Comment by anitil
5 years ago
I have a memory that experts advised that it would be safest to perform nuclear bomb tests on the east cost because the trade winds tend to move west to east, and that would ensure that radioactive dust would not fall over habitable land, and result in this very thing.
The story being that the west coast was instead chosen because something, something congress.
However I'm struggling to find a source. Is this story familiar to anyone else?
It doesn't have the detail about the trade winds, but there is this article about how the Outer Banks was nearly chosen as a test site, based partly on the input of a meteorologist: https://www.pilotonline.com/life/article_6662e143-8b1c-51b8-...
I think I was confusing trade winds with the gulf stream perhaps : "the waste products of nuclear explosions will move eastward out over the Atlantic Ocean"
In other news, that article was kind of crazy! They onshored nuclear detonations because of, essentially, PR reasons?