The thousands of nuclear tests that have been done during the atomic age, have we documented how many animals were accidentally caught in the blast radius (and the after-effects of the radiation)?
The tests definitely did kill animals who were inadvertently nearby, but I don't think we have good documentation on how many. There are anecdotal accounts of people coming across rabbits at the Trinity site and lots of work was done to study the effects of nuclear testing on the creatures and ecosystem at the Pacific Proving Grounds. The Bravo test alone deposited enough radiation in the water to be measured in radioactive fish for hundreds of miles around the test site.
The tests also deliberately killed many animals for the purposes of the testing — pigs, mice, etc. — to see the effects on creatures. Pigs, for example, have skin that is similar to human skin in many ways, and so were used for burn tests. This chart I stumbled across recently gives you a sense of scale for these kinds of testing endeavors — they may have been using conventional high explosives or other means for doing this, though. But that particular chart used 614 "large" animals, including burros, dogs, and steer, and 1,483 "small" animals, to get the data.
