Believe it or not, this is mostly a geology question.
“Trinitite,”, as you know, is the glassy residue produced from desert sand at the site of the first atomic bomb test (similar substances were produced at some Russian test sites, too); the Western Front of WWI was over four hundred miles of trenchlines and torn up ground stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea.
My question is: if I start dropping nukes on it*, are the soil conditions (& etc.) going to be right to create something like the above atomic glass, anywhere? And if so, where exactly?
I don’t need an answer fast, luckily. (Well, considering it’s tangentially a time travel question, that’s probably not reassuring. But, due diligence, right?)
*(Apparently in a tragic incident involving a time machine and a bottle of Aquavit.)
IANA French pedologist, but this map of French pedology - might help answer your question.
The geology of trinitite and natural equivalents seems to favour quartz as a key ingredient. Not surprising since you’re making a glass by applying heat to quartz and other crud lying around in the topsoil. There seem to be plenty of quartz quarries, which suggests its likely to be plentiful in the natural soil.
So will your atomic berm vapourise millions and create nuclear glass? Yeah sure, why not.
Kharitonchiki , another common nucleogenetic rock, isn’t really much like trinitite. Much more heterogeneous in composition. So it’s clear not every nuclear burst is going to give you trinitite, and the likely factor is the soil composition at Ground Zero. Semipalatinsk is likely much closer to Alamogordo than to Western Europe in soil composition, being steppe.
Finding individual quartzite quarries aren’t going to cut it. You’d need the entire area under your airburst to be more-or-less uniform in composition, highly skewed towards quartz-rich arkosic sand, to get the high amounts of green glass formed. But I’m afraid most of the Western Front was on chalk-and-clay country.
You might have some luck at the extreme northern end of the front, on the coastal plains of Belgium. But I don’t think much of your chances there, either. The Belgian dunes aren’t arkosic.
Currently listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast on World War I (Blueprint for Armageddon), and I’d be willing to bet you would find a significant number of the common soldiers who would agree with and support your project, even if they were currently in the trenches at the time of detonation.
It’s pretty hard to make the Western Front any worse.