Christian Nielsen
30 years ago today, at a test site located in the US state of Nevada, what would be the penultimate in a series of “nuclear tests” that the US carried out between 1951 and 1992 was taking place.
Each test involved the detonation of atomic devices of varying power and their effects, especially lighting, could be observed from 180 kilometers around. These macabre fireworks had started in July 1945 in the district of Alamogordo, a city in the south of the state of New Mexico.
In those days, the Manhattan Project, which brought together the most famous nuclear physicists in the free world, had managed to fission the plutonium atom by exploding it with a power equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. The Trinity module would then be replicated in two versions, the Little Boy bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the Fat Man, which would fall on Nagasaki three days later.
From Alamogordo, field testing left New Mexico and moved to the so-called Nevada Test Site (NTS).
ATOMIC FUNGUS IN SIGHT
Las Vegas had a great boost thanks to two events that marked its success as an entertainment center. In 1931, casinos were legalized in the state of Nevada and that same year the Hoover hydroelectric plant (Hoover Dam) began to be built not far from there, which would flood the entire region with light, unleashing a boom in casinos, games of chance, hotels, entertainment and business.
The influx of tourists was such that by the time the first hotel-casino in the city opened its 3,626 rooms, 7,500 square meters of games, as well as a restaurant and a comedy theater, reservations had to be made six months in advance.
So it happened. It was on February 6, 1951 that the peaceful population of Las Vegas observed a bright flash on the horizon followed by a horrific explosion as a column of smoke filled with lightning and flashes rose, which ended up dissolving at high altitude in the form of a mushroom.
This was too big and powerful to be limited to an accident with explosives or gas leaks. Later it was learned that at a test site located 100 kilometers northwest of the city, the military had detonated the device called Fox, a test atomic bomb with a power equivalent to those that had wiped the Japanese martyr-cities off the map by end of World War II.
THE “GOOD” PUMPS
Those fireworks continued until 1963, when it was decided to eliminate surface nuclear tests, replacing them with detonations deep in the earth’s crust.
The insistence on continuing with this program was aimed at demonstrating that nuclear explosives could be used for peaceful purposes, for example, the construction of canals or the carrying out of large earthworks. For this purpose, the so-called Plowshare Project (ploughshare) was designed using nuclear devices five times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Its promoters even allowed themselves to appeal to a biblical passage that says “and they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning shears…”.
Nuclear scientists had run wild with wild ideas: widen the Panama Canal, turn oil shale into oil, connect subterranean aquifers in Arizona, tunnel through the Rockies for new rail lines, and so on.
Although the concept was proven in its efficiency, it was never licensed for use in public works or of any nature.
The “good” pumps never went into activity.
BALANCES AND REMAINING
Instead, what did appear was the harmful effect on health caused by nuclear activity. In 1997 the US National Cancer Institute determined that the systematic disintegration of the atom in surface tests had spread massive amounts of radioactive iodide-131 responsible for between 10,000 and 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer over half of the North American territory. .
An instance of substantiated complaints was opened on specific cases that, as usually happens in the US, were compensated with massive amounts of money. By 2006, some 9,600 lawsuits had been admitted, settled at a rate of US$50,000 for each case. Until today, at least 2,600 thyroid cancer patients pursue their lawsuits in court without obtaining more results than the bulky bills of their lawyers.
While the “good” bombs never stood a chance, the “bad” ones cast their pestilential shadow across the northern hemisphere. And it was hardly a breath of what would cause a nuclear war, a term with which the great arbiters of the destiny of Humanity are now playing with as much lightness as irresponsibility.
