The Fallout Chronicles IV - Fallout Escapes Containment
The Fallout Chronicles IV - Fallout Escapes Containment
A year after the Desert Rock exercises got going at the Nevada Test Site, the plot thickened. In November 1952, back out at our Pacific Proving Ground, in a test called Ivy Mike, the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen device. The yield in Mike was five-hundred times greater than the yield of the Nagasaki bomb.
Could something like that have been tested inside the United States? Not on your life. What would people think? That the testing of these weapons should stop?
Because of our tests in the Pacific, the dangers of fallout were now well-known to the AEC, but the public still hadn’t heard much about it. Unless they’d read David Bradley’s book. Nothing from official sources.
After 1952 and Ivy Mike, testing continued back at NTS. In 1953, in an operation called Upshot-Knothole, eleven tests were conducted, all in the atmosphere. Four of these were the biggest tests yet at NTS though all were orders of magnitude smaller in yield than Ivy Mike had been. The clouds generated by the tests in Upshot-Knothole floated off downwind into northeastern Nevada and southern Utah. The clouds didn’t stop there, it turned out. Fallout from the Simon test registered some days later on film at a Kodak factory in Troy, New York.
In Nevada and Utah, residents who lived downwind were now being assured by the Atomic Energy Commission, now under the chairmanship of President Eisenhower’s appointee Louis Strauss, that there was nothing to worry about. If the ranchers’ sheep were dying, and they were, in the thousands, it must be from malnutrition, the Commissioners said. The ranchers knew it wasn’t from malnutrition. But they were patriots and didn’t want to question the good faith of the AEC. They just thought they should get something for their sheep. The AEC didn’t agree. Compensation could get out of hand.
In 1982, almost thirty years after the sheep die-off, Judge A. Sherman Christensen, the same judge who decided the first case about the sheep, found in a new case that Lewis Strauss’s AEC had committed fraud in the earlier hearings. The Commissioners were lying and knew it. It was for our own good, of course. The testing had to continue. We who were outside the nuclear establishment might not understand that.
In 1954, a year after the sheep kill, on another atoll in the Pacific Proving Ground, in an operation called Castle, the Bravo test was conducted. In Castle Bravo, a hydrogen device was detonated that yielded the equivalent of fifteen million tons of TNT, a thousand times more than the Hiroshima bomb and more than twice what the testers had expected. The atoll vanished. Later, over a hundred miles away, fallout from Bravo descended on a Japanese fishing vessel that we had known was there but had thought to be outside the danger zone. Most of the twenty-three crew members on the vessel got sick with acute radiation syndrome. One died later of a secondary infection.
After the Bravo shot, we who were back in the USA began to hear more about fallout. Lewis Strauss’s AEC continued to deny the dangers. But the dangers were getting less easy to ignore or conceal. In 1955, President Eisenhower finally authorized the AEC to publish some facts about fallout, as long as, he said, national security wouldn’t be endangered. In May, the AEC published a pamphlet called Facts about Fallout. It is an appalling piece of work. Not for what it says but for how ineptly it says it.
The cover of the pamphlet has pictures on it of people with very worried expressions on their faces. Inside, the text goes on to say
Fallout is nothing more than particles of matter in the air, made radioactive by nuclear or thermonuclear explosions. …Some of these radioactive particles spill out in the immediate area of the explosion soon after it occurs, but others may be carried by the upper winds for many miles. Sooner or later, however, they settle to earth. This is called fallout….
Okay. Got it.
Radioactivity is nothing new….The whole world is radioactive.
What? Really? I hadn’t known that.
But normal amounts are not dangerous.
Whew. Wait. How do they know this?
It is only when radioactivity is present in highly concentrated amounts, such as those created by atomic and hydrogen bomb explosions, that it becomes dangerous.
Wait. It’s the dangerous levels we are talking about, isn’t it?
Radioactive fallout is sometimes highly concentrated. If you are exposed to it long enough—IT WILL HURT YOU! IT MAY EVEN KILL YOU!
Okay okay. I get it. Did we need the caps? Did you think we wouldn’t be paying attention?
Whom will it hit? It could hit you! Yes, it could settle anywhere….
Well, that’s not good. How will we know if it’s settling where we are?
...You can’t hear it. You can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, you can’t touch it, often you can’t even see it…
That’s terrible. So how are we supposed to know then?
Civil defense officials and weather experts will tell you when it is safe and when you must take protective measures.
Oh, great. Like how will they tell us? When? Will they also tell us when it’s not safe? How? What are we supposed to do while we are waiting to hear from them?
The pamphlet goes on to tell us we should “evacuate,” if there’s time. It doesn’t say to where. If there isn’t time to do that (how would we know?), we should “shelter” in a house, basement or underground shelter. For how long? A week, we were told (In later communications from civil defense officials, the time kept increasing. Before we stopped hearing about the shelter option, it had gotten up to sixty days.)
For however long it was, we’d need a working air filter of the right kind.
If we think we’ve gotten some fallout on us, we should wash it off, we were told. We can count on having water, I guess.
“Americans are hard to scare,” the pamphlet says. Oh? The people in those pictures look plenty scared. Should I be as scared as they seemed to be? Were the Commissioners that scared?
“Of course, we are worried about the forces science has unlocked,” the pamphlet concludes. “We would not be intelligent human beings otherwise.”
Oh, please.
“But this problem can be solved—as others have been—by American ingenuity and careful preparation.”
Hmmm. You think?
See your Civil Defense office.
What a mess.
Next: The Fallout Chronicles V - Fallout Shelters Get Promoted