Meteorology: What Made Betsy Blow

Before the first H-bomb was exploded, there were only a few pounds of tritium—a triple-weight, radioactive form of hydrogen—in the atmosphere and in all the world's seas. By the end of 1962, when the Russians and the U.S. had ended their atmospheric testing, the tritium released by H-blasts had increased the total to about 600 Ibs. The proliferation of the relatively harmless isotope has been of little concern to most laymen and scientists, but it has enabled University of Miami Chemist Gote Ostlund to draw an important conclusion about hurricanes: instead of getting most of their energy from condensing...