The Age of Radiance (50 page)

At the time, the Centers for Disease Control told residents living downwind from the Nevada blasts that the only thing that would make them get cancer was worrying about getting cancer, especially if that worrier was a woman. In fact, to take one memorable example, of 220 cast and crew who worked on the movie
The Conqueror
in 1956 in Utah downwind from the NTS, 91 were diagnosed with cancer, a morbidity rate of 41 percent, with 46 dying of it by 1980, including the film’s two stars, John Wayne and Susan Hayward.

F
ourteen months after Mike, an American thermonuclear device, called Bravo, small enough to be carried by Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command, was ready to be tested. On March 1, 1954, Livermore and Los Alamos joined forces in the Marshall Islands, at the Bikini Atoll. Commander of the test, Vice Admiral W. H. P. Blandy, tried to reassure his men:
“The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas, and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity.”

Serviceman Michael Harris: “The explosion was going to be behind us. The major reminded us that this was essential, as he had done so many times before. Face the blast, he said, and our eyes could be damaged permanently, even if they were closed. And not just our eyes. Although he never did get specific about what other body parts might be affected. The disembodied voice repeated the warning again and again over the loudspeaker. ‘Don’t turn around before the countdown reaches zero. Don’t turn around after the countdown reaches zero. Don’t turn around until you are told it is safe to turn around.’ We stood at attention. And paid attention. Lined up as instructed. Backs to the ocean. Following orders. Careful to avoid damage. The countdown and the disembodied voice: ‘Four, three, two, one, zero.’ The flash of light. The low, distant rumble. The shaking of the earth. And guess what? The pilot missed the target, but our eyes hit the target. We didn’t have to turn around after thirty seconds. The fireball and the mushroom cloud were right there in front of us. We goggle-less enlisted men were facing ground zero. A result of pilot error. Major Maxwell gathered us together to explain: ‘You win a few and you lose a few and sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want. When that happens, you take it on the chin like a man and start all over again.’ ”

Additionally, the Livermore physicists had missed an important part of the equation. They thought it would be a 5-megaton blast, but instead it was a 14.8 Goliath with a four-mile-diameter fireball. Plasma physicist Marshall Rosenbluth:
“I was on a ship that was thirty miles away and we had this horrible white stuff raining out on us. I got ten rads of radiation from it. It was pretty frightening. There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some madman would look like. You know, the surface, with the cortex convolutions, and so on. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger. It spread until the edge of it looked as if it was almost directly overhead. It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience.”

Serviceman Michael Harris: “A mixture of radioactive materials, including pulverized coral, was forced high into the air, dispersed over a wide area by the winds, and showered down on hundreds if not thousands of people, covering them with white, gritty, hail-like ‘snow.’ Otherwise known as fallout. At least 236 Marshall Islanders, 23 Japanese fishermen, and a minimum of 31 Americans were dangerously exposed. The victims inhaled ‘hot’ ash, and radioactive particles whitened their hair, clung to their skin, and caused radiation burns. They developed nausea, diarrhea, itching, eyes that smarted and watered, and a significant decrease of white corpuscles in the blood. Eighteen Marshallese children died (after playing in the ‘snow’) and so did Aikichi Kuboyama, a Japanese fisherman aboard a boat with the unfortunate name of
Lucky Dragon
.”

Though Washington denied it was responsible, “as a token of sympathy” a check for 2.5 million yen was sent to the dead fisherman’s widow. Unfortunately,
Lucky Dragon
’s irradiated tuna was sold into the market before anyone knew why the crew’s hair was falling out.

Bravo was the first of the Castle series, which continued with such designs as Runt, Shrimp, and Nectar. Able and Baker were detonated to see if they could annihilate a flotilla of ninety ships hosting 57 guinea pigs, 109 mice, 146 pigs, 176 goats, and 3,030 rats. They could. Publicity surrounding the tests included the announcement of a revolution in women’s swimwear: “Like a bomb, the bikini is
small and devastating!”

George Cowan watched Baker from a B-17:
“An Air Force photographer was on board. He removed the door on the port side of the plane and looked directly toward the zero point. He carefully strapped himself and his equipment to buckles by the side of the door. We were supposed to be at least
two miles from the detonation point but our pilot was obviously creeping closer. The voice of the test manager began the last ten-second countdown. At ‘zero’ the brilliant flash was dimmed by the overlying water, but the entire bay seemed to rise toward us. Then the shock wave arrived. It would’ve stripped the wings off a plane less sturdy than a B-17. The photographer hadn’t practiced this part of the exercise. He and his equipment tumbled out the door and dangled outside on straps. We pulled him and his cameras back in. [His] work entered the history books. His picture of the huge ‘wedding cake’ of water and vapor rising from the bay, with ships decorating the cake fringes, was republished countless times.”

Fifty years later, a team of biologists returned to Bikini in the submersible
M.Y. Octopus
to study the long-term effects of such massive doses of radiation. They were shocked to discover the only remaining trace of twenty-three thermonuclear detonations were in the Marshall Islanders’ tombstones, which were radiant because they were made of absorbing sandstone. The lagoon waters were completely free of taint, with dosimeters not registering a blip above normal even when testing one of the sunken target ships,
Saratoga.
The area’s marine life was extravagantly abundant, and as far as the investigators could tell, the ocean had miraculously diluted the massive amounts of cesium left by Castle and washed itself clean.

At the same time that the world was learning about an exciting new swimming suit and weapons beyond human imagination, the era’s leading geneticists, Thomas Morgan and Hermann Muller, were irradiating the babies and grandbabies of fruit flies, with alarming results. The simultaneous news of
Lucky Dragon
and fruit-fly mutations would merge into a new story line in popular culture beginning in 1954, when atomic lizard Godzilla rampaged through Tokyo. While the rest of the world found
Godzilla
’s low-budget effects laughable, the Japanese, targets once again of American radioactive poisons, watched in silence, many breaking down in sobs. In 1957,
Incredible Shrinking Man
related the saga of a sailor who found himself engulfed in a mysterious cloud and grew ever smaller until he shrank into nothingness itself. After a New Mexico test site accidentally created twelve-foot ants in
Them!
, a scientist explained that this would become an everyday event in our modern atomic world. On TV screens
The Outer Limits
and
The Twilight Zone
dramatized atomic holocaust, genetic mutations, radioactive powers, and vague, invisible, indefinable terrors. In 1964’s
Fail-Safe
, Pentagon consultant Walter Matthau predicts nuclear holocaust would be survived by file clerks and hardened criminals, but one of America’s most glamorous socialites tells him that he’s all wrong, that no one will survive a nuclear war, and that’s the beauty of it:

“I’ve heard nuclear war called a lot of things . . . never beautiful.”

“People are afraid to call it that, but that’s what they feel.”

Beginning in the 1960s, Marvel Comics created a new America where radiation had nothing to do with terrors about the end of the world and everything to do with the forging of superheroes. In
Fantastic Four
,
Daredevil
, and the
Hulk
, superheroes were all created through some form of atomic mishap, while
Spider-Man
combined a child’s fantasy of spiders as aggressive, toxic, and voracious in attacking human beings with radiation, the magical force that in the world of Marvel could make anything happen. It was a brilliant remaking of atomic superstition, and like all myths it worked at the intersection of doubt and faith. Do people really believe irradiation can produce a Spider-Man? No. Do they know for an absolute fact that this is impossible?
Not really
.

The overwhelming power of Bravo pushed the Soviets to transcend
sloika
and create a weapon of equal force. Within a few weeks, Arzamas-16 physicists were doing the final calculations for their own multimegaton implosion, after having uncovered on their own the Teller-Ulam fission-fusion-fission design. On November 22, 1955, their version of Mike was ready, and it was a remarkable success. Physicist German Goncharov:
“Immediately, it felt as if you had put your head into an open oven. The heat was unbearable. Then we had this impressive view of the fireball, the mushroom cloud, all of it on a huge scale. What was shocking was that this great scene was unfolding in absolute silence. And when the shock wave approached us, we dropped to the ground. Thunder. Stones were flying. Someone was hit by a large rock. There were several claps of thunder and the ground was shaking. I remember when we arrived back at our hotel, the windows and doors had been blown out. It felt as if the place had been hit by an air raid. But our joy was indescribable. We started celebrating immediately. We took out all our supplies. Someone brought alcohol. There was a sense of fulfillment, of having completed our task. That this beautiful, complex device—and that’s what it was from a physicist’s point of view—had worked was a triumph of science, of course. We all understood that.”

Both Moscow and Washington now possessed the means to rid the world of humankind. They would spend the next five decades menacing each other with thermonuclear annihilation, while internally trying to solve a political riddle: If you already have the biggest weapon in human history, but a military insatiable for growth, what do you do next?

T
HE
rise of thermonuclear arsenals triggered consequences unforeseen by either their biggest supporters or gravest detractors, as the major nations of the earth were now armed with a weapon so grotesquely overpowered that, no matter what the circumstance, only a lunatic would deploy it. Super, indeed. Yet, just as the genocidal devastation of these ever-greater devices defied human reason—bombs, torpedoes, and missiles forever expanding in omnipotence, efficacy, and power—so, too, did overseeing these cataclysmic weapons seem to inflict a type of mental disability on its bureaucrats. Ardent Cold Warriors on both sides of the Iron Curtain found themselves beset with an ordnance version of the dysmorphia seen in some bodybuilders. No matter how many bombs they had or how big their explosives grew, they needed more, and bigger: enough was never enough. No one in charge seemed to grasp the point that Winston Churchill made resonant:
“If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.” The only strategic logic each side followed was, if Washington had enough Bombs to make the rubble bounce and bounce again, then Moscow needed enough to make it bounce, bounce, and bounce a third time, which incited the USA to then need at least four, but better yet five, bounces, and this math would continue on as infinitely as the half-life of uranium.

Nikita Khrushchev made a joking threat of this:
“I remember President Kennedy once stated . . . that the United States had the nuclear missile capacity to wipe out the Soviet Union two times over, while the Soviet Union had enough atomic weapons to wipe out the United States only once. . . . But I’m not complaining. . . . We’re satisfied to be able to finish off the United States
the first time round. Once is quite enough. What good does it do to annihilate a country twice? We’re not a bloodthirsty people.” His generals and admirals, however, did not at all share this perspective. They wanted, always, to one-up the Americans with ever more bouncing, bouncing, bouncing.