The Plutonium Files (46 page)

For Edward Teller, the successful detonation of Mike was the culmination of a lifetime and a deeply satisfying victory over naysayers like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had once called the H-bomb a “miserable thing” that could be gotten to battle only by “ox cart.”
¹²
Although Mike was a bona fide thermonuclear detonation, it still could not be gotten to the battlefield: It weighed sixty-five tons and occupied an entire building on the soon-to-be vaporized island of Elugelab.

Teller, like Oppenheimer, was a brilliant physicist, but he had none of the former Los Alamos leader’s charisma. With his volatile temper and huge ego, Teller had grown so estranged from his Los Alamos colleagues that he had not flown out to the Pacific to watch the detonation. Instead he sat in a darkened basement in Berkeley, his eyes trained on a seismograph in front of him that would tell him whether the thermonuclear device had worked. As Teller watched the small point of light on the seismograph, he felt as if he was aboard a “gently and irregularly moving vessel.”
¹³
Suddenly the light began to move erratically, recording the shock waves from Mike as they struck the California coastline. For many minutes Teller watched the dancing point of light. When the light finally grew still, the film was taken away and developed. In an article for
Science
magazine, Teller later wrote that he was unsure if what he had seen “was the motion of my own hand rather than the signal from the first hydrogen bomb.…”
¹⁴

Back in the United States that evening, there were phone calls,
telegrams, whispers of congratulations following Mike’s successful detonation. Officials in the State Department, Pentagon, and White House immediately began discussing “how to take psychological advantage of this tremendous stride in weapons development,” wrote Kenneth Nichols, the Army officer who directed the Manhattan Project’s daily operations and went on to become the Pentagon’s atomic czar.
¹⁵
The test was not announced to the public because of fears that it might influence the presidential election. Truman, who had been shown a model of Mike at the White House five months earlier, was delighted when he heard the news. He wrote in his memoirs: “It was an awesome demonstration of the new power, and I felt that it was important that the newly elected President should be fully informed about it.
¹⁶
And on the day after the election I requested the Atomic Energy Commission to arrange to brief President-elect Eisenhower on the results of the test as well as on our entire nuclear program.”

Of the thousands of enlisted personnel who participated in America’s atmospheric testing program, perhaps no humans got closer to the exploding heart of a nuclear weapon than the sampler pilots. Straight into the heaving, turbulent clouds they flew. Built into the wings of their aircraft were special tanks equipped with filter paper attached to meshed screens. As the aircraft passed through a radioactive cloud, the pilot opened the valves to the tanks, allowing the debris to accumulate on the filter paper. Radioactive gases were collected by long, hollow probes located in the nose section of the aircraft. When the planes returned from the sampling missions, ground crews removed the bottles and filter paper and sent them back to weapons scientists in the United States for analysis. As Robinson’s flight showed, the sampling missions were dangerous and unpredictable, and the pilots received some of the largest doses of anyone in the nuclear testing program. The cloud samplers were used in several actual experiments, but it goes without saying that the entire program was highly experimental. The General Accounting Office estimated that some 4,000 people were involved in units responsible for manning or decontaminating aircraft.
¹⁷

Although Robinson was relatively inexperienced, many of the sampler pilots were combat-hardened veterans who had dodged aircraft fire over the skies of Korea, Germany, and Italy. A sortie through a nuclear cloud, a flight that one scientist said would give the air crews a radiation dose equal to a couple of chest X rays, was supposed to be a breeze. But
on their maiden voyages, many of the pilots were “simply overwhelmed—so badly that they could not function satisfactorily—by the awesomeness of the cloud interior,” recalled Los Alamos scientist Paul Guthals.
¹⁸
One officer, he remembered:

Enrico Fermi, the brilliant Italian physicist, might be said to be the first sampler of the nuclear age. J. Robert Oppenheimer had warned before the Trinity explosion that airplanes “must maintain a minimum distance from the detonation in order to avoid radiation.”
²⁰
So Fermi rumbled to Ground Zero in a lead-lined Sherman tank.
²¹
A mechanical arm operating from inside the tank scooped up samples of sand from the desert floor. The radioactive debris was then taken back to Los Alamos, where it was analyzed in order to help its creators determine what happened in the first milliseconds of the bomb’s birth. Louis Hempelmann had talked “very seriously” with Fermi about the potential exposure, Stafford Warren remembered. “As I recall, he would not wear a film badge; but he took along a meter and in he went … he came back later with the statement that he’d gotten a little bit but not very much.
²²
He never said how much or how long he was in there.” Fermi developed stomach cancer that is believed to have been caused by his many years of exposure to radioactive materials.
²³
He died in 1954 at the age of fifty-three.

During Operation Crossroads, drone aircraft operated by remote control were used to analyze the radioactive fission products from shots Able and Baker. The material was captured by filter paper placed within boxlike holders attached to the top and bottom of the aircraft fuselages. Radioactive gases were collected by large rubber bags capable of gulping ninety cubic feet of air during a pass through an atomic cloud. Manned flights began in 1948 during Operation Sandstone when a young lieutenant colonel named Paul Fackler accidentally flew through a cloud and suffered no “ill effects.”
²⁴
Just to be on the safe side, though, Fackler flew his aircraft through several rain squalls before landing.

Organized sampling missions began in 1951 and continued at both the Pacific Proving Ground and at the Nevada Test Site for more than a decade. Weapons scientists came to depend on the fission products and radioactive gases that the pilots brought back from their sorties. Occasionally the sampler pilots scooped up radioactive debris on overseas missions in order to obtain scientific intelligence on the atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs being detonated by the Soviet Union and China.

The program was still in its rudimentary stages when Jimmy P. Robinson made his fatal flight. Often the procedures and equipment were modified following each test series. The year after his flight, for example, a lead-glass vest covering the sides and front of the men replaced the shroud, and the cockpits were lined with thin sheets of lead.
²⁵
Film badges were placed on the pilots and scattered throughout the cockpit. The aircraft also were equipped with several other devices that measured radiation. The pilots kept a close watch on an instrument called an “integron,” which measured the cumulative amount of radiation they were absorbing.

The samplers donned rose-colored glasses to help them hunt down the shapes of mushroom clouds.
²⁶
Eventually the glasses were replaced with face shields embedded with gold dust. Langdon Harrison, a retired sampler pilot, said the gold face shields enabled the samplers to better see the reddish hues that distinguish an atomic cloud from a regular cloud.
²⁷
The dirty colors signified the presence of nitrogen dioxide, oxides from iron, and the condensed oxides from the casings of the nuclear devices and other equipment.

The pilots also got spotting help from the scientific control aircraft that usually hovered anywhere from ten to fifty nautical miles from the cloud. A military director and a scientific director normally rode in the aircraft. Harold Plank, who helped develop many of the innovations used in the sampling program, was Los Alamos’s scientific director from about 1950 to 1957. Paul Guthals succeeded Plank in 1957 and continued until the program was terminated. In an Air Force newsletter, Plank praised the squadron that performed the cloud sampling. “Its members during test operations have an urgent and important mission, which is to pursue and penetrate the bomb cloud as a target.
²⁸
This mission has inherent elements of risks and of personal devotion to duty which are not normally required during peacetime.”

The sampling program was fraught with tension caused by conflicting goals. The weapons scientists were interested in obtaining radioactive debris and gases emitted in the first seconds of a detonation. However,
this was also the time in which the radiation levels in the clouds were so high that pilots could be killed or seriously injured. As the Air Force history explained: “Needed for planning purposes was an ‘optimum time’ at which an acceptable radiation exposure would not necessarily or accidentally be exceeded but at which it would always be possible to collect the required sample.”
²⁹
One Los Alamos official said the preplanning was so well done that the pilots’ doses were known before the mission started. “The same for ground personnel and natives was not always true, although no serious and long-lasting illnesses have resulted from unplanned fallout or routine contamination.”
³⁰

Other documents, however, indicate that, in the early days of the testing program, the estimations for expected yields from atomic or hydrogen bombs could be off by as much as 50 percent, or so approximate as to be almost useless. Mike’s designers, for example, estimated the thermonuclear device would have a yield of between four and ten megatons. Such uncertainty made dose predictions mere guessing games, a fact that was acknowledged in the Air Force history: “A scarcity of information on the dimensions of, and radiation intensity in clouds, from megaton devices at operational altitudes for times up to one hour after detonation made ‘the prediction of air crew radiation doses in transit through such clouds questionable.” ’
³¹

During most of the atmospheric testing period, the AEC limited the “permissible doses” test personnel received to no more than 3.9 roentgens during a thirteen-week period.
³²
But the dose limits were waived for air crews. The Air Force Surgeon General permitted up to 50 roentgens for air crews during the 1956 Redwing test series, but no participant received that high a dose.
³³

The actual exposures the pilots received are a matter of controversy. The Defense Nuclear Agency, a successor to the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, could not provide an average dose received by the samplers but said the largest dose any one pilot got was 42.5 roentgens. Several retired sampler pilots believe their exposures were much higher than that.
³⁴
And the General Accounting Office uncovered evidence in the mid-1980s that bolstered the claims that exposures were underestimated.

When the pilots completed their flights, they continued to be irradiated on the way home from the debris that collected in the engines and on the external surfaces of the planes.
³⁵
“As a result a radiation flux or ‘cockpit’ radiation background existed within the interior of a sampling aircraft after its departure from the cloud,” the Air Force history stated.
³⁶
“While returning to base the pilot received additional radiation exposure.”

When the planes landed, special forklifts were rolled up so that the pilots could step from their cockpits onto the platform and be rolled away without touching the sides of the planes.
³⁷
Air Force officials, embarrassed when visitors saw the pilots being wheeled away on platforms, eventually tried to do away with the forklifts. “Those aircraft never calmed down completely for 10 or 20 years,” pilot William Wright remembered.
³⁸

If time permitted, the aircraft usually were towed to an isolated area and the radioactive debris allowed to decay overnight. Then the planes were scrubbed down by ground crews. One pilot said Duz, a common laundry detergent, was used on the exteriors of the planes and ground walnuts shoveled into the engines.
³⁹
But the Air Force history said a special compound called “Gunk” was applied.
⁴⁰
Proper cleansing was important, the Air Force noted, because “grease spots collected more than one hundred times as much contamination in passage through a radioactive cloud as a clean surface of equal area.”
⁴¹
The soapy water, contaminated with radioactive debris, was often allowed to run into the desert sand.

The Air Force sought to eliminate the decontamination procedures in 1957 to save money and time. “Our experience in nuclear tests in developing knowledge of the psychological effects of radiation on humans, indicates that aircraft decontamination is not required for reasons of personnel safety except in unusual circumstances,” wrote Air Force Colonel William B. Kieffer. “…   We believe it is imperative that we take the lead in establishing a reasonable attitude toward decontamination requirements.… Furthermore, substantial economics may result from a reduction in aircraft decontamination efforts.”

The Air Force proposal provoked a heated argument with Los Alamos scientists, among them Harold Plank, Alvin Graves, and Thomas Shipman. Shipman, a patrician-looking scientist with a biting wit, intensely resented the military’s involvement in the weapons testing program. “We have always gone on the theory that the only good exposure is zero,” he began.
⁴²