Mark,
I've never heard about the A-bomb thing. We have a History Channel on satellite over here; quite fascinating at times.
I claim no originality for the wire ID problem. It's just one of the tricks that you pick up working as a telephone engineer.
The modern phone cable is pretty much foolproof with each pair identified with both colors, e.g. pair #1 tip=white w/blue bands, ring=blue w/white bands.
But the older style cable just used solid colors on each twisted pair. So if someone managed to untwist the pair (sometimes while trying to be "helpful" !!!), on a 25-pair cable you were left with 5 plain white wires, 5 blue, 5 green, 5 red, etc.
Often it was possible to apply tones or other test signals, but occasionally there was nothing for it except to trace out using just a continuity tester. If you were working alone, tricks like this saved a lot of legwork.
