Gradually observations on the movement of radiation through the environment after nuclear weapon tests created a global environmental movement that remains a strong social and political force today across national borders. Over time both the United States and the former Soviet Union developed weapons to poison vast swaths of the Earth with lethal levels of radiation into their plans for attacking and “defeating” each other in a global thermonuclear war. strategic nuclear planners quickly recognized the radiological fallout as a powerful tool of war, separate from the power of blast and heat that were fundamental to nuclear war fighting strategies. Many of these radioactive particles remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. The radiation produced by these thermonuclear weapons spread around the globe, both in the water of the oceans and in the atmosphere, contaminating fish, birds, animals and plants far from nuclear test sites. Thermonuclear weapons, or H-bombs as they were called, were thousands of times more powerful with the potential to kill tens of millions of people with single detonations, many of whom would be far beyond the blast and heat reach of the weapon. Less than ten years later both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed weapons that made these original nuclear weapons seem small.
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