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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They can’t. Cancer rates are much, much higher in the Marshall Islands than in other places.
Most modern nukes are tactical, not strategic. The tsar bomba era is thankfully over. A tactical nuke has a “reasonable” yield that can be extrapolated on theoretically.
They dont lol .
Have you heared about “castle bravo”?
My dad was a Marine and he had to observe the nuclear tests in the 50’s. But hey he got free cancer screenings from the military. They missed it, he died from pancreatic cancer.
Dozens? Try over 2000. Basically nuclear weapons only have a few kg of nuclear fuel so there isn’t much fallout compared to a nuclear reactor blowing up. Also most nuclear weapons are detonated underground so little radiation is at the surface. That being said in nevada there are places that are badly irradiated that no one is allowed to live there due to the sheer number of tests and the contaminated ground water.
Two ways.
First, people misunderstand radiation. The more radiactive some material is, the faster it gets to stable isotopes that emit very little radioactivity. So, a bomb has extremely high radioactivity in order to produce energy to destroy stuff, but that means those emitted radioisotopes will quickly become stable ones. The more problematic isotopes are the ones in intermediate range, where they are radioactive enough to harm people, but take too long to become stable isotopes.
The second is that harming the environment is less of a problem if its done in a desert. Most of the unstable isotopes will be left in the environment nearby, not far away. While nuclear winds are an issue, they have far less radioactive material than the immediate ground of a nuclear weapon.
It very much does mess up the area locally…. they had to scrape up all the contaminated land on Bikini Atoll and put it under a concrete dome (and it’s leaking).
Tests since the 1960s though have all been deep underground. And other than India, Pakistan and North Korea, no other country has tested weapons at all since the early/mid 1990s.
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