The Plutonium Files (48 page)

A young Army lieutenant shepherded his platoon into a trench 1,700 yards behind the officer volunteers on the morning that Shot Simon was being readied for detonation. The desert was blanketed in darkness. Two miles away, a small light glowed at the base of the 300-foot tower cradling the bomb. Normally the weapons were exploded about thirty minutes before sunrise.
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That way the flash from the bomb would trip the photoelectric cells that started the recording equipment and give the sampler pilots enough daylight to see the mushroom cloud.

The lieutenant, identified only as S.H., was the last man to march down the ramp into the five-foot-deep trench.
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He had been warned by his commanding officer not to look at the blast. Just twenty-two years old and two months out of officers’ training school, the lieutenant found the temptation irresistible. As the loudspeaker counted down the last seconds, S.H. turned and glanced over his left shoulder. At that very moment, Simon was exploded in a fury of light and sound.

Before the young officer had time to blink, the light flooded into his eyes. His pupils, which were dilated for night vision, instantly absorbed more than fifty times the energy they would have during daylight. The flash bleached his retinas, turning the world white. Momentarily blind, S.H. staggered down into the trench to join his platoon. When his sight began to return, his men resembled white shadows. His vision remained blurred for the rest of the day, and his left eye began to swell. That evening when he tried to read, the print appeared distorted and a spot on the page seemed to move with his eyes. When he reported the problem to the camp medical officer the following day, he was whisked to a hospital in Fort Hood, Texas, immediately.

At the military hospital, he was placed on a salt-free diet and administered cortisone and atropine. The swelling in his left eye decreased markedly. But radiating tension lines soon appeared around the burn, suggesting that he might suffer a retinal detachment in the future. The lieutenant was released from the hospital about four weeks after the accident. Soon after his hospital discharge, he was separated from the service. Branded forever onto his left retina was a small blind spot. When an eye doctor from Brooklyn, New York, examined the young man’s eyes two years later, he discovered something astonishing: The blind spot resembled an “inverted mushroom.”

Long before the inverted mushroom appeared on the young lieutenant’s eye, scientists had been concerned about the flash from the atomic bomb. At Trinity, observers had been cautioned to wait a few seconds before looking at the fireball through pieces of dark welder’s glass. Everyone heeded the instructions except Richard P. Feynman, the future Nobel laureate.
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Feynman climbed into a truck, reasoning that the windshield would protect his eyes from the harmful rays. “I’m probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye,” he later wrote.
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One historian said Feynman was temporarily blinded, but Feynman doesn’t mention such a problem in his autobiography.

Radiation emitted by the cyclotron and other sources were also extremely damaging to the eye. Early in his tenure at the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine, Shield Warren was confronted with the unsettling news that cyclotron workers were developing cataracts at an alarming rate. “Calls about cyclotron eyes,” he jotted in his diary December 19, 1948. The eyes of eleven scientists were examined.
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Three had very severe cataracts, four had mild ones, and four had none. The findings prompted the AEC to begin a preliminary investigation of 1,000 people in Hiroshima who were believed to have been within 3,000 feet of the hypocenter. Forty “certain” cases of radiation cataracts and an additional forty “suspected” cases were found.
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Military leaders had grave concerns about the effects of the atomic flash on soldiers and airmen. How could soldiers fight wars if the enemy’s A-bombs blinded them? How could pilots fly? “Should the central vision of a soldier or airman be temporarily disabled and the visual acuity reduced below 20/400, he becomes useless as a fighting man and easy prey to the enemy and potentially a danger to his own forces,” a document declassified by Los Alamos in 1995 states.
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Like all light, the energy from an atomic flash passes through the lens of the eye, where it is projected in an upside-down image on the retina, a layer of tissue at the back of the eyeball. The retina, which acts much like a piece of film, contains the rods and cones that turn light into an electrical impulse that is then carried to the brain by the optic nerve. Because of the focusing ability of the eye, retinal burns occurred at far greater distances from Ground Zero than skin burns. William Jay Brady, the scientist who worked at the Nevada Test Site for many years, said he was injured twice by the flash from atom bombs. His eyes felt like they had sand in them for the first two weeks or so. Then “floaters” or black spots, appeared in his vision, which remain to this day.

The “flashblindness” experiments began almost simultaneously with the first atomic maneuvers in the fall of 1951 and were conducted through at least 1962. They continued even after the military officers and their scientific colleagues knew with certainty that the flash from the atomic bomb could cause permanent eye damage and even blindness.
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The Air Force School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, today known as the School of Aerospace Medicine, was the lead investigator in the early experiments. Scientists at the school were particularly interested in the effects of flashblindness because one of its most renowned scientists, Hubertus “Strugi” Strughold, had suffered a retinal burn during an eclipse. “That’s the thing that gave us curiosity,” recalled retired Air Force Colonel John Pickering, who joined the school in the 1940s and subsequently became director of medical research.
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As it happens, Strughold was a German scientist who had directed the Third Reich’s Aeromedical Research Institute in Berlin during World War II. He was brought to the School of Aviation Medicine in 1947 under the auspices of a controversial project that became known as Operation Paperclip. Hundreds of German scientists were imported into the United States, courtesy of Operation Paperclip and its related programs, to work on scientific and industrial projects. Many of the foreign scientists, including Strughold, were alleged to have had connections with the Nazi Party. Some were accused of participating in the human experiments conducted in the concentration camps. Strughold, who died in 1986 in San Antonio, repeatedly denied that he had any connection to the Nazi Party or the concentration camp experiments. But a 1947 intelligence assessment report on Strughold observed, “His successful career under Hitler would seem to indicate that he must be in full accord with Nazism.”
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Scientific reports and personnel records on file at the National Archives show that at least three Paperclip scientists—Heinrich Rose,
Paul A. Cibis, and Konrad Buettner—were involved in flashblindness research at the School of Aviation Medicine.

Heinrich Rose, a diminutive scientist with blond hair and blue eyes, worked for Strughold when he was in the Luftwaffe from 1939 to 1945. He was an expert in visual acuity, night vision, and depth perception, all problems of vital concern to the U.S. Air Force.
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According to intelligence reports, Rose was a member of the Nazi Storm Troopers from 1933 to 1935 and achieved the rank of
Sanitatsoberscharfuhrer,
or “sanitary red cross corporal.”
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A denazification court in Heidelberg, Germany, classified him as a “follower” after the war and fined him 500 Reichmarks.

But in an affidavit for an immigrant visa, Rose stated that he had been urged to join the Storm Troopers by the local party leader in Berlin who was also his supervisor at the hospital where he was doing an internship. “While a member of the SA [Storm Troopers], I did not participate in any other activities than in those of a medical nature,” he wrote.
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According to a security report prepared by U.S. Office of the Military Government, Rose was a member of the Nazi Party from 1937 to 1945. But Rose said in an affidavit he was not a party member, and no records were found indicating party membership.
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The Air Force awarded Rose the Exceptional Service Award, its highest civilian honor, ten years after his arrival in the United States for his studies on visual aids in aircraft landings, depth perception, night-vision training for pilots, and flash-blindness arising from atomic bomb explosions.
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Paul Cibis, whose last name also appears as “Zibis” on some military records, was brought to the United States some time after 1949. Cibis was “especially qualified in the field of time relationships and vision,” wrote Walter Agee, a brigadier general working in the Air Force’s Directorate of Intelligence.
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“His services are also desired in connection with studies in relation to the recognition and identification of aircraft flying at supersonic speeds. Dr. Zibis is further qualified in studies on the adaptation to darkness and has recently published a paper of fundamental importance in this field.”

Konrad Buettner, a slender, serious-looking scientist with a ruddy complexion and brown hair, arrived in the United States in June 1947. His records state that he was a member of the Nazi Storm Troopers from 1934 to 1938, the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1939, and a major in the Luftwaffe from 1939 to 1945. At the height of the war, he was involved in experiments studying the pressure changes on pilots pulling in and out of dives and the “climatization” of airplane cabins and cockpits.
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Buettner, who eventually moved on to the University of Washington in Seattle, said he joined the Storm Troopers and the Nazi Party “under pressure” from party organizations.
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He said he was expelled from the Storm Troopers and resigned from the Nazi Party. “When invited to reenter the party during the war, I declined,” he stated in an affidavit for an immigrant visa.

One of Buettner’s colleagues described him as a dedicated scientist who cared little for “material advantages.”
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But another remembered his “very elegant dwelling” and how he “paid all the expenses for social festivities among his circle of friends.”
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A security report states that Buettner was not in “sympathy with Nazism but of necessity maintained a discreet silence.”
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From 1931 to 1947 Buettner, a meteorologist, conducted experiments at the University of Kiel on the effects of heat, cold, and moisture on human beings. According to Buettner’s personnel records, his research included “Experiments with human beings in Arctic (Norway), subtropic (Sahara), and tropic (Bel. Congo), climate, climatic chambers and in aircraft.
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Erythema and solar-ultraviolet aerosol and static electricity (dust, fog, and salt crystals.)”

Buettner was assigned to two projects when he arrived at the School of Aviation Medicine. One involved the development of clothing and goggles to protect against intense heat. The second was the “correlation of skin temperature with pain threshold of skin.”
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Part of the second project involved determining how “White and Colored Human Skin” would react to the atomic flash. For his experimental subjects, he used pigs because their skin behaves like human skin.

Focusing an intense beam of light on the black skin of young anesthetized pigs, Buettner observed that “blisters began to rise after 2.2 seconds, and they exploded with a light popping noise after 4 seconds.” When the beam of light was aimed at the white skin on the same pig, Buettner found no signs of blistering even after ten seconds. “Its significance in civil defense,” he said of the finding, “is obvious when one considers the close microscopic similarity of black pig and heavily pigmented human skin.”
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The first flashblindness experiment took place during the 1951 Buster-Jangle series. Approximately twenty-five volunteers watched the blast from a C-54 aircraft nine miles from Ground Zero.
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Some subjects wore goggles; others were given no eye protection. The initial study concluded
that air crews who witnessed atomic detonations during daylight did not suffer any “serious visual handicap.”

During the 1952 Tumbler-Snapper test series, the armed forces wanted to conduct flashblindness experiments at night in order to “determine accurately what temporary or permanent effect the flash of an atomic explosion has on the human eye.”
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The AEC, which had demanded a written release from the military during the first experiment, had reservations about the second but eventually agreed to the military’s demands.
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A light-tight trailer was constructed and hauled to a location ten miles from Ground Zero.
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With twelve portholes punched into one side, the trailer bore a crazy resemblance to an oceangoing vessel that somehow had washed up on the Nevada desert. Inside the trailer, twelve stools on runners were positioned in front of the portholes. Directly behind the stools were visual charts, aircraft instruments, and other devices designed to measure the visual acuity of the test subjects after they witnessed the flash.

The portholes were fitted with shutters that exposed the left eye of each subject to the detonation. Half the subjects wore protective goggles while the other half did not. “The shutters remained open 2 seconds which allowed maximum bleaching of the retina and then the shutters closed.”
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The experimental subjects then turned on their stools and attempted to operate the aircraft instruments.

The experiment was aborted after two shots when two men developed retinal burns. Air Force Colonel Victor Byrnes stated in a formerly classified report that both men had “completely recovered.”
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But a scientific paper published three years later suggests that wasn’t the case.
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That article disclosed that five of six people who suffered eye injuries from watching atomic blasts had developed a permanent blind spot or scar tissue. “Consequently, we assume that in these areas visual function is permanently destroyed,” the authors wrote.
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