The Fallout Chronicles III - Fallout Gets Tested on Our Soldiers
The Fallout Chronicles III - Fallout Gets Tested on Our Soldiers
In 1951, the Office of Civil Defense that had been established by President Truman after Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb mounted its first big Civil Defense operation. One product of the operation was the film Duck and Cover, released in 1952 and shown in elementary and secondary schools across the country, including mine. Fallout and what to do about it gets no mention in Duck and Cover. What we learned from the film was that the threat from the bomb comes only from blast and heat. If we saw a flash, we were supposed to duck and find cover, under our desks in the classrooms maybe or next to a curb in the street, and stay there until an adult from Civil Defense came and told us to come out.
By now, major fall-out effects had been observed in our tests in the Pacific, but those effects had been confined to our test site. At the beginning of 1951, however, the U.S. opened a new nuclear test site inside the U.S., sixty miles northwest of Las Vegas. In 1951 and 1952, twelve devices were exploded at the new NTS, all in the air, some on towers, some as dropped bombs.
Operations began almost right away at NTS in which thousands of soldiers were exposed to the detonations to see how they would respond to “the bomb experience.” They were stationed in trenches around ground zero and sent in after the blast to practice tactical maneuvers. The operation, called Desert Rock, lasted from 1951 to 1957. In addition to seeing how the soldiers would react and perform, the military also wanted to see how the residual radiation would affect them. If at all.
Desert Rock was, then, a training mission but it was also an experiment, an experiment with human subjects. Soldiers aren’t asked whether they consent to training missions. Experiments with human subjects, however, require the informed consent of the human subjects. This principle had been established in 1947 after World War II during the Nuremberg trials of Nazis who had performed ugly experiments using human subjects.
A few of the soldiers in Desert Rock were volunteers but the vast majority were not. None was asked to give informed consent. They were, however, “indoctrinated” (the military’s term) before the exercises about the radiation danger. What were they told?
We can get an idea from a June 27, 1951 memorandum written by Dr. Richard Meiling, the chair of the secretary of defense's top medical advisory group, the Armed Forces Medical Policy Council. The memorandum asserted that troops should be exposed to bomb tests not so much to examine risk as to demonstrate relative safety.
"Fear of radiation," Dr. Meiling's memorandum began, "is almost universal among the uninitiated and unless it is overcome in the military forces it could present a most serious problem if atomic weapons are used."
In fact, he continued, "[i]t has been proven repeatedly that persistent ionizing radiation following air bursts does not occur, hence the fear that it presents a dangerous hazard to personnel is groundless." The Desert Rock exercise, he said, "would clearly demonstrate that persistent ionizing radiation following an air burst atomic explosion presents no hazards to personnel and would effectively dispel a fear that is dangerous and demoralizing but entirely groundless." https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/chap10_2.html
At this point, health physicists like Karl Morgan would have wanted Dr. Meiling to be more careful. Morgan was in the process of concluding, as he said in The Angry Genie, that no dose is completely safe.
In Desert Rock, “radiological safety monitors” were sometimes sent in ahead of the troops. One discovery they made was that after the detonations the radiation levels throughout the area were very hard to predict. There could be “hot spots.” David Bradley had also made this discovery.
The soldiers who took part in Desert Rock were required to swear an oath that they wouldn’t talk to anyone about this mission. On pain of imprisonment. The Cold War ended. The soldiers were not told they had been released from this oath.
Next: The Fallout Chronicles IV - Fallout Escapes Containment