The Nuclear Arms Race
Once the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was assumed that the nuclear arms race was inevitable, it was just unavoidable that all the other major powers would develop nukes.
At the end of the war, Canada and the U.K requested a meeting to discuss what would be done about nuclear weapons. Surprisingly U.S was open to these discussions as they realized that they wouldn’t be the only nation with nuclear weapons for long. They offered to decommission all their nuclear weapons of other nations would pledge to never make them.
This was Brauch plan, it proposed that an international body would control all radioactive materials on earth, from mining to refining to using these materials for peaceful purposes as a nuclear power generation. But Soviets rejected the proposal as it was just seen as another ploy from U.S. to maintain American nuclear dominance and hence the global nuclear arms race began.
To develop new nuclear weapons required extensive testing and most of it was done in remote places like the Arctic or the South Pacific Islands.
Radioactive products from the tests blew across the country and many people started to feel the adverse effects from it, further when the nuclear research advanced to thermos nuclear weapons which were exponentially more powerful than the first atomic bomb the radiation spread from it was also seen to be a lot more than expected and casualties from the nuclear weapons started to appear even before the weapons were used, Annihilation of any life on earth was being brought within the range of technical possibility. These events triggered public outcry against nuclear testing.