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 moralists even by some of the scientists who worked 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 good.

Would make a tremendously interesting contrast of what was going on in Los Alamos at the same time as what was going on in Hiroshima.

Nuclear weapons have been tested over 2000 times since little boy and fat man were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Four tests and demonstrations for civil engineering purposes moving land, creating artificial bays, things like that.

There was even an extended U.

S.

Military operation called Operation Plow share started in 1958 at the height of the atomic age which aimed to exploit the quote friendly adam plowshares saw the explosion of 35 nuclear bombs until public outcry shut the program down in 1975.

The nuclear industry wanted to desensitize the public too.

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 press gallery that was called to confirm its safety.

The next blast, 104 kiloton detonation at yuca flat Nevada displaced 12 million tons of soil and resulted in a radioactive dust cloud that rose 12,000 ft and plumed toward the Mississippi River.

You can read all about operation plow share 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 plow share 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 Einstein fermi um were the result of the first thermonuclear explosion, code named ivy Mike.

In 1952 nuclear blasts create so much change in the environment that their fingerprint can be felt in fields on the opposite end of the academic spectrum.

In 2000 and eight, it occurred to Russian avant garde painting expert Elena Basner, then curator of the Russian museum in Saint Petersburg, inundated with a booming forgery market that if scientists chemically tested the paint in suspicious canvases, 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 cesium 1 37 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 oil.

And then Earth's plant life, namely Flax plants from which we get flax seed 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 are 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 wanna 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 Plow share about nuclear weapons fission products, art forgeries.

There's just a lot of cool things.

Thank you to everybody who follow me on Tumblr and use the ask me anything featured to have some discussions about some cool stuff about this video, but other videos.

Um I encourage you to keep doing that.

Tumblr is really cool for for doing sort of longer discussions about things.