70 years ago exactly — 5:30am, New Mexico: the Trinity test explodes. "Now we're all sons of bitches."pic.twitter.com/qAPOcLf7Yg
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@wellerstein Would be interesting to know 1) when they changed the estimate 2) when the exact value of yield was published for the 1st time
@pfc_joker They used the figure of "20,000 tons of TNT" pretty immediately as a rough estimate. E.g. Truman's Hiroshima announcement has it.
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@wellerstein Thanks. But is it possible to find out when the first "precise" figure was publicly released and what it was, 18.6 kt or 21 kt? -
@wellerstein I'm interested because "Атомный проект СССР" gives several yield estimates for RDS-1: first 10 kt (blast wave only), then 15 kt -
@wellerstein ...then 17 kt and finally they seemed to settle with 18.5 kt (in 1951 AFAIR). -
@wellerstein But the current official yield for RDS-1 is 22 kt, a figure that seems not to have come from the contemporary documents. -
@wellerstein (current official yields for RDS-2, RDS-3 and all the later devices, are, on the contrary, the same as in "Атомный проект") -
@wellerstein Could it be the case that the official yield of the first test was scaled up because of some prestige considerations? -
@pfc_joker No clue — presumably you could track it in the US case pretty easily, Soviet case would be harder. -
@wellerstein@pfc_joker weren't the first estimate based more on blast then revised / fine tuning based on fission product analysis?
End of conversation
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