Mushroom Cloud - Origin of The Term

Origin of The Term

Although the term itself appears to have been coined at the start of the 1950s, mushroom clouds generated by explosions were being described before the atomic era. For instance, The Times published a report on 1 October 1937 of a Japanese attack on Shanghai in China which generated "a great mushroom of smoke". The 1917 Halifax explosion also produced one. During World War II, descriptions of mushroom clouds were relatively common.

The atomic bomb cloud over Nagasaki, Japan was described in The Times of London of 13 August 1945 as a "huge mushroom of smoke and dust." On 9 September 1945, The New York Times published an eyewitness account of the Nagasaki bombing, written by William L. Laurence, the official newspaper correspondent of the Manhattan Project, who accompanied one of the three aircraft that made the bombing run. He wrote of the bomb producing a "pillar of purple fire", out of the top of which came "a giant mushroom that increased the height of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet."

Later in 1946, the Operation Crossroads nuclear bomb tests were described as having a "cauliflower" cloud, but a reporter present also spoke of "the mushroom, now the common symbol of the atomic age." Mushrooms have traditionally been associated both with life and death, food and poison, making them a more powerful symbolic connection than, say, the "cauliflower" cloud.