The Plutonium Files (41 page)

Chairing the meeting was Alvin Graves, the scientist who was peering over the shoulder of daredevil physicist Louis Slotin when the screwdriver slipped. Graves, who combed his longish, unkempt hair over a bald spot caused by the radiation exposure, instructed the participants to restrict their comments to the radiological hazards “omitting insofar as possible the psychological and political implications.”
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Then he turned the meeting over to the Army officer who had found his identity in the
postwar confusion of the Manhattan Project and whose career had flowered in the deepening Cold War: General James Cooney.

Breezy and confident as ever, Cooney assured the group that atomic bombs could be safely detonated in Nevada, pointing out that the medical profession “generally accepted” the position that an individual, no matter what his or her physical condition, would suffer no harm if exposed to twenty-five roentgens.
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Cooney said he felt certain Warren and others in the radiobiology field would accept this figure, but years later Warren said the general was “quite wrong” in his opinion.
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Nevertheless, records show that Cooney’s twenty-five roentgen figure was adopted by Los Alamos and the AEC as the upper-level dose that civilians could receive in an emergency.

Cooney was also confident the tests would not result in any serious internal contamination. “One would have to ingest a kilogram of the material immediately under the shot tower in order to ingest enough plutonium to cause physical damage,” he is quoted as saying in notes taken at the meeting.
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To buttress his argument, after the meeting Cooney asked University of Rochester professor William Bale to prepare a memorandum on the radiation dose a person in the path of fallout might theoretically receive. Bale, an old-timer from the University of Rochester, had obtained one of the first biophysics degrees in the country under Stafford Warren’s tutelage and had supervised the metabolic ward where Samuel Bassett had conducted the Rochester plutonium injections. When he later worked as an AEC consultant in the early 1950s, Bale discovered radon levels in a mine in Marysvale, Utah, that were more than 4,000 times greater than the exposure allowed for radium dial painters. But he applauded Public Health Service officials for not “unduly alarming miners as to hidden hazards that may exist, or in any way impeding mining operations.”
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In the memo he prepared for Cooney, Bale inexplicably limited his discussion of radioactive dangers to beta particles, even though he and the other scientists knew that atomic bomb detonations also released gamma rays and alpha particles. At Rochester’s Manhattan Annex, Bale’s colleagues had investigated the potential biological damage caused by both alpha and beta particles. Mild exposure to beta particles can cause erythema, a reddening of the skin that resembles sunburn. Severe or prolonged exposure can cause dryness of the skin, wartlike growths, chronic ulcerations, and skin cancer. “It should be emphasized,”
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wrote Simeon Cantril, one of the Manhattan Project scientists, “that beta particles of the average energy associated with the long-lived fission products
will penetrate well below the skin, and hence there is real potentiality for injury if due caution is not exercised to avoid overexposure.”

Bale further limited his discussion by confining it to only three possible scenarios: He analyzed the potential exposures people living downwind from an explosion might receive from beta particles if the fallout was uniform, if the fallout was uneven, or if residents were in their homes when the radioactive cloud passed overhead. (For some reason he had concluded that most human exposures in contaminated areas would occur when the residents were inside their homes or when the fallout was uniformly distributed. Curiously, he did not explain why he believed the fallout would be uniform. Scientists knew dating back to the Trinity test that fallout did not come down uniformly and that areas of intense radioactivity, called hot spots, could develop.) “Even the lightest type of house construction gives close to perfect protection from beta rays,” Bale wrote optimistically.
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“The soles of shoes are thick enough that substantial to complete protection to beta rays is given the bottoms of the feet when walking on contaminated ground.”

The scientists attending the August conference concluded that a twenty-five-kiloton bomb dropped from a tower would expose residents in a hundred-mile radius to no more than six to twelve roentgens. They did concede, however, that some “people will receive perhaps a little more radiation than medical authorities say is absolutely safe.”
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Enrico Fermi wanted the report to stress the “extreme uncertainty” upon which the conclusions were based.
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Apologizing for bringing up “psychological implications,” Fermi added that “his impression was that if conditions are such that 10 r will be received, people should be warned to stay indoors, take showers, etc.” His suggestions were not followed.

With little fanfare and no input from the public, the Nevada site was approved for bomb tests by President Truman in December of 1950. Before the first weapons were detonated in January of 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission embarked upon a highly sophisticated public relations campaign—approved by the National Security Council—to gain public acceptance for the tests. The whole thrust of the PR program, according to one memo, was “to make the atom routine in the continental United States and make the public feel at home with atomic blasts and radiation hazards.…
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It appeared that the idea of making the public feel at home with neutrons trotting around is the most important angle to get across.”

The weaponeers originally envisioned the Nevada Test Site, as it later became known, as a place where they could conduct quick experiments with relatively small atomic bombs. The information obtained from the Nevada tests would then be applied to the development of bigger atomic bombs and thermonuclear weapons that would be exploded in the Pacific. But the atmospheric tests and the corresponding military maneuvers became routine events and continued for more than a decade. What’s more, a number of the bombs exploded in Nevada were significantly larger than what the Graves Committee had anticipated.

Two series of atmospheric tests were conducted in Nevada in 1951. Subsequently, one atmospheric test series per year was conducted in Nevada in 1952, 1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, and 1962. Atmospheric tests were conducted in the Pacific in 1946, 1948, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1962. In addition, a thirty-kiloton bomb was exploded underwater off the coast of San Diego, California, in 1955 during Operation Wigwam, and three bombs, ranging from one to two kilotons, were detonated on rockets hundreds of miles above the South Atlantic Ocean in 1958 during Operation Argus.
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Some 35 other nuclear devices were detonated at and near the test site, as well as in Alaska, Colorado, New Mexico, and Mississippi as part of the Plowshare Program, a project aimed at investigating the peaceful uses of nuclear explosives.

It turned out that William Bale was wrong even in the very limited risk analysis he provided. Hundreds of downwind residents suffered from both external and internal beta burns caused by fallout during the testing period. AEC investigators later attributed the complaints to “sunburns,” “gastro-intestinal disturbance,” “hysteria,” and “hypothyroidism.”
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For Shields Warren and his biomedical colleagues at AEC headquarters, the continental testing program posed a whole new set of problems. Although Warren argued strenuously against some of the military maneuvers, particularly the plan to put troops closer to Ground Zero, he ultimately could shrug those off as the Pentagon’s responsibility. Fallout was another matter. Eventually the radioactive debris circled the globe, creating an international furor by the mid-1950s. Incapable of engaging in an honest debate and unwilling to level with the American public, the AEC retreated behind its walls of secrecy, sowing a legacy of distrust that still exists toward its modern day successor, the Department of Energy. Many residents who lived downwind of the bomb tests contend they were used as laboratory animals by their government. Likewise, thousands of atomic veterans allege they were used as unwitting guinea pigs by the military.

Documents that were not declassified until the mid-1990s reveal that in 1951, the year the bombs began raining down on Nevada, Shields Warren had grave concerns about the health risks from fallout. But by the time the fallout controversy was in full bloom, he had become firmly committed to the idea that whatever the risks, the tests were necessary to keep the United States safe from the Soviet Union and a world dominated by communism.

Huddled in the cold night air, with galaxies of stars wheeling above them, Jerry Schultz and his two friends listened for the sound of approaching aircraft.
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The three enlisted men had left their wooden shack and taken refuge in a small hollow in the desert when the man on the red phone told him the aircraft would be arriving at 0547. The red phone was a direct link to the Atomic Energy Commission offices in Las Vegas. The AEC official had warned Schultz that the atomic bomb the aircraft was lugging toward them would be the biggest ever dropped from a plane. Be sure to protect yourselves, he had warned. “How do we do that?” Schultz asked. There was a long pause and then the voice said, “Frankly, we don’t know.”

Jerry Schultz, Jack Richards, and Lewis Woods had been assigned to gather weather data during Operation Ranger, the first atomic bomb tests ever held in Nevada. They were just kids, between nineteen and twenty-one years old, who had been handpicked by their commanding officer at Edwards Air Force Base and told to pack their bags for a top-secret assignment. The next day a plane picked them up and brought them to Indian Springs Air Force Base in Nevada. They worked in a wooden building about six and one-half miles from Ground Zero.

In the last days of January and the first days of February of 1951, the three young men witnessed the fiery glory of Ranger’s first four detonations. With yields ranging from one to eight kilotons, the bombs were firecrackers compared to the weapon an aircraft was hauling toward them at that very moment. This fifth and final bomb, code-named Shot Fox, would have a yield of twenty-two kilotons, one kiloton bigger than
the bomb that devastated Nagasaki. Although Schultz’s recollection differs in some details from the official account of the shot, the following is what he remembers:

At 0540 the three men spotted a blinking light coming in from the east. All commercial airliners within a hundred-mile radius had been banned from the air space. They were certain this was their bomber. Schultz harbored the irrational hope that the aircraft was making a dry run, but the sudden high-pitched whine of the engines and the plane’s bank to the right told him the bomber had dropped its payload. The men had no radiation badges, no Geiger counters. Schultz made a quick act of contrition and then looked at the fading stars, the burst of gold along the eastern horizon, and the scared eyes of his two young companions. It was February 6, 1951.

The bomb split open the soft cantaloupe of darkness with a searing light and an unearthly roar that was capable of rupturing human eardrums within six-tenths of a mile of Ground Zero. “The entire landscape around us was lit up in an eerie unrealistic light from horizon to horizon as far as the eye could see. The light was so intense that THERE WERE NO SHADOWS,” Schultz later wrote.

He dropped to one knee. As he did so, the first shock wave struck him. It felt like a hundred-pound bag of sand hitting him in the chest. He staggered backward and his fur cap was blown from his head. His buddy, Jack Richards, began running back toward the wooden shack. The shock wave from the blast slammed Richards into the door, shoving his hand through one of the windows.

The black floor of the desert pitched and rolled. Two lightning bolts appeared in the rising mushroom cloud. The wintry air, sharp as cut glass only seconds earlier, grew thick with dust. As the cloud rose into the sky, its billowy mushroom shape turned the color of lava and then faded to a muddy brown.

When they regained their senses, the three young men returned to their duties. They bandaged Richards’s hand. They filled out reports. And they began picking up the debris. The doors and windows and the wall of the shack facing the blast had been blown out. Schultz later estimated that if the pilot had missed his target by a tenth of a degree, the bomb could have landed on them—or near enough to kill them. “When I close my eyes, I can still see it,” he said of the atomic explosion. “I will never forget it.”

Operation Ranger lasted just thirteen days and involved less than 400 Department of Defense personnel.
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The test series was predominantly
a Los Alamos—run show, designed to help weapons scientists work out some of the technical bugs for the larger atomic tests planned at the Pacific Proving Ground later that spring. Those Pacific tests, in turn, would yield critical information needed for the construction of the hydrogen bomb.

The armed forces had little involvement in Operation Ranger, a fact that several military leaders found unacceptable. Determined never to let such an opportunity slip by again, the Pentagon began mapping out plans for its first large-scale atomic exercise with troops. The first maneuvers would be held in the fall of 1951 during Operation Buster-Jangle, the second test series ever held at Nevada Test Site, and would continue for another eleven years. During that period thousands of soldiers would be shipped to Nevada to participate in atomic maneuvers that were often as haphazard and ill-conceived as the bomb drop Jerry Schultz and his two friends had witnessed. With temperatures sometimes exceeding 100 degrees, the soldiers marched across saltbush and sage toward imaginary invaders waiting for them near Ground Zero. Sometimes they were lost in the dust and wind, driven off course, only to find themselves dangerously close to the scorched center of the blast.