Target Nevada

Those with a different, more Strangelovian sensibility may appreciate "Target Nevada", a 1953 short film about nuclear testing. When Walt and friends were assembling their "First Tech Weatherman Film Festival", when we college students at NM Tech in Socorro in 1975, this was the audience's favorite. (The decontamination procedure at 6:28 still slays me.)

Lots of film footage here of Albuquerque too, as evidenced by the Sandia Mountains.




Of course, there were some problems too. We are at the 59th anniversary of the Albuquerque Broken Arrow, which occurred near "Q" Studios, home to "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul", on May 22, 1957, when a mammoth 10 megaton device was dropped on the outskirts of town:

No one knows precisely what happened aboard the B-36 aircraft transporting a nuclear weapon from Texas to New Mexico that day, but somehow the device fell through the bomb bay doors, plummeting about 1,700 feet into a field south of Kirtland Air Force Base. The conventional explosives detonated, blasting a crater 12 feet deep and 25 feet across. Luckily the nuclear capsule had been separated from the conventional explosives during transport for safety reasons, and that capsule was found intact. The only casualty of the blast? An unfortunate cow grazing nearby.