I was under the impression that the baking heat and rads were at least in part due to artificial weather control. Protecting the city from fallout meant that weather patterns elsewhere were disrupted, thus the weather outside the city became increasingly chaotic. This resulted in the severe storms, heat and dust bowls.
Factor in also that the retconned Death Belt is said to be a result of experimental anti-grav devices from the Atomic War. Even muties are now explained away not just as a result of radiation, but a side effect from the original anti-rad pills given out by Booth, which protected from radiation but gave high incidence of bizarre birth defects.
This does suggest that the first muties were the children of adult survivors of the Atomic Wars, which does get a little squiffy timeline-wise when muties (and the Cursed Earth in general) are often treated as an age-old staple of Dredd's world, but would actually - especially in earlier stories - have been a rather recent development. In 2099 for example, by the new explanation, there shouldn't have been muties older than late twenties.
In a sci-fi world, you can always subtly update the explanations to make pseudo-scientific sense according to the current frame of reference.
In reality, thousands of nukes have already been tested on land around the world in the past century, prior to moving to simulated testing.
Fun fact - nuke tests at Bikini Atoll were the inspiration for Spongebob, lil' muties on the bottom of the sea.
Factor in also that the retconned Death Belt is said to be a result of experimental anti-grav devices from the Atomic War. Even muties are now explained away not just as a result of radiation, but a side effect from the original anti-rad pills given out by Booth, which protected from radiation but gave high incidence of bizarre birth defects.
This does suggest that the first muties were the children of adult survivors of the Atomic Wars, which does get a little squiffy timeline-wise when muties (and the Cursed Earth in general) are often treated as an age-old staple of Dredd's world, but would actually - especially in earlier stories - have been a rather recent development. In 2099 for example, by the new explanation, there shouldn't have been muties older than late twenties.
In a sci-fi world, you can always subtly update the explanations to make pseudo-scientific sense according to the current frame of reference.
In reality, thousands of nukes have already been tested on land around the world in the past century, prior to moving to simulated testing.
Fun fact - nuke tests at Bikini Atoll were the inspiration for Spongebob, lil' muties on the bottom of the sea.