Awhile back I authored a tech-history book on nuclear testing. It was published by Macmillan just before the first wave of the corporate takeover juggernaut took them down. And no, I won't flog the title here.
But since then I am regularly contacted by grad students and the occasional reporter trying to make sense of the 1950s and 1960s--especially since politically and militarily we seem to be returning to that interesting time period.
Example: nuclear bunker busters. Great idea. We tried it with shot "Jangle-Uncle" in the fall of 1951. Didn't work then, won't work now. Lots and lots of radioactive fallout though!
Anyhow, back to the story---the fellow who contacted me last week had done his homework and had come up with two great questions: (1) was Midland, Texas hammered from fallout in the time period before George Bush's sister died of leukemia? (answer: probably not---on a scale of fallout that county was, at worst, only the 678th hottest county in the U.S.) and (2) did President Eisenhower himself know that nuclear fallout was exposing large segments of the population to radiation?
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