We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "BigWallop"
saying something like:

And what brought those thoughts
was the fact that, if it had been as bad as was reported, no one in their
right minds would have been willing to build any further weapons of that
sort, ever again. Yet the US and others were willing to continue with a
nuclear weapons assembly industry.

If it was that devastating, no one would have survived, including the people
who made the thing. That secret would have stayed a forgotten secret.

Odd leap of logic there.
It continued because it had cost billions and it was a new toy.