While Dr. Jones's survival of a nuclear detonation in a lead-lined refrigerator has brought many scientists' hands to their eyes with head-shaking disappointment, Indiana has more than radiation poisoning (or total vaporization) to worry about with the 1950's proliferation of fission testings around the globe. As many of you might know, one of the key means of dating archaeological and geological artifacts and specimens is through the use of radiometric dating. Various isotopes of the chemical elements are unstable, and will decay to (eventually) stable or long-lived products over the course of time. Since the temperature of even the deep interior of the Earth is far below the necessary energies for nuclear processes to occur, the rate of underground nuclear decays of unstable uranium, thorium, protactinium, argon, potassium, carbon, and other unstable isotopes has proceeded since the formation of the Earth unchanged. In the atmosphere, spallation of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and other gases produces a series of radioactive nuclei, such as \(\ce{^14C}\), with a half-life of 5,715 years. Once \(\ce{^14C}\) is formed from atmospheric nitrogen, it oxidizes to \(\ce{^14CO_2}\), which is incorporated into living organisms through carbon fixation by plants and ingestion of those plants by animals. When an organism dies, it stops ingesting \(\ce{^14C}\), and the measured amount remaining can be used to calculate the time at which the organism died, providing a precise way to date many archaeological finds. However, surface testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950's has created an atmospheric surplus of \(\ce{^14C}\) which, although it cannot alter the half-life, does change the baseline for count rates. Wood from trees grown just before 1950 produce about 16 counts per minute (cpm) per gram of carbon (using a Geiger counter, say), while wood 5,715 years old produces 8 cpm, as expected. Modern wood produces substantially more decays per minute, and hence would give a much younger age than actuality. While this doesn't pose much worry for current paleontologists and anthropologists (50 year old trees can be dated by many other methods, and probably not of interest to paleoscientists), it will create an enormous amount of confusion for specialists hundreds or thousands of years from now: there will be an "atomic window" of time when nuclear testing gave artificially large doses of naturally occurring radioisotopes to living organisms, which may cause future archaeologists to date today's specimens as far younger than they should be.