Just like the title says, I don’t understand how they can test nuclear bombs in the desert, or Bikini Atoll (in the ocean) without permanently irradiating the ecosystem (and consequently, Earth) beyond repair.
They’ve tested dozens and dozens of nuclear bombs throughout the years, and I’m confused why that hasn’t messed our world up?
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Two things to think about here.
One, how/where you detonate a nuclear weapon makes a huge difference. A big part of the lasting “damage” to the local ecosystem is how close to the ground you detonate the weapon. The closer to the ground, the more debris will be irradiated and blown into the surrounding area. The higher up, the more the heat and radiation (mostly) dissipates into the air.
Most of these tests detonated the bombs well into the air, where the radiation doesn’t have as much to latch onto and therefore limits the medium/long term effects. That isn’t to say you could/should go vacationing in the Bikini Atoll or Chernobyl or a Siberian test site right now, but they aren’t some irradiated wasteland out of a Fallout game. [Mostly normal plants and animals grow there, scientists can visit the site, and all things considered it looks pretty normal](https://medium.com/stanford-magazine/stanford-research-on-effects-of-radioactivity-from-bikini-atoll-nuclear-tests-on-coral-and-crab-dna-48459144020c).
Secondly, the Earth is really big and these weapons aren’t like the “all-encompassing doomsday machines” they often look like in media. Most tests really only affected a few hundred square miles. Even the Chernobyl exclusion zone is only ~1000 sq miles — for reference, Switzerland is about ~15,000 sq miles. It would take the detonation of dozens and dozens of these things to really start to irradiate the planet in a way that would seriously mess things up on a global scale.
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