The Fear of Setting the Planet on Fire with a Nuclear Weapon

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The Fear of Setting the Planet on Fire with a Nuclear Weapon

By the time Enrico Fermi jokingly took bets among his Los Alamos colleagues on whether the July 16, 1945, Trinity test would wipe out all earthbound life, physicists already knew of the impossibility of setting the atmosphere on fire, according to a 1991 interview with Hans Bethe published by Scientific American.

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