I don't know anything about this specific test, but the military goes to extraordinary lengths to train realistically for unusual and new war scenarios. (E.g.,

I don't know anything about this specific test, but the military goes to extraordinary lengths to train realistically for unusual and new war scenarios. (E.g., most US soldiers have been preparing for fighting in the presence of chemical weapons with gas masks, etc., for decades even though, to my knowledge, there's never been a large-scale usage since WW2.) But in this case, I'd wager they're taking scientific data for understanding the performance of the bomb; terrestrial bomb tests were huge exercises in data taking, and I don't know why airbursts would be different. The link between radiation and cancer was established in the '20s, and certainly well-known (if poorly understood) by the time atomic weapons were developed. For instance, Muller got the Nobel prize for this work in 1947. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation-induced_cancer#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation-induced_cancer#Histo... Certainly, safety rules weren't as conservative and stringent as they are today, but it's silly to think US soldiers were routinely and openly used as guinea pigs.