1952 zündeten die USA im Rahmen eines militärischen Tests bei einem Atoll nahe der Marshall Inseln im Südpazifik die erste Wasserstoffbombe:

„Since nothing like this had ever been tried before, nobody knew how big a bang it would make. (…) some nuclear physicists thought the explosion might go as high as one hundred megatons – a blast so off the scale that scientists could only guess the chain of consequences. One possibility was that it might ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Still, nothing ventured, nothing annihilated, as the Pentagon might have put it, and on morning of 1 November somebody lit the fuse and, as I like to picture it, ran like hell.“

Bill Bryson in „The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid“ (S.177f)