The History Of Nuclear Weapons Is More Messed Up Than You Thought

When it comes to nuclear weapons, things escalated quickly.

It started in earnest with the Manhattan Project — that was set up by the United States in August of 1942, and according to ICAN, it was just less than three years later that the first nuclear test was conducted. Bombs were dropped on Japan only a month later, and those days remain some of the most infamous in world history. It was the moment that everyone stopped and looked to the skies and realized that warfare — and the world itself — was now very, very different.

By 1946, the U.N. was both setting up commissions to deal with the now-real threat of nuclear weapons and to try to eliminate them all together. That obviously hasn't worked well, even though the world knows just how devastating these weapons can be.

And here's the thing — the act of dropping a nuclear bomb during a time of war and dealing with the aftermath isn't the only terrible thing that has come out of this industry. Not by far.

Between 1945 and 1962, the U.S. conducted a shocking number of nuclear tests on domestic soil — 230 above-ground tests, to be precise. Forbes says that during those tests, around 235,000 military personnel were involved, and around 20,000 British soldiers also saw atomic blasts up close and personal.

British soldier Douglas Hern told Motherboard that it was a "defining point" in his life. He continued, "When the flash hit you, you could see the x-rays of your hands through your closed eyes. Then the heat hit you, and that was as if someone my size had caught fire and walked through me. It was an experience that was unearthing. It was so strange. There were guys with bruises and broken legs. We couldn't believe it."

David Hemsley was just 18 years old when he was on site for a test, remembering, "If I was looking at you now, I would see all your bones. You would see all the blood vessels." 

Did it have a lasting impact? Not according to the official research published in the International Journal of Radiation Biology. While researchers say that the radiation had "no statistically significant" occurrence of things like cancer, sterility, and other health problems, those that were there say otherwise. According to soldiers like George Coleman (via ICAN), not only were they given no choice, but they suffered things like radiation burns and lifelong health problems ranging from hair loss to cancer. Many were denied compensation.

The U.S. dropped two bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, and there was a third core built. Science Alert says it was originally given the code name Rufus, but it wasn't long before it earned itself another — the demon core.

After Japan's surrender, Rufus was kept at the Los Alamos Lab where scientists performed high-risk experiments they called "tickling the dragon's tail." They essentially wanted to know how far they could push it before triggering the supercriticality that would result in the deadly reaction. And yes, it proved as dangerous as it sounds.

The first casualty was Harry Daghlian who, on Aug. 21, 1945, was working on building a wall of tungsten carbide bricks around the core. Unfortunately, he dropped one of the bricks directly onto the core, and, reflexively, he reached out through the tingling blue glow and the heat to pick up and move the brick. After 25 agonizing days, he was dead.

Security protocols didn't improve, not immediately, at least. A year later — on May 21, 1946 — a physicist named Louis Slotin was conducting a similar experiment when he dropped a screwdriver on the core. This time, eight people were exposed to the wave of radiation as it went supercritical, but it was Slotin who died just nine days later. The aptly named demon core was ultimately melted down and the plutonium returned to the stockpile.

The detonation of the bomb of Castle Bravo made an unbelievable mess, one that Mongabay says started with the complete destruction of three nearby islands. They also say that the radioactive fallout covered a shocking 7,000 square miles, and for comparison, New York City is a mere 303 square miles.

Among the worst hit was Rongelap Atoll, which was quite literally covered with radioactive debris. No, literally — it was an average of an inch thick and spread all over the atoll and the surrounding coral reefs. In 2018, divers headed out to Rongelap to see just what progress the coral reefs had made and found that hot ocean currents in 2014 had bleached and killed much of the marine life that was there. 

There's good news and bad news. The good news is that researchers found the marine ecosystem to be incredibly resilient in the face of things like nuclear testing, but when it came to the current state of global warming, the bad news is that some serious damage was still being done. 

That's not to say Castle Bravo hasn't had much of an impact on the environment, because it has — on a global scale. The Atlantic says that the explosion (and others like it) generated a massive amount of the radioactive carbon isotope called carbon 14, and hydrogen bombs have created so much of it that researchers have found it in every living thing they've tested.

It was Harry Truman — the same president who dropped the bombs on Japan — who designated a 640-square-mile patch of the Nevada desert to be designated as the Nevada Proving Grounds. According to PBS, it was the only above-ground nuclear test site that was active in the continental U.S. during peacetime. And here's the thing — Las Vegas was a little worried, because they were only about 65 miles away.

That's not far at all, and this is when a weird thing happened. They embraced their proximity to the testing sites, re-branded themselves as the Atomic City, and started throwing some fallout-style parties... Vault suits optional.

The first test was done on Jan. 27, 1951, and the local Chamber of Commerce immediately added "mushroom cloud" to their list of things to see in Vegas. And people absolutely came. Some got reservations at the Desert Inn's Sky Room for a panoramic view of the mushroom clouds, while others packed lunches and headed into the desert to get even more up close and personal. The booming tourist trade — along with the military personnel stationed there — brought a huge amount of cash into the area, and Vegas was the hottest spot to be.

Until, that is, area farmers started complaining their livestock were suffering from the radiation fallout. Testing was banned in 1963.

Nuclear testing is extremely controversial, and there's some recent research that makes it even more uncomfortable.

In 2017, the University of Arizona published a paper that looked at just how the U.S.'s nuclear testing impacted the health — and mortality — of citizens. The findings were dire. "The cumulative death toll attributable to nuclear testing is seven to fourteen times larger than previous estimates."

The paper took into account things like radiation that had entered the food supply through dairy products — which the National Cancer Institute had named as "the primary vector" of radiation in the food chain — along with studies that had examined radiation that was spread by the wind and made it into the food chain via other methods, like being absorbed into wheat and grains. Their estimates suggest that between 1951 and 1973 alone, the fallout and radiation from nuclear weapons testing contributed to somewhere between 340,000 and 460,000 deaths. For an idea of scale, the Atomic Archive says that around 135,000 people died during the bombing of Hiroshima, and 64,000 died in Nagasaki. 

They also looked at something they called the "social costs," which Economics Help defines as the amount of money that an action costs both private individuals and society as a whole. Researchers suggest those deaths cost the U.S. somewhere between $473 billion and $6.1 trillion.

The effects of nuclear testing aren't just long-lasting, they're global — and in 2020, New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer set out to prove that (via The Atlantic).

To do it, he headed to Cape Cod, Mass. — 7,300 miles away from the nuclear testing grounds in Bikini Atoll. There, he visited the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where they were studying the cross-section of a tree that had been planted in 1870 and succumbed to rot 150 years later. The cross-section was sent to Mary Gaylord, who just happened to be an expert in a radioactive carbon isotope created by a nuclear explosion — carbon 14.

When she sampled the levels of radiocarbon in the rings of the tree, what she got was a map of the nuclear timeline. Carbon remained level until the ring that corresponded with 1954, and as more and more testing was done, the tree gained more and more carbon — until 1963's Partial Test Ban Treaty.

Then, it started to decline but at a much slower rate than it accumulated. The last ring in the tree still contained levels of radioactive carbon that were 6% higher than pre-test levels, and it wasn't just the tree that she's mapped — from trees in Cape Cod to trees in New Zealand and coral reefs in the Galapagos, the history of mankind's nuclear testing is written loud and clear.