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SUMMARY:The secret causes of the Castle Bravo accident - Alex Wellerstein 
 (Stevens Institute of Technology)
DTSTART:20260205T153000Z
DTEND:20260205T170000Z
UID:TALK244114@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ahmad Elabbar
DESCRIPTION:The Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test\, in March 1954\, was th
 e worst radiological accident of the United States nuclear testing program
 \, contaminating tens of thousands of square miles of the territory of the
  Marshall Islands\, including several inhabited atolls\, and exposing near
 by Marshallese\, American observers\, and the crew of a Japanese fishing b
 oat to harmful levels of radioactive fallout. Despite being a fixture of b
 oth popular and scholarly interest for the past 70 years\, the underlying 
 cause of the accident has only very recently been understood. The official
  explanations – that a change in wind conditions\, coupled with an unexp
 ectedly high-yield – are now known to have been incorrect and even delib
 erately misleading. Documents and reports declassified and released in the
  last decade or so in fact point to an entirely different cause of the acc
 ident: a fundamentally flawed and unsubstantiated theory of how fallout wo
 uld form for megaton-range weapons. In this talk\, I will focus on 'what w
 ent wrong' in the Bravo accident\, what impact different causative mechani
 sms do to our historical (and possibly legal) narratives about the acciden
 t\, and\, ultimately\, the practices of Cold War knowledge production that
  were arguably the ultimate 'cause' of the accident.
LOCATION:Hopkinson Lecture Theatre\, New Museums Site
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