Since the formation of the United States, its mainland has never been invaded or
had any major attack but there are places there which have had more nuclear
explosions than anywhere else on earth. Of the 1054 U.S. nuclear tests, 928 were
carried out on the US mainland mostly at the Nevada Test Site but it wasn't just
the US testing nukes, the Soviets, British, French, Chinese,
Indian and Pakistanis and more recently the North Koreans have all tested
nuclear weapons some on their own territory and some in remote locations
around the world in the air, on land, underwater and even in space but by far
it's the U.S. and the Soviets that would have been the biggest players. But what happened
at and to the nuclear test sites. The very first full-scale nuclear test was
the Trinity explosion of May 16 1945 at the White Sands Missile Range in New
Mexico. This was to prove the theories developed by the Manhattan Project would
actually work in reality. Trinity was an implosion device that used plutonium,
this was in response to the original design which was a gun type device that
used uranium-235 but at the time uranium-235 had to be
refined almost an atom at a time and even using a massive x10 graphite
reactor of the newly constructed Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it would take
years to get enough uranium-235 for just one bomb. Plutonium could be
made much easier in the reactor but in order to make it become critical and an
explosive device, a ball of it would have to be compressed to about half its size
with an explosive lens and this is what the Trinity test was all about. As the
bomb exploded the 30-meter metal tower, its support structure and the bomb
casing itself was vaporized along with the sand of the desert floor below
as the vaporized material cooled and fell back to the ground
it became a green glossy mineral now called Trinitite. In some of the greenish
glass there are patches of red which is thought to be the copper wire which was
used to trigger the explosive lens. Just after the war
samples of Trinitite were sold as jewelry because it was thought that the
fireball had just melted the sand and it wasn't particularly radioactive, although
now it's illegal to take samples from the site which is open to the public
twice a year. The level of radiation at the Trinity Ground Zero site is now
approximately for one hour of exposure about the same as the average U.S.
citizen would get per day from natural radiation sources. Following the war
nuclear testing moved to the Nevada proving grounds about a 100km
northwest of Las Vegas. From 1951 until 1962, 100 above ground
tests were performed becoming a bit of a tourist attraction in Las Vegas where
they could feel a seismic shock wave through the ground and see the mushroom
cloud rising in the distance. At the time even though the effects of radiation
were becoming much more well-known about, little was done to reduce for Fallout.
But it wasn't just bombs which they tested the government wanted to know how
building's, infrastructure and people might fare if there was a nuclear attack.
So they built typical American houses, fully furnished, industrial buildings
parts of bridges, electrical supply stations, even bank vaults in the test
zone and exploded nuclear devices nearby. They tested different types of concrete
and building materials to see which would be more resilient, in fact many of
the building codes now in use today are based on the results of these nuclear
tests. As part of the government's attempts to reassure the public that
things like their money and valuable documents and records would be safe in
the event of a nuclear attack, Edwin Mosler the president the Mosler
safe company whose biggest customer was the government built an armored vault on
the Frenchmen flats area near a 37 kiloton test to prove it
it would withstand the heat and blast, which it did, and it's still there today,
minus the door which was removed afterwards. Air bursts are considered cleaner than
ones just above the ground because if the fireball reaches the ground, soil and
other materials are sucked up into the fireball and mixed with the nuclear
elements to make a highly radioactive cloud that can travel for hundreds of
kilometres. In 1953, a 32 kiloton device nicknamed 'Harry' was detonated. The device
later became known as 'Dirty Harry' because this test generated more fallout
than any other US continental test. Due to an error and an unexpected change in
the wind direction the fallout was blown over 200 kilometers and over the city of
St. George Utah where the people said there was an oddly metallic sort of
taste in the air. But the prevailing winds carried the fallout from many of
the Nevada tests over southern Utah. But the effects were spread across much
of a mid US affecting over 3,000 counties and causing a marked increase
in the number of cancers from the mid 1950s up until the early 1980s. As of
2014, the US government had approved 28,000 880 claims for a total of $1.9
billion in compensation to servicemen at the test ranges and to the
public who had been exposed to radioactive fallout. Because of a partial
test ban treaty of 1963, atmospheric tests were banned and all testing went
underground. The thinking was that if the test could be contained deep underground
there will be little or no fallout but they could still contaminate underground
water sources if poorly located. In this shot of the
area from Google Earth, each one of the small circular marks is a subsidence
crater formed as a result of an underground test. Some 828 were done this
way, the biggest of these which can be seen unaided from space as
part of Operation Plowshare to see if nuclear devices could be used in the
peaceful use of excavating large areas of land quickly. The sedan crater which
is 100 meters deep and 390 meters across was formed by a 104 kiloton
device detonated a 194 meters underground in july 1962. The
test displaced 11 million tons of soil but the fallout which spread northeast
wards in two separate clouds as far as Iowa was found to be too highly
radioactive to make this a practical peaceful use of nuclear explosions in
the u.s. at least but it has believed to have been used in the Soviet Union. Today
the Sedan crater can be visited and the levels of radiation are safe enough as not to
warrant any protective clothing. However in the Soviet Union at this time there
was less of a concern for the health and safety of the rural population of
Kazakhstan near the Semipalatinsk test site which was also known as the polygon.
The test site was created as a top priority on the orders of Stalin by the
Marshal of a Soviet Union and head of the NKVD secret police ever Lavrentiy Beria .
in 1947. The facilities were built on an 18,000 square kilometer area of the steppe
in northeastern Kazakhstan with gulag forced labor in what Beria said was
uninhabited land but actually had around about a million people living within a
160 kilometre radius of a site and had many villages much closer.
Between 1949 and 1989, 456 tests were performed of that 116 were above ground
either air dropped or on towers the last of which occurred in 1962. The total yield
of the tests over the site's 40-year history is equivalent to about 400
Hiroshima sized bombs or about 6 megatons. After the collapse of the Soviet
Union and Kazakhstan became a separate country, the area was neglected and
nuclear materials were left unguarded in mountain tunnels
and bore holes, many of which were targeted by scavengers looking for scrap
metal but not necessarily knowing what they were picking up. The significant
amounts of plutonium left behind were considered to be one of the biggest
nuclear security threats and in 2012 Russian, US and Kazakh scientists
completed a secret 17 year, $150 million cleanup operation to make
the site safe which included things like filling bore holes and tunnels with
special concrete with chemically bonded with plutonium. It's only in the last few
years of a scale of radiation damage has come to light. The Soviet state
covered up the extent of the damage for decades and it wasn't until 1956 that
any studies were conducted into the effects on the local population. The
Institute of radiation medicine and ecology in Semey or what was known as
Semipalatinsk has said that between 500,000 and 1 million people were
exposed to substantial radiation doses when the atmospheric tests were being
carried out, which led to a dramatic increase in cancer, birth defects and
mortality from the effects of radiation. You can find out more in the
report by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs at the address
shown now and also in the description. But for the biggest Soviet tests they needed
somewhere even more remote, Novoa Zemlya is a crescent-shaped island group in the
Arctic Ocean off of the northern coast of Russia. There are 3 test zones on the
islands zones, A B and C. It's most famous for being the place where the
largest-ever nuclear test took place October 31st 1961 when the Tsar Bomba a
50-megaton nuclear device was dropped over test zone C. Originally designed to
have a yield of 100 megatons it was scaled back because of fears of
the large amount of fallout it would create and that the plane carrying the
bomb would not be able to escape the fireball in time. Even with a 50-megaton
blast, the specially modified Tu-95V was only
given a 50% chance of survival. The Tsar
Bomba was detonated at 14,000 feet, 4,260m
creating a fireball 8 kilometers across but it was stopped from reaching
the ground by his own huge shock wave reflected back from the ground. The
release plane managed to get 45 kilometers away before the detonation
but it still dropped a kilometer in the air due to the shockwave, however it made
it back to base safely and the pilot flying the plane resigned from the airforce
shortly after a test. The explosion was so large that the fireball was visible
over a 1000 kilometers away. Every building within a 55 kilometers radius was
destroyed, wooden houses in districts hundreds of kilometers away were
destroyed and stone ones had their roofs blown off of windows and doors blown in.
The mushroom cloud reached an altitude of 65 kilometers or 213,000 feet,
seven times of a height of Everest and the heat from the fireball
could create third-degree burns a 100 kilometers away. This wasn't the
only test carried out at Novaya Zemlya, there were 224 nuclear detonations with
a total yield of 265 megatons that's a 132 times more than
the total amount of munitions used by all sides during World War two including
the two atomic bombs on Japan. The last nuclear test was carried out there in
1990 and today it's still a military test area although mostly a barren
Arctic island. Visitors there have found only slightly raised levels of radiation
but access to the main test sites is not possible. Tor the larger US tests they
also used remote islands and atolls but this time in the South Pacific. Testing
started there in 1948 after the islands came under control of the US as part of
the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and by 1962, 105 atmospheric and
underwater tests had been carried out. The first ever test after Trinity and
Japanese atomic bombs was to find out if Navy ships could withstand a nuclear
attack. Operation crossroads was performed in a lagoon at Bikini Atoll
because of its remote location suitable weather and only a small population of a
167 people which were relocated. The Galapagos Islands had
also been considered as a possible nuclear test site. The test was witnessed
by invited members of the press and the public. Over 90 ships including captured
German, Japanese and surplus US ships would make up the test fleet in the
lagoon. This was to be a three bomb test the first being called 'Able' was an
airdrop exploding 158 meters above the fleet with
the following tests being underwater. All three bombs were to be the same as the
23 kiloton 'Fatman' implosion bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The 'Able' test
was hampered by the bomb being 650 meters off target. Five ships were sunk
and 14 seriously damaged. The second test called 'Baker' was an underwater test
the first time that this had occurred. It created a host of effects many of which
had never been seen before but the biggest was the fact that it made the
sea in the lagoon highly radioactive. The radiation was so bad that many of the
ships could not be decontaminated but some in the Navy didn't believe the
problem was real. It was only when a navy surgeon who retrieved a fish from a
lagoon and placed it next to a piece of photographic film which it exposed that
they decided to cancel the third test. Only five ships were able to be used
after the test and the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Glenn T Seaborg
called it the world's first nuclear disaster. In 1952, the first hydrogen bomb
test codenamed Ivy Mike took place at the
bigger Eniwetok atoll 320 kilometers east of bikini. This
wasn't so much a bomb as a scientific experiment as the
hydrogen fuel had to be cooled in a massive cryogenic plant. When it was
detonated it produced a yield of 10.4 megatons but over 8 megatons
of that came from the fast fission of the uranium temper which
created a huge amount of fallout and an underwater crater 1.9 kilometers wide
and 50 meters deep. By 1954 the hydrogen bomb had been refined to become a device
that could be dropped from a plane and on the 28th of February the first of six
bomb tests were carried out as part of Operation Castle at Bikini Atoll. The
Castle Bravo test was estimated to have a yield of 6 megatons but due to an
unexpectedly high performance of the lithium-7 in the design it actually had
a yield of 15 megatons and to this day is the largest U.S. nuclear explosion.
Because of a much greater power, the fall out was much more than expected with
highly radioactive calcium from the vaporized coral reef below the bomb not
only covering the Bikini Atoll itself but also blowing eastwards and
contaminating other atolls where both US personnel and Islanders were residing at
the time. A Japanese fishing boat was also caught in the fallout and one
member of a crew died of radiation sickness a few days afterwards. To this
day Bikini Atoll is still heavily contaminated and crops grown there are
not safe to eat. At Eniwetok, a crater on the small island of Runet which had
been formed by a bomb test was used by the U.S. to dump contaminated topsoil
and radioactive debris including plutonium from a bomb that failed to
explode correctly. Starting in 1977 four thousand U.S. servicemen worked for three
years to clean up the area and then cover the waste with a concrete dome.
However, this was only meant to be a temporary measure until something more
permanent could be arranged and only 4 out of the 40 islands contaminated
were cleaned. Because of this the bottom of a test crater was not lined with concrete
and so now with rising sea-levels caused by climate change, sea water is
seeping inside through the porous bedrock into the dome and leaching out
radioactive material. But the seabed of the Eniwetok lagoon is actually as
radioactive as the material under the dome. It's been estimated that it will
cost nearly a billion dollars to clean up the area effectively and instead it's
proposed that contaminated areas be treated with potassium which were only
cost around about a $100 million. Many of the U.S. servicemen that built the dome
and worked on the cleanup claim they were not told they will be cleaning up
radioactive waste and were not given proper training or protective clothing.
In the decades since the end of the cleanup
many have died of cancer and had other health problems which they say is
related to their exposure to radiation. However because they were not at the
test sites when the tests were being performed the U.S. government says they
are not eligible for compensation. The full effects of nuclear testing are
difficult to quantify but there has been a growing body of evidence over the last
60 years or so. Whichever way you look at it every nuclear power put the
development of increasingly more devastating weapons ahead of the health
and safety of not only their own people but also many others for generations to
come who were far removed from the political decision-makers and that is
the legacy of the nuclear test sites. In 1991 a study by the International
physicians for the Prevention of nuclear war the IPPNW estimated that by the year
2000, 430,000 cancer deaths would have been related to atmospheric testing and
concluded but eventually about 2.4 million deaths would be the result of
the nuclear tests. So what are your thoughts on the issues of nuclear tests
and the effects they've had and are still having let me know in the comments
below and also don't forget to subscribe, thumbs up and share the video please.
Although over tests were the practical demonstration of the Theory's, the ideas
themselves came from the brightest minds in maths and physics using nothing more
than slide rules on blackboards but even the best had to start somewhere. If you
want to develop your intuition in maths and science then you need to check this
out. This is from brilliant an interactive problem-solving website
where you can solve real world problems and learn to think like a scientist by
breaking down a problem into easy-to-understand steps and then
pulling it back together so you can see how the overall process works.
Brilliant helps you develop your intuition about these concepts, having
these math and skill sets in your mental toolbox is valuable because it gives you
a much deeper understanding of how the world works. Whether you're a
professional, hobbyist or scientist you can get started for free at Brilliant.org/CuriousDroid
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