Our Friend the Atom

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a lot of different dates for the onset of the Anthropocene. Stratigraphers, who like clarity, tend to favor the early 1950s. As the United States and the Soviet Union vied for Strangelovian supremacy, aboveground nuclear testing became routine. The tests left behind a more or less permanent marker—a spike in ra

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could not survive. Other women gave birth to shapeless deformities. Ninety percent of the children under the age of twelve at the time of the test developed thyroid tumors. In short, the bomb tests ruined the lives of hundreds of people, damning them and their children to shockingly short lifespans and illness.36 And the American public, still unde

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