Bicycle team or weapons test code name?

[beige_alert]

I've been watching the Tour de France and noticed that many of the names of the teams sound a lot like military code names.  I mean, yeah, that's the name of the sponsor, but the sponsors tend to be French companies, or Australian companies, or whatever, so if you live in the United States you need google to have any idea who they are.  Thus inspired, I present the following challenge:

[Poll #1922967]

Comments

[jaelle-n-gilla.livejournal.com]

Given only those choices I'd go for bicycle team for all of them. That may be because Europeans in general don't associate a lot of things with weapons. ;-)

That said, I think Quicksilver sounds like a DJ, FDJ is the Freie Deutsche Jugend (the ex-GDR Boy Scouts with free communist indoctrination included), and Storax surely is an antacid medication. Castle Bravos would be a teen magazine, Tumbler Snapper a fishing club, Lampre Merida a new fashion dance. Sojasun is probably a non-dairy coffee whitener.

So there, no bicycle team left over either way :)

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

I think you have the best answers!

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I actually recognized one name as an actual weapons test, so I figured it was a real quiz. My strategy is that if it's made of real English words, it's a weapons test, because that's how code names were done back then. I'm starting to doubt about Quicksilver, because that's just one word, and would actually make sense as a bicycle team name. But I won't actually bother to google.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

(Names taken from the Tour de France website and the Wikipedia list of American nuclear weapons tests.) Quicksilver just has to have been used for all manner of racing teams, but not one in the Tour de France this year. It was used as the name of a series of 18 nuclear tests at the Nevada site in 1978-1979. Storax was a series of 48 bomb tests in 1962-1963, one of which you probably do know of, Sedan, the great big crater produced as a "Plowshare" test. The great big crater is as much of a tourist attraction as anything at the Nevada test site can be, which is a limited sort of tourism. After 50 years it's pretty safe, but it was number 1 in fallout from tests inside the US.