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The day America dropped 4 nuclear bombs on Spain + Poe's big bang cosmology?

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C C Offline
The day America dropped 4 nuclear bombs on Spain... but the disaster, 50 years ago, has been forgotten by all but its surviving victims
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ctims.html

EXCERPT: On January 16 1966, a U.S. B-52 Stratofortress took off from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in North Carolina. Bombers were continually flown on 24-hour missions across the Atlantic, to provide the States' nuclear capability. It was a routine mission for the crew but then disaster struck over Palomares, Andalucia, as the aircraft refuelled. Four hydrogen bombs plummeted to earth at horrific speeds, which would have killed millions had they exploded.

[...] This raises some awkward questions for the United States, many of which have a direct bearing on the 1,600 inhabitants of Palomares, at least half of whom are British expatriates. In particular, why have the Americans taken so long to clean up the fallout?

As soon as the crash took place, the residents of Palomares found themselves bombarded with huge scraps of flaming metal. In the words of one five-year-old girl, the sky was ‘raining fire’. [...] What of the remaining three bombs? Miraculously, not one of them caused any damage to people or property. The second bomb also detonated, although only half of its conventional explosives blew up. The third landed in a dried river bed without exploding, and the fourth fell six miles out to sea.

Still more fortunate, the parachutes on the bombs had failed, which meant they fell with such force that they were largely buried when they detonated, so only a relatively small amount of radioactive plutonium was blown around. Better still, a breeze took the radioactive particles away from Palomares. No wonder that the village priest said ‘the hand of God’ was at work.

Divine intervention may have spared Palomares, but it was less merciful when dealing with the crews of the two aircraft....

MORE (photos): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ctims.html



Edgar Allan Poe: visionary of big bang cosmology?
https://aeon.co/essays/edgar-allan-poe-v...-cosmology

EXCERPT: [...] Despite his relatively brief life, from 1809 to 1849, Poe applied his style to an astounding range of genres, from supernatural horror to detective stories. Even among that diversity, though, one piece stands out. In his final major work, Eureka – A Prose Poem (1848), he took his fascination with nature beyond the human world and crafted a chronicle of the Universe itself. The unique subject matter required an inversion of his usual approach. Instead of imagining a breaking down of regularity into shards, as in many of his famous short stories, Poe envisioned a systematic building up of order from a unitary beginning – a genesis rather than an apocalypse. Moreover, he offered his account as an attempt at realistic truth rather than mere fiction. ‘My general proposition … is this,’ he wrote. ‘In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.’

Readers who first encounter Eureka are often surprised by its resemblance to the Big Bang model of cosmology [...] Poe identified a vital cosmos, pulsing with change, as dynamic as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and indeed maelströms. The Universe, painted with Poe’s vivid colours, became not just a backdrop to nature’s theatrics but a dramatis persona in its own right [...] In bringing the cosmos to life, Poe mirrored the embrace of natural transformation in many of the writings of the Transcendentalists around this time...

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/edgar-allan-poe-v...-cosmology
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