The Plutonium Files (43 page)

Scientists at the time were most concerned about particles measuring about one to two microns in diameter.
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A micron is a millionth of a meter. Radioactive particles of one to two microns can lodge in the alveoli, the tiny air sacs in the lungs where the blood receives fresh oxygen and eliminates carbon dioxide. Once lodged in the air sacs, the particles can continue to irradiate the lung for a long time or they can gravitate to the lymph nodes on either side of the sternum. There the particles can irradiate the white blood cells that pass through the nodes and the red blood cells in the bone marrow of the sternum. Larger particles will not enter the body; smaller ones will be brought up by the mucus system of the airways coughed out. Some of the smaller particles are swallowed and eliminated through the digestive system. The digestive system, in turn, is exposed to some radiation as the particles pass through the GI tract.

Joseph Hamilton, in a secret report delivered to Shields Warren on October 4, 1949, had warned that radioactive particles in the one-micron range “would appear most ominous particularly with respect to the possibility of carcinogenesis.”
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Hamilton had glossed over the dangers, though, by suggesting that it would take many hot particles in the lung to start a cancer. Warren and other scientists subscribed to the same theory.

Throughout the testing program, scientists focused on the external exposures to radiation and not on internal exposures from radioactive particles inhaled or absorbed through open wounds. The prevailing philosophy was that if the external dose was within a “permissible” range, the internal dose would be negligible. But the notes of the May 21–22 meeting suggest that even during the early period of the testing program, scientists knew internal doses posed a serious hazard.

“The particle size problem is a great worry, primarily because we don’t know much about the effect of small hot particles in the lungs,” began Walter Claus, one of Warren’s chief aides from AEC headquarters.
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“However, one can always say that there have been so many of these particles spread about the country (from past tests), that so many people have already breathed pretty hot particles (why be concerned with it now). [The parentheses in this quote and others cited below are in the transcript of the notes taken at the meeting and apparently represent the completion of a thought or statement.]

From his examinations of the Raitliff family, Louis Hempelmann
knew fallout was unpredictable and was disturbed by the fact that the group had no hard data on which to base its recommendations. “One point makes me unhappy,” he said.
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“All the discussion of particle size indicated that we had absolutely no idea whether breathing these things in was serious or not. I think we should at least have some philosophy or basis for saying that we think people twenty miles downwind would be safe.”

Hempelmann would not let the issue go. When the debate resumed the following morning, he again brought up the fact the committee had no hard data upon which to base its recommendations: “Our safe region is based upon how many particles this committee is willing to let another person breathe.”
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Shields Warren, apparently fed up with Hempelmann’s hand-wringing, retorted, “Let persons breathe one particle, because chances of that happening anywhere in the northern hemisphere is a good possibility.”

Warren’s group considered evacuating residents within a forty-four-mile radius from Ground Zero, but Thomas Shipman advised against any postshot evacuation, because it would cause “bad public relations” and might expose the residents to even greater amounts of fallout. He said, “From our experience with the fallout after the first shot on Enewetak, we found most of the people had fallout in their hair.
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I think we could gain more by urging the people to take baths. (Again, bad public relations).”

Along the same lines, another participant suggested that gas masks be issued if the fallout risks were high, but Warren immediately quashed the idea. “I don’t think so—it is psychologically bad and also almost impossible to enforce.” Although Warren acknowledged the “possibility of external beta burns is quite real,” he nevertheless argued that the underground shot should proceed because scientists needed the data to prepare for nuclear war.

He added, “We are faced with a war in which atomic weapons will undoubtedly be used, and we have to have some information about these things.
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With a lot of monitoring, the end instrumentation will give us the information we want; if we look for perfect safety, we will never make these tests.”

In the end, the participants agreed and decided to move ahead with the tests. But after Warren returned to Washington, several scientists at Los Alamos performed some additional calculations and concluded that the deep underground test—the initial shot that was supposed to be
used to assess radiological dangers—might prove to be the most hazardous of all. Subsequently that shot was scrapped, but preparations for the surface test and the shallow underground test continued.

One of the participants, identified as L. Thompson, wanted to insert a disclaimer in the final report stating that the committee’s conclusions were “based on conjecture and incomplete data.” But Warren felt such a disclaimer might be misunderstood. “One thing I’m afraid of is that in stating our scientific caution here, we overdo it from the standpoint of lay and political feeling.
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Although in our final wording we have to give due regard to our gaps in knowledge, we must not make these overly prominent so as to mislead those who are not used to scientific caution.” The final report was amazingly blunt nevertheless:

In the ensuing years, as he had already begun to do in this meeting, Shields Warren took the side of the scientists and politicians who contended that fallout was a small price to pay to keep America safe. In 1956, on the eve of a presidential election in which fallout was one of the most hotly debated issues, Warren said that if the atmospheric tests were to continue for another thirty years, the genetic dose to the human race would still be insignificant. “Distant or worldwide radioactive fallout is not a controlling factor in bomb testing,” he said in a telegram to Lewis Strauss.
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“To permit us to fall behind Russians is disastrous; to wait for them to catch up to us is stupid.”

While Shields Warren and scientists at Los Alamos were discussing fallout hazards, General James Cooney and other military leaders were mapping out their strategy for the first large-scale maneuvers that would be held at the Nevada Test Site. Unlike Operation Ranger, which involved only a few hundred men, the military exercises that began in the fall of 1951 would involve thousands of troops and specific activities designed to acclimate soldiers—both psychologically and physically—to atomic weapons.

During September and October of that year, thousands of troops from military installations throughout the country were trucked to the test site. Among them were cooks, mechanics, radar operators, machinists, and paratroopers. The operation was so secret that most of the soldiers barely had time to pack a duffel bag. Few knew where they were headed or why. Most were too young to care.

The GIs lived in a hastily erected camp dubbed Camp Desert Rock, which was located some thirty miles from where the atomic bombs were detonated.
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The soldiers slept in rows of tents that had been staked out in the middle of the desert. With dirt floors and one pot-belly stove for heat, the tents were freezing in winter. In an effort to keep warm, GIs lined their cots with newspapers and wrapped bath towels around their necks. In the days leading up to the shot, they dug foxholes and beautified the campsite with cactus transplanted from the surrounding desert.

Fresh fish and jumbo shrimp were flown in for the military brass and dignitaries. The troops had 16-mm movies and trucks to ferry them into Las Vegas during the waiting period. For many, the visions that greeted them in the casinos were as dazzling as the dawn explosions. The GIs got
free drinks, free admittance to the shows, but no free betting, recalled Venlo Wolfsohn, then a public information officer for the 11th Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
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The first military exercise began on November 1, 1951. In the frigid, predawn hours, some 3,000 troops were ordered out of their bunks and trucked to Frenchman Flat. As they sat on the cold desert floor, a man on a P.A. system began talking about the atomic explosion they would soon witness: Shot Dog, the fourth bomb detonated during Operation Buster-Jangle. The briefing officer emphasized the safety of their position. Within ninety seconds of the blast, any danger from the radiation would be over, he said. With simple protective clothing, they could have been positioned much closer to Ground Zero. Most important, they were told the detonation would not make them sterile. Ribbing each other good-naturedly and passing binoculars back and forth, the helmeted GIs had no reason to doubt their officers. As the soldiers jostled each other impatiently, the darkness receded, revealing the contours of a wide valley enclosed by ragged mountains. Five minutes before detonation, the men were ordered to turn away from Ground Zero. Some had film badges and goggles; most did not. Seven miles from where the men knelt in the sand, the twenty-one-kiloton bomb exploded 1,417 feet in the air.

Even with their backs to the explosion, their eyes shut and arms flung over their faces, they could feel the presence of the white light obliterating the long shadows of the morning sun. From the direction of the rising cloud of dust came a tremendous blast of heat. Thirty seconds later the first shock wave rolled over the troops. Some of the men were knocked over like bowling pins. “The ground was running at you like a roller coaster,” recalled William Brecount, an equipment operator from Washington state.
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Robert Saunders, a Marine, said it felt like an oven door suddenly had opened behind him.
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Ubaldo Arizmendi, a small plane mechanic from California, remembers rocks falling on him.
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A few moments later, the soldiers were instructed to turn around and look at the fireball. It was beautiful and terrifying, capped by a thin layer of ice. High winds sliced off the mushroom cap and carried it “dangerously close” to a mountain range on which reporters stood. “Though they drove frantically away, the newsmen were slightly contaminated,”
Life
magazine reported.
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A young corporal later told
Life
he was surprised troops could enter the blast area so soon after detonation—unwittingly lending support to the no-residual-radiation argument put forth by the generals.

A short while after the detonation, some 2,796 men who had
watched the explosion were transported to Ground Zero, where they were instructed to walk through a display area where make-believe fortifications and equipment had been subjected to the blast. Meanwhile, a combat battalion composed of nearly 900 troops who had also observed the test then “attacked” in the direction of Ground Zero where imaginary enemy soldiers were waiting.

Afterward, the troops went to a decontamination station where they were swept off with brooms and monitored for radiation. “If the radiation intensity could not be lowered to 0.01 r/hr the individual was to shower and change his clothing, and vehicles were to be washed,” an official summary of the test noted.
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Some of the soldiers underwent psychological testing to determine the effectiveness of indoctrination programs. Researchers from HumRRO, the Human Resources Research Organization, an Army contractor based at George Washington University, found the troops’ confidence in the use of atomic weapons had “increased materially.”
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But psychologists from the John Hopkins University Operations Research Office, known as ORO, claimed their studies showed deep worry and anxiety among the troops despite the indoctrination lectures.

Many of the troops returned to their home bases following Shot Dog. But several hundred remained behind to observe the last two explosions of the Buster-Jangle series—the small surface detonation and the shallow underground detonation that Shields Warren had gone to Los Alamos to discuss the previous spring. As expected, both of these shots produced huge amounts of radioactivity. One hour after firing, the lips of the two craters measured 7,500 roentgens per hour. The troops waited until the radioactivity had decayed, but as a precautionary measure, they toured Ground Zero by bus instead of on foot. That arrangement, wrote DOE historian Barton Hacker, prevented the soldiers from getting much exposure, but he acknowledged, “The absence of film badges for most of these troops … leaves much uncertainty.”
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The armed forces, not satisfied that the atomic maneuvers were realistic enough, pressured the AEC at the conclusion of each test series for permission to move the troops closer to Ground Zero. During the 1951 Operation Buster-Jangle, the soldiers were seven miles from the blast. The following spring, during the 1952 test series, they were four miles. They were moved up to two miles from Ground Zero during the 1953 series. And for a select group of “officer volunteers,” eventually the gap was narrowed to one mile or less.