Nuclear blimpicide

I wouldn't have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that's just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. . .

In 1960, the Bureau of Naval Weapons issued a report on the airship tests, entitled "Structural Response and Gas Dynamics of an Airship Exposed to a Nuclear Detonation". The abstract reveals that the aim was to see how an airship employed on anti-submarine duties -- the USN was still using these into the 1960s -- would fare after dropping a nuclear depth charge.

Posted by David on June 29, 2009 2:03 PM