The atmospheric tests were the cause of death of fewer than half a million people, it’s not the best metric.
A single well placed bomb could be far more destructive to human life than the total effects of all of the testing.
And... the negative consequences of atmospheric testing just weren’t known very well.
You’re exaggerating.
A real nuclear war would threaten being an extinction level event. Nuclear testing probably caused several hundred thousand cancers. There is a sense of scale that needs to be respected.
The threat of nuclear testing is the inevitable arms race which makes nuclear war more and more likely.
Something weird to me though is and it's a bit far out but the conditions created in a nuclear explosion are so extreme what if all of this so-called weapons research had another purpose. What if it wasn't related to developing great nuclear weapons so we could blast enemies out of existence what if it was something like particle accelerator research but somehow connecting to or passing energy into the electromagnetic (or other) field of the planet, and passing that energy through the filaments of those fields that connect our planet to the other planet in our solar system to our sun and onwards from there. In other words what if nuclear weapons have some other effect that's measurable but it's still classified, and what if the proliferation of that research was an exploration of that science whatever that is?
What's the real difference between nuking your own country (or some allies/subject nations) for "testing" and an actual nuclear war?
Sure no-one got killed directly but god knows the indirect effects.
528 nuclear bombs have been set off in the atmosphere and many more underground.
Imagine if there had been an actual nuclear war in the 1950s in which 528 nuclear weapons were exploded - well in a way it kind of did happen - it's just that the countries being nuked were our own.
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally