Creative History

  No light.   No air.   No water.   Temperatures in excess of one-hundred and fifty degrees.  The smell of excrement and piss.  Hundreds of filthy, naked and sweaty men with only room to sit cross legged on the floor.  No room to lie down.  Not enough room to stand up. If heat exhaustion and dehydration don’t kill you then you may be lucky enough to lose your mind and go insane and into a blissful oblivion before someone strangles you, or bashes your head against the metal walls just to get you to shut up.   And then there are the beatings and the periodic executions, performed for sport by your sadistic captors on deck who will blindfold you, have you kneel and then slice off your head at the neck with the curved blades of their samurai swords and then laugh as your severed head rolls off the deck and floats out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Maybe, just maybe you’ll be “lucky” enough to live through the be...

  The explosion creates a bright red and orange fireball that is five miles wide in diameter--a mini manmade flaming sun.  This fireball is visible to the naked eye from over six-hundred miles away.  In the seconds after the explosion a giant mushroom cloud over forty-two miles high, eight times the size of Mount Everest, reaches all the way into the stratosphere. A witness, commissioned by the Soviet Union as a cameraman to document the event, and flying in an observation aircraft some fifty miles from the detonation described what he witnessed years later by saying, “Slowly and silently the fireball crept upwards.  Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing…it seemed to suck the whole earth into it.  The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, spectacular.” It is October 30, 1961 in the skies over the Soviet Union on the edge of the Arctic Circle and this is the test detonation of the “Tsar Bomba” or “Tsar’s Bomb”--the largest and most powerf...