The Plutonium Files (44 page)

Military leaders also chafed under the dose limits that had been set by Shields Warren, arguing that soldiers should be allowed to receive
higher doses than AEC employees because they would be receiving only “infrequent” exposures. With the Cold War in full swing and the three branches of the military jockeying for their share of the atomic arsenal, Warren and the other members of the AEC were no match for the pressure. In the end, they gave the generals what they wanted, then they washed their hands of the problem.

The push to put the soldiers 7,000 yards, the equivalent of about four miles from Ground Zero, started almost immediately at the conclusion of Buster-Jangle. “So strong is the feeling about the importance of being at a tactically realistic distance from Ground Zero that the Marines have stated they would not participate if the seven mile limitation fixed during Desert Rock were again imposed,” said Brigadier General Kenneth Fields, the AEC’s director of Military Application.
¹⁰

Shields Warren would not relent on the distance. He was worried not so much about fallout hazards as the potentially harmful effects of the blast on the troops—not to mention the potentially negative publicity attendant on any such disaster. “Accidents occurring at the time and place of an atomic explosion are magnified by the press out of all proportion to their importance, and any injury or death during the operation might well have serious adverse effects,” he wrote.
¹¹
“The explosion is experimental in type and its yield cannot be predicted with accuracy.”

But the military representatives were adamant, and after a lengthy debate, AEC commissioners overruled Warren. AEC Chairman Gordon Dean, in a letter to Brigadier General Herbert B. Loper, chief of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, formally approved the 7,000-yard stipulation as well as the military’s request to maneuver on foot in the vicinity of Ground Zero as soon as practical after detonation. He cautioned, though, that the 7,000-yard line meant the soldiers would be “from two and one-half to three miles to a bomb run.”
¹²

The following year nearly 11,000 Defense Department personnel participated in Operation Tumbler-Snapper, the 1952 test series in Nevada governed by the four-mile limit. Afterward the military decided that four miles was still too far from Ground Zero for soldiers to get a realistic sense of the nuclear battlefield. “Here again,” explained Lieutenant General L. L. Lemnitzer in a letter to U.S. Representative Carl Durham, “we found that we had not yet reached the point where the atomic explosion itself had any significant effect, psychological or otherwise, on the ability of the troops to maneuver after the explosion.”
¹³

The military began lobbying to put soldiers even closer to Ground Zero for Operation Upshot-Knothole, the 1953 test series. In conjunction
with this plan, they also launched a campaign to force the AEC to waive its 3.9 roentgens limit.
¹⁴

The Department of Defense felt the AEC was “not realistic” in setting exposure limits. The AEC had authorized up to 20 roentgens of exposure for crews of sampling aircraft, but ground crews had been limited to 3.9 roentgens. The AEC eventually capitulated to the military’s demand, provided the armed forces issue a public statement announcing that it had assumed responsibility for troop safety. “Our position,” said one AEC official, “is that we probably cannot dictate exposure limits to the military, but we do have the responsibility of informing them of the hazards in order that they may be fully aware of the responsibility which they assume.”
¹⁵

Before the 1953 Upshot-Knothole series began, the Pentagon conducted a study to determine the “minimum distance” from Ground Zero that troops could be placed. The armed forces knew how soldiers would respond if a nuclear weapon were detonated miles away, but what about soldiers who were called upon to provide
“close
atomic weapon support?”
¹⁶
mused Colonel John Oakes, secretary of the Army General Staff. “Under conditions of a tower explosion, such as currently being conducted in the Nevada tests, it may be possible to place troops in deep foxholes as close as 800 yards from Ground Zero without these troops suffering serious injury.”

General Kenneth Nichols, the officer who had run the Manhattan Project’s daily operations, recommended that selected soldiers—who subsequently became known as “officer volunteers”—be allowed to receive up to ten roentgens per test and no more than twenty-five roentgens for the entire series while maneuvering within 1,500 yards of Ground Zero.
¹⁷
“The Surgeon General has agreed that it is highly improbable that such exposure will result in any injury to these selected individuals,” he wrote.

The officer-volunteer experiments, which began during Upshot-Knothole, were carried out in a democratic fashion: The volunteers themselves calculated the distance from Ground Zero from which they felt it would be safe to watch the detonations. The proposed distances then were approved by their commanding officers. The officer-volunteers, a memo later stated, “must have sufficient indoctrination in weapons effects to be fully aware of all the risks involved in exposure of this nature including possible latent effects, and must volunteer for such duty.”
¹⁸

In 1955 Army Major R. C. Morris suggested that humans be used to validate tests conducted on dummies and animals at Ground Zero: “Volunteers
in foxholes and prone on the surface of the ground can be exposed to low levels of blast and thermal effects until thresholds of intolerability are ascertained.”
¹⁹
The Armed Forces Special Weapons Project was vehemently opposed to the idea. “It is evident that the injury threshold cannot be determined without eventually exceeding it,” an official succinctly observed.
²⁰

Although atomic maneuvers would continue for another seven years, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project felt by 1955 that no more “useful data” could be obtained at the Nevada site, according to a memo declassified in 1995. Like the scientists in the Atomic Energy Commission, AFSWP was also obsessed with the possibility of future lawsuits, that memo reveals:

The statement was a harbinger of events to come. Following their tours of duty in Nevada or at the Pacific Proving Ground, the military participants returned home with mysterious rashes, blisters, and allergies that still plague them today. Some have said in sworn testimony that their hair and teeth fell out and they suffered from nausea and vomiting. Many believe they carried away damaged cells that over the decades have developed into cancer and other diseases. These veterans also believe that the radiation they were exposed to at the bomb tests resulted in genetic mutations that have caused a vast assortment of diseases among their children and grandchildren.

Ubaldo Arizmendi, the airplane mechanic who witnessed the detonation of Shot Dog, said his face turned bright red and he came down with an extremely high fever twenty-four hours later. He was sent to the camp hospital, where he said he saw other men with similar symptoms. He has had skin and joint problems ever since. William Brecount, the young equipment operator, developed blisters on his feet. Forty-five years later the blisters still plague him, and sometimes his feet burn so much at night he can’t keep a blanket over them. He said, “At that age, I didn’t think
there was anything big enough to whip me.” Robert Saunders, the Marine who said it felt as if an oven door had opened behind him, had a melanoma on his back removed seventeen years ago and now has skin cancer.

The Defense Nuclear Agency, a successor to the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, contends that only 1,200 of the approximately 205,000 military personnel who participated in at least one test in Nevada or in the Pacific got more than five rem of radiation. Based on that data, President Clinton’s Advisory Committee calculated that only a handful of excess cancer deaths would have been caused by doses received during the troop exercises.
²²

But the veterans claim the data are inaccurate. Documents show unequivocally that many veterans were not issued film badges, and the records for some film badges are missing altogether. Los Alamos scientist Harry Jordan in 1981 said one person in a platoon or company was often given a badge, and that dose was assumed to be the same for all other members of the group. “There were also innumerable instances,” he recalled in an interview, “in which arbitrarily the executive decision was made—that those people had no exposures—and therefore they weren’t given film badges.”
²³
Newly declassified records, such as memos describing General Cooney’s comments at the Fort Monroe conference in which he recommended using “gamma detectors of
low sensitivity
(and very few of them)” show that some exposures were surely underestimated. Film badges in general could not measure the radiation from the alpha particles, beta particles, and neutrons. What’s more, many reports, including the military’s own official accounts, show that unexpected fallout blew over the trenches or was found in the areas where the troops maneuvered. Despite the shifting winds, unpredictable fallout, hot spots, inaccurate recording instruments, and insensitive or missing film badges, the official doses assigned to the soldiers were always and invariably low.

Even more unconscionable, internal doses received by military participants as they marched toward Ground Zero on maneuvers or through equipment display areas have been ignored. This practice continues today even though the government knows participants were not wearing respirators and that extremely high blast winds blew radioactive material from past tests into the soldiers’ faces. William Jay Brady, a scientist at the test site for many years, said internal doses would be much higher than external doses but appear to have been ignored to prevent paying the veteran or his survivors the benefits mandated by Congress. Brady began working at the Nevada Test Site in 1952 and actually observed many of the military exercises. During his nearly forty-year career, he
served as a radiation monitor, a security officer, an expert witness, and a health physicist. When he retired from the nuclear weapons program in 1991, he began helping atomic veterans and their widows with their claims. With his scientific background and firsthand knowledge of what went on, he has proved to be a powerful ally for the veterans. When asked why he switched sides, Brady responded, “I thought it was time to even the score.”
²⁴

No comprehensive epidemiological study has ever been done of the atomic veterans. The National Academy of Sciences in 1985 concluded a mortality study of 46,186 veterans who participated in five test series—Operations Upshot-Knothole, Plumbbob, Greenhouse, Castle, and Redwing—but the study had serious flaws. It erroneously included 4,500 veterans who had never participated in an atomic test and excluded 15,000 individuals who participated in one or more of the test series.
²⁵
Another serious flaw was using the general public as the control cohort. Soldiers are healthier than civilians and generally have less cancer. Even so, excess leukemia cases were detected in the 1957 Plumbbob series.

In 1996, the federal government released the results of a mortality study of Crossroads participants, which produced equally confusing results.
²⁶
The study concluded that Crossroads veterans had a higher death rate but lower cancer rate than nonexposed veterans. Although the authors were unable to fully explain the higher mortality rate, they said the findings do
not
support the notion that radiation exposure caused the increased deaths among Crossroads participants.

Congress has passed several major laws aimed at compensating veterans suffering from cancer possibly related to the radiation exposure they received while participating in the atmospheric testing program or the American occupation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Veterans Dioxin and Radiation Exposure Compensation Standards Act of 1984 requires that veterans prove that they received at least five rem of radiation exposure, an expensive and all-but-impossible task for vets. The Radiation-Exposed Veterans Compensation Act of 1988 provides compensation if a veteran can show that he or she participated in the occupation or testing program and suffers from certain specified cancers. Although the 1988 law does not require a dose reconstruction, many atomic veterans feel the list of cancers is too restrictive.

According to Pat Broudy, the widow of an atomic soldier and longtime lobbyist for the veterans, fewer than 500 of the 450,000 military personnel who participated in the occupation of Japan or the atmospheric testing program are receiving awards under the two laws established
by Congress.
²⁷
Hundreds of thousands of veterans who helped clean up the Marshall Islands following various detonations or were involved in other nuclear weapons activities are not even covered by these laws, she added.

The Department of Defense has opposed compensation for atomic veterans for many years. In 1981 William Taft IV, general counsel for the Defense Department, warned that proposed legislation to compensate the veterans would have a disastrous and far-flung effect on military and civilian programs. The proposed legislation, he wrote: