Almost immediately after the U.S. started atmospheric nuclear testing on the continent in 1951, farmers began to blame the bombs for triggering unseasonable cold snaps and hailstorms that damaged their crops. In March 1952, Golconda, Nev., became the first of many towns to petition the government to cease testing because of atom weather.
The controversy hit front pages nationwide in June of 1953 when one of the most lethal tornado outbreaks in history smashed into Flint, Mich., and Worcester, Mass, right on the heels of the spring nuclear test series. This outbreak capped an especially deadly season that saw an F-5 tornado in Waco, Tex., kill 114 people in a single day. A Gallup survey two weeks later indicated that nearly a third of the public believed that the testing had caused the outbreak, with another third unsure. Congressmen pressed the White House for answers, dragging all branches of the military, as well as the Atomic Energy Commission and Weather Bureau, to testify in hearings.
The Worcester tornado was a wake-up call. It launched a national debate over the power of new technologies and their culpability in natural disasters. It also suggested that the earth was perhaps not as resilient to human activity as scientists had previously believed. People started pondering whether humanity had become more powerful than even the greatest forces of nature.
In the early 1950s, meteorologists working with the Atomic Energy Commission had dismissed these claims, arguing that the bomb was “puny” when held up to even a regular thunderstorm, much less a hurricane. As the Weather Bureau Chief quipped, the weather was “usually unusual.”
But after the tornado, the Weather Bureau finally took public hysteria seriously and directed their scientists to investigate the issue. In 1955, they published a series of reports that all reached the same agnostic conclusion — it was “unlikely” the bomb could affect the weather, much less climate. But no one could know for sure.
Farmers responded with outrage over their inability to prevent the AEC from risking environmental catastrophe. Local farmers’ collectives such as the Cherry Growers Association of Beaumont, Calif., began to fund their own studies. And it was not just organizations that produced studies. Individuals — from a sportsman in rural Pennsylvania to a high school student in suburban Pasadena — became citizen-scientists, concerned about climate change and its consequences on their lives.
By the end of the decade, the farmers had won the war of public opinion. City-dwellers were just as likely as rural folk to believe in “atom weather.”