Trinity had a big impact on the total amount of radioactive fallout in the U.S.
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. The research paper uses high-resolution reanalyzed historical weather fields, U.S. government data, and complex atmospheric modeling to try to chart the distribution of radioactive fallout in the days following historical nuclear tests. 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.
