From the Vault: The Atomic Scar

to NBC in nineteen sixty five. We'll be back with new content on Wednesday. As always, Thanks for your patience and your listenership.

human costs of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing. But today I wanted to focus on a couple of interesting and lesser known environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing, specifically something that I came across as it pertains to industrial metals, and then we're going to get into some other scientific territory as we go on, but quite apart from any straightforward chemical effects on the atmosphere, I think it is pretty fair to say that the human departure into the

nuclear weapons testing era in nineteen forty five was really sort of a shift to moment for humankind as a species.

In it, the American theoretical physicist and father of the atomic bomb, as he sometimes referred shares the following regarding the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb at the Trinity Test in New Mexico on July sixteenth, nineteen forty five, he said, quote, we knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried,

most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bagavad gitaw is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi armed form and says, now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

But I want to come back to the quote that that Oppenheimer is is deploying here, So if you're not familiar with it, Basically, these are these are who the figures are in this. You've got Vishnu, one of the principal deities of Hinduism. Uh. The Blahabad Gita or the Gita as it's sometimes just shortened to, is part of the Hindu epic, the Mahabarata. Technically it's book six in that, and the prince in question is the hero Arjina, part of the Pandava family that wages war against the Kravas.

That's the big struggle, that's that's key to the Mahabarata. Anyway, at the beginning of the Gita, which Oppenheimer is is quoting here, Arjina rides his chariot onto the field of forthcoming battle between these two families. But he suddenly overcome by doubt and depression, as he notes there there on the other side, within the ranks of the enemy, he recognizes friends, relatives, teachers, and therefore has this just immense weight descend upon him. This is a quote from it.

This is as translated by Edwin Arnold in eighteen eighty five. And as as is always the case with translated works of literature and poetry, you know the English is going to be approximate, and certainly with Hinduism there are many cases where particular ideas and phrases don't really have a parallel word in English. Anyway, it goes as follows quote. Thus, if we slay kinsfolk and friends for love of earthly power, a vat, what an evil fault it were better? I

deem it? If my kinsmen strike to face them, weaponless and bear my breast to shaft and spear, then answer blow with blow. So speaking in the face of those two hosts, Arginus sank upon his chariot seat and let fall bow and arrows. Sick at heart, so the prospect of the forthcoming bloodshed is just too much for him. But what does he do? He turns to his chariot tea for council, and luckily his charioteer is the blueskinned Krishna, the avatar of the mighty Vishnu, and he gives him

his council. In fact, he gives him his council for eighteen chapters. That's what the Gita is is basically him providing all of this philosophical and spiritual advice on what it is to have to make these sorts of decisions and engage in war and duty and so forth.

he also summarizes Krishna's counsel as follows. He says, look, you're a soldier, Argina. You have to fight. Fighting is your duty, so you need to do it. He also says, look, Krishna, you know this god who I also am is going to be the one to determine who lives and who dies. It's not your place to mourn or rejoice over human loss in this case, you should try to remain unattached from the outcome. And then also faith in Krishna is going to be what saves your soul, Argina, And this

is the most important part of the whole scenario. But as Argina begins to metaphorically see the light or I suppose behold the true nature of the reality he's faced with, he asks if he can see Krishna's god like form, and this site ultimately seals Arjina's case commitment to do his duty. And this occurs in chapter eleven, verse thirty two, where where the now cosmically embodied Vishnu speaks to Arjina.

And what he exactly says to English speaking years is going to depend on the translation, but for instance, the writer translation has him say death, am I a my present task destruction. There's a translation by Arnold that says, thou seest me as Time, who kills Time, who brings all to doom? The slayer Time, ancient of days, come hither to consume. And there's another one I came across

that I thought was pretty good. I am mighty time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. And I've always loved this one by jab Van Bettinen quote, I am time grown old to destroy the world embarked on the course of world annihilation. I am time grown Old'll always find that kind of there's something kind of perplexing about that phrasing that seems to be fitting this all powerful being that is, you know, that has taken on his true form to you.

mover here, I'm the one who destroys you. Just do your duty. Oppenheimer seems to be implying the opposite, that there perhaps is no all powerful force that bears the burden of our deeds, that the burden is instead on the shoulders of those involved in the creation of such a weapon. You know, when he's saying, you know, now I am become death, and that we all felt that way one way way or another. I mean, I mean,

he is, he is. He seems he's confronting the personal responsibility that seems to be there in the creation of such a weapon.

But then, yeah, how much mass human death will be brought into the world, even on the short term if this is successful, without even getting into the way that it will change the landscape of not only warfare and potential warfare in global security, but just human civilization itself.

and Research Facility. And within this facility there is a special room that is surrounded on all sides by thick plates of steel that was once part of a World War Two era battleship called the USS Indiana. This was a battleship that served in the war. It was launched in nineteen forty one. It was in a number of battles It served extensively in the Pacific theater during the war, and then after it was decommissioned, they took steel out of the ship to build this room. Why would anybody do that?

as radionuclides. Radio nuclides consist of atoms that can decay into different isotopes and emit radiation as they do so. And if you take the into your body, say by swallowing them or breathing them in, they can do this inside your body and provide internal radiation sources which you do not want. They can pose a serious health risk. If enough of them accumulate in the body, a large

dose could cause acute radiation syndrome. Prolonged exposure to even smaller doses over time could be a risk for damaging DNA and causing cancer. This is to use one example why you don't want to consume things that would come from a radioactively contaminated area, you know, somewhere around a nuclear meltdown. Why would you not want to, say, you know, roll around in the dirt near Chernobyl or drink the

water there. It's because the environment is contaminated with radio nuclides, these little particles that you don't want anywhere near your body. You do not want them going inside you. So people who get tested regularly in this room would include Department

of Energy workers. But Lynch also mentions that the room has been used to test a helicopter pilot and some other workers from Chernobyl, as well as children from Chernobyl I guess who lived nearby, So this has been in use for a long time and it's used to measure the radiation coming from living people. So somebody walks into the detector room, they get scanned for radio nuclides across the length of the body by a counting system that

Lynch describes as comprised of five coaxial germanium detectors. And because the level of radiation emitted by these radio nuclides is usually very faint outside the body, you need an extremely sensitive detector. And here you hit another problem, which is interference from background levels of radiation coming from the rest of the world. So you've got cosmic sources, atmospheric sources,

terrestrial sources. So in order to scan the body properly, you need a room with extremely tight radiation shielding and this is where the steel comes in. So the counting chain here is surrounded by a thin layer of lead and then cadmium and then copper. This is what's known together as a graded Z shield. And then outside that you have thirty solid centimeters of steel that's all pre war battleship steel, and this keeps the background radiation within

the chamber within low minimum detectable activities. But the question remains, Okay, so you need thirty centimeters of steel, but why couldn't you just build your radiation shield out of any old steel, Like, if regular steel is good enough for your car and your appliances and your skyscrapers, why would you have to harvest the flesh of a decommissioned battleship in order to build this thick radiation shield.

make steel. Steel is of course a mixture of iron and carbon and sometimes other additives to create alloys with special properties, and crucially for our purposes, the process for making steel involves the incorporation of atmospheric gas. I was reading about this in an article for Chemistry World by Kit Chapman. I think it was also a podcast episode of THEIRS talking about how there are two major industrial

processes for making steel in the modern world. One is known as the Bessemer process, and this involves melting the iron in a furnace and then removing impurities by blowing

air through the molten metal. The other is known as the Bos process, and this is similar but it uses pure oxygen instead of air, but that oxygen is still extracted from the atmosphere, and so the problem is that either way, the gas you're blowing through the molten iron to make your steel comes from the atmosphere, from the air. And ever since nuclear weapon tests began in nineteen forty five, that has not exactly been regular air.

with radioactive contamination. Now, the levels today are much lower than they were, say in the mid nineteen sixties, when these tests have been going on for a decade and a half, But even today the air still contains some radioactive isotopes such as cobalt sixty and others that is left over from the hundreds of nuclear detonations that characterize the post war period. Now this had many effects, of course, the most important of which are probaly like the health

effects on humans and the effects on wildlife. But another one of the effects is that for a long time you couldn't make steel via normal processes without it being potentially contaminated with radioactive particles. Not so many radioactive particles that it would be unsafe for regular use, but enough that it would be unsuitable if you were trying to make a sensitive instrument. So if you needed to make a Geiger counter or shielding for a sensitive radio bioassay chamber,

So what would you do. Well, it probably wasn't impossible to make steel without environmental contaminants from nuclear tests, but it would have been expensive and difficult. And another option presented itself, which was harvesting steel made before the Trinity test in nineteen forty five, and this precious material became known in the industry as low background steel. Low background because of its low background radiation, and what would be a great source of huge quantities of pre bombed steel

old naval vessels. So, to come back to the Timothy Lynch article about the radio bio assay facility in Richland, the USS Indiana was again the battleship that was sourced was the source here. It was decommissioned on September eleventh, nineteen forty seven, and then sold for scrap after it was taken off the navy list in June first, nineteen

sixty two. And as the ship was dismantled, some parts were kept for ceremonial purposes, like the main mast and a forty millimeter gun were put on display on the campus of India University, Bloomington. And I know some of its anchors were put on display at various museums and memorials. You know, its compasses, wheels and all that went to places where you can honor the fallen ships.

also fabricated into a room. These applications were probably never imagined by the original designers of the Indiana. These sections of the hull are still being used for the original purpose as a shield, but instead of protecting against artillery shells and torpedoes, the new purpose is to shield radiation detectors from the background radiations originating from cosmic, atmospheric, man

made and terrestrial sources. So what was once armour again unitions is now armour against the entire universe and its radioactive contents. The room was first constructed at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City, where it was used for many years in radio biology research, and then it was finally moved to the Richland facility in nineteen eighty eight, and the Indiana was not the only

battleship that became a source of low background steel. So after the Armistice in nineteen eighteen, at the conclusion of World War One, the German High Seas Fleet was ordered to report to an Allied base known as the Scapa Flow, where the naval vessels were supposed to be handed over to the British Royal Navy. But the German officers did not like that. They had a different idea and they decided, sort of as a kind of last middle finger to

the British, they scuttled their ships in the harbor. They sank their own ships on purpose so that the British couldn't have them. So now there are all those shipwrecks there. In fact, the Scapa Flow is well known for its World War One era shipwrecks and has been exploited extensively

as a source of low background steel. And though it's not known for sure, I've read rumors, unconfirmed rumors that some early spacecraft may have used low background steel from the scap of Flow or other res in radiation detectors. Interesting now I mentioned this earlier, but it's worth pointing out again that the atmosphere is much less radioactive today than it was at the height of nuclear testing in

the middle of the century. For example, cobalt sixty has a half life of about five point three years, and there has been a lot less nuclear testing since the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in nineteen sixty three, certainly a lot less atmospheric testing. So the atmosphere should be reduced to near pre war levels of background contamination within a reasonable amount of time, but it took decades. So Robert, when reading about this, I came across a comic strip

I thought you might like. It's one of the XKCD comics, and in it they build a time machine. But it turns out the time machine requires lead from sunken Roman warships, and this is of course hard to come by, so they determined they have enough lead for one trip into the past, and in this way through time travel, Greek Fire is born. It's kind of like the the You know, if you could you only had one wish from a genie, what do you do, well? You wish for more wishes?

the place. They were in the upper atmosphere, underground, in the ocean, and once several other The majority of the tests were by the United States and the Soviet Union, but several other countries eventually got involved, and there were a lot of bomb tests in the end.

to say in a July twenty twenty report. Quote. Since the first nuclear test explosion on July sixteenth, nineteen forty five, at least eight nations have detonated two thousand and fifty six nuclear test explosions at dozens of test sites, including Lopnor in China, the atolls of the Pacific, Nevada, Algeria, where France conducted its first nuclear device, Western Australia, where the UK exploded nuclear weapons, the South Atlantic Semipalitans in Kazakhstan, across Russia, and elsewhere.

you have North Korea, India and Pakistan. The United States is of course responsible for the only wartime detonation of nuclear weapons as in utilized as weapons against another people. Two bombs deployed against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between one hundred and twenty nine thousand and two hundred and twenty six thousand people, mostly civilians. Needless to say, those were both atmospheric detonations.

of radionuclides into the atmosphere. Now, there's been another perhaps unexpected, interesting environmental side effect of the nuclear testing age, which is how it has affected atmospheric levels of carbon fourteen and the way that this has turned into an unexpected number of scientific tools that can be used to study the natural world. So, in nature, carbon fourteen is a radioactive isotope of carbon that is generated in Earth's atmosphere

every minute of every day. The Earth is of course bombarded by cosmic rays, and cosmic rays are charged particles, usually protons and atomic nuclei, which are emitted from high energy sources, including the Sun, but also places far away,

usually traveling near the speed of light. And when one of these high energy particles enters the atmosphere, it sometimes strikes atoms to generate free neutrons, and a free neutron then combines with a regular atom of nitrogen fourteen to produce an atom of carbon fourteen, and this carbon fourteen then pairs up with oxygen to create carbon fourteen CO two, So there's a lot of carbon fourteen in the atmosphere is just produced at a steady rate naturally as the

cosmic rays are coming in, and this carbon fourteen CO two gets into everything that ingests atmospheric carbon. So plants suck in CO two with a predictable amount of carbon fourteen and they use that carbon to make their bodies, and then the trees and the grass and the corn are all made out of carbon content that is retrieved from the air and has a certain amount of carbon

fourteen in it. So if you do a molecular analysis of a plant, you will have a certain proportion of carbon fourteen in there, because cause the atmosphere does, about one out of every trillion carbon atoms is a carbon fourteen atom. But of course it doesn't stop at plants, because we also exist in a carbon fourteen generating atmosphere. You know, all the chemistry on Earth is sort of interconnected.

So we eat those plants, and we eat animals that eat those plants, so our bodies also have a predictable amount of carbon fourteen content. And as I said earlier, carbon fourteen is radioactive, which is another way of saying it's unstable. It has a known half life, so we know that it decays into other isotopes at a regular, predictable rate. So if you die and you stop breathing and stop eating, the amount of carbon fourteen in your

body will steadily decrease over the years. And what scientists figured out in the twentieth century was that you could use the amount of carbon fourteen in a formerly living object or an object formerly incorporating a known percentage of atmospheric carbon, to see approximately how long it had been since that organism stopped ingesting carbon from the environment, in other words, when it died. And this has been amazingly useful to the historical sciences. This has created the era

of carbon fourteen dating. It's been enormously useful to archaeologists and all kinds of other scientists to analyze and date organisms and substances from the past. But nuclear testing, beginning in the nineteen forties and especially since the nineteen fifties, has introduced new wrinkles into this. It has introduced new layers of radiocarbon science, both some complications to the existing radiocarbon science and new tools that scientists couldn't have predicted

at first that they would have. And so next, I just wanted to talk a bit about a really, really excellent article in The Atlantic by Carl Zimmer. Can we say friend of the show? Carl Zimmer? He's a former guest of the show, Carl Zimmer.

reading on its own. But I wanted to talk about a few things that Carl gets into here about some of the environmental effects of nuclear testing, specifically relating to carbon fourteen.

to our hearts and brains. It lights up the cryptic channels that join the entire biosphere into a single network of chemical flux. This man made burst of carbon fourteen has been such a revelation that scientists referred to it as quote the bomb spike. Only now is the bomb spike close to disappearing, But as it vanishes, scientists have found a new use for it to track global warming, the next self inflicted threat to our survival.

in your ears. And yet like that's I mean, that is the reality that drives through in all of this science, and it stands in such harsh contrast to the way certain individuals in like the political and the military sphere view nuclear weapons. The idea that like, you know, certainly we can say a head of state using a nuclear weapon against a city within their own nation, that would

be that would be ridiculous, that would be monstrous. But it's but but then those you know, people will say, oh, but do you use it again to another nation and other people that's less monstrous. But no, no, it's all interconnected in a scientifically verifiable way. I mean, it's one atmosphere at the very base level, without getting into some of the other issues we're going to explore, and just the basic ethical framework of the choice.

that nearly as much anymore. It's funny how easily those illusions can be dissolved just by sort of a single visual impression or a single realization about, say, how chemistry works, that you're suddenly like, oh, wait a minute, you know, there's just sort of earth life, and we really need to make this work and not create problems that aren't necessary to begin with.

called a physical chemist. He was somebody who studied radioactive elements and was one of the major developers of carbon fourteen dating. And one of the really interesting things that Libby does is that Libby ends up comparing measurements of methane from say living current sources. Say methane comeing off of a sewage plant, so this is going to be sewage from things that are currently alive, versus methane coming off of fossil fuels like oil that has been there

for millions of years. And what he showed was that, say, the methane coming off of the excrita produced by living humans is something close to about the atmospheric level. Meanwhile, what's coming the methane coming off of fossil fuels, coming off of say oil that's been there for millions of years, has essentially no carbon fourteen in it right, because it's been there for so long that all of the radioactive isotopes of carbon have decayed, so it's just got regular

carbon in it. And there was some other really interesting experiments too, but one of the things I wanted to focus on was Carl's profiling of the New Zealand physicist Ethyl Rafter. So Rafter was picking up on Libby's research and he was interested in radiocarbon dating. In its early days, he used it to test the bones of extinct birds and ancient volcanic eruptions. But he also tried to help refine the technique itself by performing measurements of the radio

carbon in the atmosphere. And he would do this by setting out a tray of lye on top of it on a hilltop, and the lye would capture CO two from the air, and then he would measure the atmospheric levels of carbon fourteen or the ratio. Of course, whenever we're talking about the levels of carbon fourteen, we're talking

about the ratio of carbon fourteen to regular carbon. And so Rafter would have been doing his research in the nineteen fifties and what he expected was that levels of radio carbon in the atmosphere would sort of bounce up and down, there'd just be sort of a natural fluctuation around a baseline. But instead he found an extremely steady trend. The level of carbon fourteen was just continually going up.

And what was the reason. Well, it was the nineteen fifties, So to quote from the article, the Castle Bravo test and the ones that followed had to be the source. They were turning the atmosphere upside down. Instead of cosmic rays falling from space, they were sending neutrons up to the sky, creating a huge new supply of radiocarbon. In nineteen fifty seven, Rafter published as results in the journal Science.

The implications were immediately clear and astonishing. Man made carbon fourteen was spreading across the planet from test sites in the Pacific and the Arctic. It was even passing from the air into the oceans and trees. And when they checked, they found increasing levels of radiocarbon in everything, in tree rings in Texas, in snails in Holland, in the lungs of recently deceased people from New York, even in the blood of living people. There's just extra carbon fourteen in everything.

And as bomb radiocarbon. So the bomb radiocarbon would be would be up in the upper atmosphere, and as it settles back down to Earth, it becomes a sort of tracerle that can be used as a scientific tool. So Carl quotes from somebody named Steve Beauprey, who's an oceanographer at Stonybrook University, and he's quoted in the article saying that carbon fourteen is inextricably linked to our understanding of how water moves. So I thought this was so interesting.

So in the nineteen seventies, oceanographers found that there was bomb radiocarbon that was distributed throughout the top one thousand meters of the ocean's water column. So if you go down one thousand meters, you're going to find atmospheric radiocarbon the elevated levels that you'd get from a bomb. But then if you go down below that suddenly not so

much anymore. And this became a really important piece of evidence in estimating the or in establishing that the ocean, like the atmosphere, had layers, and that water was primarily circulated within rather than between these layers. Carl writes, quote the warm relatively fresh water on the surface of the ocean glides over the cold, salty depths. These surface currents become saltier as they evaporate, and eventually, at a few crucial spots on the planet, these streams get so dense

that they fall to the bottom of the ocean. The bomb radiocarbon from Castle Bravo didn't start plunging down into the depths of the North Atlantic until the nineteen eighties, when John Clark this character from the Castle Bravo test was two decades into retirement. It's still down there where it will be carried along the seafloor by bottom hugging ocean currents for hundreds of years before it rises to the light of day. And he points out also that

lots of ocean life bears the seal of the bomb spike. Again, this is from atmospheric tests, so this is not even underwater test. This is atmospheric tests coming down into the ocean. Bomb radiocarbon falls into the ocean. It infiltrates everything from algae to the rings of calcium carbonate within coral growth, and then it forms this kind of slime so quote.

The living things in the upper reaches of the ocean release organic carbon that falls gently to the seafloor, a jumble of protoplasmic goo, dolphin droppings, starfish eggs, and all manner of detritus that scientists call marine snow. In recent decades,

that marine snow has become more radioactive. In the article, he also profiles a researcher named Mary Gaylord who works at the National Ocean Science's Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility, which is known as no SAMs for short, and that's at the woods Hull, which is where Hooper comes from in Jaws, Oh huh. And she measures radiocarbon and everything from bat

guano to fish eyes. There's a lot about fish eyes in this article, which is more interesting than you'd think because surprisingly the study of radiocarbon and fish eye lenses can tell us a lot like the cores of fish eye land lenses have the same levels of carbon fourteen as the fish did when they were still egg So

it's a really good age indicator. And this knowledge was used by Danish researchers in twenty sixteen to create an aging metric for these cold bottom dwelling animals, the greenland sharks, which you might have read about them because they grow so old. This helped confirm the discovery that these animals could live to be almost four hundred years old. So a lot of these are pre bomb sharks. And actually

this also applies to humans. People born in the early nineteen sixties have more radiocarbon in the lenses in their eyes than people born before the nuclear testing age, and people born in the years since then have less and less as time passes since the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Bomb radiocarbon can also be used to date human teeth.

But there's a very sobering fact that's discussed at the end of Zimmer's article, which is that the proportion of carbon fourteen currently in the atmosphere is actually a bit lower than would be predicted by the known nuclear tests and the known rate of decay and absorption by the Earth and seas. So what makes the difference, Like why is there less carbon fourteen than we think there should be? And it turns out there's an answer to that. The

answer is fossil fuels. Remember how I mentioned earlier that the methane coming off of oil had basically no carbon fourteen in it because the oil is so old. All of the carbon fourteen has already decayed. It's gone. So as we release carbon from these ancient carbon sources into the atmosphere, we're putting a much higher percentage than normal of regular carbon up there, which actually dilutes what carbon

fourteen there is. Carlzember points out that in nineteen fifty four, which was the year of the Castle Bravo test, humans emitted six billion tons of carbon dioxide that year. Quote, in twenty eighteen, humans emitted about thirty seven billion tons, which is more than six times more as Willard Libby first discovered. This fossil fuel has no radiocarbon left. By burning it, we are lowering the level of radiocarbon in the atmosphere like a bartender watering down the top shelf liquor,

which is so strange. So the remaining signature of humanity's first great sort of civilization level threat technology is being diluted by the ever increasing mark of our other one, by the second one. Wow, all right, I guess we need to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more.

outer space nuclear detonation ever committed. It occurred around eleven pm local time, this would be in that region, and the thermonuclear sphere burned like a new sun in the night sky. And if you look up Starfish Prime online you can see photos that were taken from Honolulu, Hawaii at the time, and it does look like a sun in the sky. Wow. Afterwards, an aura could be seen as well for thousands of kilometers. It also resulted, and this kind of comes down to one of the key findings.

It resulted in an electromagnetic pulse or an EMP, something that had been suspected by scientists, but this was really the proof in the pudding. It ended up disrupting the flow of electricity for hundreds of kilometers around it, with its most of its disruptions felt in Hawaii itself. It also damaged six satellites which ultimately failed, and other failures might be link to Starfish Prime. As well, so this was ended up being an effect that was far stronger

than anticipated. Now, now that's all interesting, but obviously a test like this expand is going to expand on our understanding of the weapon technology being tested. But the side effect here is that the CD one oh nine tracers released by the detonation allowed scientists to work out some of the seasonal mixing rate of polar and tropical air masses. So again comes down to the fluid dynamics of in our earlier example, the ocean, and here with atmospheric movement.

And this is not just a scientific curiosity, and this is something that had tragic consequences for real people like the people of the wrongolap Atoll, who were pretty nearby where the Castle Bravo test was conducted, were affected horribly with by like fallout from the test just because it was so much bigger than the scientists thought it was going to be.

You know, we believe we're calling this episode the atomic scar. But a scar, we tend to think of is something that is visible but is fully healed. And the thing about a lot of these tests is that it's it's not so much a scar, but it is like a thick scab, and if we are to pick at it again, we may bleed. In fact, we may bleed for the

duration of our lives sort of situations. So so yeah, these kind of coming back to what we said earlier about, you know, about the world in which we conduct these tests. You know, we might think, oh, we're not setting this off in the house, We're setting it off in the backyard, you know, but but ultimately, you know, the wilds of Nevada or some islands you know off the coast of Australia.

These are these are part of the world we live in and it's part of the atmosphere that we all breathe, part of the ocean that we all depend on.

submarines or how they would impact submarines. The deepest was the nineteen fifty five Wigwam test at a depth of two thousand feet six hundred and ten meters. Now, an author by the name of Sarah Lascal wrote a really good article about the US tests for Atlas Obscura pointing out that the water is what really made the tests more problematic, because instead of spreading radioactive particles through a wider atmospheric region, it instead released an immediate radioactive water cloud.

So the ships used in these tests were highly radiated and impossible to clean, so they were just towed out to the deep and scuttled. Now Lascal writes that quote, the Atomic Energy Commission would not sign off on it until it was clear that no one in the United States or Mexico was at risk and that the test area was relatively free of marine life. But the test

certainly killed fish in other organisms. I read an account by a UK veteran who was of course working with some of those UK tests, claims that men were sent out in boats to collect dead irradiated fish after the test was conducted. And this particular test would have been the nineteen fifty two Hurricane test in the Montebello Islands, as this was the only UK underwater nuclear test that was conducted.

that took place there as well. And what's interesting here is that there have been some studies over the past decade or so that have really looked at how the local environment has bounced back, and indeed it does show that nature can be very resistant to even this kind of, you know, intense damage. That they say that corals have recolonized bomb craters. Other life forms are doing well, even if there are some curious mutations like sharks missing their

second dorsal fin that sort of thing. The general belief is that at least with Bikini, that the worst affected fish died off decades ago, and today's fish populations are only exposed to low radiation levels as they frequently swim in and out. Plus, these are also areas that have been left alone by humans, they more so than other

marine areas. Now one should also note that the occupants of the area around Bikini Atoll and the Marshall Islands were displaced by the test, some one hundred and sixty seven people, I believe, and they've never been able to return. Their dislocation was supposed to be temporary. But then on top of that, children in the Marshall Islands were observed

to experience thyroid problems long after nuclear tests ended. Now we've thus far been talking about nuclear testing, and of course beyond that, I think we can hardly talk about nuclear testing without at least briefly discussing the prospect of nuclear war itself, because that is ultimately what the testing

is all about. Now you can make the argument that ultimately it's about preventing that sort of warfare from taking place by making sure you have a terrifying number of nuclear weapons in your armament, or the reverse is true, that you were to developing these weapons which may potentially be used. Any nuclear weapon is a potential holocaust, you know, contained within the warhead, right.

People are saying, well, things would have been worse if we hadn't had the nuclear threat looming over us to discourage us from going to war. I guess it's hard to know whether that's true or not. But I guess it's also though, it's just hard to calculate costs and benefits when you're thinking about when you know, the potential cost is like a civilization ending worldwide calamity.

such possibilities. I don't like considering such possibilities either. If you are troubled by such possibilities, I would urge you to consider following a group like the Arms Control Association at Armscontrol dot org or any number of other anti

nuclear weapon or nuclear weapon control or disarmament groups. And if you're in a position to use your vote to favor candidates political candidates who take nuclear testing and nuclear war seriously and are committed to certainly not testing them, but even you know, not even raising the question of their deployment or questioning why they shouldn't be used and that sort of thing, then you should you should do so.

All right, on that note, we're going to go ahead and close it out. In the meantime, we'd of course love to hear from you your thoughts about nuclear testing, nuclear weaponry, et cetera, or just sort of the overall impact on all of this on our world and our culture in the many ways the world would not be the same. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of our show, you can do so by finding us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever

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