I didn't think so many nukes had been set off. Before knowing that fact, I'd have thought 2,000 nukes would give radiation poisoning to a decent portion of the the world.

Most of these are underground; that's the least fallout-producing way of setting off a nuke, since there's no irradiated debris going up into the sky. The second least fallout-producing nuking method is an air burst. The ground bursts are the worst, and also the rarest in the doomsday plans.

Enemy missile silos and other hardened sites would all receive ground bursts - in the case of the Soviets they had (and Russia may still have) multiple extremely large warheads (25Mt) targeted at places like Cheyenne Mountain and Raven Rock Mountain - these would have been ground bursts and incredibly messy.

Modern (fission-)fusion bombs are cleaner and more efficient than old fission bombs.

Low efficiency means that the nuclear reaction doesn't end with the explosion. The remaining heavy nucleus decay at their normal rate and radiate.

The biggest one, Tsar Bomba was luckily very efficient.

"It has been estimated that detonating the original 100 Mt design would have released fallout amounting to about 25 percent of all fallout emitted since the invention of nuclear weapons." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

Original Source (acknowledged in the article, though its embed links a YouTube flamewar): http://www.ctbto.org/specials/1945-1998-by-isao-hashimoto/

In the 50's and 60's it looked like the US was just trying to maintain a 2:1 lead over the Soviets. I wonder if it was driven mainly by bragging rights.

It was driven by the desire to be able to guarantee that, even if the Soviets attacked first and took out as many military and infrastructural targets as possible, the US would still be able to launch a crippling nuclear counterattack. The Soviets wanted the exact same thing, but in reverse. It wasn't driven by bragging rights; it was driven by the dangerous fact that the advantage in a nuclear war goes with whoever strikes first.

The development of ICBMs, missile submarines, and so on, actually made us a lot safer by making the "strike first and strike hard" approach much less effective. The situation was more volatile back when it took a month or so to put together the bombs for a nuclear attack. When you look at it from such a ruthless perspective, the Cold War made a weird kind of sense.

And as pointed out in Wargames, whoever strikes first still loses.

MAD (mutually assured destruction) is not a pretty thing.

The point is to make it so that whoever strikes first still loses. If the first-striker advantage is big enough, then the country that strikes first could survive with their population, government, and military capabilities largely intact, while pretty much destroying the other side.

I think that the scientists behind the US research effort just had a better budget.

Bragging rights are directly correlated to budget, and maybe even vice versa ;)

I know that nuclear fuel must be a precious resource, and to see that we wasted so much of it during those years is unsettling. We could have set that fuel aside to power civilization for centuries. Might we be able to recover any valuable radioactive material from the test sites? Since most of the warheads were detonated at just a few sites, there might be high concentrations.

The amount of fuel used by a warhead is tiny compared with a power station reactor. A typical nuclear warhead contains less than 50kg of fissible material. A typical reactor contains 50 tons or more.

Makes me really wonder if those explosions had any scientific need, or were they just displays of power. I would think that those test sites would be so polluted that any fallout analysis would be very hard if not impossible.

I just think it's interesting how mch territory has been used as a test facility for nukes. Russia seems like a nuclear wasteland, and it even appears we detonated nukes (underground I presume) in the SE US - wild!

Most of the testing was done at the Nevada Test Range. Today this is probably the most polluted place in the US. Check it out on google maps, the place looks like the surface of the moon. Area 51, incidentally is very close to that area as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site

Google maps link: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

Thanks for that link, it's amazing to me that they detonated that many nukes underground in that grid like pattern.

I recently read that Kazakhstan was one of the USSR's main testing areas, and has suffered tremendously - this due to the fact that a lot of the tests were atmospheric.

"Between 1949 and the cessation of atomic testing in 1989, 456 explosions were conducted at the STS, including 340 underground (borehole and tunnel) shots and 116 atmospheric (either air-drop or tower shots)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipalatinsk_Test_Site

Semipalatinsk hosts three of Kazakhstan's four nuclear reactors. They also have one of the world's biggest uranium deposits.

Have a look at these links - "Dirty Harry" was a particularly nasty atmospheric test:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Upshot-Knothole

Your assumption that only the evil Russkies would expose their population to fallout from nuclear tests is hilarious.

The USA conducted 331 atmospheric nuclear tests, at least 86 of them on US mainland territory.

Here's a thought to ponder: The intense x-ray/gamma radiation given off by the above-ground nuclear tests may very well be the most powerful indicator of intelligent life on this planet that has ever been broadcast into outer space, purely in terms of signal power. It's kind of sad to think that the first message received by E.T. (if they're out there) could potentially be, "Yes, there are sentient beings on Earth but, unfortunately, they're a bunch of war-mongering a-holes."

Does it feel like we're at war with the pacific islands here?

Or the sand in the desert!