams from the collection of the University of New Mexico. The pictured diagram features the Biblis B Kernkraftwerke (AKW) near Worms, both A and B blocks were closed in March 2011 following the Fukushima and since permanently shut-down and slated for decommissioning. More to explore at the links above.

cinematic titanic

Starring Rex Reason, Faith Domergue and Jeff Morrow, the 1955 sci-fi vehicle This Island Earth, its concurrent critical acclaim was in part—not to detract from the pretty solid script—due to the novelty of Technicolor, was given a second lease on life with its MST3K treatment as the show’s first feature film, premiering on this day in 1996. With elements of The Last Starfighter, Earthling scientists are recruited, abducted by extra-terrestrials from the planet Metaluna to perform the alchemy necessary to defend themselves from an invader alien called the Zagons, learning too late that this effort only covers up and conspiracy to relocate a doomed population to Earth along with their irreconcilable differences.

snapshot

Via their excellencies Nag on the Lake and Everlasting Blört, we are directed to a profound and touching curation and salvage operation a decade on launched by local photographer Munemasa Takahashi in the Lost & Found project, wherein volunteers gathered and conserved photographs scattered among the destruction caused by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant disaster that struck Japan on 11 March 2011. Ranging from candid snapshots, vacation photos, wedding portraits and class pictures, over seventy hundred and fifty thousand pictures have been preserved and digitised with almost half-a-million reunited with those who lost them along with everything else in the catastrophe. Prints and framed photos are of course fragile things exposed but the damage that they sustained and personal connections they represent in whatever form speak to how this disaster upended lives.

your house is on fire and your children are alone

Courtesy of a film recommendation by one of our favourite podcasts, The Flop House, we learn of the 1963, Oscar-nominated film by Frank Perry that analyses the psycho-social toll of the Cold War that really speaks to the uncertainty and the fears harboured over our current collective crisis and what totems we rally to preserve through selective ignorance. Set during the Cuban Missile Crisis (previously) from just a year prior, following the protocol of classroom drills, teachers escort their students home at a rural elemental school after a warning siren sounds. Absent independent verification on the veracity of the alarm, no one is sure whether it is a false warning, a test or not. Some of the students’ parents dismiss these distant, abstract events as they frantically search for a fall-out shelter that can accommodate them all. One girl is ejected, with the claim there is not enough space and goes off to take refuge in a discarded refrigerator—introducing that trope, though her classmates don’t abandon her or forget about her altogether.

honoured guests

Through this 1982 tribute by artist Roger Brown (*1941 – †1997), known for his portrayal of society, entertainment and politics with bold and distinctive storyboards, we are reminded of the individual selfish acts of heroism when it came to saving passengers of Air Florida Flight 90 that crash-landed on the frozen Potomac on this day the same year as the picture was created in honour of Washington, DC Congressional Budget Office employee Lenny Skutnik, whom didn’t hesitate to dive into the icy waters to save Priscilla Tirado, representing one of the hundreds of brave bystanders whom intervened.
Two weeks later, Ronald Regan invited Skutnik to attend the State of the Union Address and sit in the presidential box with First Lady Nancy Reagan, with the president acknowledging his heroism as the embodiment of the American ideal. Since then, other members of the public attending the State of the Union or other similar joint sessions of Congress at the invitation of the president and so honoured have been referred to by the generic name of “Lenny Skutniks.” Before reality television set in with the game-showification of the government and bully-pulpit of incumbency, though previously not universally without contention or political statement, the guests were usually limited to one or two individuals worthy of recognition, and not a singled-out victim vilified whose problems were at least in part systemic to US policies and priorities in the first place. The other subject of Brown’s piece is anti-nuclear weapons activist Norman Mayer, who was shot by police while threatening to dynamite the Washington Monument on 9 December of the same year, two diametrically different events bookending 1982 in the capital, unless a serious dialogue be held on the topic of disarmament and achieving peace.

when the wind blows

Premiering on this day in 1986, the animated adaptation of the eponymous Raymond Briggs’ comic book—previously introduced to the public as a BBC radio play—marked the artist’s follow-on collaboration with the studio and directorship of Jimmy Murakami and musical stylings of David Bowie (Roger Waters of The Who thanks Dad Pink Floyd, Genesis, Squeeze and Paul Hardcastle also contributed to the soundtrack) after their 1982 success with The Snowman—another tune I regularly hum to myself. Based on Briggs’ own parents, the narrative accounts the efforts of a rural couple to maintain normalcy and survive in a nearby nuclear bomb blast. The attack portrayed was meant to be collateral from the escalating conflict of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and despite the bleak subject, the presentation encouraged viewers to stick with it until the end. Here is the trailer below and full version of the graphic novel read through here and the full score at the link. 

 

sing along with khrushchov

With a rather engrossing follow-up to an earlier mention of a rare 1962 volume by Ilona Fabian with illustrations by Victor Vashi, the prolific Hungarian artist who cartooned his way through Nazi and Soviet occupation, Weird Universe shares this coloring book that doesn’t bother mincing words or diplomatic happy talk in framing contemporary geopolitics.

A reader of the blog had reached out with a digitalised copy (find a complete PDF at the site) of this imagined correspondence between “Nyetochka”—Khrushchev’s granddaughter and Caroline Kennedy about the foibles of her extended family with “Uncle Fidel,” “Uncle Nehru” and “Uncle Tito” and those written out of the will, and saved it from oblivion. The Soviet leader is depicted shod with just one shoe throughout in reference to his shoe pounding spectacle at the United Nations. Vashi’s other work from this period, the 1967 retrospective published on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Red Primer for Children and Diplomats, is more well-known.

6x6

blocking: Ella Slack has been the Queen’s stand-in and body-double for the past three decades 

grizzly ii: a previously unreleased 80s horror flick starring Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen is making its debut forty years later, via Messy Nessy Chic  

life, the universe and everything: fun facts about the number forty-two, via Boing Boing  

welcoming autumn: it’s decorative gourd season 

the long now: hiding a ten-thousand-year clock inside a mountain (see also)

framing: Twitter issues apologies for its biased image cropping algorithm

the long now

Having previously (see here and here) assayed the conundrum of deflecting curious future explorers from spelunking in our present nuclear waste, we were intrigued to see what sort of out-the-box solutions our artificial intelligencer Janelle Shane (see previously) might be able to coax out of her neural network to serve as a ten-thousand year warning.  Summarising the schema to the GPT-3 routine, its designs seemed to match that of its human engineering inspiration to intrigue as much as dissuade any future civilisation. Giant tube worms and a field of Tulips Shrieking Madness might deter exploration but I am not sure about Dangerous Stairs or Disrupted Pollen Lines. Much more to explore at the links above.

red telephone

Despite its conception in the popular imagination the Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link or hotline, which first went into operation on this day in 1963, was a text-only emergency channel as spoken communication was considered too prone to misunderstanding.
Engineers first recognised the need for an expedient exchange between the leaders of the polarised world in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis of the previous summer when it took US diplomatic and military staff nearly twelve hours to receive and decrypt the initial settlement message from Nikta Khrushchev and deliver it to John F. Kennedy, with a nod to the direct link as portrayed in Red Alert, the 1958 novel that Doctor Strangelove (1964) is based on. The superpowers could initially send teletypes to one another—the equipment tested hourly by exchanging passages from William Shakespeare and Mark Twain (with selective quotations from the former and A. A. Milne as they were considered Soviet cultural property) for excerpts from Anton Chekhov and other literary figures, with messages of greetings and congratulations sent instead on New Year’s and on 30 August, the anniversary of the hotline’s launch. In 1986, the system was upgraded to facsimile machines and finally in 2008 to an extra secure form of email.

tritium breeding concepts

Earlier this week, after years of preparation, Emmanuel Macron inaugurated the assembly phase of the international collaborative effort to demonstrate that a nuclear fusion reaction can be achieved and sustained to generate energy at commercially viable levels.
Iter (see previously) is being constructed in Provence next to an existing facility called Cadarache that conducts research into nuclear and alternative energy and fuel sources and this largest of more than one hundred experimental fusion reactors built dating back to the 1950s to produce plasma by 2025 and if successful will furnish clean and virtually unlimited power.

belau rekid

Though human settlement on the group of islands extends back millennia, Palau (see previously) is a young republic, observing annually its founding on this day since 1981 with Constitution Day, the referendum voting for independence for this former US territory after most Pacific islands fell under the administration of America as Trust Territories, having previously been a Spanish colony governed from the Philippines, administered as German New Guinea, then becoming part of the Japanese-ruled League of Nations’ South Seas Mandate, choosing not to join Micronesia, an association compromised of recently decolonised neighbours. Modelled in part of the US constitution, Palau’s uniquely prohibits all atomic applications, be it for warfare as a testing-site or for energy-generation as a dumping-ground for nuclear waste—as well as specifically banning biological and chemical weapons.

republik freies wendland

Though only in existence for a month before police cleared the protest camp and micronation (see also) on this day in 1980 and evicted the occupants outside of Gorleben to rally against the excavation of a nuclear waste dump there and accused of high-treason by the interior minister of Niedersachsen, the self-proclaimed community of some five thousand encamped on a barren patch of the Lüneberger Heath that was cleared by the wildfires of 1975 had an impressive infrastructure designed for the long-term with permanent shelters, shared facilities, greenhouses, a health clinic, a hair salon, a radio station, sauna and solar- and wind-generated electricity.
Geologists had been conducting drilling tests to determine whether the salt domes beneath the nature reserve were suitable for storing nuclear waste. During the Republic’s final days, a sit-in was staged of at least two-thousand Wendlanders were carried away by police forces with the demonstration coming to a mostly peaceful conclusion, with authorities thanking them for their nonviolent approach. Though the controversial dump was ultimately built in October 1986, the anti-atomic movement progressed and did eventually achieve more and greater, transformative accomplishments, and also despite its brief existence Wendland has an enduring and outsized legacy, including as recently as 2015 the mayor of a nearby municipality extended to Edward Snowden asylum with a “Wendepass” from the days of the Republic.