Oh, now that you mention it, I think I may have been mixing memories together. Confusing the nuclear tests with early radio research. 😅

Edit:
I couldn’t help but keep wondering about this, so I did some digging to check my memory. Turns out I was right after all!

The trick, Tesla thought, was to use the air of the upper atmosphere to transmit energy - over any distance, above or through the Earth, even to other planets. Power would be beamed to a terminal in the upper atmosphere, then transmitted to receivers on the ground or in the air. The risks were potentially high - “So strangely do such powerful discharges behave,” he wrote in 1899, “that I have often experienced a fear that the atmosphere might be ignited.”