the use and proliferation of nuclear
weapons is a detestable artifact of
human beings seemingly in a radical
desire to dominate other human beings
nuclear weapons perhaps more than any
other man-made thing represent that
uneasy dichotomy between the brilliant
scientific creativity of a technological
achievement and the consequences of its
function its attention that's been
explored by so many thinkers and more or
less even by some of the scientists who
work themselves on the famous or
infamous Manhattan Project only reaction
I remember perhaps I was blinded by my
own reaction it was a very considerable
elation and excitement and there was
kind of parties and people got drunk and
it would make a tremendously interesting
contrast and what was going on in Los
Alamos at the same time as what was
going on in Hiroshima nuclear weapons
have been tested over 2,000 times since
little boy and fat man were dropped on
Nagasaki and Hiroshima for tests and
demonstrations for civil engineering
purposes moving land creating artificial
Bay's things like that there was even an
extended US military operation called
operation plowshare started in 1958 at
the height of the Atomic Age which aimed
to exploit the quote friendly atom
ploughshare saw the explosion of 35
nuclear bombs until public outcry shut
the program down in 1975 the nuclear
industry wanted to desensitize the
public to the negative connotations
associated with nuclear weapons but the
problem was that those negative
connotations were present in every step
of the program project known vented
radioactive steam over the very pressed
gallery that was called to confirm its
safety the next blast 104 kiloton
detonation at Yucca Flats Nevada
displays 12 million tons of soil and
resulted in a radioactive dust cloud
that rose 12,000 feet and plume toward
the Mississippi River you can read all
about operation plowshare
are in the department of energy's
executive summary of the program which
I'll put in the description below
even now they seem to talk about it with
a kind of what could have been
disappointment ploughshare and the
hundreds of other nuclear tests that
have been done since its termination
deal in the super violent production of
fundamental particles that have a real
almost unbelievable impact on
environmental makeup indeed the creation
of new chemical elements like
einsteinium fermium were the result of
the first thermonuclear explosion
codenamed Ivy Mike in 1952
nuclear blast create so much change in
the environment that their fingerprint
can be felt in fields on the opposite
end of the academic spectrum in 2008 it
occurred to Russian avant-garde painting
expert Elena bassinger then curator of
the Russian Museum in saint-petersburg
inundated with a booming forgery market
that if scientists chemically tested the
paint in suspicious canvasses they might
find something in its makeup which dated
the pieces more accurately than other
methods using a mass spectrometer Basner
and some artistically minded scientists
were able to see that two isotopes
caesium 137 and strontium 90 appeared in
greater concentration in canvases from
after 1945 when the first nuclear
weapons were detonated these radioactive
fission products are ejected from
nuclear blasts into the atmosphere and
absorbed into Earth's soil and then
Earth's plant life namely flax plants
from which we get flaxseed oil or
linseed oil a major bonding agent in oil
paints this fills me with such an odd
feeling almost all post-1945 oil
paintings contain a fingerprint of
nuclear weapons remember that next time
you go to your local gallery or if ever
you lose faith in the ironic
interconnectedness of all things that
within our most refined creative impulse
lurks traces of our equally refined
exact opposite impulse for destruction
hey everybody thanks for watching there
are so many tangents I could have gone
down with this video and I wanted to I
just didn't want to make it too long but
I put a lot of the links and sources in
the description under work cited so you
can read for yourself some of the cool
stuff about operation plowshare about
nuclear weapons fission products art
forgeries there's just a lot of cool
things thank you to everybody who
followed me on tumblr and use the ask me
anything feature to have some
discussions about some cool stuff about
this video about other videos I
encourage you to keep doing that tumblr
is really cool for for doing sort of
longer discussions about things and I'll
see you next week