This sort of fits with the recent events and discussions.
A friend of mine told me about this, I didn’t believe it so I looked it up
Crazy stuff
Fifty years ago this month, a nuclear bomb test went awry in the desert near Las Vegas, and the result was fallout and a substantial radiation dose in an unexpected place – Troy, N.Y. A new book on the subject relying heavily on declassified documents shows that the Atomic Energy Commission moved quickly to limit public exposure to radioactive fallout near the blast, while the exposure may actually have been larger in Troy, a city next to Albany.
The test, code-named Simon, occurred on April 25, 1953, atop a 300-foot tower in the Nevada desert. The mushroom cloud rose higher than expected, to 44,000 feet above sea level, where a wind of about 115 miles an hour carried the fallout swiftly to the Northeast. Thirty-six hours later, a severe rainstorm in Troy washed much of the fallout out of the air and into the ground.
The extent of the exposure has come to light gradually. Soon after the explosion, the Atomic Energy Commission said the dose to Troy residents was in the range of 100 millirads, an amount equal to the natural background exposure for most Americans over a four-month period. But in 1982, Representative Samuel S. Stratton, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who then represented the Albany area in Congress, revealed that the actual dose was probably about 20 times larger.Documents declassified in the 1980’s made it clear that the commission routinely understated doses released during the cold war.
If the exposure levels revealed by Representative Stratton and current assumptions about health effects of small doses of radiation are correct, the Troy fallout may have caused several cancer cases in the area. But current and former New York State Health Department officials were not able to say what effect the fallout had.
A book to be published this month, ‘‘A Good Day Has No Rain’’ (Whitston Publishing, $19.50) by Bill Heller, shows that the commission was concerned about radiation exposure. The agency set up roadblocks on two highways near the detonation site, and technicians scanned cars and trucks with Geiger counters. About 25 vehicles were ordered to go to nearby towns to have their vehicles decontaminated, and technicians temporarily confiscated some drivers’ licenses to ensure that they would comply.
Plus more
Troylet, that is all