The discovery of the pervasiveness of radioactive isotopes compelled the world’s militaries to fundamentally rethink their approach to nuclear testing, with the result that in 1962 the United States performed its last atmospheric nuclear test (though it would go on performing underground tests until the early 1990s) and in 1963 the world’s nuclear powers signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, outlawing atmosphering testing altogether. Saruhashi’s paper demonstrated that radioactivity from the tests, far from being confined locally, had in fact reached Japan in under two years, pushed through the oceans by the reigning water currents. That theory came crashing down in 1958 thanks to a paper by Saruhashi Katsuko (1920-2007), a Japanese geochemist who had been asked to look into the distribution of radioactive isotopes in the vicinity of the Bikini Atoll coral reef where the US had been conducting its nuclear tests. Fortunately, that did not happen, but the power unleashed that day was sufficiently awesome that the military decided to conduct future bombing tests in more remote locations in the Pacific (beginning in 1946) and Nevada (beginning in 1951).ĭozens and eventually hundreds of bombs were detonated under the theory that the radioactivity thus generated would be largely localized, and certainly could not spread to areas of human habitation. At the time, it was not clear what might result from the explosion, with the most terrifying models predicting that the very atmosphere itself might ignite and trigger a global chain reaction which would wipe out all life on the planet. On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in the deserts of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

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