The Plutonium Files (45 page)

According to documents obtained by Pat Broudy, the Defense Nuclear Agency paid $13.6 million between 1978 and 1994 to a contractor called Science Applications International Corporation to “reconstruct” the doses needed by veterans to qualify for compensation under the 1984 law. To arrive at the doses, a whirl of data about the atomic explosion and the soldier’s whereabouts are fed into a computer. The results have been overwhelmingly in favor of the government; fewer than fifty veterans or their widows have qualified for awards under the 1984 law.
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Scientist William Jay Brady said the internal dose estimates developed by Science Applications are based on incorrect assumptions. The contractor used the amount of radiation delivered to the bone to decide whether an internal dose reconstruction was necessary, but most veterans who participated in the Nevada tests received the largest doses of radiation to their lungs and lymph nodes from inhaling the so-called hot particles that Shields Warren and others were so worried about. In testimony submitted to Congress in 1996, Brady said that many of the internal organ doses “were in the hundreds or thousands of rads, certainly high enough to cause concern regarding incidence of radiogenic as well as nonradiogenic disease.”
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The military maneuvers at the Nevada Test Site captured the nation’s imagination. Letters poured into Washington, D.C., from citizens throughout the United States who wanted to witness the fury of an atomic bomb. The commission had a stock response for the letter writers: “The Atomic Energy Commission does not deliberately expose any human being to nuclear radiation for research purposes unless there is a reasonable chance that the person will be benefited by such exposure.
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Needless to say, we are interested in exploring all possible means of evaluating the biomedical effects of atomic blasts, but we have restricted such experimentation to laboratory animals.” The following are excerpts from some of those letters:

Sandwiched between the soft blues of sky and ocean, four fighter pilots cruised toward a tower of mud and water directly in front of them.
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The column was twenty miles wide and 45,000 feet high.
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As they drew closer to the unearthly shape, the jets looked no bigger than flies. In groups of two, they pierced the curtain of dirty clouds and entered the dull red glow of the world’s first thermonuclear detonation.

It was the morning of November 1, 1952, in the Pacific Proving Ground, October 31 in the United States—and three days away from a presidential election. Atop the muddy column of water floated a diaphanous cloud that eventually flattened out to more than 150 miles in diameter.
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The apparition, shockingly incongruous in the middle of the tropical mildness, was “Mike,” the first shot in Operation Ivy and the most powerful explosion ever experienced on Earth. The blast incinerated the island of what was then called Elugelab and left a huge crater on the ocean floor. Its yield was estimated at 10.4 megatons, or five hundred times the size of a Nagasaki-type bomb. A “monster,” declared an Air Force historian a decade later.

The four pilots were members of the “Red Team,” the first wave of samplers who were scheduled to penetrate Mike and gather radioactive debris and gases for scientists back in the United States. A “White” and “Blue” team were also slated to enter Mike later that morning. The leader of the Red Team was Virgil Meroney, code-named Red One. His fellow pilots included a Captain Brenner, Red Two; Captain Robert Hagan, Red Three; and Captain Jimmy P. Robinson, Red Four.

Jimmy P. Robinson was a newcomer to the Pacific Proving Ground
where the wind and rain were often fickle companions. Just twenty-eight years old, Robinson had a little over six hundred hours of flying time. At Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas, his home base, he had completed a course in water survival. After attending a weeklong ground school for Radiological Indoctrination at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he had flown to Nevada where he participated in one sampling mission during the 1952 tests. Nearly six feet tall and 170 pounds, Robinson thought he was ready for the nuclear tests. But the Pacific blasts were bigger and more dangerous than those held in Nevada. And Mike was the biggest explosion yet.

The day before the shot, the four men had been briefed on what to expect by Dr. Harold Plank, a Los Alamos scientist who was in charge of the scientific aspects of the sampling operations. (“A dingaling but a brillant one,” retired cloud sampler William Wright described him.)
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As the men listened intently, Plank reviewed the shot with them, but no one—not even Plank—knew how big Mike would be or whether it would actually work. Be sure to keep your canopies closed until the aircraft have come to a complete stop, he cautioned the men. The planes were extremely radioactive following the sorties, and potentially harmful amounts of alpha and beta particles could be blown back into their faces.

The sampler pilots were buckled into their cockpits. Then ground crews draped lead-filled gowns over their shoulders and placed lead-lined helmets on their heads. The gowns weighed fifty-five pounds each and the helmets six pounds, a combined weight that was equal to nearly a third of what some of the pilots weighed. Although the gear provided the participants with some degree of protection and psychological comfort, the scientists at Los Alamos undoubtedly knew the lead would not fully protect the pilots from the penetrating radiation in the heart of a thermonuclear cloud.

When the Red team arrived in the sampling area “one hour after H’ hour,” they split into pairs. Virgil Meroney and Captain Brenner were the first to fly into Mike’s stem. Filled with many tons of water, debris, and the coral remains of Elugelab, the stem was highly radioactive and extremely turbulent due to the convective forces set up by the temperature changes.
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When the head of the cloud moved off, a 1963 declassified Air Force history of the cloud sampling program states, the stem remained in the upright position, pouring down into the ocean the radioactive water and muddy debris for one to two hours.
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It took Meroney and his teammate about fifteen minutes to make contact with the roiling column of mud and water. “When he reached
the cloud, Colonel Meroney was in for a busy time,” the Air Force history reported.
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The two men put their planes on automatic pilot while they hastily gathered information. There were three radiation instruments to monitor, data to be recorded on a report sheet, and numbers to be radioed back to Harold Plank, who hovered in the nearby scientific control aircraft. The pilots also carried a stopwatch to time their stay in “radiation over one roentgen in intensity.” Wrote the Air Force history:

The “radiation over one-roentgen intensity” could refer to anything from 1 to 1,000 rads, and the history does not disclose how much radiation Colonel Meroney was subjected to during his five-minute sortie. When Meroney cleared the cloud, he turned his jet around to watch Robert S. Hagan and Jimmy P. Robinson make their runs. Meroney cautioned them not to go too far. Soon he heard Hagan, the Red Three pilot, tell a controller that he was changing direction, indicating that he, too, had run into a pocket of intense radiation. Next he heard heavy breathing over the radio, as if someone were holding his mike down. Jimmy Robinson also apparently had run into a hot spot while gathering scientific data. When he made a tight turn to escape, he somehow overtaxed the abilities of the plane’s autopilot. The aircraft stalled and went into a spin.

It was a nightmare come true. The jet tumbled down 20,000 feet through the radioactive steam, mud, and coral smithereens of Elugelab. Finally it leveled out.

Meroney radioed Robinson and asked him if he was okay. The pilot responded, “I am O.K. and the aircraft is O.K. except it flies as if my flaps are dragging.” Meroney then instructed Robinson and Hagan to get together, return to the control aircraft, and then head for the tanker plane for refueling. Both pilots acknowledged the instructions and
switched to a different station. It was the last time Meroney heard Robinson’s voice. The young pilot was to become a footnote in history, a tragedy quickly forgotten on the day when the fusion that burns deep within stars was first harnessed on earth.

When Red Three and Red Four exited the thermonuclear stem, the skies were filled with rain clouds. Neither could visually see the control aircraft or the refueling tankers. According to a 1952 accident report that was declassified in 1998, the electromagnetic interference from Mike had disrupted the electronic equipment on their jets and also had caused the radar equipment on the nearby control aircraft to malfunction.
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The two pilots could not pick up the electronic signals that would tell them where the refueling aircraft was or the emergency landing strip at Enewetak. Nor could the military controllers, who suddenly found their radar inoperative, give the pilots accurate directions.

The two men circled in the “soup” for nearly an hour. As they circled aimlessly, their jets, which burned 1,200 pounds of fuel per hour, grew dangerously low on fuel. Suddenly Red Three picked up a signal for Enewetak. With only 600 pounds of fuel in his tanks, he made a beeline for the emergency landing strip. Then Jimmy Robinson’s aircraft picked up the beacon. The spinout in the cloud and the climb back up to altitude has cost him more fuel; he had perhaps 400 to 500 pounds of fuel left. He, too, raced toward Enewetak.

The island was covered in rain squalls. With his fuel tanks on empty, Captain Hagan landed on the runway. The touchdown was so rough that his right main tire blew out. Then it was Robinson’s turn. He radioed the tower at 19,000 feet and told them his fuel gauge was on empty. At 13,000 feet he reported that his engine had just “flamed out.” At 10,000 feet he was given steering instructions to the runway. At 3,000 feet Robinson radioed the tower and said that he couldn’t make it. At 2,000 feet he said he could see a helicopter pilot who had been dispatched to look for him. Then, a second later he screamed, “I’m bailing out.”

Donald Foss, the helicopter pilot, spotted Jimmy Robinson’s plane just north of the atoll. The jet was in a level glide at 150 knots. Foss jumped in behind the aircraft and followed it. He assumed Robinson was attempting a water landing and thought he saw the wing tanks and canopy being released. Other observers later told accident investigators they saw what looked like a seat being ejected from the aircraft. If Robinson were in that seat, he would have been weighed down by an extra 61 pounds of lead.

The jet landed with a “great deal of force” on the water, Foss told
authorities, skipping like a stone for another 100 to 300 yards. Then the belly of the plane slammed onto the sea again. The nose plowed into the water, flipping the aircraft on its back. Rapidly it began to sink. The helicopter pilot kept circling the plane, calling for aid. He watched helplessly as Robinson’s plane disappeared into the lagoon three and one-half miles from the runway.

In the rain, the rescue teams kept looking for Robinson. Other units arrived to help. One aircraft, in an effort to reach the search area as fast as possible, knowingly took the shortest route: through a fallout zone. The seven-member crew received exposures ranging from 10 to 17.8 roentgens.
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Long after the muddy stem of Mike had collapsed back into the sea and the four winds had shredded the diaphanous mushroom cap, the rescue crews kept searching for the downed pilot. They found an oil slick, a couple of maps, and one glove.
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The small coral island of Elugelab and Jimmy P. Robinson were gone.