#radiationgate

Just hours before Chernobyl disaster day McDonald’s Ukraine announces “something’s coming…30.04”

A week after ST: Tales from ‘85 release with the last episode being named “Countdown.”

Will Byers, the Atomic Bomb

Yes this is a diagram of the wormhole, but it also resembles an atomic bomb explosion to me.

The wormhole diagram scene is immediately followed by the scene where Mike is picking the record for his bomb.

Atomic bombs have keys. "It turns out getting to Mike, now that was the key." There's an X over Will's heart in the wormhole diagram -> M marks the spot -> Mike is the heart. Getting to Mike was the key. Emotionally distancing Mike from Will enabled Vecna to use Will (imo). For what exactly, I'm not sure. To build? To spy? ("The most famous Soviet operation involved its atomic spies that delivered crucial information from the United States' Manhattan Project, leading the USSR to detonate its first nuclear weapon in 1949.")

Atomic bomb explosions can cause melting.

I'm not a military uniform expert, so feel free to debunk this, but the uniforms of the soldiers whom Nancy and Jonathan find seem to resemble Cold War uniforms.

The Nevada Test Site is a restricted area once used for nuclear testing, but I'm thinking instead of literal radiation exposure, it's exposure to conformity and what this does to people.

‘The monument in the centre depicts 8:15, the time the A-bomb was dropped toward the hypocenter’

I’m going to be mad for a while that I didn’t get an actual picture of it, but when you leave the Memorial Hall there’s another explanation about its design that mentions the use of flowing water to give back to the victims that died with extreme thirst:

When the bomb dropped it burnt so hot (as hot as the surface of the sun) so that everyone who wasn’t immediately scorched to charcoal was left with severe burns and an unquenchable thirst. When the skin burns the moisture in your body is sucked out; if you have severe and/or full body burns like many of the victims, your body has been sucked dry of much of its water.

The heat also caused any surface water to instantly vaporize and dried out the surrounding air. It was the peak of summer and fires were blazing everywhere. The remaining large bodies of water were instantly poisoned by radioactive material, and eventually decaying bodies as victims jumped in to relieve their pain and quench their thirst - dying soon after. The vaporized water began to rain down hours later, but contained radioactive fallout and soot and was also undrinkable (picture above).

There’s discussion on what the lack of water could mean in the Upside Down. It’s significant because it is not only lampshaded (wrong word but you get the idea) by the characters and the whole Lovers Lake scene, but it’s also important to understanding how Will survived in S1. Because as presented to us so far, it should have been impossible.

And while I can’t explain that, I can offer the already-pointed-out Hiroshima inspirations to be a possible reason why the UD doesn’t have water. Because Hiroshima didn’t either (at least symbolically).

Okay… so as I said: Will is “Little Boy” the first atomic bomb (used in an act of war). The one that hit Hiroshima…

The name of the second atomic bomb, you ask? The one that dropped on Nagasaki?

“American Prometheus” is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb" and this is the book Christopher Nolan's film (starring Matthew Modine, our Papa) is based on.

(Tagging Mr Radiationgate @henrysglock for this one!)

Alright, so, today I stumbled across an interesting piece of information- the clocks and watches from Hiroshima are stuck at 8:15, the moment that the bomb struck.

Considering all of the constant references to 8:15 and all the posts James has made about radiationgate and Hawkins and nuclear disasters, I have to wonder if 8:15 is going to be significant for the radiation stuff in S5, especially with all of Vecna’s clock imagery and with Eddie talking about his watch being stuck at the moment that Patrick died.

There’s also all of the references to the UD being “frozen in time,” (whether you believe it’s really frozen in time or not, that’s how they refer to it in the show), which is also something that’s often mentioned figuratively with Hiroshima, with the clocks being frozen.