Yeh. And in the military, the word "volunteer" sometimes does not have the meaning you might think.
Coerced is sometimes a better word
There is never a great big reward for volunteering
At the time of these tests, scientists already had considerable radiation, wind, weather, shock and vibration, all kinds of test equipment. I doubt that some guys standing around could have added much to the equation unless whether or not they became ill WAS the object of the test.
And, there had already been considerable study on the victims of the bombs dropped on Japan for radiation sickness, etc, as well as tests on animals in the Bikini and other tests.
Quite frankly, seems to me some of this period of time was the blind leading the stupid, and in the case of the gigantic Soviet test, allegedly the largest above ground bomb ever, we might just be lucky that some bunch 'o nuts didn't knock the earth out of round
The Soviets at their "finest"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
The damn thing was originally designed for 100MT, but later limited to 50MT
A quote from above:
"It has been estimated that detonating the original 100 Mt design would have released fallout amounting to about 25 percent of all fallout emitted since the invention of nuclear weapons"
"The Tsar Bomb was a three-stage Teller–Ulam design hydrogen bomb with a yield of 50 megatons (Mt).[5] This is equivalent to 1,400 times the combined power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,[6] 10 times the combined power of all the conventional explosives used in WWII, or one quarter of the estimated yield of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa"
