The Plutonium Files (49 page)
Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
The injuries should have discouraged further experimentation, but the School of Aviation Medicine forged ahead with even more elaborate preparations for the 1953 Upshot-Knothole tests, the series during which S.H.’s eye was imprinted with the upside-down mushroom. Before the test series began, Heinrich Rose and Konrad Buettner calculated that at night the flash from a twenty-kiloton bomb could produce retinal burns forty miles away. “Due to the concentration of the energy in the image formed on the retina, skin burns and retinal burns follow different laws,” they wrote.
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The light-tight trailer was again used for the experiments. But instead of remaining stationary, it was moved from distances ranging from seven to fourteen miles from Ground Zero. Once again the shutters opened briefly to expose the subjects’ left eyes. But this time the participants viewed the detonations through a double filter that reduced the light transmitted to the retina by 75 percent. Only one person, an officer with darkly pigmented eyes and the initials C.B., sustained a “slight retinal” burn.
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The injury occurred during “Climax,” the largest shot in the Upshot-Knothole series and the largest nuclear weapon detonated in Nevada up to that date. The trailer was seven miles from Ground Zero at the time of the May 31 explosion—the shortest of the distances at which the trailer was deployed.
The School of Aviation Medicine’s John Pickering said he volunteered for one of the experiments and signed a consent form before the study began. “When the time came for ophthalmologists to describe what they thought could or could not happen, and we were asked to sign a consent form, just as you do now in the hospital for surgery, I signed one.
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I’m damned sure everybody in that trailer signed one.”
At the same time the human experiments were being conducted in the trailer, the School of Aviation Medicine was also coordinating a massive flashblindness experiment with rabbits. About 700 rabbits were trucked to the test site and placed in boxes at two, three, five, eight, ten, eighteen, twenty-seven, and forty-two miles from Ground Zero.
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The rabbits’ heads were fixed through openings in the boxes so that they could not look away from the fireball. Moments before the bomb was detonated, alarm clocks woke the animals from their slumber. With their long ears twitching lazily, the rabbits were gazing toward Ground Zero when the searing white light flooded into their eyes.
When scientists decapitated the rabbits and removed the eyes, they made some shocking discoveries: The light was delivered so rapidly that tiny explosions occurred on the surface of the animals’ retinas.
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The fluids in the eyes of the animals closest to Ground Zero began boiling and turned to steam.
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The flash had burned deep holes into the eyes of the animals stationed at eight miles or closer to Ground Zero, and retinal burns resembling a “yellowish white plaque” appeared at greater distances.
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In all, more than 75 percent of the rabbits sustained retinal burns, with some burns detected in animals as far as forty-two miles from the blast. Heinrich Rose, Paul Cibis, and two military officers cautioned, “One must consider the possibility of an atomic flash burn occurring
directly on the optic nerve head.
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This would, if of sufficient size, result in complete blindness of the affected eye.”
The flash from the hydrogen bomb was even more dangerous. Following Shot Bravo, which was detonated in 1954 at the Pacific Proving Ground, the deputy commandant of the School of Aviation Medicine sent an urgent message to the Atomic Energy Commission. “It can be assumed that all persons who viewed the actual fireball without eye protection have received permanent chorio-retinal damage,” wrote Colonel John McGraw.
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McGraw also disclosed that air crews flying at high altitudes within 1,000 miles of the detonation could have received retinal burns and urged that people who were within 100 miles of Ground Zero be examined by competent eye doctors. “It must be emphasized,” he concluded, “that an immediate examination is of utmost importance. Such early data would greatly add to our present knowledge of this
economically
important eye injury in the human.”
The injuries from the flashblindness experiments caught the attention in 1954 of Colonel Irving Branch, an official at the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project headquarters in Washington, D.C. In a letter to the assistant Secretary of Defense, Branch noted that in two instances volunteers were injured. “Because of the implications involved due to these injuries, it is felt that a definite need exists for guidance in the use of human volunteers as experimental subjects,” he wrote.
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Attached to Branch’s memorandum was an unsigned note that began:
In Nov. 53, it was learned that there existed a T/S [top secret] document signed by the Secretary of Defense which listed various requirements and criteria which had to be met by individuals contemplating the use of human volunteers in Bio-medical or other types of experimentation.
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Since this information was of particular importance to this office in classifying and/or releasing information on the Flash Blindness programs at weapons tests, attempts were made to learn the nature of these requirements.… It was learned that although this document details very definite and specific steps which must be taken before volunteers may be used in experimentation, no serious attempt has been made to disseminate the information to those experimenters
who had a definite need-to-know. The lowest level at which it had been circulated was that of the three Secretaries of the Services.…
Incredibly, the document that was being so closely guarded was a version of the Nuremberg Code, the principles guiding ethical human experimentation that had been handed down by the U.S. judges presiding over the trial of the Nazi doctors. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson had signed a memorandum embracing the principles on February 26, 1953. The provisions contained in the Wilson memorandum were circulated in unclassified Army documents beginning in 1954, but the Wilson memorandum itself was not declassified until 1975.
Although records are sketchy, the flashblindness experiments apparently stopped for four years and then were resumed by other military groups during Operation Plumbbob, a 1957 test series conducted in Nevada, and Dominic I, a test series conducted in 1962 in the Pacific.
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At least sixteen human subjects appeared to have been used in the Plumbbob experiment and three in the Dominic study. Official reports do not say whether any injuries occurred. Rabbit experiments also continued during the high-altitude nuclear shots detonated in the Pacific Ocean. John Pickering said that rabbits on barges 325 miles from Ground Zero got retinal burns from the flash.
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B
ODY-SNATCHING
P
ATRIOTS
The fallout from the bomb tests drifted down over the Earth. The radioactive debris found its way into starfish, shellfish, and seaweed. It covered alfalfa fields in upstate New York, wheat fields in North Dakota, corn in Iowa. It seeped into the bodies of honeybees and birds, human fetuses and growing children. The atom had split the world into “preatomic” and “postatomic” species.
At Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and AEC headquarters in Washington, scientists were growing uneasy. Could the fallout from the bombs already detonated be creating a health hazard? If not, how many more bombs could be detonated before the human race would be put at risk? In the summer of 1953, as the radioactive debris from the Upshot-Knothole tests gusted across the continent, a group of military and civilian scientists convened at the RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, California. Willard Libby, a brash scientist who passionately supported the testing program and would be awarded the Nobel Prize seven years later for the radioactive carbon dating technique, chaired the meeting. The group decided the only way they could properly ascertain worldwide hazards from fallout was by collecting and analyzing plants, animals, and human tissue from the four corners of Earth. Thus was born Operation Sunshine, one of the most bizarre and ghoulish projects of the Cold War. The source of its name is a matter of debate, but some say it was derived from the fact that fallout, like sunshine, covered the globe.
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According to a 1995 General Accounting Office study, Operation Sunshine was the largest of fifty-nine “tissue analysis studies” conducted
by atomic scientists during the Cold War.
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Collectively, the body parts of more than 15,000 humans were used in those studies. In countless instances, scientists took the corpses and organs of deceased people without getting permission from the next of kin.
For Operation Sunshine alone, approximately 9,000 samples of human bones, entire skeletons, and nearly 600 human fetuses were collected from around the world. Since the project was initially classified secret, researchers concocted “cover stories” that they used in order to acquire human samples from abroad. The military later began its own top-secret collection program of human urine, animal milk, and tissue samples under the guise of a “nutritional” study.
Willard Libby believed that “next to weapons,” Sunshine was the AEC ’s most important mission.
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“This statement is made in all seriousness,” he once told fellow Sunshiners, “because if the problems surrounding fallout are not properly understood and properly presented to the world, weapons testing may be forced to stop—a circumstance which could well be disastrous to the free world.”
Raised on a ranch in northern California, Libby entered the University of California at Berkeley on the advice of his father, a successful farmer with only a third-grade education. One of his teachers while he was an undergraduate was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although he enjoyed Oppenheimer’s lectures, Libby still thought of Oppenheimer as “an active Communist” when he was interviewed for an oral history project in 1978.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1931 and his Ph.D. in 1933, Libby remained at Berkeley and taught classes.
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In 1940, he joined a team of Manhattan Project researchers at Columbia University who were trying to develop a method to separate uranium isotopes. He went on to serve as a member of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee and as an AEC commissioner. The commission appointment came about because of his support of the H-bomb, he said. “For some reason, Oppenheimer had decided against the hydrogen bomb, and I fought him, tooth and nail.
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And I won. That’s why I was appointed to the AEC.”
Following the 1952 Mike detonation, it took weaponeers nearly two years to develop a slimmed-down hydrogen bomb that could be delivered by airplane. The perfected weapon, code-named Bravo, was detonated on March 1, 1954, at the Pacific Proving Ground. With a yield of fifteen megatons, Bravo was the largest bomb ever detonated by the United States.
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Not only did it endanger the eyesight of observers within 1,000
miles of Ground Zero, but it also dumped large amounts of fallout on several inhabited atolls and on a Japanese fishing vessel. A number of American soldiers and scientists were exposed as well.
Two days after the shot was fired, 236 Marshall Island residents were finally rescued. A number of them were found to be suffering from severe radiation sickness. The crew of the
Fukuryu Maru No. 5
(Fortunate Dragon), a Japanese fishing boat that was only eighty miles from Ground Zero at the time of the detonation, also suffered from acute radiation sickness. The fallout from Bravo covered the trawler’s decks with a deep white powder that was so thick that the men left footprints when they walked on it.
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The fishermen pulled in their nets and headed for home. But before they did, they rinsed down the decks, a precautionary measure that probably saved the lives of many of them. According to Japanese scientists, the crew members received anywhere from 200 to 500 roentgens. Aikichi Kuboyama, one of the crew members, died seven months later.
The Bravo shot and five subsequent hydrogen bomb blasts in the Castle series had a combined yield of forty-eight megatons and distributed fallout over the globe. The fallout triggered an international furor that was to increase in intensity in the ensuing years and eventually culminated in an end to above-ground testing. Prime Minister Nehru of India, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Pope Pius XII were among those who called for an end to nuclear tests. As recently as 1994, the Bravo shot and what the AEC knew about an unexpected wind shift prior to the blast were the subject of a hearing before the House Natural Resources investigations subcommittee.
Ten months after the Bravo fallout disaster, Libby and his fellow scientists met in Washington, D.C., for a classified conference to discuss the latest Sunshine findings.
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By that time researchers had analyzed some fifty-five stillborn babies from Chicago, one from Utah, three from India, and three adult human legs from Massachusetts. According to a transcript of the conference, which was declassified in 1995, Libby told the group that they needed to procure more human samples, particularly from children. Although he didn’t explain why, Libby said the “supply” of stillborn infants had been cut off and “shows no signs … of being rejuvenated.”
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He added, “If anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.”
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Libby then turned his attention to the radioactive strontium accumulating in the oceans. Atomic scientists had believed the sea was an “infinite sink” but were
discovering that wasn’t true. Soluble fission products from the bombs probably would remain in the top 100 meters of sea water “essentially indefinitely,” Libby said. Then he returned to the question of procuring human bodies:
