WI: No Castle Bravo Tragedy

What if the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test did not overyield? My understanding is it wouldn't take much of a PoD to accomplish this - all you need is for someone to discover before the test that Lithium-7 splits into Lithium-6 and a neutron when struck by a fast neutron.

So, aside from On the Beach never being written, what other consequences would there be? For example, how important was Castle Bravo and the Lucky Dragon to the development of the anti-nuclear movement, particularly the opposition to atmospheric testing?
 
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Well, right there in your own most recent TMMAM post you give plenty of evidence that if there wouldn't have been opposition to atmospheric testing without the CB fiasco, there should have been. Right there, you tell us one reason for the Inuit skepticism about AEC assurances was their track record in CB--so if by the late 1950s everyone was still forging ahead in unblemished nuclear optimism, but something did go wrong with Chariot, presumably they'd fob off the Aleuts just as cavilierly as they did the Pacific Islanders and Japanese fishermen OTL. Or worse; one hopes they learned something from CB.

But everything you wrote there about how the AEC actually approached and handled the plan suggests that if they had learned anything it was very little indeed! Mainly, still, go find someplace in the world where there are few people nearby, and those are People Who Don't Matter. But even though they were mere Natives, these Inuit were after all US citizens--they'd have that much more clout and your fine article shows us just how they used it.

Right there in that article you also let us know that these particular Inuit already had four times the concentration of certain worrisome fallout elements in their bones over the global average, due to the nature of their Arctic ecosystem (perhaps also due to their being situated so as to get fallout from both US and Soviet tests?)

Before there was the Einewetok test, there was of course Bikini and a bunch of other bomb tests in the Pacific and in Nevada. I believe they had already raised a certain questioning note in certain circles. It may well be that CB was the turning point after which anti-nuke protests turned from the geopolitical aspects (there were objections to Bikini coming from many circles--including from US veterans organizations, protesting on the grounds that the test was obviously a provocation of the Soviets--I guess that dimension of protest damped down to "manageable" levels after the Berlin crisis and particularly the Korean War) to the matter of the environmental hazards even aside from what would happen if these bombs were unleashed en masse in global war.

But if it needed such a spectacular outcome that's a sad commentary on the general rationality of our political process, because as test after test was conducted, the cumulative level of long-term fallout only rose, soon to surpass the releases of even the very worst of any single release.

In Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe, IIRC, he pointed out an argument I believe he attributed to a fellow member of the nuclear establishment, that after all each test generated new questions that could only be tested with more than one new test, so aside from the competitive dynamics of a Cold War, on strictly scientific grounds we'd expect the number of tests to rise and rise exponentially--until some other factor, such as running out of fissionables, or external political bans brought on by the rising fallout levels, checked the process. Dyson had a lot invested in the tests going on at the time and may have subscribed to this argument only after the fact, as a consolation--but it is a sound argument, insofar as atmospheric tests do pose any risk, that risk would only rise unless arbitrarily checked.

My personal impressions of the atmosphere of rising skepticism and fear regarding bomb testing of the 1950s was that on the whole, it was general and pervasive and cumulative and not hinging on any one crisis. That impression could be quite wrong; it could be that every 1950s vintage SF story I read hinging on post-war mutations and every B-movie from Hollywood or Japan featuring bomb-mutated or awakened monsters (giant ants, prehistoric atomic-breathed tyrannosaurs, huge tarantulas, or whatever it was that Came From Beneath the Sea (never saw that one)) came after Castle Bravo and wouldn't have without it. But I doubt this.

I think if CB hadn't given them a bit of a turn, then the testers would have been that much more reckless with another test farther down the line and gotten into some other PR disaster. Or maybe not; they apparently didn't learn anything from the Bikini "Baker" test after all. So maybe CB was the worst that could have happened, and it happened because these guys were, after all, experimenting. For that reason of course there was no way to be sure in advance, before just about any test--certainly any test that covered new ground--that something that seemed unlikely up front would turn out to be in the cards after all? Like triggering a nuclear chain reaction in the whole bloody atmosphere--it sure didn't happen, in retrospect the fear looks silly (given that Earth is after all always being bombarded with meteors and cosmic rays), but that didn't stop some of the Manhattan Project bigwigs from fearing that it just might happen after all, at Trinity.

So now, having taken the risks, we know more about what can and can't happen. It's not very reasonable to assume, as the POD, that they should have known in advance what was going to happen to the Lithium-7, when the way that we found that out was via the embarrassingly large burst of Castle Bravo. Nor did that costly surprise (not really a fiasco though if you are in the bomb business--they just learned that they could make a bigger bomb cheaper than they thought!) result in the testers getting reined in; by the time that was on the table diplomatically it was for a lot of other reasons.

Based on what I know in general I'm answering your WI with a "no, it made no difference to the general trend." If you know more that shows that pretty much all anti-fallout skepticism clearly stems from CB, maybe it should have gone in the OP--or anyway it would be interesting to see that evidence laid out for our consideration now!
 
Well, right there in your own most recent TMMAM post you give plenty of evidence that if there wouldn't have been opposition to atmospheric testing without the CB fiasco, there should have been. Right there, you tell us one reason for the Inuit skepticism about AEC assurances was their track record in CB--so if by the late 1950s everyone was still forging ahead in unblemished nuclear optimism, but something did go wrong with Chariot, presumably they'd fob off the Aleuts just as cavilierly as they did the Pacific Islanders and Japanese fishermen OTL. Or worse; one hopes they learned something from CB.

Actually, even if Castle Bravo means an unsuccessful anti-nuclear movement, I think there's a very high probability that the whole Plowshare program, and Chariot in particular, gets butterflied away. Even if Plowshare still gets started, they're not going to be pushing so hard for the "early and obvious demonstration" for public relations purposes, which was the whole point of Chariot. So the nuclear earth-moving program probably starts with *Gnome and *Sedan in the American Southwest, and it probably dies there when they really start looking at the cost and health analyses.

Before there was the Einewetok test, there was of course Bikini and a bunch of other bomb tests in the Pacific and in Nevada. I believe they had already raised a certain questioning note in certain circles. It may well be that CB was the turning point after which anti-nuke protests turned from the geopolitical aspects (there were objections to Bikini coming from many circles--including from US veterans organizations, protesting on the grounds that the test was obviously a provocation of the Soviets--I guess that dimension of protest damped down to "manageable" levels after the Berlin crisis and particularly the Korean War) to the matter of the environmental hazards even aside from what would happen if these bombs were unleashed en masse in global war.

I know there was rising opposition to atmospheric testing prior to Castle Bravo - in addition to the protests against the Pacific Testing, I believe a group of cattle-ranchers whose land was near the Nevada Test Site had filed a lawsuit. But I don't really know much about the history of the anti-nuclear movement outside of the opposition to Chariot, which is why I posted the thread.

In Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe, IIRC, he pointed out an argument I believe he attributed to a fellow member of the nuclear establishment, that after all each test generated new questions that could only be tested with more than one new test, so aside from the competitive dynamics of a Cold War, on strictly scientific grounds we'd expect the number of tests to rise and rise exponentially--until some other factor, such as running out of fissionables, or external political bans brought on by the rising fallout levels, checked the process. Dyson had a lot invested in the tests going on at the time and may have subscribed to this argument only after the fact, as a consolation--but it is a sound argument, insofar as atmospheric tests do pose any risk, that risk would only rise unless arbitrarily checked.

The number of underground tests per year stabilized. I'd expect something similar for atmospheric testing if there's no Partial Test Ban Treaty, although possibly at a higher level due to lower costs. Unless Plowshare goes full steam ahead, although I rather doubt that would happen. I'm going to get into this later in God's Shovel, but Plowshare for excavation purposes probably wouldn't have gone ahead even if they'd ignored the arms control and long-term health issues - basically, any site worth a Plowshare device is too densely populated to cost-effectively evacuate.

Based on what I know in general I'm answering your WI with a "no, it made no difference to the general trend." If you know more that shows that pretty much all anti-fallout skepticism clearly stems from CB, maybe it should have gone in the OP--or anyway it would be interesting to see that evidence laid out for our consideration now!

I don't, that's why I asked. I'm not trying to say that no Castle Bravo disaster means no anti-nuclear movement means glorious atompunk ATL.
 
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