The Atomic Scar

The creation of atomic weaponry changed human civilization forever, but it also left its mark on the Earth itself -- in both obvious and subtle ways. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss some of the ways in which the world would not be the same.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Land, and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today we're going to be talking about nuclear weapons testing. Now,
this is something that has come up on the show

(00:23):
a good bit before. Obviously we've had to talk many
times about the very real, uh you know, danger potential
civilization level threat and and the real human costs of
nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing. But today I wanted
to focus on a couple of interesting and lesser known
environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing, specifically something that I

(00:47):
came across as it pertains to industrial metals, and then
we're going to get into some other scientific territory as
we go on. But quite apart from any straightforward chemical
effects on the atmosphere, I think it is pretty fair
to say that the the the human departure into the
nuclear weapons testing era in nineteen forty five was really

(01:08):
sort of a shift moment for for humankind as a species. Yeah,
and I feel like there there are very few things
that have been said there are there are very few
audio samples certainly that sum it up quite as well
or or as or are as haunting as those given
by J. Robert Oppenheimer in nineteen sixty five on the

(01:30):
television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb, broadcast as
an NBC white Paper. I imagine most of you have
heard this before. I've heard it's a sampled and used
in music. It uh, it shows up in comic books, literature,
um in it. The American theoretical physicist and father of
the atomic bomb is he's sometimes referred, shares the following

(01:53):
regarding the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb at
the Trinity Test in New Mexico on July six, nine,
four five. He said, quote, we knew the world would
not be the same. A few people laughed, a few
people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line
from the Hindu scripture the Bagavad Gita. Fish Knu is

(02:14):
trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty,
and to impress him, takes on his multi armed form
and says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
It's a difficult thing to imagine working on that kind
of research in a way feeling that it is your
duty or your necessity to aid the Allied cause in

(02:36):
World War Two, but at the same time knowing that
you were working on something that that would unleash an
age of terror in human history. Yeah, I mean absolutely
a weapon that would as of this recording, UH, has
only been used twice in war, which on one hand
you can you can say, thankfully, has only been used

(02:58):
twice in war, but in the same hand you can say,
tragically has been used twice in war. Um. Yeah, Well,
we'll get into the just the destructive capabilities a bit
of of of the bomb as we proceed here, and
of course we've covered it on the show before to
varying degrees. But I want to come back to the
quote that that Oppenheimer is UM is deploying here. So

(03:23):
if if you're not familiar with it, basically these are
these are who the figures are in this. You've got Vishnu,
one of the principal deities of Hinduism. UH. The Bugabad
Gheita or the gutas it's sometimes just shortened to, is
part of the Hindu epic, the Mahabarata. Technically it's books
six in that and the prince in question is the

(03:43):
hero Argina part of the Pandava. Finally that wages war
against the Caravas. Uh. That that's the big struggle. That's uh,
that's key to the Mahabarata. Anyway, at the beginning of
the Geta, which Oppenheimer is um is quoting, here Aregenna
rights his chariot onto the field of forthcoming battle between

(04:03):
these two families. But he suddenly overcome by doubt and
depression as he notes they're there on the other side,
within the ranks of the enemy's he recognizes friends, relatives, teachers,
and uh. And therefore has this this just immense so
weight descend upon him. Um. This is a quote from it.
This is as translated by Edwin Arnold in five and

(04:25):
as as is always the case with translated works of
literature and poetry, Uh, you know, the English is going
to be approximate, and certainly with Hinduism there are many
cases where particular ideas and phrases don't really have a
parallel word in English. Um. Anyway, it goes as follows quote. Thus,
if we slay kinsfolk and friends for love of earthly power,

(04:48):
av what an evil fault? It were better I deem it.
If my kinsmen strike to face them weaponless and bear
my breast to shaft and spear, then answer blow with blow.
So speaking in the face of those two hosts, Arginas
sank upon his chariot seat and let fall bow and arrows.
Sick at heart. So the prospect of the forthcoming bloodshed

(05:10):
is just too much for him. But what does he do?
He turns to his charioteer UH for counsel, and luckily
his charioteer is the blueskinned Krishna, the avatar of the
mighty Vishnu, and he gives him his counsel. In fact,
he gives him his counsel for eighteen chapters. That's that's
what the Geta is is basically him providing all of

(05:32):
this uh philosophical and spiritual advice on what it is
to have to make these sorts of decisions and engage
in war and duty and so forth. It's kind of
like something like the Book of Job in the form
we have it now, which you have a sort of
small framing narrative that mainly contains a didactic discourse on
theological matters. Right and now, if you want to, like

(05:55):
a really good breakdown all of this episode, uh in
the Mahabarata of the Gita, and especially as it relates
to Oppenheimer in his life. There's a wonderful paper that
you can find out there in full on the on
the internet from James A. Hegi, a professor of history,
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Uh. He this was a nice

(06:16):
write up he did for the American Philosophical Society in
two thousand and He goes into greater depth, but he
also summarizes Chrishna's counsel as follows He's He says, look,
you're a soldier, Aregna. You have to fight. Fighting is
your duty, so you need to do it. Um. He
also says, look, Krishna, uh, you know this, this God,

(06:38):
who I also am, is going to be the one
to determine who lives and who dies. It's not your
place to mourn or rejoice over human loss in this case.
You should try to remain unattached from the outcome. And
then also faith in Krishna is going to be what
saves your soul, Aregenna, and this is the most important

(06:58):
part of the whole scenario. But as Argina begins to
metaphorically see the light or I suppose behold the true
nature of the reality he's faced with. He asks if
he can see Christiana's godlike form, and this site ultimately
seals Argina's commitment to do his duty. And this occurs
in chapter eleven, verse thirty two, where uh where the

(07:19):
now cosmically embodied Vishnu speaks to Argena. And what he
exactly says of two English speaking ears is going to
depend on the translation, but for instance, the writer translation
has him say death, am I and my present task destruction. Um.
There's a translation by Arnold that says, VU seest me

(07:40):
as Time, who kills Time, who brings all to doom,
the slayer Time, ancient of days, come hither to consume.
And there's another one I came across that I thought
was pretty good. I am mighty Time, the source of
destruction that comes forth to annihilate the world's And I've
always loved this one by J. A. B. Van Bitten quote,
I am time growing old to destroy the world embarked

(08:05):
on the course of world annihilation. I am Time grown old.
Always find that kind of there's something kind of perplexing
about that phrasing that seems to befitting of this all
powerful being that is, you know, that has taken on
his true form to you. Yeah, there's something that comes
in the fullness of time. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting the
way the personification as time further serves that purpose of

(08:28):
the kind of depersonalization of one's role in history. You
know that there is a kind of like a fate
or world path that is executed through the passing of time,
and what you are is someone who plays a role
within it, not the shaper of it. Yeah. Absolutely, Um again,
it is it is even in translation as it's it's

(08:51):
this really perplexing and beautiful passage. Now, it should stress
that Oppenheimer was not religiously Hindu, but he was interested
in Hindu scripture, and clearly he found an association here
between his role in the creation of the bomb and
the idea of duty performed regardless of potential outcome. Now,

(09:11):
he certainly is bending the text here a bit, because
in in the Gita, Vishnu slash Krishna is saying, look,
I'm the prime mover here, I'm the one who destroys you.
Just do your duty. Oppenheimer seems to be implying the opposite.
That there perhaps is no all powerful force that bears
the burden of our deeds, that the burden is instead

(09:31):
on the shoulders of those involved in the creation of
such a weapon. You know, when he's saying, you know,
now I am become death and that we all felt
that way one way way or another. I mean, I mean,
he is he is. He he's confronting the personal responsibility
that seems to be there in the creation of such
a weapon. But so it does seem that there's this

(09:53):
this double terror in Oppenheimer's mind, like what if we fail?
But also what if we succeed? Yeah? Yeah, that that
that's something that Heggia gets into. You know, this this
idea that there's this an immense fhere of failure. You know,
what if we don't develop the bomb as we've been
tasked with, uh, and what will that mean for us?
But then yeah, well, how much mass human death will

(10:15):
be brought into the world, even on the short term, Uh,
if this is successful without even getting into the way
that it will change the landscape of of not only
warfare and and potential warfare in global security, but just
human civilization itself. Yeah, there's so many ways you can
track the impact of the invention of nuclear weapons. Clearly

(10:36):
one of them is a sort of like world psychological impact.
You know, there's just there's bomb consciousness in the world
now that the sort of will always be there unless
nuclear weapons are entirely eliminated, But even even then they
would they'll probably still be the knowledge that they could
be built again. Yeah. This this reminds me of one
of Grant Morrison's creations for the Doom Patrol comic book,

(10:59):
the idea of Candlemaker, this embodiment of all of our apprehension, uh,
surrounding nuclear annihilation that takes on this kind of godlike
really almost kind of terrifying, Vishnu like appearance in the
human psyche. Is this the guy who's made of wax?
It is, and we'll have we'll have more to say

(11:19):
about him in a forthcoming October episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind. Oh, that's right, it's almost October. It is.
But to come back to the part of Oppenheimer's quote
that is not part of on the of the Guida, Um,
we knew the world would not be the same, uh,
and that that is true. It wasn't it isn't, And

(11:40):
you're you're probably aware of most of the reasons why.
But but yeah, today's episode, we're going to look at
some of the particular ways that it was changed, Uh,
particularly regarding um, you know, a few environmental scenarios as
well as the nature of steel. Yes, So getting into
these lesser known environmental effects, I want to start with

(12:01):
the fact that might seem extremely odd, which I was
reading about in an article published in the journal Health
Physics in two thousand seven by a health physicist named
Timothy P. Lynch, and the articles called a historically significant
shield for in vivo measurements, And the fact goes like this.

(12:21):
In Richland, Washington, there is a research facility called the
in Vivo Radio Bioassay and Research Facility. And within this
facility there is a special room that is surrounded on
all sides by thick plates of steel that was once
part of a World War Two era battleship called the

(12:43):
USS Indiana. This was a battleship that served in the war.
It was launched in nineteen It was in a number
of battles It served extensively in the Pacific theater during
the war, and then after it was decommissioned, they took
steel out of the ship to build this room. Why
would anybody do that? Yeah, if you don't know the answer,

(13:06):
it sounds a bit mysterious, right it all. It sounds
like the kind of thing Grant Morrison would make up
where you're having to engage in some sort of magical
ritual involving steel from old ships. Oh yeah, yeah, it
totally sounds like something magical, either kind of magical or
symbolic thinking of like, you know, I'm gonna melt down
the statue of the Golden Calf for the false title

(13:27):
or king or whatever and and turn it into something holy.
I'm going to make a throne out of all the
swords of those who wants opposed my rule. Exactly. Yes,
it is the iron throne. So this is the the
iron throne of rooms. Now the room is again an
in vivo radio bioassay detector, and Lynch tells us in

(13:47):
the paper that quote the detection system is used to
monitor workers for intakes of fission and activation products. So
this means that it's used to check workers people to
see if they have ingested tiny radioactive particles known as radionuclides.
Radionuclides consist of atoms that can decay into different isotopes

(14:10):
and emit radiation as they do so, and if you
take them into your body, say by swallowing them or
breathing them in, they can do this inside your body
and provide internal radiation sources which you do not want.
They can pose a serious health risk if enough of
them accumulate in the body, A large dose could cause
acute radiation syndrome. Prolonged exposure to even smaller doses over

(14:33):
time could be a risk for damaging DNA and causing cancer.
This is to use one example why you don't want
to consume things that would come from a radioactively contaminated area,
you know, somewhere around a nuclear meltdown. Why would you
not want to, say, you know, roll around in the
dirt near Chernobyl or drink the water there. It's because

(14:54):
the the environment is contaminated with radio nuclides, these little
particles that you don't want anywhere near your body. You
do not want them going inside you. So people who
get tested regularly in this room would include Department of
Energy workers, but Lynch also mentions that the room has
been used to test a helicopter pilot and some other
workers from Chernobyl as well as children from Chernobyl I

(15:18):
guess who lived nearby. So this has been in use
for a long time and it's used to measure the
radiation coming from living people. So somebody walks into the
detector room, they get scanned for radio neew clides across
the length of the body by accounting system that Lynch
describes as comprised of five coaxial germanium detectors. And because

(15:41):
the level of radiation emitted by these radio neew clides
is usually very faint outside the body, you need an
extremely sensitive detector. And here you hit another problem, which
is interference from background levels of radiation coming from the
rest of the world. So you've got cosmic sources, atmospheric sources,

(16:01):
terrestrial sources. So in order to scan the body properly,
you need a room with extremely tight radiation shielding and
this is where the steel comes in. So the counting
chamber here is surrounded by a thin layer of lead
and then cadmium and then copper. This is what's known
together as a graded Z shield. And then outside that

(16:24):
you have thirty solid centimeters of steel that's all pre
war battleship steel and This keeps the background radiation within
the chamber within low minimum detectable activities. But the question remains, Okay,
so you need thirty centimeters of steel, but why couldn't
you just build your radiation shield out of any old steel, Like,

(16:45):
if regular steel is good enough for your car and
your appliances and your sky scrapers, why would you have
to harvest the flesh of a decommissioned battleship in order
to build this thick radiation shield. Yeah. Again, it's it's
easy to sort of leap to magical conclusions. It's kind
of like, well, we live in a we live in

(17:05):
a sinful world. We have to build our sacred vessel
out of wood from the garden of Eden. You know, um,
you know, the the atomic age is so scarred our
world that we have to we have to find artifacts
from before that time. Yeah, it certainly does feel like that.
But no, there is actually a very good physical, scientific
reason for this, and maybe we should take a break

(17:27):
and then get back into it when we come back.
Than alright, we're back. So we've been talking about the
idea of radiation shielding around a very sensitive radiation detector room,
and the shielding was made out of steel that was
harvested from a decommissioned World War Two battleship called the

(17:49):
USS Indiana. So the question is, why would you need
to get steel from a source like that, Why couldn't
you just use regular steel. Well, so let's look at
how you make steel. Steel is of course a mixture
of iron and carbon and sometimes other additives to create
alloys with special properties, and crucially for our purposes, the
process for making steel involves the incorporation of atmospheric gases.

(18:14):
I was reading about this in an article for Chemistry
World by Kit Chapman. I think it was also a
podcast episode of Their's talking about how they're There are
two major industrial processes for making steel in the modern world.
One is known as the Bessemer process, and this involves
melting the iron in a furnace and then removing impurities
by blowing air through the molten metal. The other is

(18:37):
known as the bos process, and this is similar, but
it uses pure oxygen instead of air, but that oxygen
is still extracted from the atmosphere, and so the problem
is that either way, the gas you're blowing through the
molten iron to make your steel comes from the atmosphere
from the air, and ever since nuclear your weapon tests

(19:01):
began in nineteen forty five, that has not exactly been
regular air. It is bomb air. Yeah. The the ghastly
truth of it is, Yeah, we we find ourselves saying, oh,
we need to use air in this is like, oh
that the air, the air we breathe, that's where we
set off, um, a whole lot of nuclear weapons. Um,
and and therefore changed it. Um that air is not

(19:23):
good enough for our steel, for for the special steel,
at least, just for our breathing and our our food
and our our children and so forth. Now we'll get
a bit more into the history of the nuclear testing
era in a second here, But in short, there was
a period of time in the middle of the twentieth
century when lots of nuclear weapons tests were conducted around

(19:43):
the world, and these tests seeded the atmosphere with radioactive contamination. Now,
the levels today are much lower than they were, say
in the mid nineteen sixties, when these tests have been
going on for a decade and a half, but even
today the air still contain in some radioactive isotopes such
as cobalt sixty and others. Uh that is left over

(20:05):
from the hundreds of nuclear detonations that characterized the post
war period. Now this had many effects, of course, the
most important of which are probably like the health effects
on humans and the effects on wildlife. But another one
of the effects is that for a long time you
couldn't make steel via normal processes without it being potentially

(20:26):
contaminated with radioactive particles. Not so many radioactive particles that
it would be unsafe for regular use, but enough that
it would be unsuitable if you were trying to make
a sensitive instrument. So if you needed to make a
Geiger counter or shielding for a sensitive radio bioassay chamber.
Uh so, what would you do. Well, it probably wasn't

(20:48):
impossible to make steal without environmental contaminants from nuclear tests,
but it would have been expensive and difficult. And another
option presented itself, which is harvesting steel made before the
Trinity test in nineteen forty five, and this precious material
became known in the industry as low background steel. Low

(21:10):
background because of its low background radiation and what would
be a great source of huge quantities of pre bomb
steel old naval vessels. So to come back to the
Timothy Lynch article about the radio bioassay facility in Richland. Uh,
the USS Indiana was again the battleship that was sourced.

(21:30):
It was the source here. It was decommissioned on September
eleven nine and then sold for scrap after it was
taken off the navy list in on June one, nineteen
sixty two. And as the ship was dismantled, some parts
were kept for ceremonial purposes, like the mainmast and a
forty millimeter gun were put on display on the campus
of India University, Bloomington. And I know some of its

(21:54):
anchors were put on display at various museums and memorials.
You know, it's compasses, wheels and all that went to
places where where you can honor the fallen ships. Well
it this really drives home this metaphor of the ship
is a fallen beast, like the warship is a thing
that once dead. Uh. You know that certain parts are
kept for like you said, ceremonial purposes or display purposes,

(22:17):
magical purposes, and yet other things are harvested for for
the raw meter bone of the creature, right, and the
raw meter bone would be the steel here the smade
up the bulk of the ship was put to low
background uses. So in Indiana, VA Hospital got sixty five
tons of low background steel from the Indiana and that
was used for their own uh their own background radiation

(22:40):
counting facilities. But then Lynch writes quote in addition to
the VA Hospital facility, several large sections of the hull,
weighing a total of two tons, were also fabricated into
a room. These applications were probably never imagined by the
original designers of the Indiana. These sections of the hull
are still being used for the original purpose as a shield,

(23:02):
but instead of protecting against artillery shells and torpedoes, the
new purpose is to shield radiation detectors from the background
radiations originating from cosmic, atmospheric, man made and terrestrial sources.
So what was once armor again unitions is now armor
against the entire universe and its radioactive contents. The room

(23:24):
was first constructed at the University of Utah Medical Center
in Salt Lake City, where it was used for many
years in radio biology research, and then it was finally
moved to the Richland Facility in nineteen and the Indiana
was not the only battleship that became a source of
low background steel. So after the Armistice in nineteen eighteen,
at the conclusion of World War One, the German High

(23:45):
Seas Fleet was ordered to report to an Allied base
known as the Scapa Flow, where the naval vessels were
supposed to be handed over to the British Royal Navy.
But the German officers did not like that. They had
a different idea, and they decided, sort of as a
kind of last middle finger to the British, they scuttled
their ships in the harbor. They sank their own ships

(24:07):
on purpose so that the British couldn't have them. So
now they're all those shipwrecks there. In fact, that the
Scapa Flow is well known for its World War One
era shipwrecks and has been exploited extensively as a source
of low background steel. And though it's not known for sure,
I've read rumors, unconfirmed rumors that some early spacecraft may
have used low background steel from the Scapa Flow or

(24:30):
other wrecks in radiation detectors. Interesting now, I mentioned this earlier,
but it's worth pointing out again that the atmosphere is
much less radioactive today than it was at the height
of nuclear testing in in the middle of the century.
For example, cobalt sixty has a half life of about
five point three years, and there has been a lot
less nuclear testing since the Partial Nuclear Test Band Treaty

(24:53):
in nineteen certainly a lot less atmospheric testing. So the
atmosphere should be reduced to um near pre war levels
of background contamination within a reasonable amount of time. But
but it took decades. So Robert, when reading about this,
I came across a comic strip I thought you might like.
It's one of the X K C D comics. And

(25:14):
in it they build a time machine. But it turns
out the time machine requires lead from sunken Roman warships
and uh. This is of course hard to come by,
so they determine they have enough lead for one trip
into the past. And uh, and in this way through
time travel, Greek Fire is born. It's kind of like
the the You know, if you could you only had

(25:36):
one wish from a genie, what do you do? Well?
You wish for more wishes? Yeah, more wishes? Yeah. I
love this little comic strip. I had not seen it
before you I shared it with me. But it it's
especially nice because I just started watching some nineties episodes
of The Outer Limits, and this is the kind of
sort of Outer limitsy sort of plot, maybe skewed a

(25:58):
little bit for comedic purposes, you know, it's the it's
the kind of twist you you expect in time travel fiction.
I like it. Yeah, uh so if I wasn't totally
clear and you didn't get they travel back in time
and use their future weapons on Roman warships, and of
course that becomes the legend of Greek fire. Yeah. They
take out like a helicopter with a flamethrower back in

(26:18):
time and uh and and set to light the Roman ships. Now,
I guess we've made several references to this nuclear testing
age in the middle of the twentieth century. Of course,
this began in the nineteen forties. The first one was
again the Trinity Test by the United States in July ninety.
The Soviet Union first performed nuclear weapons tests in nineteen

(26:39):
forty nine. Tests took place all, you know, all over
the place. They were in the upper atmosphere, underground, in
the ocean, and once several other The majority of the
tests were by the United States and the Soviet Union,
but several other countries eventually got involved, and there were
a lot of bomb tests in the end. Yes, so
you probably wonder, well, just how many? So I looked

(27:02):
it looked around for a good, UH, good good total
on this. I find that the estimates vary a little bit,
I mean not a lot. But according to Darryl Kimball,
executive director of the Arms Control Association, which is a
great source for for the sort of UH information, this
is what they had to say in a July report quote.
Since the first nuclear test explosion on July six, ninety five,

(27:25):
at least eight nations have detonated two thousand and fifty
six nuclear test explosions at dozens of test sites, including
Lopnore in China, the atolls of the Pacific, Nevada, Algeria,
where France conducted its first nuclear device, Western Australia, where
the UK exploded nuclear weapons, the South Atlantic Semipalatans in Kazakhstan,

(27:47):
across Russia, and elsewhere. So that's over two thousand nuclear
test explosions in total. And if you're looking specifically at
atmospheric tests alone, which are often considered like the worst
kind in terms of proliferating UH contaminants into the atmosphere.
Of course those would be there. There were definitely more
than five hundred atmospheric tests. Yeah, when you when you

(28:10):
start breaking down the numbers, the US conducted most of
these with let's see some two hundred fifteen atmospheric tests
and eight hundred and fifteen underground tests. The USSR slash
Russia ranks second with two hundred and nineteen atmospheric tests
and four hundred nine underground test and the remaining ranking
goes like this. You've got France, then the UK and China.

(28:33):
They're tied UK and China with a total of forty
five tests each. Then you have North Korea, India and Pakistan.
The United States is of course responsible for the only
wartime detonation of nuclear weapons as in utilized as weapons
against another people. Two bombs deployed against the Japanese cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between one hundred twenty nine

(28:55):
thousand and two hundred twenty six thousand people, mostly civilians.
Needles to say, those were both atmospheric detonations. Yeah, and
of course with each of these tests there is going
to be more radioactive contamination entering the atmosphere. Now in
nineteen sixty three, the Partial Nuclear Test Band Treaty managed
to ban tests in the atmosphere and underwater, so basically

(29:18):
it banned all except underground tests. It did not really
stop nuclear proliferation, but it did massively decrease the dispersal
of radio nuclides into the atmosphere. Now there's been another
um perhaps unexpected, interesting environmental side effect of the nuclear
testing age, which is how it has affected atmospheric levels

(29:41):
of carbon fourteen and the way that this has turned
into an unexpected number of scientific tools that can be
used to study the natural world. So, in nature, carbon
fourteen is a radioactive isotope of carbon that is generated
in Earth's atmosphere every minute of every day. The Earth
is of course bombarded by cosmic rays, and cosmic rays

(30:02):
are charged particles, usually protons and atomic nuclei, which are
emitted from high energy sources, including the Sun, but also
places far away, usually traveling near the speed of light.
And when one of these high energy particles enters the atmosphere,
it sometimes strikes atoms to generate free neutrons, and a

(30:22):
free neutron then combines with a regular atom of nitrogen
fourteen to produce an atom of carbon fourteen, and this
carbon fourteen then pairs up with oxygen to create carbon
fourteen c O two, So there's a lot of carbon
fourteen in the atmosphere is just produced at a steady
rate naturally as the cosmic rays are coming in, and

(30:44):
this carbon fourteen c O two gets into everything that
ingests atmospheric carbon. So plants suck in c O two
with a predictable amount of carbon fourteen and they use
that carbon to make their bodies, and then the tree
is in the grass and the corn are all made
out of carbon content that is retrieved from the air

(31:05):
and has a certain amount of carbon fourteen in it.
So if you do a molecular analysis of a plant,
you will have a certain proportion of carbon fourteen in there,
because the atmosphere does about one out of every trillion
carbon atoms is a carbon fourteen atom. But of course
it doesn't stop at plants, because we also exist in
a carbon fourteen generating atmosphere. You know, all the chemistry

(31:28):
on Earth is sort of interconnected. So we eat those plants,
and we eat animals that eat those plants, so our
bodies also have a predictable amount of carbon fourteen content.
And as I said earlier, carbon fourteen is radioactive, which
is another way of saying it's unstable. It has a
known half life, so we know that it decays into

(31:49):
other isotopes at a regular, predictable rate. So if you
die and you stop breathing and stop eating, the amount
of carbon fourteen in your body will steadily decrease over
the years. And what scientists figured out in the twentieth
century was that you could use the amount of carbon
fourteen in a formerly living object or an object formerly

(32:12):
incorporating a known percentage of atmospheric carbon, to see approximately
how long it had been since that organism stopped ingesting
carbon from the environment, in other words, when it died.
And this has been amazingly useful to the historical sciences.
This this has created the era of carbon fourteen dating.
It's been enormously useful to archaeologists and all kinds of

(32:35):
other scientists to analyze and date organisms and substances from
the past. But nuclear testing, beginning in the nineteen forties
and especially since the nineteen fifties, has introduced new wrinkles
into this. It has introduced new layers of radio carbon science.
Both some complications to the existing radio carbon science and

(32:56):
new tools that scientists couldn't have predicted at first the
they would have. Uh. And so next, I just wanted
to talk a bit about a really, really excellent article
in The Atlantic by by Carl Zimmer. Can we say
a friend of the show, Carl Zimmer. He's a former
guest of the show, Carl Zimmer. Um, let's see what
we had. We laid out specific rules for this in
the past. Right, if you're on the show once, you're

(33:18):
a former guest or a previous guest of the show. Okay,
I think you have to be on two times to
be a friend of the show, or is it three times?
I can't remember how that status we break. We've been
the rules all the time. Uh. Karl is one of
my favorite science writers. He wrote an excellent book called
She Has Her Mother's Laugh that we talked about on
the show, and and this article is just fantastic. But

(33:40):
it's called nuclear Tests Marked Life on Earth with a
radioactive Spike. And this article, of course is worth reading
on its own. But I wanted to talk about a
few things that Carl gets into here about some of
the environmental effects of of nuclear testing, specifically relating to
carbon fourteen. So Carl Carl Zimmer, in addition to how
having been a wonderful and just cheerful guest of the show,

(34:04):
is just all a wonderful writer as always, I want
to read just a little bit from this article here
to to set the stage. Quote. Carbon fourteen, produced by
hydrogen bombs spread over the entire world. It worked itself
into the atmosphere, the oceans, and practically every living thing.
As it spread, it exposed secrets. It can reveal when
we were born. It tracks hidden changes to our hearts

(34:26):
and brains. It lights up the cryptic channels that joined
the entire biosphere into a single network of chemical flux.
This man made burst of carbon fourteen has been such
a revelation that scientists referred to it as quote the
bomb spike. Only now is the bomb spike close to disappearing,
But as it vanishes, scientists have found a new use

(34:46):
for it to track global warming, the next self inflicted
threat to our survival. The part of this that sticks
with me the most is where he talks about how
looking at carbon fourteen in the way it penetrates the
whole by sphere. Really, it's one of those you know,
like the brain lights up with the sudden realization that, uh,

(35:07):
to use a sort of stoner cliche, everything's connected, but
it really is it like literally in a scientific way,
is there is a single sort of chemical flux that
that takes place all throughout this planet. Yeah. I keep
coming back to this, this basic like this this uh,
this sort of you know, arguably hippie notion this everything

(35:29):
is connected, we're all one world on people, et cetera,
which I know is something that everyone has heard so
many times that even if you believe in it wholeheartedly,
it can it can sound a little uh uh limp,
you know, in in your ears. And yet like that's
I mean, that is the reality that drives through and
all of this science, and it stands in such harsh

(35:49):
contrast to the way uh, certain individuals, uh in uh
like the political and the military sphere view nuclear weapons.
The idea that like, you know, certainly we can say
a head of state using a nuclear weapon against the
city within their own nation, that would be that would
be ridiculous, that would be monstrous. But it's but but

(36:11):
then the you know, people will say, oh, but do
you use it against another nation? And other people that's
less monstrous. But no, no, it's all interconnected in in
a in in a in a scientifically verifiable way. I mean,
it's it's one atmosphere at the very base level, without
getting into um some of the other um issues we're
going to explore, and just the basic ethical framework of

(36:34):
the choice. Yeah, I mean it makes me think of
that commonly sided thing about astronauts very often, you know,
seeing the Earth from space and then suddenly feeling more
of a kinship with all of humankind and not feeling
nearly as much the uh, not feeling the reality of
national borders and things like that, uh, nearly as much anymore. Uh.

(36:54):
It's funny how easily those illusions can be dissolved just
by a sort of a single vision, dual impression, or
a single realization about saying how chemistry works, that you're
suddenly like, oh, wait a minute, you know, there's just
sort of earth life, and we we really need to
make this work and not create problems that aren't necessary
to begin with. Yeah, those are those lines and those naps.

(37:17):
They really do nothing against radioactive particles and certainly concepts
such as nuclear fallout or um or a climate change.
So going into Karl Zimmer's article. As I said, it's
worth reading the article in full. It's really fantastic. He
begins by telling the story of the Castle Bravo test
in nineteen fifty four, which is uh, both all inspiring

(37:40):
and horrifying and heartbreaking. Um. But later on, when he's
getting into the scientific history of of carbon fourteen, he
talks about the Chicago physicist Willard Libby, who was a
Nobel prize winning or did I say physicist, I think
he would be called a physical chemist. Uh. He was
somebody who studied radioactive elements and and one of those
was one of the major developers of carbon fourteen dating.

(38:03):
And one of the really interesting things that Libby does
is that Libby ends up comparing measurements of methane from
say living current sources, say methane coming off of a
sewage plant, So this is going to be sewage from
things that are currently alive, versus methane coming off of
fossil fuels like oil that has been there for millions

(38:25):
of years. And what he showed was that, say, the
methane coming off of the excreta produced by living humans
is something close to about the atmospheric level. Meanwhile, what's
coming the methane coming off of fossil fuels, coming off
of say, oil that's been there for millions of years,
has essentially no carbon fourteen in it, right, because it's

(38:48):
been there for so long that all of the radioactive
isotopes of carbon have decayed, so it's just got regular
carbon in it. And there was some other really interesting
experiments too, but one of the things I wanted to
focus on was uh Karl's profiling of the New Zealand
physicist Ethel Rafter. So Rafter was picking up on Libby's research,
and he was interested in radiocarbon dating. In its early days,

(39:11):
he used it to test the bones of extinct birds
and ancient volcanic eruptions. But he also tried to help
refine the technique itself by performing measurements of the radio
carbon in the atmosphere. And he would do this by
setting out a tray of LIE on top of it
on a hilltop, and the LIE would capture c O
two from the air, and then he would measure the

(39:31):
atmospheric levels of carbon fourteen or the ratio of course,
and whenever we're talking about levels of carbon fourteen, we're
talking about the ratio of carbon fourteen to regular carbon,
and so Rafter would have been doing his research in
the nineteen fifties, and what he expected was that levels
of radio carbon in the atmosphere would sort of bounce
up and down, there just be sort of a natural
fluctuation around a baseline. But instead he found an extremely

(39:56):
steady trend. The level of carbon fourteen was just tenually
going up. And what was the reason. While it was
the nineteen fifties, so to quote from the article, the
Castle Bravo test and the ones that followed had to
be the source. They were turning the atmosphere upside down.
Instead of cosmic rays falling from space, they were sending

(40:18):
neutrons up to the sky, creating a huge new supply
of radio carbon. In nineteen fifty seven, Rafter published as
results in the journal Science. The implications were immediately clear
and astonishing. Man made carbon fourteen was spreading across the
planet from test sites in the Pacific and the Arctic.

(40:38):
It was even passing from the air into the oceans
and trees. And when they checked, they found increasing levels
of radiocarbon in everything, in tree rings in Texas, in snails,
in Holland, in the lungs of recently deceased people from
New York, even in the blood of living people. Uh,
there's just extra carb and fourteen and everything. And as

(41:02):
bomb radiocarbon, So the bomb radio carbon would be would
be up in the upper atmosphere, and as it settles
back down to Earth, it becomes a sort of tracer
molecule that can be used as a scientific tool. So
Carl quotes from somebody named Steve Beauprey who's an oceanographer
at Stony Brook University, and he's quoted in the article

(41:26):
saying that carbon fourteen is inextricably linked to our understanding
of how water moves. And so I thought this was
so interesting. So in the nineteen seventies, oceanographers found that
there was bomb radio carbon that was distributed throughout the
top one thousand meters of the ocean's water column. So
if you go down a thousand meters, you're going to find,

(41:48):
you know, atmospheric radiocarbon the elevated levels that you'd get
from a bomb. But then if you go down below
that suddenly not so much anymore. And this became a
really important piece of evidence in estimating the or in
establishing that the ocean, like the atmosphere, had layers, and
that water was primarily circulated within rather than between these layers.

(42:10):
Carl Wright's quote, the warm, relatively fresh water on the
surface of the ocean glides over the cold, salty depths.
These surface currents becomes saltier as they evaporate, and eventually,
at a few crucial spots on the planet, these streams
get so dense that they fall to the bottom of
the ocean. The bomb radio carbon from Castle Bravo didn't

(42:31):
start plunging down into the depths of the North Atlantic
until the nineteen eighties, when John Clark this character from
the Castle Bravo test was two decades into retirement. It's
still down there where it will be carried along the
seafloor by bottom hugging ocean currents for hundreds of years
before it rises to the light of day. Uh. And

(42:52):
he points out also that lots of ocean life bears
the seal of the bomb spike. Again, this is from
atmospheric tests, and so this is not even underwater test.
This is atmospheric tests coming down into the ocean. Bomb
radiocarbon falls into the ocean it infiltrates everything from algae
to the rings of calcium carbonate within coral growth, and

(43:14):
then it forms this kind of slime, so uh quote.
The living things in the upper reaches of the ocean
release organic carbon that falls gently to the seafloor, a
jumble of protoplasmic goo, dolphin droppings, starfish eggs, an all
manner of detritus that scientists call marine snow. In recent decades,

(43:37):
that marine snow has become more radioactive. In the article,
he also profiles a researcher named Mary gay Lord who
works at the National Ocean Science is Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility,
which is known as No Sam's for short, and that's
at the Woods Hole, which is where Hooper comes from
in Jaws, and she measures radiocarbon and everything from bat

(44:00):
guano to fish eyes. There's a lot about fish eyes
in this article, which is more interesting than you think
because surprisingly the study of radio carbon and fish eye
lenses can tell us a lot, like the cores of
fish eye lenses have the same levels of carbon fourteen
as the fish did when they were still egg so
it's a really good age indicator. And this knowledge was

(44:22):
used by Danish researchers in to create an aging metric
for these cold bottom dwelling animals, the greenland sharks, which
you might have read about them because they grow so old.
This helped confirm the discovery that these animals could live
to be almost four hundred years old, So a lot
of these are pre bomb sharks. And actually this also

(44:44):
applies to humans. People born in the early nineteen sixties
have more radio carbon in the lenses in their eyes
than people born before the nuclear testing age, and people
born in the years since then have less and less
as time passes since the since the partial test band
treat bomb. Radio carbon can also be used to date
human teeth. But there's a very sobering fact that's discussed

(45:06):
at the end of Zimmer's article, which is that the
proportion of carbon fourteen currently in the atmosphere is actually
a bit lower than would be predicted by the known
nuclear tests and the known rate of decay and absorption
by the Earth and seas. So what makes the difference,
Like why is there less carbon fourteen than we think
there should be? And it turns out there's an answer

(45:28):
to that. The answer is fossil fuels. Remember how I
mentioned earlier that the methane coming off of oil had
basically no carbon fourteen in it, because the oil is
so old, all of the carbon fourteen has already decayed.
It's gone. Uh. So, as we release carbon from these
ancient carbon sources into the atmosphere, we're putting a much

(45:50):
higher percentage than normal of regular carbon up there, which
actually dilutes what carbon fourteen there is. Uh Carl Carl
Zimmer points out that a nineteen f d four, which
was the year of the Castle Bravo test, humans emitted
six billion tons of carbon dioxide that year uh. Quote
in humans emitted about thirty seven billion tons, which is

(46:14):
more than six times more as Willard Libby first discovered.
This fossil fuel has no radiocarbon left. By burning it,
we are lowering the level of radiocarbon in the atmosphere
like a bartender watering down the top shelf liquor. Which
is so strange. So the remaining signature of humanity's first
great sort of civilization level threat technology is being deluded

(46:39):
by the ever increasing mark of our other one, by
the second one. All right, I guess we need to
take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more.
Thank So, I have another example of a specific resulting
scientific discovery from a nuclear test that that I ran
across UM and it it concerns UH, the of a

(47:00):
test known as Starfish Prime. So this was a one
point for megaton thermonuclear device launched two hundred and fifty
miles or four hundred kilometers into the sky near Johnston
A Tall. So it is the largest outer space nuclear
detonation ever committed. It occurred around eleven pm local time. UH.

(47:22):
This would be um you know, in the in that region,
and the thermonuclear sphere burned like a new sun in
the night sky. And if you look up Starfish Prime
online you can you can see photos that were taken
from Honolulu, Hawaii at the time, and it does look
like like a sun in the sky. Wow. Afterwards, an
aura could be seen as well for thousands of kilometers

(47:46):
it It also resulted, and this kind of comes down
to one of the key findings. It resulted in an
electromagnetic pulse or an e MP, something that had been
suspected by scientists, but this was really the proof in
the pudding. It in up disrupting the flow of electricity
for hundreds of kilometers around it, with its most of
its disruptions felt in Hawaii itself. It also damaged six

(48:10):
satellites which ultimately failed, and other failures might be linked
to starfish prime as well. So this was this was
ended up being an effect that was far stronger than anticipated. Now,
now that that's all interesting, but obviously a test like
this expand is going to expand on our understanding of
the weapon technology being tested. But the side effect here

(48:31):
is that the CD one O nine tracers released by
the detonation allowed scientists to work out some of the
seasonal mixing rate of polar and tropical air masses. So
again comes down to the fluid dynamics of of in
our earlier example of the ocean, and here with atmospheric movement.
This also touches on something that comes up with the

(48:51):
Castle Bravo test and a number of other tests, you know,
the Castle Bravo being the hydrogen bomb that turned out
to be a much bigger explosive yield than was predicted.
And this is not just a scientific curiosity, and this
is something that that had tragic consequences for real people
like the people of the wrong gelop Atoll. Who were
pretty nearby where the Castle Bravo test was conducted were

(49:13):
affected horribly with by like fallout from the test just
because it was so much bigger than the scientists thought
it was gonna be. Yeah, you see this this trend
with a number of the earlier tests, um, where they
they don't get quite what they were expecting or you know,
it's larger, or it doesn't go off exactly the way
it was planned. And and and and indeed, uh, in many

(49:34):
cases it means people were were sick and people's health
suffered because of these tests. Environments were um, we're tainted
by the radiation, are still tainted. In some case cases
people have been dislocated and have not yet been able
to return. Um. You know, we believe we're calling this
episode the atomic scar. But a scar to we tend

(49:56):
to think of as something that is visible but is
fully healed. And the thing about a lot of these
these tests is that it's it's not so much a scar,
but it is like um, a thick scab, and if
we are to to pick at it again, uh, we
may bleed. In fact, we may we may bleed um
for the duration of our lives. Sort of situations. So

(50:18):
um uh so yeah, the these uh kind of comes
back to what we said earlier about, you know, about
the world in which we conduct these tests. You know,
we we might think, oh, we're not setting this off
in the house, We're setting it off in the backyard,
you know. But but ultimately you know, the wilds of
Nevada or some islands you know off the coast of Australia,

(50:38):
these are these are part of the world we live in,
as part of the atmosphere that we all breathe, part
of the ocean that we all depend on. And even
underground tests are not without some environmental consequences. I mean
not nearly as much as a atmospheric or underwater tests,
but underground tests too can can produce leakages. Yeah. Now,
on the subject of underwater tests, I was reading a

(50:59):
little bit more about the EASE and these were banned
by the Partial Nuclear Test Band Treaty in nineteen sixty three,
but the U, S, the UK and the uss ARE
managed to conduct a total of nine before that that
that band came into place, and these included um, shallow
detonations to see how the the the weapon would impact

(51:20):
ships as well as deep detonations to see how they
might be used against submarines or how they would impact submarines.
The deepest was the nineteen fifty five Wigwam test at
a depth of two thousand feet six and tens now
an author by the name of Sarah Lascau wrote a
really good article about about the US tests for Atlas Obscura,
pointing out that the water is what really made the

(51:42):
tests more problematic because instead of spreading radioactive particles through
a wider atmospheric region, it instead released an immediate radioactive
water cloud. So the ships used in these tests were
highly radiated and possible to clean, so they were just
towed out to the deep and scuttled. Now Alascow rights

(52:05):
that quote. The Atomic Energy Commission would not sign off
on it until it was clear that no one in
the United States or Mexico was at risk and that
the test area was relatively free of marine life. Um.
But but the test certainly killed fish and other organisms. UM.
I read an account by a UK veterrian, who was
of course working with some of those UK UH tests,

(52:26):
claims that men were sent out in boats to collect
dead irradiated fish after after the test was conducted. And
this particular test would have been uh the nineteen two
hurricane test in the Montebello Islands, as this was the
only UK underwater nuclear test that was conducted, and of
course in a lot of these like tests in the
Pacific Islands and stuff, even when the explosion was carried

(52:49):
out in the atmosphere, it was still extremely damaging to
marine life. Like, Yeah, there's a part in uh Karl
Simmer's article that we were talking about earlier where he
talks about with the Castle Bravost four quote, within seconds
the fireball had lofted ten million tons of pulverized coral
reef coated in radioactive material. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, these

(53:11):
these atmospheric tests were also devastating to these areas. One
area that frequently comes up is is Bikini at all.
This is where the first underwater test was was was
conducted Baker, but also you had many other atmospheric tests
that took place there as well. And what's interesting here
is that there's been there's some studies in in over

(53:31):
the past decade or so that have really looked at
how the local environment has has bounced back, and indeed
it does show that nature can be very resistant to
even this kind of you know, intense damage. That they
say that corals have recolonized bomb craters. Other life forms
are doing well, even if there are some curious mutations

(53:53):
like sharks missing their second dorsal fin, that sort of thing.
The general belief is that um at least with with Bikini,
that the worst affected fish died off decades ago, and
today's fish populations are only exposed to low radiation levels
as they frequently swim in and out. Plus, these are
also areas that have been left alone by humans, they've

(54:14):
more so than other marine areas. Now one should also
note that the occupants of the area around Bikini Atoll
and the Marshall Islands were displaced by the test, some
one seven people, I believe, and they've never been able
to return their Their dislocation was supposed to be temporary. UM.
But but then on top of that, children in the
Marshall Islands, Uh, we're observed to experience thyroid problems long

(54:38):
after nuclear tests ended. Now, we've thus far been talking
about nuclear testing, and and of course beyond that, we
we can I think we can. We can hardly talk
about nuclear testing without at least briefly discussing the prospect
of nuclear war itself, because that is ultimately what the
testing is all about. Now you can make the argument

(55:00):
it that ultimately it's about preventing uh that's sort of
warfare from taking place by making sure you have uh
you know, a terrifying number of of of nuclear weapons
in your armament, or you know, the reverse is true,
that you are developing these weapons which may potentially be used.
Any nuclear weapon is a potential holocaust, uh you know,

(55:21):
contained within the warhead, right, I mean, I think, I
guess the advocates of the pro nuclear armament theory would say, well,
what we did is that we did these tests so
that we wouldn't have to have actual wars, and the
tests discouraged, say the United States and the Soviet Union
from actually ever initiating a real, you know, shooting war

(55:43):
with each other. Of course, there are plenty of proxy
conflicts and all that. I mean in a way you
can only you know, you can never know how sure
to be about counterfactuals like that. People are saying, well,
things would have been worse if we hadn't had the
nuclear threat looming over us to discourage us from going
to war. I guess it's hard to know whether that's
true or not, but I guess it's also though it's

(56:05):
just hard to calculate costs and benefits when you're thinking
about when you know the potential cost is like a
civilization ending worldwide calamity. Yeah, and and that indeed, you know,
to come back to the the idea of the world
changing forever. I mean that is one of the frequently
touched upon aspects of the whole scenario, is that it
is humanity's ability to to truly destroy itself and and

(56:30):
ultimately within a very short period of time. Now, I
know that this kind of brings us to a kind
of a dark corner for the end of the podcast.
And I know a lot of you don't like considering
such possibilities. I don't like considering such possibilities either. If
you are troubled by such possibilities, I would urge you
to consider following UH a group like the Arms Control

(56:52):
Association at arms Control dot org or any number of
other anti nuclear weapon or nuclear weapon control or disarmament groups.
And if you're in a position to use your vote
to favor candidates political candidates who take nuclear testing and
nuclear war seriously and are committed to certainly not testing them,
but even you know, not even raising the question of

(57:14):
their deployment or questioning why they shouldn't be used and
that sort of thing. Then you said you should do so, Yeah,
I mean, the Cold War may be over, but there
are still lots and lots of nuclear weapons out there,
and uh, and fantasizing about nuclear escalation is not a joke.
It's not It's not something to play around with, absolutely,
especially since I think we've touched on some of this

(57:36):
on the show before. Like the the the barriers between
our our current world and one of nuclear warfare, those
those barriers are not as thick as as sometimes we
might think they are, Like the safeguards in place are
are not that robust. We we need to do everything
we can to to to to lessen the possible ability, uh,

(58:01):
that such a thing could come to pass, either in
a in a large scale, certainly, but even at a
quote unquote small scale. Alright, on that note, we're gonna
go and close it out. In the meantime, we would
of course love to hear from you, oh your thoughts
about nuclear testing, nuclear weaponry, etcetera. Or just so do
the overall impact on all of this on on our

(58:23):
our world, and our culture in the many ways that
the world would not be the same. In the meantime,
if you want to check out other episodes of our show,
you can do so by finding us wherever you get
your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just
asked that you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a

(58:45):
topic for the future, just to say hello, you can
email us at contact that Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's products of
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(59:05):
you listening to your favorite shows.