The Plutonium Files (42 page)

Because the exercises often took place in areas where previous nuclear detonations had occurred or fallout activity remained, the potential exposures of the soldiers increased with each test series.
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Blast waves from the detonations dispersed into the air one to two inches of earth containing plutonium, uranium, and long-lived fission products from earlier explosions. Some of the troops were loaded into trucks and transported to display areas where they witnessed the bizarre and uneven destruction left by the blasts. They saw trucks, Jeeps, even planes overturned with headlights melting and leather seats burning. They smelled the singed wool of sheep placed in cages close to Ground Zero. One of the eeriest spectacles was “Doom Town,” a make-believe suburb filled with tract homes, school buses, and J.C. Penney’s mannequins substituting for Mom, Dad, and the kids.
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In all, approximately 205,000 enlisted men participated in the atmospheric testing program in Nevada or the Pacific Proving Ground. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments estimated 2,000 to 3,000 troops were used in actual human experiments.
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But many participants allege the entire testing program was one vast experiment.

Public relations, the issue that so consumed the Manhattan Project, was one of the driving forces behind the atomic maneuvers. The military hoped the bomb tests would be an emotional vaccination of sorts. Richard
Meiling, chairman of the Armed Forces Medical Policy Council, a powerful group located within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, summarized the problem in a June 27, 1951, memo: “Fear of radiation is almost universal among the uninitiated and unless it is overcome in the military forces it could present a most serious problem if atomic weapons are used for tactical or strategic purposes.”
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The military was also eager to prove to the world that atomic bombs left no residual radiation on the ground beneath the point of detonation. Ever since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the armed forces had asserted that Ground Zero could be occupied soon after the blast. Meiling urged that the soldiers be marched in the vicinity of Ground Zero to prove this point:

Such thinking could not have been more in line with General Cooney’s. In July of 1951, just months before the large-scale maneuvers began, Cooney went to Fort Monroe, Virginia, the headquarters of the Army’s training command, to sketch out goals for the upcoming exercises. Finally, the nation’s troops and Mr. and Mrs. America” would see that their foreboding about nuclear weapons was nonsense. The time had come, Cooney told his fellow officers, to replace the “negative, defensive attitude” toward the bomb with a positive offensive type of thinking.”
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The way to accomplish the change, he said, was by:

Cooney’s proposed doses were huge, and there is no written evidence that any troops in Nevada were ever exposed to the amounts he suggested. At the time the AEC would not allow its employees to receive more than 3.9 roentgens for any thirteen-week period. And today’s nuclear worker is not allowed to receive more than five rem in a year.

As for inhalation hazards, the Army Chemical Corps had been pressuring the Army’s Surgeon General for “more realistic tolerance levels” for airborne radioactive materials.
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The Surgeon General’s office acquiesced—completely capitulated might be a better term—to their demands, stating that hazards from ingested or inhaled radioactive material could be “completely discounted” and the hazard of lingering radiation was “insignificant.” General Cooney and the other military men at Fort Monroe also decided it was time to jettison some of the safety precautions used at earlier tests:

Thus the comments made at Fort Monroe show that even before the first large-scale troop maneuvers were held, the armed forces planned to ignore inhalation hazards and considered collecting the data with instruments that would result in lower reported exposures for troops. These remarks, when combined with the cavalier attitude exhibited by Cooney and other high-ranking officers toward radiation hazards, strongly suggest that some troops received greater doses than what has officially been reported.

Before the maneuvers began, the Pentagon’s Joint Panel on the Medical Aspects of Atomic Warfare met to thrash out a shopping list of questions that needed to be answered at the upcoming bomb tests. “It is,
of course, obvious,” the panel acknowledged, “that a test of a new and untried atomic bomb is not a place to have an unlimited number of people milling about.”
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The top-secret panel was formed in 1949, the year the Soviets exploded their first bomb, but it’s not clear when it was dissolved. Little was known about the Joint Panel until 1994, when a stack of its records was obtained by the Clinton Committee. Those records show that James Cooney, Louis Hempelmann, Robley Evans, and Hymer Friedell served as members or consultants.

Among other things, the “shopping list” prepared by the Joint Panel called for an investigation into the psychological effects of nuclear explosions on troops, research into the efficiency of protective clothing and devices, the measurement of radioisotopes in the body fluids of weapons test personnel, orientation flights in the vicinity of nuclear explosions, and studies on the effects of the atomic flash on the human eye. It so happened that the psychological tests, the orientation flights, and the flashblindness studies would all begin in the fall of 1951 and continue for the next decade.

In late May of 1951, when the dust from Operation Ranger had settled, Shields Warren went to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to discuss the fallout hazards from several underground detonations planned for that fall. A lifelong New Englander, he must have marveled at the raw ugliness of a western spring: the stinging wind, the leafless willows and cottonwoods, a gauzy brown veil draped over the Sangre de Cristos. In Albuquerque, local officials were trying to tell residents what to do if an atomic bomb were dropped on the state. “A person in the vicinity of an A-bomb can protect himself by turning and falling away from the explosion,” the
Albuquerque Journal
quoted a local official as saying on May 23, “thus cutting down on the danger from flying debris, burns and radiation.”
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Like so many before him, Warren followed the switchbacks that led up from the Rio Grande Valley to the tangled jumble of buildings on top of the mesa. In the arroyos that gouged their way down to the river, wild asters and prairie zinnias clung to the chalky soil. As Warren looked across the arid expanse toward the blue granite mountains, he may well have pondered the memo he had written three months earlier in which he had warned that the desert was no place to explode an underground atomic bomb.

At the time of the Los Alamos meeting, the outcome of the Korean War was still uncertain. General Douglas MacArthur had just been recalled after threatening Communist China with a naval and air attack. Many people, including Warren, believed another war was imminent. Los Alamos had once again become a beehive of activity. Dejected and uncertain about its future in the years following World War II (some
even talked of making the lab a monument or museum), the lab staff had been bucked up by the atomic blasts in Nevada and at the Pacific Proving Ground. “In Los Alamos, a sort of status symbol evolved from the Pacific tests,” the Los Alamos Historical Society wrote.
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“If you had a giant clam in use as a bird bath or garden ornament, you were a bona fide Bikini veteran.” With the continental test site in its backyard, the laboratory’s future was secure at last.

Many of the security precautions enacted during the war were still in place when Warren arrived. The entire community of Los Alamos was off limits to outsiders. Miles of fences, set in concrete and topped by barbed wire, enclosed both the town and the laboratory. The main gate to Los Alamos, with its four lanes, resembled a turnpike toll barrier. Residents and visitors, both coming and going, were required to show their passes to guards. The town itself would not be declared an open city until February 18, 1957. Accustomed to their isolation by then, Los Alamos residents were chagrined at the prospect of unannounced visits from “meddlers, peddlers, [and] mothers-in-law.”
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The five atomic bombs that had been exploded in Nevada in January and February of 1951 had all been dropped from airplanes. The so-called air drops did not create the immense amount of contaminated dust that underground explosions were expected to generate. The planned underground explosions were the brainchild of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. Ever since Crossroads, military planners had wondered if a bomb buried deep within the earth would create the same spectacular contamination as Shot Baker. In November of 1950, a month before the Nevada Test Site was officially approved, AFSWP had received authorization from President Truman to conduct two twenty-kiloton detonations on the island of Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands. One bomb would be detonated on the surface and the other buried dozens of feet underground.
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But once the Nevada site opened, AFSWP officials decided they wanted to conduct the tests there. It was a much more convenient location, but even more important, it would allow AFSWP to develop a comprehensive map of fallout, something that couldn’t be done properly on an island.

But Shields Warren objected to the underground test precisely because of the fallout hazards. “It is not possible for us to disregard a potential long-term inhalation hazard,” he told General James McCormack, director of the AEC’s Division of Military Application.
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“There would be a continually recurring problem of dust contaminated with
material of long half-life being blown around by the winds. The arid character of the region increases this hazard.”

The dispute was one of the first of many arguments between civilian and military planners at the Nevada Test Site. Since both had legitimate interests in the nuclear weapons program, they generally came up with compromises or tried to carve out mutually exclusive areas of responsibility. In this case, the two sides reached a compromise: The two twenty-kiloton tests were canceled; instead, three bombs with yields of approximately one kiloton each were to be detonated. The first bomb, at the insistence of the AEC, was to be buried deep underground and would be used to assess the radiological hazards of the subsequent tests. The second bomb was to be exploded at the surface and the third a few feet below the ground. Although they were small, all three bombs were expected to generate significant fallout because of the tons of dirt that would be sucked up into the fireballs. The radioactive dirt, being heavier than usual fallout dust sucked up in the fireball, was expected to fall to earth more rapidly instead of being carried up and away with the wind, thus posing more danger to area residents.

The meeting was so important that many of the lab’s top officials were there. They included Norris Bradbury, the Navy officer who succeeded J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos, and Thomas Shipman, the physician who had taken over the lab’s health division. Louis Hempelmann, who by then had gone to the University of Rochester, returned for the discussion. Even more impressive was the presence of Gioacchino Failla, a scientist who helped set the United States’ first radiation standards. Edward Teller, who was hard at work on the hydrogen bomb, made a cameo appearance on the second day.

Fifty-five pages of notes taken at the May 21–22 meeting were declassified (with deletions) by Los Alamos in 1995 and show how shockingly little scientists really knew about fallout at the dawn of the atmospheric testing program.
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They also reveal that even though scientists were aware that fallout from the tests could pose serious hazards to nearby communities, they chose not to evacuate residents because they apparently feared such a move would harm public relations and jeopardize the test site.

Despite his initial reservations, Warren appeared to be solidly behind the shots by the time he arrived in Los Alamos. As chairman, he was tactful and accommodating, artfully nudging the group toward the conclusion the detonations could be carried out without “undue hazard.” But a transcript of the discussion shows that several scientists, including
Louis Hempelmann, had grave concerns about the “hot particles” the bomb would throw into the atmosphere.