#FALLOUT 4 HOW TO REDUCE RADIATION DRIVER#
#FALLOUT 4 HOW TO REDUCE RADIATION VERIFICATION#

If the health effects of radiation exposure were directly proportional to doses, the fallout scattered all over the world would only slightly increase the chance of harm to any particular individual living on the planet, and yet its total impact would be enormous in absolute terms because the fallout was to affect the worldвЂ™s population over many generations. Equally ambiguous was the moral import of global radioactive contamination. While the worldwide dispersion of radioactive fallout reduced its radiation levels to a low range, this paradoxically made our knowledge of its biological effects deeply uncertain.

The nuclear arms race made our planet more radioactive, but whether or not this global environmental change was harmful to humans has proved to be a highly contentious issue.

Building upon the latest scholarship seeking to illuminate the natural environment as a significant factor in the Cold War, this study will reexamine the Eisenhower administrationвЂ™s test-ban policy in the context of radioactive contamination on a global scale ( McNeill and Unger, 2010 McNeill and Engelke, 2014).

#FALLOUT 4 HOW TO REDUCE RADIATION VERIFICATION#

While historians have acknowledged the significance of radioactive fallout in the nuclear-test ban debate, their main concerns have remained focused on aspects of nuclear disarmament, such as verification ( Divine, 1978 Smith-Norris, 2003 Greene, 2007 Maddock, 2010).

#FALLOUT 4 HOW TO REDUCE RADIATION DRIVER#

In this sense, the Cold War differed from other major conflicts in that it was a war in the Anthropocene, a term recently proposed to describe the latest geological era where human activities became a major driver of planetary changes ( Crutzen, 2002 McNeill and Engelke, 2014). And each nuclear device detonated aboveground introduced a massive amount of radioactive debris into the atmosphere, slowly but steadily raising levels of ionizing radiation all over the world. In the meantime, however, the Eisenhower administration aggressively pursued nuclear technological superiority, conducting >120 weapon tests in the Pacific and Nevada. Historians have demonstrated that the President and his advisers, despite their bellicose rhetoric of nuclear brinkmanship in public, acted rather prudently during international crises and ultimately came to terms with an emerging nuclear stalemate with the Soviet Union ( Gaddis, 1987 Erdmann, 1999 Holloway, 2010 Gavin, 2012). The literature on the Eisenhower administrationвЂ™s nuclear policies is rich, but it tends to overlook their global environmental context. Although a more permanent solution awaited the conclusion of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the moratorium, lasting until August 1961, provided the anxious world with some respite from the Cold War as well as from radioactive pollution. Global fallout emissions eventually came to a halt in November 1958, when the three nuclear rivals entered test-ban negotiations and temporarily suspended all nuclear testing. Historian John McCormack has suggested that the worldwide dispersion of radioactive fallout after the Second World War, both in scale and intensity, became вЂthe first truly global environmental issue of the postwar era-and perhaps the first everвЂ™ ( McCormick, 1989, p. While some of the radioactive debris quickly fell to the ground close to the test site, most remained suspended in the atmosphere, traveling great distances before descending to EarthвЂ™s surface. Estimates show that the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union conducted 223 nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, on the ground, or underwater during the period from 1953 to 1958, with the total yield equivalent to в€ј140 megatons of TNT ( United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 2000). The United States during the Eisenhower years confronted an increasingly radioactive planet.

Fallout 4 how to reduce radiation