A Strange Test Case

Scientific American describes the rise and demise of Telstar 1:

In 1962, a small spherical satellite weighing about 77 kilograms was launched from Cape Canaveral.  Its name was Telstar 1, and it was the first commercial telecommunications satellite—the first of a long line that have led to today's digitally connected world, where television programs and other media are easily accessible at locations across the globe.
By the following February, however, Telstar 1 had been completely fried by energetic electrons from a U.S. high-altitude nuclear test.
Walter Brown, a Bell Laboratories engineer who worked on the project, recalls Telstar 1’s triumphs and untimely demise. Currently a professor of materials science and engineering at Lehigh University, he says it was his job to “examine how radiation in space affects solar cells and semiconductors.” He got rather more than he bargained for.
The day before launch, the U.S. had set off a nuclear explosion at an altitude of 400 kilometers just southwest of Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. The test, known as Starfish Prime, released the energy equivalent of 1.4 megatons (million tons) of TNT—creating a huge electromagnetic pulse that produced spectacular aurora over the Pacific.
"The people who set off the nuclear explosion were totally surprised by the huge number of high energy electrons that were released," Brown says. "They had no idea this would be the case until we started seeing this huge flux, a hundred times what was predicted."
The satellite unwittingly became an experiment to analyze the aftermath of a nuclear blast on electronic equipment. "We learned a lot about radiation damage from Telstar 1," he says. "Initially, Telstar 1 couldn't be turned on, some transistors had failed. But the electronics engineers figured a way around that and got it working."
Their efforts bought enough time for the satellite to prove its worth.

It is absolutely amazing that scientists were just setting off massive nuclear explosions without any real idea of what might happen.  That is a pretty major oops.  I wonder how many people died from cancer and radiation sickness over the previous 60 years because of those tests?  I would think it would be a hell of a lot.