"Starfish Prime serve as a warning of what might happen if Earth’s magnetic field gets blasted again with high doses of radiation"
Bad things will happen. Don't need to be a scientist to understand that. I fail to see any value of this information.
I think it's a mistake to look at past errors this way, as if it was obvious and easy. The reality is that, in foresight, the risk is uncertain, it's hard to get other people to face with unseen risks, and that all applies to yourself too.
And all that makes it very hard to get yourself to stand up to social pressure and assert a risk that is uncertain and unseen to you. If you are wrong - or even if you are right, but it's a 50-50 chance of disaster (or 25-75 or 10-90, all much too dangerous) and the dice roll is fortunate - you look like a fool. If you are right, you rarely get credit in a situation like that - you've just made everyone else look bad.
The way to look at something like Starfish Prime is to ask: given the human dynamics described above, how do we set up systems to prevent such outcomes? How could I handle it effectively, even in the absence of such systems?
They never ever actually had to proper equipment to even measure any results.. It was by luck we got to notice the changes in earths magnetic field.
Somebody came up with the idea, and was immediately dismissed by the most pessimist estimates. After somebody spent 10 minutes doing the math, there was no doubt anymore.
> Edward Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei.[note 2] Bethe calculated that it could not happen,[34] and a report co-authored by Teller showed that "no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started."[35] In Serber's account, Oppenheimer mentioned the possibility of this scenario to Arthur Compton, who "didn't have enough sense to shut up about it. It somehow got into a document that went to Washington" and was "never laid to rest".