Strange Glow

by Timothy J Jorgensen

  It’s been said that the first casualty of war is the truth.38 This was exactly the case following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese military officials ordered Tokyo newspapers to downplay the bombings. After the bombing of Hiroshima, the Tokyo daily Asahi ended a general story about recent American bombing raids with the single sentence regarding Hiroshima: “It seems that some damage was caused to the city and its vicinity.”39 Furthermore, the American occupation authority, under orders from General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), censored all information related to the nature of the bombs, leaving the Japanese population with no information.40 Even John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, which described the victims’ plight in graphic detail, was not published in Japanese until 1949, three years after it was published in America, and four years after the bombing. This paucity of credible information spawned some fantastic rumors among the bomb victims about the nature of the bombs. Some initially thought, because of the bomb’s brightness, that magnesium (the flash power once used by portrait photographers) had been sprayed over the city and then ignited. Others thought the bomb was an enormous “bread basket”—a self-scattering cluster of conventional bombs.

  Despite all the false rumors and lack of official information, most of the bomb’s survivors soon learned what had actually happened to them, even if they got the details a bit muddled. One woman offered a description: “The atom bomb is the size of a matchbox. The heat of it is six thousand times that of the sun. It explodes in the air. There is some radium in it. I don’t know just how it works, but when the radium is put together, it explodes.”41 That about says it all.

  THE SILENT CASUALTIES

  It is an odd fact that, for all the focus on radiation emitted from atomic bombs, radiation constitutes their smallest energy output. In a typical atomic bomb, fully 50% of the energy goes into the shock wave and 35% into heat, leaving only 15% emitted as radiation.42 It is the combined shock wave and fire that account for most of the lives lost. The rings of devastation around ground zero are primarily the overlapping of the shockwave damage with the firestorm damage, leaving only people who happened to be outside this area, in the minimally damaged fringe zone, vulnerable to radiation effects. In the case of Hiroshima victims, it was largely the irradiated people from this fringe zone who lived to tell their stories. Consequently, the human experiences of the atomic bombing were related through their perspective, with eyes that mainly saw the radiation effects. We have heard nothing from the shock wave and firestorm victims who didn’t live to tell their tales. Doubtless, they would have told a completely different story about how atomic bombs affect health.

  Ironically, radiation emitted from ground zero becomes even less important as the kilotonnage of atomic bombs increases. At bomb sizes even slightly larger than Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s (15 and 21 kilotons, respectively), the radii for shock wave and burn deaths increase to distances beyond the radius for radiation deaths.43 This means that every person who receives a significant radiation dose is also simultaneously cremated. It’s a sad fact that, for bombs greater than 50 kilotons, no one dies from the blast radiation. But as far as the health effects of the radioactivity released by these king-sized nuclear bombs go, that’s quite another story.

  CHAPTER 8

  SNOW WARNING: RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT

  [My body] is radium. If I should strip off my skin the world would vanish away in a flash of flame and a puff of smoke, and the remnants of the extinguished moon would sift down through space, a mere snow-shower of gray ashes!

  —The Devil, in Mark Twain’s short story Sold to Satan (1904)

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  —T. S. Elliot, The Waste Land (1922)

  NEPTUNE’S WRATH

  The fishing vessel Lucky Dragon No. 5 had left its homeport of Yaizu, Japan, in January 1954, with a crew of 23 fishermen onboard. It was the beginning of a very long offshore fishing voyage that placed the boat about 80 miles (129 kilometers) east of Bikini Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, just north of the equator, in the early morning hours of March 1. As the men worked their baited lines, the sun rose over the vast expanse of ocean to the east. But before the sun had the chance to fully brighten the sky, a flash of light appeared over the western horizon, far outshining the sun. Minutes later there was a roar louder than any thunder the crewmen had ever heard. Shortly after that it began to snow. However, the “snow” turned out to be a coarse powder that sprinkled down on their boat for hours. “We had no sense that it was dangerous. It wasn’t hot. It had no odor. I took a lick; it was gritty but had no taste,” recalled crew member Matashichi Ōishi.1

  By the time the Lucky Dragon No. 5 returned to Yaizu with its catch two weeks later (March 14), the fishermen were already experiencing the symptoms of radiation sickness.2 Nevertheless, they managed to unload their fish and take them to market.

  Once the fish were sold, the fishermen sought medical help. After hearing their story and witnessing their symptoms, it wasn’t hard for doctors to diagnose radiation sickness. The story quickly hit the news media, and the radioactive fishermen were the front-page news of every major newspaper in the world.

  When word got out about the radioactive fishing boat, the catch had already reached the regional fish markets. Yashushi Nishiwaki, a young biophysicist living in Osaka, heard the news, grabbed his Geiger counter, and headed down to his local fish market. All the tuna in the market were heavily contaminated with radioactivity. The news about contaminated tuna in the outlying markets hit the press and widespread panic ensued, as public health officials tried to retrieve all the contaminated fish from the various markets.3 Meanwhile, local fish sellers bought up all the available Geiger counters so that they could demonstrate to their customers that their particular catch was not contaminated and was safe to eat. But it was a hard sell. Then fish sales collapsed totally when it was reported that Emperor Hirohito had stopped eating fish. With no customers, the Tokyo fish market was forced to close until all the radioactive fish were recovered.4

  What the fishing crew had inadvertently witnessed was the United States’ second test of a new breed of nuclear weapon that was based on fusion of atomic nuclei, rather than fission. This new type of bomb was called a hydrogen bomb.5 The name comes from the fusion reaction between isotopes of hydrogen, which is the source of the bomb’s energy.6 Problematically, hydrogen atoms don’t like to fuse, so it takes a lot of input energy to force them together. Nevertheless, once they do fuse, the output energy they then release is enormous, much greater than the input amount. The net result is a massive explosion.

  The energy barrier for fusing atoms is so great that fusion does not occur naturally on Earth. Only the sun has high enough temperatures for fusion to take place. But nuclear physicists had noticed that fission bombs, like the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, produced temperatures rivaling the sun’s. In that fact, they saw an opportunity to use fission bombs to trigger fusion bombs. So a hydrogen bomb is really a hybrid explosive in which a fission explosion kindles a fusion explosion.

  Fusion bombs release so much more blast energy than fission bombs that it’s hard to comprehend. If the energy of the atomic (fission) bomb detonated over Hiroshima was likened to one page of this book, a hydrogen bomb’s energy would equate to eight full books. For a damage comparison, if a fission bomb like Hiroshima’s (13 kilotons) were dropped on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, it’s likely that the White House would be spared severe damage. In contrast, a large hydrogen bomb (50,000 kilotons) dropped on the Capitol Building would take out all of Washington, DC, and the neighboring city of Baltimore as well.7 If accompanied by winds from the southwest, lethal radioactivity would blanket Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and possibly Bangor, Maine.

  Far from being secret tests, much of the world’s populace had been very familiar with the nuclear bomb testing occurring at Bikini Atoll ever since the first exhibitions of atomic bomb power took place there eight years earlier. Just as Edison had
publicly felled poor Topsy the elephant to indict AC electrical current, and as Rutherford had showcased the dangers of electrical coronas by blowing up a hapless rat, the US military felt it also needed to publicly demonstrate the destructive power of its newly acquired nuclear weaponry. During the summer of 1946, before throngs of reporters, US politicians, and representatives from all the major governments of the world, a 95-vessel fleet of obsolete warships, including American, German, and Japanese vessels, was demolished with an airdropped atomic bomb (June 30), followed a few weeks later by an underwater detonation (July 24).8

  Since 1946, there had been a total of 11 nuclear bomb tests at Bikini and its neighboring atoll Enewetak,9 including ten atomic (fission) bombs and one previous hydrogen (fusion) bomb.10 The March 1, 1954, bomb test that the fishermen had witnessed was the twelfth and largest test of any nuclear bomb to date—a massive hydrogen bomb facetiously nicknamed “Shrimp.” Shrimp delivered a much grander spectacle than the elephant, the rat, or, for that matter, any prior nuclear detonation.11

  Complicating the fishermen’s medical treatment was the fact that, despite repeatedly bathing, they were still heavily contaminated with radioactivity. It was too much for the local hospital to handle, so a plan was hatched to send the patients to Tokyo hospitals, but no commercial trains or planes would transport them. To break the impasse, the United States military sent two C-54 warplanes to Japan to fly the fishermen to Tokyo, where Tokyo University Hospital doctors awaited their arrival.

  The men were admitted to an isolation ward, where they would remain for one year. At first, their main problems were surface burns where the radioactivity had touched their skin. The doctors initially weren’t sure what other health problems to expect since the radiation doses that the men had received were unknown. There were no significant gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, so whole body doses over 5,000 mSv were ruled out. But then, after a couple of weeks, the men’s blood cell counts started to drop precipitously, as would be the case for people receiving doses over 2,000 mSv. Some even had white cell counts below 1,000 per microliter—the threshold that Dr. Sasaki had found to be a portent of death for Hiroshima bomb victims.

  Recognizing the sensitivity of the spermatogonia cells of the testicles to radiation, the doctors measured the men’s sperm counts to get yet another inference as to the radiation dose levels they might have received. Sperm levels were very low, with some men having no detectible sperm at all, suggesting they received doses greater than 3,000 mSv.

  It was apparent that the men were all suffering from the hematopoietic syndrome of radiation sickness, so treatment consisted largely of antibiotics, vitamins, and blood transfusions to ward off death until their bodies could recover their blood producing capabilities. Still, based on the clinical findings, Dr. Masao Tsuzuki of Tokyo University Hospital was not optimistic. He indiscreetly divulged to the inquisitive newspaper journalists his concern that as many as “10% of the 23 crew members may die.”12 As it turned out, all but one survived. On September 23, Aikichi Kuboyama, the boat’s radio operator, died.13 Although his immediate cause of death was ruled liver failure, most likely due to the hepatitis infection he had contracted from contaminated blood transfusions he was known to have received in the hospital, the media asserted it was radiation exposure that had destroyed his liver. But radiation-induced death was unlikely, since the liver is a fairly radiation resistant organ and does not contribute significantly to any of the three lethal radiation illnesses (i.e., GI, CNS, and hematopoietic syndromes, as discussed in chapter 7).

  Although there were no direct measurements of the doses the fishermen received, the clinical findings alone told a fairly accurate story. The symptoms (anemia and low sperm counts, but no GI symptoms) suggested a whole body dose range from 3,000 to 5,000 mSv. In contrast, the skin burns the fishermen experienced were not a good indicator of internal doses, because radioactive fallout delivers much of its dose through beta particle emissions; these have limited ability to penetrate into internal organs. Thus, it would be a mistake to gauge a fallout victim’s whole-body dose based solely on their skin burns, since exposed skin receives a disproportionately higher dose. This may not have been fully understood by the physicians. Radioactivity raining down from the sky was a new twist the doctors weren’t familiar with. Medical experience with high levels of radioactivity thus far had been primarily limited to ingested radium, not nuclear bomb radioisotopes.

  This Japanese fishermen incident was very different from the previous Japanese experience with atomic bombs. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all the radiation sickness was caused by exposure to blast radiation coming from ground zero. Fallout hadn’t been a significant health threat. Now, fallout was the main and only health issue. The fishermen had received no radiation dose from the blast itself.

  Fallout is the term used to describe radioactivity that settles to Earth’s surface from the sky. Most frequently it is caused by the detonation of a nuclear device that spews various radioactive isotopes up into the atmosphere where they combine with bomb debris, dust, or even just water vapor. Sooner or later, it all settles back down to Earth.

  At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the local fallout was minimal because both bombs were detonated above ground level (1,980 and 1,540 feet, respectively).14 Had the bombs been detonated at ground level, they would have kicked up much larger dust clouds and fallout would have been a far greater problem. Instead, the high altitude detonation dispersed the radioactivity into the upper atmosphere where it lingered, thus allowing some time for it to decay, dilute, and dissipate before settling mostly over the Pacific Ocean and away from people. As it turned out, radioactivity readings taken near ground zero just three days following the Hiroshima bombing showed minimal fallout, and it was safe for rescue workers to immediately enter the city and for residents to return to the area. Had significant fallout been present, rescue and reentry might have been considerably postponed until the radioactivity decayed away to less dangerous levels.

  BLAME IT ON THE WEATHER

  “The wind failed to follow the predictions” is the way Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss (1896–1974), chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, explained how the crew of a fishing vessel outside the restricted zone received toxic doses of radioactivity from a US nuclear bomb test. He neglected to mention that the bomb also released more than twice the energy that scientists had predicted: 15,000 KT (15 MT) of TNT, rather than the anticipated 6,000 KT (6 MT). The stronger than expected blast was caused by an error in the theoretical yield calculation made by physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But how could these genius scientists make such a basic mistake as to miscalculate the explosive yield of the fuel? Had Einstein’s E = mc2 failed them?

  The fuel of hydrogen bombs is lithium deuteride. (Deuterium is another name for the nonradioactive isotope, hydrogen-2, which has one proton and one neutron.15) The physicists believed, based on theoretical considerations, that only the lithium-6 isotope of lithium deuteride could support a fusion reaction,16 and that the lithium-7 isotope (approximately 60% of the lithium content) was inert (i.e., an inactive ingredient). They were wrong. The lithium-7 also contributed to the fusion reaction making the bomb’s explosive yield more than twice that expected.17 These two factors—the unreliable wind and the truculent lithium-7—conspired to make Castle Bravo, the code name for the test, one of the most infamous blunders of the US nuclear bomb program.

  At the center of the Castle Bravo debacle was Alvin C. Graves, no stranger to nuclear mishaps. He had been working with Louis Slotin when Slotin’s infamous screwdriver slipped, thereby uniting two halves of a plutonium core and producing criticality. The massively overdosed Slotin and Graves were both afflicted with radiation sickness, but Graves alone recovered and continued working in nuclear bomb research. Graves, like Slotin, had very high tolerance for risk, and he was used to pushing the safety envelope.18 Unfortunately, for Graves, once bitten did not mean twice shy.

  It was Graves who gave the final go ahead for the d
etonation despite deteriorating weather conditions. A change in the prevailing winds had increased the risk of downwind fallout casualties, but mathematical weather models predicted the risk level to still be marginally acceptable. Rather than wait until the wind pattern improved, Graves was willing to take the risk and authorized the test to proceed as planned.

  JUMBO SHRIMP

  Shrimp was a 15,000-kiloton hydrogen bomb. It was, and remains, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested by the United States.19 The bomb was detonated on a platform constructed on a coral reef off of Namu Island, of the Bikini Atoll.20 This atoll is part of the Marshall Islands, a vast chain of remote atoll islands in the central Pacific Ocean. The Bikini Atoll is composed of 23 small islands arranged in circular formation, the largest of which is named Bikini Island. Originally a German possession, the Japanese gained control of the Bikini Atoll during World War I, and the United States took control from the Japanese after their defeat in World War II.

  Because of its remoteness, the United States military had chosen Bikini as a site for nuclear weapons testing,21 and the responsibility of delivering the news to the islanders fell to Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, military governor of the Marshall Islands. Wyatt intercepted the entire community of 167 Bikini islanders as they were leaving church services one Sunday and told them that their island was needed for a project to benefit mankind. Somewhat in awe that the United States would select their humble islands for such an important role in human history, the Bikinians readily acquiesced to the request. “If the United States government and the scientists of the world want to use our island and atoll for furthering development, which with God’s blessing will result in kindness and benefit to all mankind, my people will be pleased to go elsewhere,” was Bikini chieftain King Juda’s response to Wyatt. The military governor thanked him, and likened their exodus to “the children of Israel whom the Lord saved from their enemy and led into the Promised Land.”22