Were they just a product of showmanship and one-uppance, along the lines of the space race?

Did it go hand in hand with the never ending pursuit of first strike capability which amounted to the a ridiculous amount of nukes we have now?

A case of too many tests, too many nukes.

South Africa provided various types of support, including staging for the tests.

South Africa has since given them up.

That’s a lot of nuclear explosions. It occurs to me that if the alien observer of cliche fame had a different sense of time than us, he’d assume we had a 50 year nuclear war. That’s a serious use of weapons.

The Tsar Bomba, ostensibly 100 megatons, was detuned by the Russian scientists to 50 megatons, but the Soviet leadership wasn’t told. The scientists thought the fallout from the bigger bomb would be way too irresponsible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

The US Castle Bravo test was calculated at 4 to 6 megatons and went off at 15. That had to be a real surprise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

I had absolutely no idea there were so many. And the mix includes some colossal errors and the US had done so many or how widespread they were.

There’s a joke among heavy equipment operators, “if you don’t like the site you’re working on, run over the nuke meter.”

I couldn’t figure out the date of those tests, but they are played at the end when each country’s testing is summarized.

“Neutrons are produced when alpha particles impinge upon any of several low atomic weight isotopes including isotopes of lithium, beryllium, carbon and oxygen. This nuclear reaction can be used to construct a neutron source by intermixing a radioisotope that emits alpha particles such as radium or polonium with a low atomic weight isotope, usually in the form of a mixture of powders of the two materials.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_source

I’d never heard of any of this before.

I am familiar with one source of neutrons in
nuclear density meters.

“Another variant is to use a strong neutron source like 241Americium to produce Neutron radiation and then measure the energy of returning neutron scattering. As hydrogen characteristically slows down neutrons, the sensor can calculate the density of hydrogen – and find pockets of underground water, humidity up to a depth of several meters, moisture content, or asphalt content. Neutron sources can also be used to assess the performance of Separator (oil production) in the same way. Gas, oil, water and sand all have different concentrations of hydrogen atoms which reflect different amounts of slow neutons. Using a head which contains an Am241Be source and a slow neutron detector, by scanning it up and down a separator it is possible to determine the interface levels within the separator.”

-Wiki

This has be posted before but it’s fairly informational.

Video