Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  The explosion entirely vaporized the landing craft, no measurable parts of which have ever been found. But it did far more than that. It sank ten ships, including two battleships, an aircraft carrier, and three submarines. Most potently, photographs taken a millisecond or two after the blast reached the surface show a dark stain rising vertically up along the side of the great water column. This stain is believed by analysts to be the entire battleship Arkansas, upended by the enormous blast and seemingly pasted onto the column’s side before being hurled into the maelstrom that followed and then thrust back into the water upside down. This was a mighty battleship, with a displacement of twenty-six thousand tons. To be reduced to a mere stain, a mid-ocean skid mark—with the whole starboard side of her hull, the side that had faced the bomb blast, crushed as if by some monumental hammer blow; and then her ruined self thrown backward into the Pacific mud, with her guns lolling out of their upended casemates like the tongues of the hanged Mussolinis—is a fate few would wish on any ship. Especially not a ship with so proud a heritage as the Arkansas, built in 1910, with service in both world wars, and with Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa among her battle honors. Her sudden annihilation as an almost casually picked-up and tossed-away victim of the supersonic subsea pressure wave from the bomb must have made many an admiral shake his grizzled head.

  The plutonium bomb Helen of Bikini, used in the underwater Baker shot of Operation Crossroads, expelled disastrous quantities of fallout, ending the series. The dark stain at the column’s lower right is said to be the entire battleship USS Arkansas.* [U.S. Department of Defense.]

  There were months of subsequent scientific fascination with this one bomb—a whole conference was convened eight weeks later to deal with the vast amount of data that came from the explosion. Elaborate new atom bomb terms were created: the Wilson Cloud, the slick, the crack, the bubble, the base surge, the cauliflower.

  Geophysicists, unexpectedly, learned something from the explosion that helped solve a near-Pacific problem of old: why the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa had caused a tsunami. It turned out that, unwittingly, the two detonations, the volcano and the atom bomb, somewhat mimicked each other. The A-bomb’s explosion created a huge underwater bubble of fast-expanding gas; and the water displaced by the bubble formed a wave ninety feet high, which then rocketed toward Bikini Island, and was still fifteen feet high when it got there seconds later and picked up ships and tossed them onto the beach with cool impunity and then flooded the entire island.

  Krakatoa’s explosion did much the same thing: the island of the volcano was vaporized; seawater rushed into the white-hot void and then similarly flashed into bubbles of superheated steam, which triggered a surface wave. Big volcanoes are very much larger than anything even nuclear-armed mankind can manufacture. The Krakatoa tsunami killed forty thousand and then spread around the world, being seen and felt ten thousand miles away hours later. Bikini did no such thing.

  But this second Bikini bomb also caused one terrible and entirely foreseeable wrong of which Krakatoa was manifestly not guilty. It spread abroad a vast and deadly amount of radiation. The military had been given due warning that this would happen. Admiral Blandy, who had once famously declared, “I am not an atomic playboy . . . exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim,” was told that this bomb would be much more dangerous than its predecessor. Its plume of radioactive by-products would not be swept away by upper-atmosphere winds, but would be dumped directly into the lagoon, and would contaminate the waters and the shore and any ships that might survive the initial explosion. The scientists said that to go ahead would be foolhardy. But Blandy, who would later celebrate Operation Crossroads with a party whose centerpiece was a cake decorated with a large mushroom cloud, decided to go ahead with the test anyway—and the result was a catastrophe.

  The cloud of falling debris itself produced a considerable amount of radiation, as expected; but as this column was falling back to the sea, a nine-hundred-foot-high wall of mist—the base surge, as it was later called—spread outward from the column and quickly enveloped the surviving ships as it rolled over them. This turned out to be the killer wave, and no one had known it would occur or how dangerous it would be. But it contained the majority of the fission products of the explosion, and though their total mass (three pounds or so, combined with about ten pounds of plutonium left over from the blast) might seem trivial, the substances were so toxic that an immense cleanup operation had to be undertaken, and very, very fast.

  Yet the navy had made no advance contingency plans to do this. The result was an instant panic among the officers, and then sheeplike obedience by thousands of sailors who, wearing in most cases shorts and T-shirts, and using hoses, sprays, mops, and buckets of lye, were landed on each of the intensely radioactive vessels and ordered to clean away the residual material as quickly as they could. Fifty ships promptly set sail into the lagoon with fifteen thousand enlisted men, all soon bent on measuring and cleaning and hosing and decontaminating—and at the same time unwittingly absorbing, in their clothing, on their skin, in their hair, in their lungs, and on everything they subsequently touched, unimaginably excessive amounts of radiation. Plutonium debris was in any case not detectable by Geiger counters, so contamination with this most insidiously dangerous element went unnoticed at first.

  Navy commanders on the spot had been given an impossible task, one that was incredibly perilous and that displayed the cruelest peacetime folly of having well-protected officers ordering wholly unprotected servicemen to perform the most treacherous labor. Pictures show groups of men swabbing the decks as they might have done after a topside dinner party, cheerful and vastly amused. One man said the ships were covered with sand and chunks of coral from the seabed, and he proudly displayed a chunk of rock he planned to take home, then put it in his pocket.

  Though statistics relating to the later fates of these men—specifically, figures showing which of their number died of cancers that could reliably be put down to the Bikini bomb—are muddied, scientists quickly recognized, as the navy brass clearly did not, the terrible potential dangers. As a result, the next scheduled test, Crossroads Charlie, was canceled, and the Crossroads series formally terminated. Admiral Blandy was moved away from the Pacific to command the Atlantic Fleet, where he retired after three more years. He died in 1954.

  But this was by no means the end of Bikini’s nightmare. For one thing, the displaced islanders—by now largely overlooked in the drama of the weapons testing program—were in ever-worsening shape. When Chief Juda returned to Rongerik from the Baker test, and reported with his characteristic innocence that their islands still looked much the same and all the palm trees were still standing, he was addressing a community on the verge of starvation. The supply caches left behind by the Americans had run out; most islanders now survived on thin gruel and barely edible fish; a fire had devastated their main coconut plantation. A visiting Marshall Islander reported that the Bikinian exiles were emaciated, “just skin and bones,” and an American doctor found compelling evidence of real malnutrition.

  The islanders found an unanticipated champion. Harold L. Ickes, who had been Roosevelt’s interior secretary for more than a dozen years, the man who desegregated the national parks and who dedicated Boulder Dam and who was in many ways the personification of the practical implementation of FDR’s New Deal, got involved. By now retired, he was still a formidable champion of the underdog. In late 1947 he wrote a syndicated column decrying the treatment of the Bikini Islanders: “The natives,” he declared, “are actually and literally starving to death.”

  All Washington read Ickes’s essay, and it shocked Truman’s administration into action. The government tried at first to deny responsibility—asserting, untruthfully, that the Bikinians were at fault: “[T]he natives selected Rongerik themselves,” said a statement. “We built them houses, schools and watersheds on that island, and they were perfectly happy initially. Later it developed that the island was not as product
ive as originally expected, and we had to augment their food supply by bringing in food for them.”

  Few bought the lie. So boats and seaplanes were suddenly scrambled, and far away from the White House and the National Press Club, out on a sleepy mid-ocean atoll, an operation commenced that was born out of a sudden sense of national guilt. Scores of bewildered and unhappy Bikinians, most who by now had quite broken faith with the American government, were suddenly being moved again. This time they were shipped more than two hundred fifty miles to the south, to the great base atoll of Kwajalein, where they were put up in tents set up in lines along the huge airstrip.

  It was noisy, busy, frightening, a world far removed from their isolated life up on a detached coral chain, far distant from a culture that had been based for hundreds of years on the stark simplicity of lagoon fishing. On Kwajalein, then as now a fully functioning American military base, all was stark, and little was simple. There was food and water in abundance. Too much abundance, many say today, since this was where the Bikinians began seriously and lethally to modify their diets, adding Spam, Coca-Cola, white sugar, and flour—and to change their working habits, to become what many regard them as today, participants in a handout culture. Few would dispute that from this moment on, the exiled Bikinians began to change, their native attitudes steadily eroded and diluted as the years away went on: Kwajalein is where the great alteration began to take hold.

  Within months the U.S. government swiftly realized how unsuitable it was for the Bikinians, especially the growing number of newborn children, to be living in tents on a military airstrip. So in November 1948 they were moved for a third time, now to a tiny uninhabited speck in the southern Marshalls called Kili Island, a place that neither was an atoll nor had a lagoon. The island has no harbor, and during high seas a landing can be impossible. Airdrops from military cargo planes have to be arranged still, when sea conditions are too trying. A grass airstrip theoretically allows Air Marshall Islands access, but flights are few and very far between. Nonetheless, Kili is where the Bikinians, now transmuted from unwilling atomic exiles into perpetual atomic nomads, have been based ever since 1948. It now seems they may never go home.

  If this proves to be so, it will be for many reasons—one being the obvious and long-lasting radiological contamination of their home in 1946, in the aftermath of the Crossroads Baker shot. But their exile is also a consequence of their atoll being massively polluted yet again, by the one most disastrous bomb for which Bikini has become most notorious, and which was exploded eight years later, on March 1, 1954: Castle Bravo.

  By this time, the mid-1950s, there was no doubt that the Pacific was the place to test the truly big bombs of the future. On January 19, 1950, President Truman had made his decision. The superbomb, the thermonuclear fusion bomb, was to be made, and tried out—and it was to be employed as a bargaining chip with the Russians. The first prototype, George, had been tested in 1951; a bigger version in 1952. And now this one. The first potentially deliverable American thermonuclear weapon,7 a classic hydrogen bomb, it was code-named Castle Bravo. It remains by far the biggest nuclear weapon ever exploded by the United States, and its enormous and little-anticipated explosive impact resulted from two big mistakes, a combination of a major technical miscalculation and mulish stupidity.

  History has left someone to blame for the error: a brilliant physicist with a curiously interesting stake in the nuclear world. He was named Alvin Cushman Graves, and a previous mistake with fissile material in 1946—a mistake not his own but one that killed the man who made it—very nearly killed him, too. That Graves survived the accident, and then recovered sufficiently to preside over the disastrous 1954 Castle Bravo test, was probably not entirely unconnected with his cavalier, cocksure attitude toward radiation risks from fallout. Such risks, he once famously declared, were “concocted in the minds of weak malingerers.”

  The accident Graves survived was the second of the two lethal accidents that famously involved the Los Alamos lab’s notorious Demon Core. Graves was the man standing just behind Louis Slotin when the pair of three-inch hemispheres of nickel-beryllium-plated plutonium briefly touched each other and a sudden surge of blue light and viciously dangerous radiation flooded the room. Graves was partly shielded by Slotin’s body, but he nevertheless received a sufficiently scalding bath of gamma rays, X-rays, and neutrons to kill him. Few of his doctors thought he would live. He was in the hospital for weeks, briefly lost all his hair, and developed serious neurological and vision problems. But to the amazement of all, he then slowly and steadily got better, ultimately recovering almost totally. Physically at least, there was little scarring, except one small spot of baldness, which he liked to display.

  Infamously disdainful of the supposed dangers of atomic fallout, the nuclear accident survivor Alvin Graves ordered the fateful firing of the Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon, the biggest of all American nuclear tests.* [National Nuclear Security Administration.]

  He eventually became well enough to be appointed—though at this remove, and considering what then happened, it is surely right to wonder at the wisdom of his appointment—scientific director of the Castle series of thermonuclear bomb tests. He swiftly became the most enthusiastic advocate of these new weapons—not least because he was well aware that the Soviet Union’s nuclear program was catching up fast.8 Once he arrived at the Enewetak headquarters of what were now called the Pacific Proving Grounds, he made one thing abundantly clear to his staff: since he had survived the very worst that the atom could throw at him, he would stop at nothing to detonate the Bikini-based fusion device that was now in his care.

  The bomb designated for the Castle Bravo detonation was an innocent-looking steel cylinder fifteen feet long, four feet in diameter. It looked rather like a large propane tank. It had been designed at Los Alamos, where, to suggest its innocence of purpose, it had been given the code-name the Shrimp. It had been shipped in great secrecy—lights off at night, aircraft and destroyers keeping pace with the cargo ship—to Enewetak in February, and was taken by barge to Bikini, with tarpaulin wraps to prevent the unauthorized curious glimpsing its size and shape. There it was suspended from the ceiling of a large shed, called the shot cab, that had been erected on an artificial island built on a reef off Nam Island, at the very northern tip of the atoll. A causeway connected the shot cab with dry land; the wires that would lead to the electronic firing bunker snaked across the sandbanks and coral reefs and past the Bikinians’ now long-abandoned houses, to the tiny sliver of Enyu Island, twenty miles away.

  At the end of February, all staff members were evacuated from Bikini and all ships were removed from the lagoon. Only the firing crew, nine men buried beneath concrete a dozen feet belowground, stayed behind.

  Before the firing button was pressed, there were two serious uncertainties. The first was just how big this bomb would be. The Ivy Mike explosion of sixteen months before had been a thumping ten megatons, spectacular and memorable—and when that bomb blew up, it did so exactly as powerfully as the physicists had predicted. But Castle Bravo was using a solid rather than a liquid source of hydrogen—the hydrogen that would be compressed with such force and heat as to make it undergo fusion, and release the massive amount of energy that would cause the explosion. The solid compound in the new bomb was lithium deuteride, an amalgam of lithium and isotopic hydrogen. And no one knew exactly how much hydrogen it would release, or how big the detonation would be.

  The testers would soon find out. And because of the other uncertainty—over the weather and, more specifically, the direction of the winds on detonation day—a great many others would find out as well.

  For several days before the test date, the winds had been blowing in what was considered an acceptable direction: toward the west, where they would carry any radioactive fallout over an empty expanse of sea. The United States had declared a 57,000-square-mile “danger area” in an official Notice to Mariners, suggesting that craft keep away if possible, but without stating
why. Had matters stayed as they were, the detonation would have caused little obvious harm.

  However, on the night before the planned blast, February 28, the wind began to veer toward the east, away from this designated danger zone. Matters then got worse. As the sun inched up on the morning of the shot, meteorologists started reporting that at upper altitudes a powerful gale was now blowing directly from Bikini and toward the other populated atolls of the Marshalls, most notably in the direction of Rongelap, a hundred miles away, and forty miles farther on toward Rongerik, where the Bikinians had first been sent. On Rongerik there was still an American duty weatherman; he later told the newspapers that the wind, even at sea level, had been blowing directly at his island home from the west—from the direction, in other words, of Bikini, where they were counting down to firing the bomb.

  Alvin Graves was aboard the command ship, the USS Curtiss, a venerable seaplane tender that was well accustomed to bombs, since she had been damaged by and had survived both the Pearl Harbor attacks and then a kamikaze strike in mid-Pacific. And though this bomb was a military device, Graves, the civilian chief of the project, had been given ultimate authority over the army general who was in command of the task force operating the weapon.