JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The illustration below was for the story, “Red Alert. What if an H-Bomb Hit L.A?”which appeared in the Los Angeles Times 12 March 1961, and made no doubt for some very sobering contemporary wake-up-and-die reading. If you were living anywhere in the country at the time and had never seen a representation of your city in ruins, and you encountered such a story and images before coffee, you might remember that missing cup for the rest of your life. The dramatization and mapping was done by Harlan Kilby, and it portrayed the destruction of the city and millions of people in the event of detonation of a 10 megaton nuclear weapon–it gave the reader a vague notion of what city-eating looked like, the bomb ‘flattening” everything in a 3-mile radius of its central zone and killing everything in 28 square miles.
(A little earlier, in 1960, there appeared a work by Harrison Brown and James Real called Community of Fear, which was a sci-fi kill-’em-up that used a kill zone with a 25-mile radius. For more on this film see Kenneth D. Rose One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, page 61.]
[Image via the Library of Congress]
Anyway, waking up to this in 1961 must have been an eye-opener.