Watching the atom bombs go off from ships

I remember people talking about seeing the flashes from bomb tests in Nevada from Eastern Washington, up north of Spokane. I think those were reflected off cloud layers though and at night.

 

I'm not sure the Rockies would cause much of a problem. There's a valley between the two branches that runs from eastern British Columbia down in to Nevada. I'd have to get a good topo map and locate the test site to say for sure though. The mountains probably would have blocked the flash from the Mid West and for that matter from most of California.

 

That would all depend on local cloud cover.

It's potentially feasible that a layer of high altitude clouds could reflect the light quite some way away, yet for large areas this could be obscured by lower, local cloud cover.

These weather patterns would also in all likelihood be considered by those detonating the devices...

 

And it may have reflected off a high cloud layer or just been a glow on the horizon. I remember several people claiming they saw it (and possibly multiple times) but they were my dad's generation and most if not all are dead now. Could have been something else that just correlated with when they thought there was a test as well. I know that at times of the year you could see "city glow" from well over the horizon in the case of some of the larger towns in that area. That may only have been a 50 miles or so (although I think it may have been a bit more)

 

i dunno, is the Tunguska event comparable?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event#Selected_eyewitness_reports

 

The Tunguska event was an airburst at a significant altitude (one site mentions 6 km another 5-10km), I've seen estimates of it's yield everywhere from .5 MT to 15MT so larger than an early atomic bomb and in the same range as fusion devices. IT was seen at over 100 miles in daylight. The flashes I'm talking about were night time events. Hard to make any definitive assessment. Whether the devices were on a tower or surface detonated might also have some effect. It's also possible I guess for the light to be reflected off of multiple surfaces (i.e. a mountain then a cloud or a cloud then the ground and a cloud again). Not something I've looked into the physics of.

Getting back on topic a bit. This page:
http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21088/how-far-away-could-one-be-and-still-see-the-atom-bomb-explosions
Mentions the Nagasaki blast may have been visible at over 200 miles reflecting off the cloud layer. There's also the mention of nuclear explosions being "seen" at 600 miles.

This page has some actual photos of blast in Nevada as seen from LA:
https://www.wired.com/2014/01/throwback-thursday-the-glow-of-the-atomic-age-seen-from-the-golden-state/

 

The Nevada site is even closer and at least one less range in the way. Still those are lighting up a good portion of the sky and to some altitude. The test may have been publicized, at least to some extent, to get the photos they did. Seeing a flash on the horizon at longer range doesn't sound too unreasonable to me.

 

Indeed but if the time coincides with an above ground atomic test and is in the right direction ...

 

Some do and some don't.
You can cross reference for yourself here: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/index.html

I'd also be interested to know exposure time, ISO rating of film, F-stop, etc. for the photographs taken. As these can brighten faint light considerably.

I don't doubt that something may have been seen, but I feel the photos exaggerate the amount of light visible.

You can find the photos used in the article and a few more here: http://photos.lapl.org/carlweb/jsp/DoSearch?&index=sd/&databaseID=968&count=10&tag=650&terms=Nuclear%20weapons%20Testing%26%2346%3B%20Nevada

 

Good point on the photo's brightening the light. The figure in the fore ground of one of the pictures had a fair amount of detail, I didn't look to see if it was very blurry though.

 

The fireball of the Tsar Bomba (estimated at 50 MT) was said to be visible from 620 miles away (1000 kilometers). The fireball was approximately 5 miles (8 kilometers) wide.

All buildings (brick and wooden) in a village (Severny) 55 kms away were destroyed.

Atmospheric focusing are reputed to have caused blast damage, breaking some windows in Finland and Norway.