How We Learned To Start Worrying And Fear The Bomb

As weapons TREATIES UNRAVEL around the world, researchers are still studying the collateral damage of America’s first NUCLEAR TEST.

- Louisa Hall

A HALF-CENTURY AFTER THE world’s nuclear powers signed a landmark nonproliferation pact, much of the world is on the edge of nuclear brinkmanship.

In early February, the U.S. pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia over accusations of Russian violations; President Vladimir Putin responded with some of his most explicit threats ever. Weeks later, nuclear talks between the U.S. and North Korea broke down after satellite images suggested that North Korea may be preparing to flex its muscle and test yet another long-range anti-ballistic missile.

Meanwhile, tensions ramped up between India and Pakistan, nuclear powers historically at odds over India-administered Kashmir. A February 14 suicide bombing that killed at least 40 Indian troops resulted in a retaliatory air attack by India two weeks later—for the first time in decades.

But amid the international chaos, researchers in the U.S. were wrestling with an equally startling problem: Seven and a half decades after our first foray into nuclear weapons, we still lack any clear measurements of the original test’s environmental and health effects. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is seeking to correct that with a wide-ranging study on the fallout of the Trinity test, when, on July 16, 1945, the U.S. Army exploded a plutonium bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico.

It will be years before any results are known. As it turns out, the scientists who created and test ed the bomb—an impressive scientific feat—were surprisingly unprepared for the extent of its fallout, as well as the repercussions from the explosion.