1951 ...
Before the advent of Hydrogen Bombs made mere survival problematic, there was a lot of ballyhoo about the need for good citizens to crawl out of the rubble, dust themselves off and get to work on bringing the GNP back up.
...here's the AV Kid with "Our Cities Must Fight"
... downwind
From our 1960's Civil Defense friends, a film about Fallout with music as spooky as this map!
... Atlas in bunker 1961
The first Atlas ICBMs were set up on launch pads at Vandenberg AFB and Cape Canaveral just like any rocket of the time. On a pad with a gantry tower. Vulnerable even to angry pelicans.The nest step was a hole in the ground. Not a vertical silo yet, but a big underground garage with huge roll back overhead doors.
The doors would be opened the missile cranked up into the vertical, filled with fuel and sent on it's way. Took about 3 to 6 hours- just enough time between when the Russian bombers showed up on the radar screens and what we see here was turned into molten glass.
That's a nosecone shroud for a hydrogen bomb mounted at the 'top'. Maybe it's one of those 25 megaton MK-41's - we don't have a lot of these booster warhead configurations yet (in the early 1960's) so we'd better make every one of them count!
This 'semi-hardened' Atlas facility was nicknamed the 'coffin configuration' because the missile was lying down in a box.
... test tower 1955
Easier for insturments to observe and a little less of that nasty, bothersome fallout if you put your nuclear device on a high tower before you make it go 'boom'!Tower is not re-usable.
(Notice the tanks parked over to the left- they aren't going to make it.)
... first millionth of a second.
Super-duper high speed photography (we're talking 1- ten millionth of a sec) of the birth of a Hiroshima size atomic blast. Top photo the fireball is a couple hundred feet across still vaporinzing the tall tower it was mounted on. Second photo the fireball is expanding and beginning to touch the desert floor of the Nevada test site. Not sure if these are from the same 'shot'. Sometime in the 1950's.http://www.damninteresting.com/rapatronic-nuclear-photographs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EG&G
Doc Edgerton who founded EG&G is the father of the high powered studio stobe lights that I have used all my career as a fashion photographer.
The Arctic was a pretty important place during the Cold War. It was from the North and over the Pole that the Russian bombers would come. It was the shortest and fastest route.... here's the AV Kid with a cool newsreel about the Distant Early Warning line (DEW)
http://www.archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.52896
... JFK watches militay manuevers
... no Commander and Chief did sunglasses better than John F. Kennedy!
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