Would You Fly Through an Atomic Cloud?

Dec 1, 20223 min read

British Nuclear Test Veterans Did Many Times #76 Squadron

From the archives of Flt Lt Joe Pasquini

In August 2009 Flt Lt Joe Pasquini of the RAF 76 Squadron wrote a ‘Letter to the Editor’ to Air & Space magazine (a quarterly magazine published by the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.) describing what the approach to flying through an atomic cloud is like:

“…For the first detonation, in which I was navigator in the air controller aircraft, Sniff Boss, all aircraft turned away from Ground Zero and kept flying away until the shock wave passed. After that, we turned around to see the Glory of God in front of us. The ‘fiss ball’ as we called the fission reaction, just hovered, broiling away.

Ten miles away, we encountered radiation, which we called ‘shine’ (for “sunshine”). During the early stages of the ball’s formation, the twisting white, yellow, red, and green

would just melt anything that entered. As the heat dissipated, the colours changed

to gray, with the occasional flashes of red and yellow popping out the side. Then the

ball rolled into a cloud, which started to rise. At a certain altitude, the center

dropped out, creating the stem.)

We descended from 45,000 feet to 40,000 and approached the stem.

Carefully monitoring the radiation instruments and the jet pipe temperatures. Flying past the stem, we were hit by “black rain,” and all of our instruments lit up like a Christmas tree.

We made three cuts through the stem and one peripheral cut into the cloud. “

The article he was responding to was “Into the Mushroom Cloud : Most pilots would head away from a thermonuclear explosion”. This particular article detailed what appears to be the birth of nuclear cloud flyers / nuclear cloud sampling by the United States Air Force. The article commences:

“He wasn’t supposed to do it, but on May 15, 1948, Lieutenant Colonel Paul H. Fackler, commanding officer of the U.S. Air Force 514th Reconnaissance Squadron

Weather, flew his airplane into the seething mushroom cloud

of an atomic bomb detonation.”

Interestingly enough the article discloses that

“During the first postwar test series, Operation Crossroads in 1946, specially trained pilots

in mothership aircraft guided unmanned drones through clouds of two consecutive explosions from a safe distance.”

This statement confirms that 10+ years before the British Nuclear Test ‘Operation Grapple’ on Christmas Island - the technology existed to send unmanned drones into the center of an atomic cloud to take readings.

The Wikipedia entry for Operation Crossroads provides details on those drones as follows:

“Radio-controlled autopilots were installed in eight B-17 bombers, converting them into remote-controlled drones which were then loaded with automatic cameras,

radiation detectors, and air sample collectors. Their pilots operated them from

mother planes at a safe distance from the detonations.

The drones could fly into radiation environments, such as Able's mushroom

cloud, which would have been lethal to crew members”

The ‘Able’ test was said to have a yield of 23 kilotons. Here is a link to a video of the explosion for reference: LINK. (and yes there appear to be animals trapped in cages at .12 seconds).

So for the Americans it appears that it was considered ‘lethal to crew members’ to send human beings through an atomic cloud formed after a 23 kiloton explosion.

Yet the British must be hardier people as it seemed perfectly acceptable to send the gentlemen of the RAF 76 Squadron team through atomic clouds formed after explosions ‘officially’ declared up to 3 megatons during Operation Grapple – where some of the men were exposed to up to 30 roentgen on their personal film badges (These particular gentlemen were whisked off of the island within 48 hours – but that is a story for another day).

In the December 2014 edition of Fissionline Flt Lt Joe Pasquini provided additional detail of what an Operation Grapple atomic detonation is like up close as follows:

“The fireball from Grapple Y was 6,000 ft in diameter; the surface temperature exceeded the surface temperature of the sun, generating untold billions of BTUs.

The immense heat from the explosion was hot enough to ‘boil’ the sea water 8,000-feet below and ignite vegetation on the island.

The pressure wave from the detonation caused the area under Ground Zero to form a large indented circular concave on the surface of the ocean.

As the shockwave bounced up-wards from the surface, it caused a large boiling waterspout to rise. This superheated steam was pulled upward into the bottom

of the liquid nuclear fire-ball causing it to be entrained into the detonation…”