It does look like it, in a big way. But it seems unfair to call the visual part of a nuclear explosion a mushroom cloud. Mushrooms are willing to be subtle. Humans can cometimes look right at them and not see them.

Mushroom clouds aren't like that. And even after they become no longer unavoidably seen by the naked eye, they are like the pushy salesman of death, the nightmare that keeps on giving.

I met a woman who was active in Japan against nuclear power, a tough gig for a Japanese person. She got into it because when she was little she was sick a lot and in the hospital a lot. Her sickness was related to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, but she was born maybe ten years after they were dropped.

When she was in the hospital she noticed that there were many, many more people suffering from the effects of radiation than was publically admitted, an expotential lie. So later, when they told her about the need for nuclear power and how the dangers were well dealt with, she did her own research and own thinking, and active she became.

Mushrooms will poison you, some of them, but you have to eat them for that to happen. Robert Oppenheimer loved the beauty of the desert so that's one reason the research for and first test of the US A-bomb that Oppenheimer was the scientific leader of happened in beautiful New Mexico. People downwind of that did not make a conscious choice to eat the mushroom, but it came to them, and sometimes it killed them, as they lived near the desert Oppenheimer found so beatiful