(no subject)

[camwyn]

I think I have just found a new favorite breathtaking act of KA-BLAMMO on the part of the human race: Operation Sailor Hat. Part of the mid-twentieth-century drive to make scary-ass top secret projects more secret by making their names too silly for anyone to want to repeat them very much, Operation Sailor Hat involved using godawful huge amounts of conventional explosives to simulate the force effects of a possible nuclear blast. It is this part in particular that won Operation Sailor Hat a place in my heart:

"The crater left by the blast is called the "Sailor's Hat" crater, and currently contains unique species of shrimp which have evolved to survive the hypersaline conditions in the crater."

Because dude. DUDE. They made evolution happen with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom and there wasn't even atomic radiation involved!

Comments

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Awesome.

Part of the mid-twentieth-century drive to make scary-ass top secret projects more secret by making their names too silly for anyone to want to repeat them very much

...Is this actually a thing?

[camwyn]

Not to my knowledge. It's just that I was going through a list of biggest recorded human-caused explosions last night and a great many of them had names like Sailor Hat, Minor Scale, Misty Picture (which was part of a test series called Misty Castle), and so on and so forth. It seemed a logical reason.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

I certainly can't think of a better one.

[camwyn]

If the British were involved, maybe- they have a long tradition of naming top secret operations by filling a list with random words and then simply pulling the next word off the list, so you get things like 'Operation Acorn' and what have you. But this? American.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

...I wonder what the selection criteria are for words going onto that list.

[vivian-shaw.livejournal.com]

Holy shit that's almost as cool as Tsar Bomba.

Wow.

(also, yes, the correlation between top secrecy and silliness of name is definitely borne out in CIA projects like BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE and weapons tests like Tumbler-Snapper.)

[camwyn]

I humbly submit that there was an island-based bombing test that equals Tsar Bomba if only because the sentence "While aiming at the fortifications, the island's total destruction would have been accepted" (emphasis mine) is involved. The Heligoland explosions are exceeded only by the Minor Scale and Misty Picture tests, and clock in just ahead of the Halifax explosion (which is what I was researching in the first place when I ran across Operation Sailor Hat).

[vivian-shaw.livejournal.com]

I repeat:

Holy shit. I haven't spent much (read: any) time researching non-nuclear explosions because, y'know, nuclear ones are so much more fucking bad for you, but wow.

(also, Heligoland always makes me think of John Malkovich and Udo Kier plotting to bake Willem Dafoe in surprise!sunlight.)

[camwyn]

Tell you the truth, all of this grew out of being terribly impressed with the last known words of the gentleman who saved several hundred lives at the Halifax Explosion- there were links to the other massive 'splodeys in that article.

Vince Coleman was a train dispatcher at Halifax on duty on December 6, 1917. When sailors came ashore with word that people had to evacuate because the S.S. Mont-Blanc- a French freighter stuffed to the gills with munitions- had been caught in a collision and was on fire, he and his co-worker left his post. And then Vince remembered that there was a passenger train on its way from Saint Johns, so he turned around and went back to his station to send a telegraph message to every single incoming train and dispatcher that he could reach:

"Stop trains. Munitions ship on fire. Approaching Pier 6. Goodbye."

Three hundred people were on the passenger train when it stopped at a safe distance. All the other trains coming into the station were stopped as well. The Mont-Blanc blew before Vince could escape; the explosion caused a tsunami in the harbour and a pressure wave of air that snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels, and carried fragments of the Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Three kiloton explosion, in 1917... but honestly there is just something about those last few words of Coleman's, isn't there?

[vivian-shaw.livejournal.com]

...."Tell my wife I love her very much." "She knows..."

DAMN is that awesome.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

If it's something like Operation Awesome Freedom, you know you're safe. But if it's something like Operation Pickles and Tuna on Rye, you're in trouble!

[camwyn]

Yeah. Operation Maximum Exploding Studliness is probably an EPA project to determine the number of trees under three feet tall in a particular Western biome. Operation Peanut Shell, on the other hand, is 'okay, how many people want to see if this is REALLY antimatter we've created here in the lab?'.