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Years ago I recall reading... I think it was The Maker of Dune, in which Frank Herbert discussed many of the ideas that went into the creation of Dune. At one point he mentioned a debate between Teller and Oppenheimer in which they theorized that a hydrogen bomb would ignite nitrogen in the atmosphere which could, in turn, cause the hydrogen in all the Earth's water to fuse... essentially turning the entire Earth into a giant bomb. They checked their calculations and decided it probably wouldn't happen, but there was enough uncertainty that when they set off the first hydrogen bomb in the New Mexico desert there were bets placed on what would happen. Yet they decided to set it off anyway.
That idea terrified me at the time and led me to a much deeper appreciation of environmentalism.
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