After World War II, mammoth military expeditions were mounted to conduct the first postwar atomic bomb tests. The highly publicized explosions, on atolls in the Marshall Islands 9,000 miles west of California, took months to assemble.
But the Pacific sites had many drawbacks. Whimsical winds made it difficult to predict the paths of fallout. Logistical problems were frustrating, and Pentagon officials complained about the exorbitant costs.Norris Bradbury, the new director of the Los Alamos laboratory, and his bomb testers had begun agitating for a continental proving ground before the Soviet Union surprised the world by detonating its first nuclear weapon in 1949. In response, the Atomic Energy Commission authorized a clandestine survey of possible U.S. sites: the North Carolina coast; Camp LeJeune, N.C.; Texas' Padre Island; New Mexico; Dugway, Utah; the Point Barrow area in Alaska; and central Nevada.
The area that emerged as Bradbury's first choice was the Nevada range. The commander was exhilarated that such an ideal site existed. The surrounding pop-ula-tions were small. It was close to sources of technical supply. It was 75 miles from Las Vegas. Accessible by air. Accessible by road. And, he said, "One could have more effective diagnostic tests there than any place you could imagine, and do it safely."
In the surreptitious tradition of postwar nuclear policy, the Las Vegas site was selected and ratified by President Truman, with no public discussion or consultations with governors or Congress. In a press release, the AEC announced it would begin exploding A-bombs in Nevada in three weeks. The press release assured the testing would be conducted with "adequate assurance of safety."
This press release displayed the cavalier attitude toward public health concerns that subsequently dominated the outlook of Bradbury, his Los Alamos associates and the AEC. This announcement, with its implication that protecting civilians from radiation harm would be a paramount concern, marked the beginning of a decades-long policy of public deception that later provoked Los Alamos scientist George Kistiakowsky to denounce the atomic bureaucracy as "the most arrogant and contemptuous" of all the nation's federal agencies.
When civilians who lived downwind from the Nevada test site began complaining that they had been exposed to harmful amounts of radiation and that their children were dying of leukemia, Bradbury and his associates mounted an assiduous public relations campaign to counter such complaints and to reassure the public that stringent safety precautions were being followed.
But there is unmistakable evidence that Bradbury knew that those living downwind were being exposed to serious health hazards.
Quick and dirty testing
Bradbury's bomb testers were so excited by the prospect of having a backyard test site that their assessment of the health hazards was superficial. The Los Alamos com-mittee of meteorologists and senior atomic scientists who performed this crucial study in the summer of 1950 readily concluded that the fallout they would "throw" on the ranches and small towns east and north of the test site would not cause serious harm.
At least one scientist who participated in this exercise was uneasy about the outcome. Enrico Fermi said that "our conclusions should stress the extreme uncertainty of the elements we had to go on." Worried by the gung-ho attitude of the laboratory's leaders, Fermi urged that civilians downwind should be warned to stay inside and take showers after the fallout was gone.
Underscoring the reckless haste of the bomb testers is the fact that they made their off-site safety decisions with a minimum of input from their colleagues in the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine. The director of that division, Dr. Shields Warren, was internationally recognized for studies concerning the impact of radiation on the human body. But he was deliberately excluded from the 1950 study.
During my July 1979 conversation at the Boston Radiation Laboratory that bore his name, Warren said it was a serious mistake for the Los Alamos scientists to assume that the only risks to the civilians involved external exposures to fallout.
Warren noted that the close-to-the-land lifestyle of the downwind families made them "especially vulnerable" to doses of radiation that would be inhaled in the out-of-doors or ingested through home-grown foods. In such a pastoral setting, he observed, it should have been taken into account that most of the residents ate vegetables and fruit grown in their gardens and orchards. If people milked their own cows and consumed mutton and beef from animals that foraged in the region's pastures, he said, the risks of "radiation effects" would be elevated.
By 1951, the first phase of the atomic age was history, and Warren and his colleagues had developed wide-ranging insights about the health hazards associated with exposures to radiation.
Once the new test site was in operation, this vital medical knowledge was shunted aside when the bomb testers decided to proceed on the assumption that the level of fallout they had deemed permissible wouldn't harm the offsite civilians. This attitude disturbed Warren, but his anxieties were partially alleviated by assurances that all of the big bombs would be in the Pacific and only a "relatively few" small bombs would be detonated at the Nevada site.
But in the spring of 1952, when four Hiroshima-size bombs scooped up huge quantities of earth that precipitated large loads of fresh fallout onto ranches and towns in Nevada and Utah, Warren minced no words when he told the AEC that the United States cannot risk any continental aboveground shots larger than the "Easy" shot, which was the equivalent of 12 kilotons of TNT. (Hiroshima was 13 kilotons.)
Big bombs and their victims
This was the crucial turning point for continental testing. When the AEC elected to ignore Warren's warning and subsequently approved the detonation of more bombs that had five times the power of the Hiroshima explosion, they set a course that sacrificed innocent civilians on the altar of fast-track bomb testing. It produced a series of tests the next year, code-named Upshot-Knothole, that were the dirtiest ever conducted in Nevada.
The Upshot-Knothole tests were, by far, the most reckless ever conducted at the Nevada test site. This series included five shots that vaporized tons of earth and exceeded the yield of the Easy explosion. The bombs were placed on 300-foot aluminum towers, and the most powerful, the 43-kiloton "Simon" blast on April 25, 1953, threw so much debris into the jetstream that 12 hours later a thunderstorm rained dangerous levels of radiation onto Troy, N.Y. Fallout in mid-May from the second largest, the 32-kiloton Harry shot, created a fearful moment for Bradbury's test managers when the radioactive cloud it generated hovered amid rain clouds over St. George, the largest city in the "relatively uninhabited" downwind zone. Had a rainstorm occurred, one expert later calculated it could have "killed half or all of the people in town."
During the Upshot-Knothole series, there were widespread reports that men, women and children sustained burns on exposed parts of their bodies. The AEC's radiologists were aware that this meant the individuals harmed had been exposed, in a single incident, to extremely huge doses of beta radiation.
At the tiny mining town of Tempiute, Nev., 50 miles from ground zero, Marjorie Perchet and two young girls, Theryl Stewart and Silva Ann Hines - all of whom subsequently succumbed to cancer - reported their injuries to an AEC monitor. About 160 miles northeast, on 13,061-foot Mount Wheeler, four sheepmen (brothers George, Dick, and Arlo Swallow, and Lee Whitlock) sustained facial burns that "extended up under their hats" and experienced "terrific headaches" for two days after the fallout cloud passed by their camp. And the afternoon of the Harry shot, while prospecting at a mine 50 miles east of St George, E.H. Ellett and Byron Davis and their wives had similar symptoms, along with nausea and vomiting.
There were other beta-burn victims, many in remote areas: Among them was Don Schmutz, a farmer who was working in his field near St. George as the Harry cloud hovered; a St. George woman, Aileen Anderson, who tilled her garden and did her laundry in the outdoors the same morning; a young woman, Nevada Judd, who walked through a moist alfalfa field and suffered a burn on her leg; and Elmer Jackson, a Kanab rancher who sustained severe burns on his face.
Combined with the sudden deaths of more than 5,000 sheep that were eating radiation-laden grass in downwind pastures, the stories of the beta-burn victims should have compelled the AEC to heed the warning Warren had made a year earlier.
The Big Lie
The classic cover-up the AEC launched in the summer of 1953 evolved into the most long-lived program of public deception in U.S. history. The flow of false information it produced created a cancerlike environment in which each lie generated additional misconduct and lies.
Masterminding the AEC cover-up was Gordon Dunning, who was listed as a low-level "rad-safe" official in the Division of Biology and Medicine, but who was actually clothed with authority to manage and suppress information.
The macabre mischief wrought by Dunning can best be illustrated by analyzing what happened in and around St. George during the infamous Harry shot. Monitors took over 20 actual measurements of the radioactive dust that fell in the narrow valley of the Virgin River. But Dunning's mathematical convolutions, a godsend to the nuclear-bomb testers, made the cumulative impact of radiation disappear.
In 1955, as the next series of tests got under way in Nevada, Dunning was assigned the task of selling the AEC's safety gospel to the American people. He consistently told the public that the tests were being monitored adequately and that the danger to health was negligible.
The distortions and misrepresentations of this period fostered a bias at the AEC that made covering up unwanted evidence a way of life and led the agency into a mode of operation that stifled internal debates about medical risks or better safety programs. This mind-set precluded the bomb testers from evacuating communities in the path of hazardous clouds, or to consider instructing the down-winders about steps they could take to minimize the impacts of radiation on their health.
The term "Big Lie" was coined this century to describe a tissue of lies that are, by design and by constant and shameless repetition, transformed into a paramount "truth" that governs the thoughts and actions of an organization. After the Upshot-Knothole tests, the AEC became the promoter - and the prisoner - of a Big Lie when a party line was established that the Nevada fallout was too meager to cause harm.
However, as is so often the case with a Big Lie, those who were both the first and most persuaded were the perpetrators themselves. Thus the AEC experts' self-imposed blinders prevented them from observing that the leukemia victims represented a revealing cross-section of the children living in the downwind zone. The victims' ages ranged from 3 to 15, and the towns where their families lived suggested that all sectors of this zone were being affected by fallout. Six-year old Martin Bardoli, for example, lived on a Nevada ranch 70 miles north of the test site. Arlene Hafen, 15 when her life was cut short, lived in St. George. Daryl Fox, stricken at age 3, lived at the gateway to Zion National Park. Lucille Jones, 9, lived in Parowan.
This was only the beginning of a trail of tears for the downwind communities. In a five-year span between 1956 and 1961, 14 children age 15 or under were victims of leukemia, which, in that era, killed every child afflicted with it.
By immobiling its experts and prohibiting research, the AEC's Big Lie produced an ironic, macabre outcome for atomic science and for modern medicine: the agency that carried the banner of a new age of science arbitrarily decided to restrict vital inquiries by its own scientists.
But the atomic establishment was to pay a high price in 1979, when Congress secured the declassification of secret files that revealed the stratagems the AEC had used to conceal the truth.
One of the biggest ironies revealed concerned Bradbury, who had to decide personally whether his agency's no-danger dogma was fact or fiction. In 1962, Bradbury's son, a park ranger, lived near Zion with his pregnant wife and 2-year-old son.
Bradbury surely knew that small children - especially unborn ones in utero - were most vulnerable to radiation. As a result, he made a special trip to Zion to take actions to protect his grandchildren.
Norris Bradbury behaved as a concerned grandparent should have. But his secret actions to protect his family are evidence that the bomb testers knew the downwinders faced dangers and thus knew that they were actors in a tragedy whose script was being dictated by a Big Lie.