Why did 1954's "Castle Bravo" fallout cloud , rather than 1918's Spanish Flu or 1883's Krakatoa, finally convince humans of our interconnected biosphere?

Perhaps natural things don't really matter to us hubris-driven humans.

Because even huge natural catastrophes like Spanish Flu (and earlier global pandemics) and the volcano Krakatoa's volcanic winter didn't seem to count as much in the human mind as did a relatively small disaster that humans themselves were causing.

The unexpectedly large yield from the American thermonuclear test Castle Bravo in 1954 led to a strong plume of radioactive dust to fall on a Japanese fishing boat thousands of miles away, quickly killing one crewman.

It also added a relatively small amount of a much longer term radiation killer, strontium 90, to go high up into the atmosphere and then slowly fall all over the world, onto grass and then into cow's milk and eventually into the growing bones of babies.

There its high energy level of radiation output, plus its long life, would slightly increase a young child's chances of getting fatal childhood leukemia and bone cancer.

But recall, this fallout hit every child in the world - and now spread over hundreds of millions of kids per decade that relatively small increase in the individual death rate was poised to kill many thousands of them.

And the number of deaths per million of children was only going to go up with each new thermonuclear test adding more and more strontium 90 into the biosphere.

Traditionally the South Seas of the Pacific ocean was where people fled to get away from the rest of us ---- now nuclear tests there were bringing death to children in every other part of the world.

We could no longer run , we could no longer hide.

Just as we couldn't with Krakatoa or the Spanish Flu.

So I really don't have a good idea why we felt so different in 1954.

And don't give me the old chestnut about the new TV media of the 1950s --- for we had an equally good global media in 1883 and 1918 and it was called the wire services' telegraph.

Still, for whatever reason it did so, the Manhattan atomic Project probably did as much as the Manhattan penicillin Project to usher in our present environmental, small is beautiful, movement.

Ironic, that....

1945's Natural Penicillin - and 1945's synthetic Nuclear Weapons - birthed 1960s Environmental Movement

No one who studies the matter doubts that mid-1950s fears about global fallout was the spur to today's environmental movements (and related human rights movements) that question the value of unbridled white European technology and science.

But you will have to be very,very old indeed to accept that 1945's unexpected triumph of natural penicillin from tiny primitive basement slime over the best chemical minds and laboratories in the world hit as hard a death blow to western scientism and hubris as the fallout from 1956's Castle Bravo nuclear test ever did.

In fact, you'd have to be born in 1920 - or older - to really remember when the whole world was convinced (circa 1933 or so) that male chemists (and male physicists soon too) could and would make anything Mother Nature could make - but better, cheaper, easier.

Womb envy would disappear and Penis envy would reign erect - but only if males found any further need to keep women around.

In 1930, for example, the much honored Dr Willis Whitney, a chemist who ran one of the world's first and biggest research labs for General Electric said chemists can probably make anything they can conceive of and many things they do not yet conceive of.

Soon, for example, milk - which he described it as buggy and dirty - would be gone ---  made from clean chemical elements in modern clean factories - not in dirty inefficient milk glands.

Milk - that ultimate symbol of female-only-ness - Whitney just happens to pick on it and not any of millions of other potential compounds and mixtures to focus upon.

Sheer coincidence, say most of today's male historians - still.

Now basement slime hardly seems particularly female or male or anything much to do with us humans.

But look again at the images of wartime penicillin.

Almost all the images of those tending the naturally grown penicillium fungus are women - in fact young nubile fertile working class 'girls' .

But the more chemical side of wartime penicillin shows stainless steel containers and lots of knobs and dials tended by stern faced middled aged middle class men in suits and white lab coats.

Nobel winner Peter Medawar remembers chemists semi-privately describing the idea of making live-saving penicillin naturally (with women gently nurturing the tender young fungi) as being like a return to the Middle Ages and Witches' Brews.

But human attempts to cheaply synthesis the relatively small (so thought relatively 'simple') penicillin molecule all failed during the war - and ever since.

So boomers like me grew up in the 1950s hearing that the antibiotics that had saved the lives of us children had all came from tiny bugs in jungle dirt, from sewage water or from basement slimes.

It planted a seed - I had no illusions about the wonders of chemistry growing up, the way I still did about safe cheap nuclear power for peace.

Natural penicillin helped turned this child into a young adult environmental activist.....

newest kids on the block: EARTHLINGS

500 years of Skygods
Skygods have been around for 500 years, if not thousands of years, miners of the Earth, its cut 'n' run artists.

But Earthlings are genuinely new - growing gradually in numbers since the end of WWII, with three prominent growth bumps in 1945, 1955 and 1965.

V-2 ballastic rockets and the A-Bomb convinced America's leading Air Force commander Hap Arnold that under Modernity, war had changed profoundly.

1945: 36 Hour War
This in turn led Life Magazine, in the Fall of 1945, to do a special feature on a 36 hour war totally destroying New York, based on nuclear tipped rockets launched from Africa. No hemisphere was any longer free from the horrors of total war.

Combine this with the revealed horrors of Modernity's Eugenics at Auschwitz, and we see the ushering-in of the beginnings of our post-hegemonic age: Modernity no longer had the uncontested support of  middle class humanity.

1955: Fallout from Operation Castle Bravo
It was the world's first true H-Bomb test and its most famous: fallout from this American test in a remote Pacific atoll first killed a Japanese fisherman a 1000 km from the site, then mixed into the atmosphere to fall onto food all over the world.

Our bodies prefer to take up fallout's deadly Strontium 90 atoms, over those of  life-giving calcium.

 Once permanently installed in our bones, they ignited (the then always fatal) childhood leukemia.

Like the plagues brought to us by Modernity's rapid new international jet travel breaking glacial national quarantines, it once again reminded us that no spot on Earth was remote enough to be safe from events in any other part of it.

1965: No Life - Ever - on Mars or Venus : This is Life's only Lifeboat
In 1965, we began getting accurate scientific measurements from the atmospheres and surfaces of Mars and Venus - our only likely alternative homes to Earth.

 Hard Science Fiction, the porn of Modernity, had fed us delusions for 100 years that we could ruin Earth and then move easily to Earth 2.0 on Mars or Venus. No more: both were revealed as cold and hot versions of  'Hell On Wheels' .

The hippie, alternative, counter-culture, green, environmental , global-commensalist movement began in earnest : EARTHLINGS....