The defense industry dreams of genies.

That’s because it is really hard to get the genie back into bottle after you let it loose.

Really, the only option after releasing a genie is to invent new, expensive ways to combat it. And that’s been the story of America’s persistent gift to posterity-the ‘nuclear genie.”

Just ask the people who refuse to return to the site of America’s most notorious above-ground nuclear test-the bombing of Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. That hydrogen bomb, codenamed ‘Shrimp,” remains the largest bomb ever tested by the United States. It’s also known as a ‘thermonuclear weapon” because it uses high temperatures to trigger four cascading stages, each magnifying the power of the explosion. It was an ‘advance” on the run-of-the-mill atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it was a response to the Soviet Union’s emerging atomic weapon program, which was, in turn, a response to America’s pioneering effort to weaponize the atom.

In fact, six years after the H-bomb spread nuclear fallout onto nearby islands and their inhabitants like radioactive snow, the Soviets kicked it up a notch by testing ‘Tsar Bomba”-the biggest bomb ever to explode in the history of mankind. It was 1,400 times […]