Part 8 (2/2)

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 partic.i.p.ated in the occupation of j.a.pan 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: creates the unmistakable impression that exposure to low-level ionizing radiation is a significant health hazard when scientific and medical evidence simply does not support that contention.28 This mistaken impression has the potential to be seriously damaging to every aspect of the Department of Defenseas nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion programs. The legislation could adversely affect our relations with our European allies, impact upon the civilian nuclear power industry, and raise questions regarding the use of radioactive substances in medical diagnosis and treatment.

According to doc.u.ments 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 areconstructa 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 soldieras 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.29 Scientist William Jay Brady said the internal dose estimates developed by Science Applications are based on incorrect a.s.sumptions. The contractor used the amount of radiation delivered to the bone to decide whether an internal dose reconstruction was necessary, but most veterans who partic.i.p.ated in the Nevada tests received the largest doses of radiation to their lungs and lymph nodes from inhaling the so-called hot particles that s.h.i.+elds Warren and others were so worried about. In testimony submitted to Congress in 1996, Brady said that many of the internal organ doses awere in the hundreds or thousands of rads, certainly high enough to cause concern regarding incidence of radiogenic as well as nonradiogenic disease.a30

28.

CITIZEN VOLUNTEERS.

The military maneuvers at the Nevada Test Site captured the nationas imagination. Letters poured into Was.h.i.+ngton, 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: aThe 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.1 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.a The following are excerpts from some of those letters: Dear Sirs: Please inform me how to apply for a job in the experimental department (guinea pig). Yours truly, Walter, East Liverpool, Ohio, April 6, 1953.

War Dept., Army, Pentagon Building: If you would like a guinea pig for the next A explosiona”Iam your boy. Jacob, Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., no date.

Dear President Eisenhower: I hope you donat think Iam crazy. But I am offering myself to be used as a aguinea piga to an atomic bomb blast.a P.S. My age is 13. Gary, Carlsbad, N.M., June 8, 1953.

Dear Sir:aWith all of these tests that are being made with the atomic bomb would you have any need for a live human to be placed in the target area where you make the tests? If you do, I would like to be that person. Clarence, Minneapolis, Minn., July 20, 1953.

Dear AEC chairman: Was greatly disappointed that you did not acknowledge my letter dated March 25th in which I volunteered to expose myself in the next atom blast. I am as anxious as the government to learn the biomedical effects from an atomic blast. Robert, Beloit, Wis., April 6, 1953.

Sirs: You are experimenting these days with human beings near atom bomb blasts. Will you let me be one of your human guinea pigs? a I will not be aat homea to newspapermen or anyone wanting to play up my volunteering to be a human guinea pig.a I will also volunteer to be a pa.s.senger on a rocket being sent into the stratosphere, or for any other dangerous mission anywhere on earth. Lloyd, Indianapolis, Ind., March 26, 1953.

Gentlemen:aI have been wondering exactly how close a human being can be to an exploding atomic bomb, absorb its effects (radiation) vibrations, etc. and still live. I suppose you might have wondered, too! a I also suppose it would benefit mankind a great deal to know how much the human being can take and what can be done for him (if anything) after its effects. That, to me, sounds like a real experiment you, too, may like to find out. If you are further interested, I may be your aguinea pig.a Ernest, no address, Aug. 8, 1953.

29.

THE CLOUD SAMPLERS.

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.1 The column was twenty miles wide and 45,000 feet high.2 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 worldas first thermonuclear detonation.

It was the morning of November 1, 1952, in the Pacific Proving Ground, October 31 in the United Statesa”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.3 The apparition, shockingly incongruous in the middle of the tropical mildness, was aMike,a 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 amonster,a declared an Air Force historian a decade later.

The four pilots were members of the aRed Team,a 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 aWhitea and aBluea 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 partic.i.p.ated 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. (aA dingaling but a brillant one,a retired cloud sampler William Wright described him.)4 As the men listened intently, Plank reviewed the shot with them, but no onea”not even Planka”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 c.o.c.kpits. 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 partic.i.p.ants 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 aone hour after Ha hour,a they split into pairs. Virgil Meroney and Captain Brenner were the first to fly into Mikeas 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.5 When the head of the cloud moved off, a 1963 decla.s.sified 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.6 It took Meroney and his teammate about fifteen minutes to make contact with the roiling column of mud and water. aWhen he reached the cloud, Colonel Meroney was in for a busy time,a the Air Force history reported.7 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 aradiation over one roentgen in intensity.a Wrote the Air Force history: Inside the cloud Colonel Meroney was impressed with the color.8 It cast a dull red glow over the c.o.c.kpit. His radiation instruments all ahit the peg.a The hand on the integron, which showed the rate at which radioactivity was being acc.u.mulated aa went around like the sweep second hand on a watch a and I had thought it would barely move!a the colonel reported. With aeverything on the pega and the red glow like the inside of a red hot furnace, Colonel Meroney made a 90-degree turn and left the cloud. He had spent about five minutes in radiation over one roentgen intensity.

The aradiation over one-roentgen intensitya 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 planeas 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, aI am O.K. and the aircraft is O.K. except it flies as if my flaps are dragging.a 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 Robinsonas 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 decla.s.sified 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.9 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 asoupa 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 Robinsonas aircraft picked up the beacon. The spinout in the cloud and the climb back up to alt.i.tude 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 Robinsonas 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 aflamed out.a At 10,000 feet he was given steering instructions to the runway. At 3,000 feet Robinson radioed the tower and said that he couldnat 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, aIam bailing out.a Donald Foss, the helicopter pilot, spotted Jimmy Robinsonas 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 a.s.sumed 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 agreat deal of forcea 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 Robinsonas 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.10 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.11 The small coral island of Elugelab and Jimmy P. Robinson were gone.

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 amiserable thinga that could be gotten to battle only by aox cart.a12 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 leaderas 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 agently and irregularly moving vessel.a13 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 awas the motion of my own hand rather than the signal from the first hydrogen bomb.aa14 Back in the United States that evening, there were phone calls, telegrams, whispers of congratulations following Mikeas successful detonation. Officials in the State Department, Pentagon, and White House immediately began discussing ahow to take psychological advantage of this tremendous stride in weapons development,a wrote Kenneth Nichols, the Army officer who directed the Manhattan Projectas daily operations and went on to become the Pentagonas 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: aIt 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.a Of the thousands of enlisted personnel who partic.i.p.ated in Americaas 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 pa.s.sed through a radioactive cloud, the pilot opened the valves to the tanks, allowing the debris to acc.u.mulate 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 a.n.a.lysis. As Robinsonas 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 asimply overwhelmeda”so badly that they could not function satisfactorilya”by the awesomeness of the cloud interior,a recalled Los Alamos scientist Paul Guthals.18 One officer, he remembered: volunteered to get an early sample (H + 45 minutes). It was his first sampling mission.19 As he entered the cloud, he, in a normal voice, reported an aRa reading of 30. In rapid succession his aRa reading reports came over the radioa”each report higher in radiation intensity and each report in a voice of higher pitch. As his instruments pa.s.sed 100 roentgens per hour readings, his voice was pitched so high that it didnat seem possible that a man was transmitting.

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 amust maintain a minimum distance from the detonation in order to avoid radiation.a20 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 a.n.a.lyzed in order to help its creators determine what happened in the first milliseconds of the bombas birth. Louis Hempelmann had talked avery seriouslya with Fermi about the potential exposure, Stafford Warren remembered. aAs I recall, he would not wear a film badge; but he took along a meter and in he went a he came back later with the statement that head gotten a little bit but not very much.22 He never said how much or how long he was in there.a 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 pa.s.s 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 aill effects.a24 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-gla.s.s vest covering the sides and front of the men replaced the shroud, and the c.o.c.kpits were lined with thin sheets of lead.25 Film badges were placed on the pilots and scattered throughout the c.o.c.kpit. The aircraft also were equipped with several other devices that measured radiation. The pilots kept a close watch on an instrument called an aintegron,a which measured the c.u.mulative amount of radiation they were absorbing.

The samplers donned rose-colored gla.s.ses to help them hunt down the shapes of mushroom clouds.26 Eventually the gla.s.ses were replaced with face s.h.i.+elds embedded with gold dust. Langdon Harrison, a retired sampler pilot, said the gold face s.h.i.+elds 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 Alamosas 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. aIts 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.a 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: aNeeded for planning purposes was an aoptimum timea 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.a29 One Los Alamos official said the preplanning was so well done that the pilotsa doses were known before the mission started. aThe 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.a30 Other doc.u.ments, 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. Mikeas 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: aA scarcity of information on the dimensions of, and radiation intensity in clouds, from megaton devices at operational alt.i.tudes for times up to one hour after detonation made athe prediction of air crew radiation doses in transit through such clouds questionable.a a31 During most of the atmospheric testing period, the AEC limited the apermissible dosesa 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 partic.i.p.ant 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 aAs a result a radiation flux or ac.o.c.kpita radiation background existed within the interior of a sampling aircraft after its departure from the cloud,a the Air Force history stated.36 aWhile returning to base the pilot received additional radiation exposure.a When the planes landed, special forklifts were rolled up so that the pilots could step from their c.o.c.kpits onto the platform and be rolled away without touching the sides of the planes.37 Air Force officials, embarra.s.sed when visitors saw the pilots being wheeled away on platforms, eventually tried to do away with the forklifts. aThose aircraft never calmed down completely for 10 or 20 years,a 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 th

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