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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The impact of a single nuclear weapon on the global environment is actually very small, and open air testing during the 1900’s took place in extremely remote locations. That being said, those locations have been damaged in a big way and the effects are still present today.
A lot of open air tests happened in the early nuclear days. Since then actual testing has been moved to deep underground tests to avoid the issues with fallout, and even underground testing is extremely rare today (North Korea has probably done more live tests than any other nation in decades)
One area of supercomputing has been to simulate and model nuclear weapons performance based on known quantities, which greatly reduced the need for testing in major nations at least. Other than that the expected performance of nuclear weapons is based on analysis more than actual testing. If you look up some history of nuclear tests by the US and USSR in the 1900’s, many had yields that were higher or lower than predicted. That body of testing knowledge is what enables the prediction of yields in modern weapons.
And since nuclear weapons are complex, it’s possible to test components and subsystems without a full nuclear explosion. That allows the controls, detonators, etc to be tested without the need to obliterate anything big.
They don’t. They release particles that will last for millions of years. Perhaps we invent technology that can repair that, but that’s just speculation.
You don’t have to go to that extreme though. Just walk down to your local landfill. Or to any chemical storage facility.
It’s been the cost of doing business.
To get to a point societally and technologically that we can solve that problem and so much more.
Nuclear testing is travesty to such things certainly. But it’s not the only one.
Well, they no longer test nuclear weapons because it did cause disastrous environmental effects. Some pacific areas are uninhabitable. You can draw a line on a map from the Nevada test sites to Minnesota. Along that route people have higher rates of thyroid issues.
Nuclear weapons are devastating but in the context of the planet earth, they’re not really that significant. All the nuclear weapons denotated all at once, won’t even shift the planet’s orbit or cause the world to break or anything. The earth is far far bigger than human’s ability to affect it.
These weapons can destroy lots of human lives and make many areas uninhabitable for a number of years and that could significantly reduce the number of human, animal and plant life on earth. There are theories that it could result in a climate effect called nuclear winter but that is still (thankfully) not put to the test.
Testing, although more common 50-60 years ago, weren’t that numerous to pose any danger to the “world”. Even the largest single detonation probably has an effect of two hundred kilometers in diameter, which is not small but it isn’t at all significant compared to the land area of earth (millions of square kilometers). The vast majority of nuclear weapons are tens to hundreds of times less destructive than the largest, the Tsar Bomba. A modest nuclear weapon has a destructive radius of perhaps tens of kilometer which is far smaller than a medium sized city.
That said, there are very few above ground tests in modern times. In fact, there are have been very few in total since the early 1990s.
Initially, they tested them out in the open, and that does indeed create environmental hazards and effects. The sites that were used for testing are still radioactive today, and many people were exposed to harmful radiation downwind of the test sites.
In 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was created to ban nuclear tests aboveground, and allow them only underground. If you test weapons underground, and totally contain the radioactive smoke and debris, then it doesn’t contaminate anything other than the hole it is in. That is a much smaller amount of contamination to worry about. The reason for the treaty was that people were getting concerned with how much additional radiation was being added to the air of the world.
Almost all nuclear states since then moved to underground testing. Since the 1990s, nobody except North Korea has tested any nuclear weapons, but even they tested them underground.
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.
Bikini Atoll was a fusion bomb/Hbomb. Very little radiation. Now, most tests are underground, if at all
It’s simple – they can’t. Nuclear tests, even ones which are done far underground affect the environment and ecosystem. The Earth and Atmosphere are large, expansive and extremely tolerant of forces imposed on them, but every nuclear explosion has an effect which propagates through the ecosystem and causes changes. So by the way, does every volcano eruption and every thunderstorm and so do you.
Perhaps your perspective on radiation needs updating.
Radiation is perfectly natural. Every living thing that has ever existed has been naturally radioactive. This was true for over a billion years before human beings existed, and has not changed appreciably. This means that every bite of food you have ever eaten has been radioactive, and so is your own body.
Naturally-occurring radioactive elements (uranium, thorium, potassium) are fairly common in the earth’s crust and the earth’s oceans. Also, radioactive material (e.g. Carbon-14) is constantly produced in the earth’s atmosphere by natural processes. Every breath of air every human being has ever taken has been naturally radioactive.
The amount of radioactive material produced by all the weapons tests ever conducted is tiny compared to the amounts that exist in nature.
The don’t.
Any human action has impact on the environment, and nukes are pretty significant.
At the same time, radiation is not the comic-book effect that we are lead to believe in by tv and movies.
In general when you are doing military experimentation, preserving the enviroment is not a priority.
Probably if people thought that preserving the planet is more important than exercising military pressure…
Nah i’m joking, it’s obviously more important to keep your neighbours in check with offensive prowess, keeping them underdeveloped, afraid and full of rancor. It’s not like we have experienced the fallacy of this strategy for the last five to ten thousand years, nor is it reasonable to think that we are all on the same boat, with the same needs and more opportunities to change for the better if we work together.
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