The Plutonium Files (47 page)
Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
If this means that the Air Force is trying to indoctrinate its personnel with the belief that moderate exposures may be received with impugnity
[sic],
I could not disagree more violently. Perhaps this means that the Air Force is so superior that exposure which might hurt other people do not damage them and
that rules necessary for other people do not apply to Air Force Personnel.
The ground crews who removed the filter papers with tongs and rolled them into lead “pigs” were also in danger of being overexposed. The filter papers were extremely radioactive. At a distance of one foot, some of the filter paper emitted a gamma radiation intensity of 100 roentgens per hour. At twenty-five feet, the background intensity from the paper was approximately 0.5 roentgens per hour.
43
Even the lead pigs did not completely shield all the radiation. During the flights back to the States, the samples were marked so that “neither crew or passengers would get close enough to the pigs to receive more than one week’s tolerance dose during the flights.”
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The samples were flown straight back to Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore, another weapons lab established in California in the early 1950s. The samples were removed immediately from the pigs, placed in acid solutions, and dissolved.
Following the flights, the air crews went to a decontamination area where they stripped down and showered. “After we went through the showers, we were washed down and they checked us through the dosimeter on the Geiger Counter.
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Then we’d go through the showers again until finally it got down to what they considered an acceptable rate. Still we were emitting radiation even when it was an acceptable rate,” Langdon Harrison recalled at a 1985 Veterans Administration hearing.
Harrison’s recollections are partially confirmed in the Defense Nuclear Agency’s official reports. For example, air crews during the 1951 Operation Ranger were emitting an average of 0.2 to 0.3 roentgens per hour following their sampling missions.
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Without scrubbing, the men could have exceeded today’s 5-rem-per-year limit in about twenty-four hours.
Like the Army generals who kept nudging the troops closer to Ground Zero, the Air Force brass had a burning desire to find out what happened to a pilot who flew through an atomic cloud minutes after detonation. “Since there is a lack of knowledge concerning the homogeneity of the radioactivity in early thermonuclear clouds, there is a further requirement that at least part of the cloud penetrations should be straight through on a horizontal flight path at altitudes of interest to SAC [Strategic Air Command],” Air Force Brigadier General W. M. Canterbury stated in a letter to the Air Force Surgeon General.
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Air crews eventually flew through atomic and thermonuclear clouds as early as seventeen minutes after detonation in an experimental project called the Early Cloud Penetration Program. Before the human studies began, mice and monkeys were flown through the nuclear clouds in remote-controlled aircraft. The animals then were killed and examined for internal contamination. Scientists concluded the internal hazard was negligible, although on what basis they came to that conclusion is difficult to say, since it would have taken years for cancers to have developed.
The first early penetration experiments with humans were conducted during Operation Teapot, a 1955 test series in Nevada. Among other things, scientists wanted to find out if the internal doses air crews received on a pass through an atomic cloud were equal to external doses measured on film badges. Before penetrating the cloud, pilots and technical observers swallowed a film packet consisting of nine small disks of film enclosed in a watertight capsule attached to a string.
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A similar capsule was attached to the outside of the flight suits. Seven penetrations were made from seventeen to forty-one minutes after detonation.
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Dose rates in the mushroom cloud were recorded as high as 1,800 rad per hour. Afterward, the two packets of film were analyzed. Scientists concluded that the external film badges accurately reflected the internal radiation doses the crews were receiving. Crews also rubbed their bare hands on the radioactive surfaces of the returning planes as part of an experiment to evaluate the radiation meters and “define exactly” what dangers existed for men working around contaminated aircraft.
Los Alamos scientist Wright Langham was brought in for a second group of experiments during Operation Redwing, a series of atomic and hydrogen bomb tests conducted in 1956 at the Pacific Proving Ground.
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During those experiments, scientists sought to measure the hazard from inhaling or ingesting radioactive particles on a sortie through a thermonuclear cloud. Before departing for the Pacific, the pilots and observers were sent to Los Alamos, where twenty-four-hour urine samples were collected and each participant’s internal radioactivity measured in the lab’s whole-body counter, a device that can measure the radiation of an entire body. The air crews then made twenty-seven penetrations of thermonuclear clouds from twenty to seventy-eight minutes after detonation. Radiation dose rates as high as 800 rads per minute were measured. Urine samples were collected from each subject immediately after the cloud penetrations and shipped back to Los Alamos for analysis.
Upon their return to the States, the radioactivity in the participants’
bodies was measured again by the whole-body counter at Los Alamos. The pilots had absorbed a “wholly insignificant” amount of internal material from the flights, the scientists concluded.
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The exposures were so negligible, in fact, that Langham and his colleagues recommended that “no action” be taken to develop filters for aircraft pressurization systems nor “to develop devices to protect flight crews from the inhalation of fission products.”
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The cloud samplers continued to swoop in and out of the mushroom clouds until 1962. Like the ground troops, many of the pilots developed cancer or other diseases that they feel were caused by their radiation exposure. Langdon Harrison, who contracted prostate and bladder cancer, believes wholeheartedly that he received more than the 8.5 roentgens listed on his official reports. He said often he was ordered to circle in the dirty-looking clouds for up to fifteen minutes while trying to fill his tanks with radioactive gases. All the while he watched as the numbers on his radiation monitors climbed.
Harrison said he would never have volunteered for the sampling missions if he had been informed of the risks. “The whole thing was fraught with peril and danger and they knew it was, and this I resent quite readily,” he told one interviewer.
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“There isn’t anybody in the United States who isn’t a downwinder, either. When we followed the clouds, we went all over the United States from east to west and covering a broad spectrum of Mexico and Canada. Where are you going to draw the line? Everyone is a downwinder. It circles the earth, round and round, what comes around goes around.”
D
ISPATCH FROM
G
ROUND
Z
ERO
The sampler pilots returned to Nevada in the spring of 1953 along with thousands of ground troops for one of the longest and dirtiest test series yet. Eleven atomic bombs were detonated during Operation Upshot-Knothole. Seven were dropped from towers, three from airplanes, and one was fired from a cannon. With so many detonations, the military leaders had ample opportunity to try out the new “officer volunteer” program, a project in which officers witnessed the blasts at close range. It’s not known how many officer volunteers participated or whether they suffered any long-term effects. President Clinton’s Advisory Committee estimated that fewer than 100 people were involved.
1
One of the participants was Robert Hinners, a young Navy captain, who hunkered down with seven other officer volunteers in a trench 2,000 yards, or a little over a mile, from Ground Zero when Shot Simon was exploded on April 25, 1953. Simon had an “official yield” of forty-three kilotons, but Hinners estimated the yield to be fifty to fifty-five kilotons. Other records support his numbers.
The military allowed the eight officer volunteers to observe the explosion 2,000 yards
closer
to Ground Zero than the Army had concluded was a safe distance for bombs in the thirty-five- to forty-kiloton range. Hinners estimated that he and his fellow officers received 13.6 roentgens of radiation, but a memo declassified in 1995 stated the officers probably received “24 rem initial gamma plus neutron radiation.”
2
(Neutrons are at least ten times more effective at causing biological damage than gamma radiation.)
Hinners prepared a report on his experience for the Armed Forces
Special Weapons Project, which provides an extraordinary firsthand account of the light, the radiation, and the dust from an atomic detonation witnessed at close range. The following are some excerpts from his account:
3. Prior to final acceptance as a member of the group, each officer was required to personally and individually compute the effects to be expected in an open trench on the basis of the expected yield of 35 to 40 KT, and to recommend a distance for positioning the group which would not exceed the effects criteria which had been established for this exercise.
3
Each officer also was required to execute a certificate confirming his volunteer status.… In submitting my own forms, I recommended a distance of 2,000 yards.
4. General Bullock reviewed the computations at a briefing conference held in his office on the day before the shot. Since there was substantial agreement between all of the officers of the group as to the 2,000 yard distance, this distance was approved by the General.… Trenches previously had been prepared at 500-yard intervals, so that the final decision could be made with some flexibility on the basis of the weather conditions and any other lastminute considerations having any bearing on the predicted effects. At the final briefing, General Bullock also informed us that although there had been a rather complete press release on the volunteer program following the first Desert Rock V exercise, more recent security restrictions precluded public release of the exact distance at which we would be positioned relative to Ground Zero or of any of the other details of our position and observations.…
8. On the morning of the shot, we rode to the forward area on one of the buses of the regular troop observer convoy. The Army psychologists accompanied us as far as the main troop positions at the 4,000-yard point. Our group continued on alone by truck to the general vicinity of the 2,000-yard position, arriving there about one hour before shot time.… We remained above ground until about 15 minutes before shot time, at which time we entered our trenches. There were two trenches in line, each about 20 feet long, 3 feet wide and 6 feet deep, with their adjacent ends separated by about five yards of unexcavated earth. One was reinforced with a solid wood lining on the front and rear faces and cross-braced with wood timbers at about 4-foot intervals. The other one was unrevvetted. Each trench had a row of sandbags placed flat on the ground
around its top perimeter, and had a loose fill sloped to about a 45 degree angle at each end to facilitate climbing in and out. We were permitted to choose our respective positions. I chose the unrevvetted trench, along with two other officers of the group. Both trenches were bare of any equipment except for several shovels.…
10. The following is a summary of the various effects as we observed them at 2,000 yards from Ground Zero, in the positions described:
a. Light—The intense white light was the first manifestation of the explosion, and seemed to persist for at least six seconds, as it continued well beyond the time of arrival of the shock wave. I was wearing Navy safety goggles with clear glass lenses, as I was carrying a high-range experimental type of radiation survey meter and had hoped to get an early reading of the prompt nuclear radiation by opening my eyes very slightly. This proved to be impossible; I not only could not see the meter scale or pointer, but could not even see the profile of the instrument, the bottom of the trench, nor any other surrounding objects. There was nothing but white light on all sides. However, I had no sensation that it was hurting my eyes; it merely blanked out all vision for the duration of the fireball. When the fireball finally cooled off and the light gradually diminished, I had no sensation of any momentary flash-blindness; so far as I could tell, my eyes adapted to the rather dim early morning light (which was further reduced by the heavy dust cloud) as fast as the fireball disappeared.
b. Earth shock—This was the second manifestation of the explosion to be felt at our position, and in our case never exceeded a rather slight trembling motion. I was squatting on the balls of my feet with one shoulder braced lightly against the forward wall of the trench. In spite of this rather unstable position, at no time did I lose my balance due to ground motion, nor did I feel any appreciable ground shock against my shoulder.…
c. Heat—There was no sensation of heat in the trench; not even on my face, which was entirely exposed except for the small area covered by the frames of my safety goggles.…
d. Nuclear radiation—The first reading which I was able to obtain on my survey meter was exactly 100 r/hr. I estimate this to have been at about 8 seconds after the detonation, as soon as the light had diminshed enough for me to regain my sight. At this time, the pointer on the instrument was moving smoothly downward. The
decrease in the reading was fairly rapid at first—down to 50 r/hr. during the next 10 seconds or so—but the rate of decrease then gradually slowed down so that it required about one additional minute for it to drop down to a reading of between 20 and 25 r/hr. I was calling the readings over to the group leader in the other trench and at this point he directed us to leave the trenches. I watched the meter as I climbed out, and it moved up to 40 r/hr. as I left the trench for the open ground. We stopped briefly to examine some sheep which had been tethered in a dugout, in shallow trenches, and in the open in the vicinity. As we did so, I noticed that the meter reading was gradually increasing, so that it was again up to about 50 r/hr. by the time we started walking down the road away from Ground Zero. It was then about four or five minutes after the burst. During all this time, particles of sand or other debris were continually raining down on our helmets; the sound resembled light sleeting.
11. As we walked away from Ground Zero, the survey meter reading steadily decreased, but whenever we stopped to look at something, it would gradually increase again which indicated that a substantial amount of fallout was still being deposited at those distances (between 2,000 and 2,500 yards from Ground Zero). After we had walked for about a quarter of a mile, we were met by our two evacuation trucks; by this time the instrument reading was down to about 10 r/hr. The reading continued to decrease rapidly as we moved away from Ground Zero by truck, and was down to less than 1 r/hr. by the time we reached the main body of troops at the 4,000-yard position
14. The principal effects visually observed above-ground after we had emerged from the trench were:
a. Sheep—Those in the vicinity were singed to a dark brown color on those portions of their bodies which had been exposed to line-of-sight thermal radiation, but they were all on their feet and showed no other evidences of physical injury.
b. Trees—A large Joshua tree just outside our trench was partly broken off and on fire.… Other Joshua trees were burning on all sides of our position.
c. Dust—The dust was sufficient to make the visibility very poor beyond a hundred yards or so in any direction, but was not heavy enough to be suffocating. I did not feel the need of putting on my gas mask, and did not use it.
15. A stop was made for a monitoring check at the Desert Rock station across from the control point on our way back to camp. It was found that sweeping off our clothing and shoes with a broom was sufficient to bring the reading down to an acceptable level.
16. Following our return to camp, we were given an “exit interview” by the Army psychologists, and filled out questionnaires, Tab [illegible]. With respect to the question concerning the ability of the troops to carry on immediately after emerging from trenches under these conditions, it was the consensus of opinion that there should have been no difficulty except a reduction in efficiency for about the first five minutes due to the heavy dust cloud and resultant poor visibility….