BTW, anyone hear the urban legend that some of the scientists who set off the first nuke thought it would start a chain reaction in the O2 in the atmosphere and basically glass the planet? Wonder if it’s true. If it is, can you believe they set it off anyway?
guess that was a “hey ya’ll! watch this!” moment
It was Enrico Fermi, while waiting in the bunker for the Trinity test, jokingly asked if anyone wanted to take bets on "whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world."
Robert Oppenheimer also expressed some concern to the military prior to the original detonation that there was a slim probablility that his calculations might contain a significant enough error that an atomic blast would ignite the hydrogen in the atmosphere but he was pretty sure that that would not happen. This is also mentioned in his trial transcripts.
What he was speaking of was the possibility that the fission reaction would initiate a fusion reaction in Nitrogen present in the air. If this reaction were self-sustaining, it could 'ignite' the atmosphere.
Not an urban legend. Manhattan Project actually calculated reaction temperatures and area/volume to see if Trinity would set off a N2-O2 burn that would sustain. It’s in Richard Rhode’s book The Making of the Atom Bomb as well as other related books.
The calculation said “no”.
Likewise the RHIC at Brookhaven and PBFA I and PBFA II (now Saturn and Z Machine) were checked to see if they’d make micro black holes that would break containment and settle into Earth and collapse it to the size of a walnut. Calculation said “no” so they turned them on.