Correct: they had to be tested, and were - and as the tech evolved to take the testing out of the atmosphere, it was.

But:

- The weapons did the deterring, not the tests - and that's not simple semantics. My point may not have been clear enough: Krushchev, Kennedy, and their respective generals decided against poisoning their own people in the attempt to intimidate the opposition, and they mutually agreed to do so in an amazingly short amount of time, considering the politics and the psychological impact of images from above-ground tests...

from which I infer

- Fallout from atmospheric testing was always more dangerous than the general populus has been led (or permitted) to believe.

And that is why I am glad the issue has not been swept under the rug of official forgetfulness - or worse, the collective attention deficit of the common people. "Plutonium is forever"; a lot of those other isotopes are still ticking merrily away. Now the rest of the science needs to be done: how much is really there, and what's it doing to us?

Fox