The numbers in reverse on the top photo tell you the date—today, 1955. The occasion was yet another nuclear test in the Nevada desert near Las Vegas, and the image captured the glow that had filtered all the way to downtown Los Angeles, more than 250 miles away. The blast that made all that light appears in the second image. The test was called Apple-2, and it was part of Operation Teapot, a fourteen blast series designed to examine potential tactics for ground forces under nuclear attack. We aren’t military experts, but we have a pretty good idea what the best tactics are—run like the Devil is chasing you. Come on now—tactics for infantry under nuclear attack? What would those be, really? Wear BluBlockers? Hide inside a fortress of hot dogs? Strategy our asses. We think the Army just liked blowing shit up. 

We came across two more postcards celebrating Las Vegas’s distinction as a city from which it was possible to see nuclear test shots. You may remember we posted a couple of similar items in December. These two promote not just Vegas’s dubious proximity to planet-killing nuclear ordnance, but also the venerable Horseshoe Club, a casino owned by Vegas legend Benny Binion. This is the 1950’s we’re talking about, so of course Binion was mobbed up. He started as a thief and killer in Dallas, and ended up with a commemorative statue on Freemont Street (later moved to the Strip). That simple fact probably says more about old Las Vegas than entire books. We’ll get back to him a bit later. No pulp site could be complete without him. 

What you see here, which we found on the great architecture forum Skyscraperpage.com, is a clipping from the Los Angeles Times showing the glare of an atomic bomb explosion. The shot was taken from atop the L.A. Times Building, and the light is from the 34 kiloton nuclear test codenamed Fox, which took place in the desert near Las Vegas, more than 300 miles away. Of course, the clipping has yellowed with time, but below you can see what the shot looked like originally. There were hundreds of photos of this type made during the heyday of U.S. atomic bomb testing, and with a glance around the web you can find many of them. This one happened today in 1951. 

The explosion and mushroom cloud you see here were generated by the Soviet nuclear blast Chagan, which took place at the Semipalatinsk Test Site today in 1965. You notice we didn’t describe this as a “test” like we have with the other explosions we’ve posted. That’s because it wasn’t. The explosion was designed to create an artificial lake. It worked, but the lake is of course still radioactive today. You have to laugh. Where could the Soviets have gotten such a crazy idea? Well, they got it from the Americans, who three years earlier had investigated the use of nuclear explosions for earth moving purposes with their Sedan test. What were the results? That experiment dumped more radioactive fallout on U.S. residents than any other nuclear test ever conducted. Below, two shots of lovely Lake Chagan. 

Above, two postcards showing a portion of the Las Vegas strip and a nuclear test in the background, about 75 miles away. For a time, yes, nuclear tests could be seen from Las Vegas, if only as a flash of light. Leave it to the Chamber of Commerce guys to think: Tourist attraction! These are from 1951. 

Above, an eerie shot of the French nuclear test Betelgeuse, one of more than two-hundred tests conducted by France over the course of thirty-six years. This one is from 1966, and took place on September 11, but we posted it today rather than in September because it’s incorrectly listed on many websites as occurring today. The location is French Polynesia and the event was strongly protested by the potentially downwind nations of New Zealand, Australia, and Japan, but those complaints were ignored. This exposure was made near the instant of detonation, and the brightly lit protrusions are stabilizing wires attached to the bomb platform vaporizing. You can see a better example of the same phenomenon here. 

These two shots show two wider angles of the Ivy Mike nuclear test detonated 31 October, 1952 (1 November in some time zones) at Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific. We’re reposting this test not because we’re running out of nuclear images (that’s not even remotely possible), but because it’s the only test we can find that occurred on the scariest day of the year, Halloween. But if it doesn’t frighten you, consider this—an independent, non-partisan report released today reveals that the U.S., Russia, France, Israel, China, Pakistan, India and North Korea are all expanding their nuclear arsenals. 

This is the mushroom cloud generated by the French nuclear test Canopus, detonated at Fangatafoa Atoll, located in the Tuamotu Archipelago, part of French Polynesia. The blast occurred today in 1968, and if you happen to search for images of the explosion online you will probably not find the one above. What you will find is many photos of the Licorne burst from Mururoa Atoll, 1970. But they are all wrongly attributed. How do we know? See here. And if you’re inclined, you can watch a film of the Canopus explosion here.

We rarely explain anything about Pulp Intl., preferring instead to let you wander through the nearly 1,800 scattered posts the same way you might wander through the clutter of a used bookstore. But today we’re making an exception, because while searching the internet for Canopus images we came across a site—which we won’t soil our webpage by naming—that was populated by the most depraved sub-humans we’ve encountered online in a long time. It was a forum, and on this forum the participants unanimously agreed that either Mecca or Teheran—or both—should be nuked. Reading these idiotic tirades, it occurred to us that an occasional visitor to Pulp Intl. might see our nuke postings as some sort of endorsement of their existence or usage. So for the record, we think nuclear weapons are self-evidently bad, but we post these explosions because, from Hiroshima to Kiss Me Deadly to Harlan Ellison, they are an inextricable part of the pulp and post-post eras. 

The unusual image you see above, which probably has you just a rarin’ to book a hotel room in Los Alamos before they’re all gone, appears in authors John O’Brien and Jeremy Borsos’ recently published Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War. The book features a wide array of nuclear themed mid-century postcards, some of which were produced for educational purposes, some to influence political debate, and some—like this one—to boost tourism. All the images we’ve seen from Atomic Postcards are fascinating, and we have a feeling this will be the hottest nuclear coffee table book since Michael Light’s stunning collection of atomic images 100 Suns. Historical note: the above photo is actually from an atomic test at the Nevada Proving Ground in 1952, but as far as the Los Alamos chamber of commerce was concerned, any old mushroom cloud would do as long as it was irresistibly enticing. Mission accomplished, chamber guys. Our bags are packed. If you’d like to see more of Atomic Postcards, there’s a slideshow here, and if you’d like to see Pulp Intl.’s collection of nuke images, just click the fallout shelter icon in the sidebar. 

Above, a photograph of the superheated debris cloud of the American nuclear test codenamed Climax, part of the series Upshot-Knothole, detonated at the Nevada Test Site today in 1953.