I think your point is missing the big picture. The US starting testing again -- even underground -- would likely start other countries testing again, at least some of which would happen aboveground.

I agree that restarting nuclear weapon testing is a bad idea but Russia has already taken that step by conducting several test flights of the 9M730 Burevestnik nuclear powered cruise missile. It isn't a bomb, but flying an unshielded open cycle nuclear engine is in some ways even worse.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-ukraine-nuclear-miss...

How do we know that underground testing has little consequences if all the sites are national security zones. What we do know is that the underground geology is likely permanently compromised, at least within any meaningful time frame, and all nearby aquifers and other water deposits are poisoned for all intents and purposes into the distant future. These tests are ecological horrors that are unnecessary and destructive.

We've been doing sub-critical component tests at the NNTS since the end of full-scale testing. So Wright is attempting to make it sound like there won't really be a change of policy, but with these guys who knows. It's not like Il Douche has any clue what he's talking about.

Are the French restarting testing?

The land/water distinction (or lack thereof) could use some work. I spent way too long trying to figure out what I was looking at before I released we were zoomed all the way out and the dark blue was land while the light blue was water.

Reminds me of this scene from Arrested Development https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/28b0326d-cba4-4d26-8c54-977f04b...

> If nuclear deterrence relies on functional weapons

I don't think it does. No one will mess with you if you merely have one bomb let alone the US which has 5k+ warheads and a triad of delivery mechanisms. Blowing up nuclear bombs anywhere for "testing" purposes is stupid.

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'scar'. Certainly the NNTS looks plenty scarred by the hundreds of subsidence craters left behind by the tests. Only once in a while would there be a leak like the Baneberry test in 1970. And plenty of the folks working in the test area were 'scarred', by radiation sickness, leukemia, etc.

> This article is fearmongering

of course it is, it's CNN

Ask the orders of magnitude more of Americans and Japanese people who weren't slaughtered in a ground invasion. Or starved to death in the mass famines a blockade would have caused. And all their descendants. Sometimes wars require the least shitty of a menu of shitty choices.

Could take this a couple different ways. Aren't those cities flourishing today?

the big, obvious distinction is that those weren't tests. "test" implies that what happened to the Marshall Islands should have been prevented.

In the sense that there's pictures of the skyline of Las Vegas with the plumes on the background, yes.

Upwind, which matters a lot. Nebraska is more affected.

*nation. Just

while we're at it

Even underground tests executed _with the explicit intention_ of improving PR for nukes polluted groundwater and vented rads to the atmosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

By that logic we have crossed that point visa-via North Korea.

> this is pointless fearmongering

of course it is, it's CNN