The Fallout Chronicles II - Fallout Gets a Name
In July 1946, four months before the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was installed in Japan, the United States conducted its first atomic bomb tests after the war. Two-thousand seven-hundred miles southeast of Japan in the Pacific Ocean at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, two Nagasaki-sized bombs were detonated in Operation Crossroads. Journalists were invited to witness the tests. So were representatives from the Soviet Union. President Truman’s Secretary of State, Jimmy Byrnes, thought that seeing the detonations might make the Soviets more “tractable.” It didn’t quite turn out like that.
Crossroads was our first “weapons effects” test. We still had some questions about the bomb’s effects. Quite a few.
Anchored in the lagoon at Bikini were over ninety ships of many different kinds and sizes. In the first test, Able, a bomb like the one that fell on Nagasaki was dropped. It sank some ships and damaged all of them, and played havoc with the animals that had been penned on the ships to see what the effects would be on them. But surprisingly the bomb had fallen so far from its target that we didn’t learn as much as we had hoped.
The second test, Baker, produced results that were a surprise. For Baker, another Nagasaki-sized bomb was anchored ninety feet down in the ocean, with the ships anchored on the surface around the detonation point. When the bomb was detonated, ten ships sank immediately. A huge wave of spray spread out from the mighty stem of the mushroom cloud and enveloped the remaining ships. The spray contaminated the ships so badly with dangerous levels of radioactivity that the sailors could not de-contaminate them. They tried hard. Finally, those ships also were sunk.
David Bradley was a young graduate of the Harvard Medical School and an officer in the Radiological Safety Section at Operation Crossroads. Two years after the tests, Bradley published No Place to Hide (1948). The book, written for the general reader, was a log of his experiences and reported some of his findings at the tests. It was engagingly written and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, and condensed for Readers Digest. Bradley’s report gave the public the first accounts of the potential dangers of what would come to be known as residual radiation and fall-out. At the end of his book Bradley, observed
The Crossroads tests at first glance might seem to have been a failure. From a military point of view the two shots confirmed what was already known of the effectiveness of a chain reaction as an explosive, and certainly proved, beyond all expectations, what was feared concerning the poisoning of land, sea, and air with radioactivity. Scientifically what was learned in the crude laboratory of Bikini remains to be evaluated and declassified from the archives of military secrecy.
But the greatest failure of all in these tests has been in apprehending their sociological implications. Evidently the Bomb has failed to impress more than a few congenital pessimists with the full scope of its lethal potential. This error in publicity—an error of omission—might be justifiable on the basis of strict military secrecy. In the long run, however, the one thing more dangerous than informed governments abroad will be an uninformed American opinion. (164-5) 1
Among those not yet impressed with the full scope of the Bomb’s lethal potential were members of our military, as we shall see.
No Place to Hide was republished in 1983 with an Epilogue by Bradley that spelled out more explicitly and dramatically the details of the Bomb’s lethal potential. Our president in 1983 was Ronald Reagan. He and his advisors were of the opinion, it seemed, even now, that a nuclear war was “winnable.”
The Atomic Energy Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1946, had put a civilian Atomic Energy Commission in charge of everything to do with atomic energy. It had also designated as “restricted data,” and therefore “classified,” any information about atomic energy. The first chair of the AEC was a man named David Lilienthal. Lilienthal and these commissioners took as one of their jobs educating the American public about atomic energy. They might have felt Bradley’s book might help educate us, even though it certainly could have been said to contain “restricted data.” Later AEC commissioners would take a very different approach to educating us.
John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published in 1946, had offered readers direct accounts by some of the survivors of the atomic bombing of that city. No book like his or Bradley’s would ever again be published during the Cold War.
After Crossroads, the public would rarely be allowed to witness tests. The public was not invited to the next operation, Sandstone, in April and May of 1948. In Sandstone, new bomb designs from Los Alamos produced yields more than two times greater than that of the Nagasaki bomb.
In August 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, a copy, a very close copy, of the Nagasaki bomb. The American monopoly had ended. In the U.S., fear exploded. Secrecy descended.
In the year after the Soviets detonated their bomb, President Truman established an Office of Civil Defense. In the same year, the Atomic Energy Commission published a book called The Effects of Atomic Weapons. Effects was intended, said the introduction, to be “a source of scientific information for technical personnel engaged in civil defense planning.” It was available to anyone, but clearly had not been written for a general audience. It went into great technical detail about the effects of atomic weapons, making use of the findings from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the two Crossroads tests. Prepared under the direction of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, it was not easy reading, in either style or subject matter.
In Effects, the “phenomenon known as the fall-out” was named for the first time (Section 2.29, p. 33). The introduction seemed to limit the fall-out to “contaminated dirt particles” and said
It may be stated at the outset that only in exceptional circumstances would the intensity of the activity [in the dirt particles] be great enough to constitute a hazard upon reaching the ground. The evidence from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb explosions, where the height of burst was about 2,000 feet, is that casualties ascribable to the radioactive fall-out were completely absent.
Detonations closer to the ground and in water would be a different story, they acknowledged. The Baker test had made that obvious.
The writers of Effects used the Nagasaki bomb, which had yielded about twenty kilotons, as the “nominal” bomb and the baseline for their discussion of effects, even though in Sandstone, bombs twice as powerful had already been detonated. Even more powerful bombs were thought to be on the way.
A later discussion of fission products in Effects (Section 8) made it clear that residual radiation (defined in Effects as the radiation that kicks in one minute after detonation) included much more than radioactive dirt particles. In their consideration of the possible harm from residual radiation, they considered data on x-rays from a report in 1936 by the U.S. Committee on X-rays and Radium. That was the data they had so far on the long-term effects of ionizing radiation.
In the conclusion to this section, the authors wrote
The whole subject of radiation susceptibility is so indefinite that it is impossible to provide exact quantitative data or the amounts that may be tolerated under a wide variety of conditions. 8.6, 249.
Residual radiation—the larger category that fallout belonged in—was known to pose a hazard but there was still a lot to learn about how much of one.
Next: Fallout Gets Tested on our Soldiers
Bradley goes on:
The question is not political so much as biological. It is not the security of a political system but the survival of the race that is at stake in the indiscriminate use of atomic energy for political coercion. Its unique problems are self-evident; there is nothing about them so profound as to require translation by a scientist. Among them are:
(1) There is no real defense against atomic weapons.
(2) There are no satisfactory countermeasures and methods of decontamination.
(3) There are no satisfactory medical or sanitary safeguards for the people of atomized areas.
(4) The devastating influence of the Bomb and its unborn relatives may affect the land and its wealth—and therefore its people—for centuries through the persistence of radioactivity.
These facts are substantiated in theory by experiments upon thousands of animals, and in practice by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini. It is in this sense that the Crossroads tests have been anything but failures. Hastily planned and hastily carried out, they may have only sketched in the gross outlines of the real problem; nevertheless, those outlines show pretty clearly the shadow of the colossus which looms behind tomorrow. 164-6