This understanding would reorient human beings to the planet on which they live, sparking and informing a global environmental movement that remains a potent social and political force today across national borders.
Over time both the United States and the former Soviet Union would integrate the capacity of this weapon to poison vast swaths of the Earth with lethal levels of radiation into their plans for attacking and “defeating” each other in a global thermonuclear war.Ĭonversely, observations on the movement of radiation through the environment after nuclear weapon tests would forge a new understanding of the interconnected nature of the Earth’s ecosystem. strategic nuclear planners quickly recognized the radiological fallout as a powerful tool of war, separate from the power of blast and heat that were fundamental to nuclear war fighting strategies. As many of these radionuclides remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, the dangers inherent in thermonuclear detonations would produce legacies still not well understood.Īs radiation from Bravo the test spread around the Pacific Ocean, contaminating fish that would be caught thousands of miles away, human conceptions of warfare and of nature also began to mutate and change. Additionally, the radiation produced by these thermonuclear weapons spread around the globe, both in the water of the oceans and in the atmosphere, contaminating fish, birds, animals and plants far from nuclear test sites.
Thermonuclear weapons, or H-bombs as they were called, were thousands of times more powerful with the potential to kill tens of millions of people with single detonations, many of whom would be far beyond the blast and heat reach of the weapon. Less than ten years later both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed weapons that made these original nuclear weapons seem small. These attacks and the spectre of future nuclear attacks cast a dark shadow on the future of humankind. Single planes had delivered single bombs that destroyed whole cities and killed tens of thousands of people in less than a second. People around the world were shocked by the devastation wrought by the American nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of World War Two. Slowly it would become evident that, while this weapon had been tested in the Marshall Islands, its detonation was a global event. 1 The radioactive fallout cloud that resulted from the weapon would kill a fisherman located 100 km away, cause illness in hundreds and perhaps thousands of people across hundreds of miles, and contaminate entire atolls with high levels of radiation displacing residents most of whom have never been able to return to their homes. The weapon yielded a force three times as large as its designers had planned or anticipated. On March 1st 1954 the United States tested its first deliverable hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
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