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What nuclear bombs tell us about obesity
Cold War weapons tests launched a worldwide experiment — on ourselves
It starts with a flash so brilliant that you can “see the bones of your hand through your closed eyes.” Next is a heat so intense that one observer said it felt “as if someone my size had caught fire and walked through me.”
This is a nuclear bomb test.
Over a relatively short period of time — from roughly 1955 to 1963 — the U. S. and the Soviet Union ignited hundreds of earth-shaking fireballs. After that, nuclear testing went underground, and eventually stopped altogether.
What the shaken military observers of the time didn’t realize is that they had actually launched two experiments. Not only were they measuring the deadly power of their weapons of war, they had also radioactively labelled the entire human race. Years later, those atomic bombs would reveal new insights about how our brain grows, how the human body heals, and how we become fat.
How to label a human
The scientists who planned the atomic bomb tests spent a lot of time thinking about the energy their massive explosions would release. They spent comparatively little time considering fallout — the radioactive dust that’s blasted into the upper atmosphere.
