Radioactive Fallout From the Trinity Test Impacted 46 U.S. States, Study Finds

upstart writes:

Ironically, despite America's Cold War fears of being nuked by the Soviet Union, the only government that ever nuked us (and nuked us quite a bit) was our own:

The Trinity test and the dozens of nuclear tests that followed were the result of the top secret Manhattan Project, the WWII era U.S. government program that focused on the development of the atomic bomb. [...] The newly published research focuses on "atmospheric tests," meaning tests that impacted the atmosphere, though the U.S. government has also extensively conducted underground nuclear weapons testing, blowing up an estimated 815 subterranean nukes between 1951 and 1998.

The new research on the Trinity and other above-ground nuclear tests uses a combination of data that wasn't previously available for other evaluations. [...] According to the findings of the new study, the Trinity test had a large impact on the total amount of nuclear fallout that has spread throughout the U.S. "Our results show the significant contribution of the Trinity fallout to the total deposition density across the contiguous U.S....and in New Mexico in particular." The report states that fallout from Trinity reached 46 states in just 10 days.

The report notes that of the 101 nuclear tests carried out during the time period studied, 94 of them created radioactive mushroom clouds that subsequently dispersed nuclear fallout across the country.

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