Operation Redwing
US Atomic Veterans
Steve Osborn
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001
From: Adrienne & Steve Osborn theplace@whidbey.net
To: Keith Whittle pdxavets@aracnet.com
Subject: Vet's Meeting
Ed's Note: More of Steve's writing can be found on this page.
osborn1.htm
Where Do We Go From Here?
by
Steve Osborn
WE are all most painfully aware of the horrors of nuclear warfare and of the dangers we all face from fallout and contamination, not only from a nuclear blast, but from accidents and poor disposal of nuclear waste. We are also aware of the difficulty of getting the government to recognize these dangers. It is an uphill struggle to get recognition and help from the government for those whose exposure has left them and their families crippled by genetic damage and nuclear related diseases.
Most of us who have been witness to the nuclear test programs are aware of what a fragile thing our planet is. I, for one, celebrated with great abandon when the non-proliferation treaty was finally signed and the reduction of weapons began. True, all that did was reduce the amount of overkill available, but it was a step in the right direction. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the only nation with a reliable delivery system was the United States. Several other nations have nuclear weapons and some reportedly unreliable delivery systems, but not enough to count on to paralyze us in a first strike.
I read in the paper and heard on the radio where the appointed President, Mr. Bush, has asked Russia to help him scrap the treaty so he can reactivate the old "Star Wars" project for missile defense at a cost to us taxpayers of probably a trillion dollars for the military industrial complex.
This will fuel more suspicion and more development of rockets and nuclear warheads. We will be back to the old, unlamented, days of the cold war once again. The Space Arm of the military, a joint group of all the services called "Space Command," has derided the treaty for the peaceful uses of space as being naive. They have announced themselves ready to take military control of the space around earth, in effect giving us world domination. I don't know about you, but this scares the Hell out of me. I have no argument with the United States showing moral leadership and leading the world to a higher plane through example, but I don't want anyone dictating to the world with their finger on a button in space to punish any offenders, i.e., those who don't do as they are told.
It is time to tell our "leaders" and our elected representatives that it is time we renew our commitment to help heal our planet, not accelerate its slide to destruction. We need cleaner air, drinkable water, healthier crops. We need to slow or stop the degradation of our environment at least to the point where the earth has a chance to recover. Global warming has been scientifically identified and means found to at least slow its progression. Our national policy, since December, is to accelerate it, if it will profit certain oil, coal and power industries. Arsenic in the water is fine, as long as certain mining industries don't have to spend money to clean it up or find safer processes. Starvation is fine as long as certain agribusiness companies can make a greater profit on their food products. Sweatshops are fine, as long as certain companies can fire employees earning a living wage and farm out the labor to nations where people make pennies per day. Poor and elderly people dying from disease is fine as long as certain pharmaceutical companies can make huge profits on medications. A few hundred dollar tax rebate for us is fine as long as certain big businessmen get hundreds of millions for themselves, leaving nothing in the coffers for environmental and social programs or to pay down the national debt.
For a while, the common people of the United States had a say in their government. Let us reaffirm that by beginning with an insistence on keeping the missile reduction and nuclear non-proliferation treaties in place. Likewise the peaceful uses of space treaty. That treaty came about in part due to the terrible communications problems that happened after our one ionospheric test. Since practically all our communications now is through satellite relays, imagine the result.
We who have faced the nuclear dragon and survived should take a leadership position regarding the health of our planet, in memory of those who faced the dragon and died.
Steve Osborn
Email: theplace@whidbey.net
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001
From: Adrienne & Steve Osborn theplace@whidbey.net
To: All
Subject: Memorial Day Remembrance
Memorial Day Remembrance
On Memorial Day 1956, I was a young sailor steaming toward Bikini Atoll to witness
the Hydrogen Bomb tests at first hand. Now much older and retired, I had hoped that was
all behind us, until we began the Cold War all over again this year. My Memorial Day
remembrance begins with World War II.
I was just a boy during the war and it was largely an adventure to us, but I remember
the quiet pride and the sadness in the eyes of the increasing number of mothers who hung
a gold star in their window, never knowing if my mom might be next and my big brother
gone.
The wars, great and small, were legion this past century. My dad lost his leg in the
Phillippines in 1913, WW-I, the Great War to end all wars, where an entire generation
died in the trenches and one of my uncles, who lied about his age, was the first, and
youngest, soldier from Oregon to die in the war, at the battle of Chateau Thierry.
The memory of man is short and only twenty years passed before another generation
was thrown into the meat grinder to stave off domination by Hitler's Nazis, Mussolini's
Fascists and Imperial Japan's expansion.
We had hardly buried the dead and recovered from the shock of the realities of
nuclear annihilation when East and West went at it in Korea, a war which still goes on,
the fighting finally just stopped.
The cold war and the covert wars went on, then along came Vietnam. Since then, the
"little" wars have gone on all over the world, like brushfires in the California hills,
consuming human and material resources.
Amongst the dead may be the man who would have discovered the cure to cancer or
other deadly diseases, the composer who may have surpassed Mozart or Brahms, the
playwright or poet who might have succeeded Shakespeare, the statesman who could
have brought about world peace or the person who might have been able to end world
hunger.
Those are the might-have-been's. The reality is the millions of humans who have
died, fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, fighters and civilians in just this past
century, all with the dream of peace and human dignity before them. Yet, war still goes
on around the world.
Let us give pause in remembrance of those who died, often alone and forgotten,
victim of mine and booby trap, sniper fire or disease and infection, whose resting place is
unmarked save for perhaps a little more verdant growth where they have nurtured the
soil.
Let us give pause in remembrance for those who survived, maimed in body or soul by
the atrocity of war.
Let us give pause in remembrance for those who survived to carry on, with nothing
but memories, of which they do not speak.
Let us give pause and reflect, that we might carry out our lives in such a way that love
and tolerance might overbalance hatred and bigotry in the scales of life and the dream of
peace might become a reality, so those we remember today did not die in vain.
Steve Osborn
Email: theplace@whidbey.net
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001
From: Adrienne & Steve Osborn theplace@whidbey.net
To: pdxavets@aracnet.com
Subject: Redwing, aboard USS Badoeing Strait
I was an ET aboard the "Bing
Ding" for the Redwing series and wrote about it, both when the film,
"The Day After," was aired and after Chernobyl.. I finally found copies
of the two essays. I don't know whether they would be of interest to you
or not, but I would be willing to send them along to you. Congresswoman
Barbara Boxer read, "There Must Be No 'Day,'" on the floor of the House
of Representatives on Hiroshima Day, 1984. I hope it made someone think.
Like most of us "kids," I dove and swam in the lagoon, sneaked
coconuts when I could, and after a guy was hit by a barracuda going for
his dogtags and film badge, left them ashore when diving.
I was scared
to death when my hair started to come out in clumps and my gums bled,
but was sure I'd be courtmartialed if it came out, so I just bided my
time, hoped for the best, and eventually returned to normal. I had
various Leucocytosis over the years and mononucleosis several times.
Each time, I've wondered if this was going to be the big one, but so
far, so good.
Throughout the "cold war" I wrote to world leaders and the
UN pleading for communication and understanding among the Great Powers
and for nuclear disarmament. I don't know if it did any good, but at
least I tried. We cannot yet safely handle the nuclear dragon and, until
we can, we should explore every other alternative energy source and
learn to use with wisdom, what nature has given us.
Please let me know if you would like me to download the essays to you.
Sincerely,
Steve Osborn
Email: theplace@whidbey.net
'Hoy Keith,
I'll include the files. They are a little dated now, but still valid,
I think. God! I just realized it is almost fifty years ago since
Redwing. Time sure flies. Takes no effort to recall that cloud. I wrote
my folks at the time, "If everyone in the world could sit in a big
amphitheater and watch just one of these things, they'd go out and break
up every missile and every warhead with crowbars and sledgehammers if
that is what it takes."
Well, here are the files. Keep in touch.
Steve Osborn
"THE BURNED HAND THINKS TWICE ABOUT FIRE"
by
Stephen M. Osborn
1986 Stephen M. Osborn
The Time: Summer, 1956, shortly before dawn.
The Place: A passageway leading to a lightwell aft of the conning tower of the escort carrier,
U.S.S. Badoeing Strait, at sea off Bikini Atoll.
An eighteen year old boy stood with his back to the lightwell, his arms tightly crossed
over his eyes, shivering with anticipation as he listened to the voice on the intercom. Other than that, absolute silence reigned about the ship.
"...Five ...Four...Three...Two...One...Zero."
Intense light! Seen right through the arms and clenched eyelids.
Heat! As though standing before an opened furnace door.
Eerie silence.
After a time, the light began to fade; the boy cautiously removed one arm from before his face and winced, for it was back, shining through the remaining arm, but again fading. When he could finally open his eyes, he squinted up the lightwell at a sky so brilliantly blue it dwarfed the noon. Finally, he peeked around the conning tower at the fireball and glowing cloud of "Cherokee," later described to us as a "twenty megaton plus thermonuclear device, detonated at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, at a distance of approximately thirty miles."
Now that young sailor is forty-eight, with a grown daughter and a seventeen year old son. He can still, when he closes his eyes, see those glowing clouds in his memory and feel the shockwave hammer the ship. He still, upon occasion, has the nightmares.
I have written elsewhere of my impression of that nuclear test series and the effect that it has had on my life; on all of our lives. Every time the "cold war" is warmed up, the "Star Wars Program" is extolled or more missiles are deployed, I go through agonies of depression and apprehension. I write, to the Kremlin, to the White House, to the U.N.
The U.N. sends me literature and refers me to my government. My government answered me once. The State Department sent me a copy of one of Reagan's speeches and told me that the President was as concerned about peace as I was and that was why we needed to build more modern, efficient missiles - and retire the obsolete ones. The Kremlin never replies, but a couple of times they have used almost the same language as in one of my letters. A coincidence, no doubt, but it made me feel good.
For a time, we cooperated in space, visited each other's stations, even designed the
docking bays so both nation's ships could use them. Now, we are to use space as a battleground. We are to lift satellites into orbit with a nuclear device on board. Good thinking, when we are zero for three and can't even put a weather satellite in orbit.
If we get them up there, they are supposed to be detonated through a device to zap "most" of the incoming missiles with x-rays. Of course, some ten percent are going to get through. I remember when they detonated a nuclear warhead in space and it screwed up the Heaviside layer so badly that radio communications were knocked out for weeks. They quickly made a treaty never to do that again. We have a rather finely tuned set of screens shielding us from solar radiation. We are not too sure what it would take to damage it beyond restoration, but the scientists have a pretty good idea of what life, or the lack of it, would be like without that screen.
With the magic of "Star Wars," they seem to have forgotten all about that test and its effects. (My son just walked in and asked me if I had seen the weather report in the Chronicle, "For the first time in history," he said, "'Scattered showers this evening with minor traces of radioactive iodine.' Wow!"
That brings us to the point of this article; Chernobyl.
Chernobyl was a minor incident. A single reactor failure. The explosion was a simple
chemical one, the fire a chemical fire, rather intense and hard to extinguish, but simply an
extension of a coal mine fire. The amount of nuclear fuel was probably a few tons at best.
Yet the effect of that small incident has been felt, physically, half way around the earth and the
cloud is still moving East. The area surrounding the plant, the local reservoirs, crops, livestock, the earth itself, contaminated perhaps for decades. Discussions are going on as to removing the soil and replacing it with uncontaminated soil from elsewhere. Very good. Bring in livestock, new plant stock, new soil. Perhaps in a few years it will be just a memory.
Multiply that by even a small nuclear exchange, or perhaps a major meltdown, say a
whole complex of reactors. Where are you going to put the contaminated soil? Where are you
going to find the uncontaminated soil to replace it with? We can't even dispose of our current
nuclear waste from normal operations safely, to date.
Oh! We're in high dudgeon about the Soviets not keeping us informed of what was going
on. At Three Mile Island, the state officials couldn't get any information about what was going
on for days, just the usual "Situation under control," followed by "A small. amount of radiation
was released," then "Well, it was a bit more than we thought," etcetera. When the Titan exploded at Vandenberg, the local officials could get nothing from the military about the toxic cloud of Red Fuming Nitric Acid vapor drifting across the landscape. Union Carbide wasn't exactly free with information on either of their spills and just try to get toxic dump information out of any company or agency without a court order. Come on, now, the Russians didn't do anything differently than we do.
We crow about our containments, but they cannot withstand infinite pressure. Why do
you think they valved off radioactive vapors at TMI?
Russia offered a moratorium, unilaterally, on nuclear testing. No more tests, period.
Reagan said, "You can come over and watch ours." We then proceeded to set off three tests,
while the Russians kept saying, "No more testing, please." After we set off three, they called off the moratorium and Reagan said, "See, the Russians can't be trusted." Since then we set off another one. Who is showing bad faith?
Our seismographic stations around the world can pinpoint any explosion over a few
hundred tons. That makes verification quite easy. We could have supported the moratorium.
Ending the arms race is the only thing in the world that makes sense. It is bankrupting everything but the military-industrial complex. Even a one-sided nuclear attack is going to destroy civilization and most of the life on the entire planet. We are getting a little fallout from
Chernobyl. What does the government think would happen if we hit the Soviet Union with
everything we've got before they could get anything off the ground? They would be the lucky
ones, most of them would be quickly dead, we might take months, but we would have sealed our fate and that of the rest of the world as well.
The lesson of Chernobyl, TMI, the Fermi Plant near Detroit, Bikini, Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Nevada and Utah is clear; Star Wars, hardened sites and missile subs have nothing to do with it. We must leave the nuclear beast alone until it is tamed and its waste made harmless.
The best way to do this is to talk, and listen, then act to dismantle this beast. Perhaps, if we do
this and the world heaves a collective sigh of relief, we can then bend our efforts to solving some of the problems of hunger, poverty, disease and illiteracy here on earth. With that under control, perhaps we can even begin the joint adventure of exploring the stars.
Steve Osborn
Email: theplace@whidbey.net
NOTE: I must admit, I did get a reaction from one part of our government. I sent a copy of my essay, THERE MUST BE NO "DAY", to my Congresswoman, Barbara Boxer. She read it on the floor of the House of Representatives on Hiroshima Day, 1984. Perhaps it stirred some thought, but the arms race still goes on.
THERE MUST BE NO "DAY"
by
Steve Osborn
Where does one begin, in responding to the movie, The Day After? For me, it can have many beginnings. I remember, as a seven or eight year old boy, looking with awe at the Bikini battered ships at the Bremerton Navy Yard. Then, I grew up in the cold war rhetoric of the late- forties and fifties.
In 1956, as a young navy man, I was at the thermonuclear tests at Bikini, code named Operation Redwing. The first bomb exploded was, we were told, a twenty megaton plus thermonuclear device, to be detonated at an altitude of twenty thousand feet. Our observation point was to be aboard ship at a distance of thirty miles from from ground zero. That is a long way; about, as far as the doctor was from Kansas City when the first bomb went off in the movie. It is not far enough.
Most of the crew was ranged on deck, wearing blast goggles and facing aft, away from the blast. I was not on deck as there were not enough goggles to go around. Instead, I picked a spot in a passageway, about thirty feet forward of a light well. Any light coming in would have to come from the direction away from the blast, down about a twenty foot well, then penetrate the passageway. I had my back to the well. During the final countdown, I wrapped both arms across my eyes, one over the other. I could hear the voice on the ship's intercom; 5...4...3...2...1...ZERO.
Suddenly, I could see light, right through my arms! The heat was intense, as though I had my back to an opened furnace door. The silence was deafening. After what seemed like minutes, but was probably a few seconds, the light began to fade. As it grew dark, I eased one arm away from the other and the light was back, but again fading. When it was gone, I moved my other arm. The light through my clenched eyelids was painful, but it continued to fade and I gradually opened my eyes and began backing toward the light well. As the light continued to decrease, it finally got to the point where I could squint up the light well at the sky. The light was brilliant, the sky an intense blue. I climbed out of the well and peeked forward around the shelter of the conning tower, directly at the cloud and the, now fading, fireball.
My first impression was of a weird beauty. The cloud was sharply defined, like a thunderhead, and had a florescent; amythest colored glow, which tinged toward a dark red. It is impossible to communicate the scale of the cloud. We were thirty miles away, yet the feeling was similar to when one stands beneath a huge redwood, watching the trunk taper away above you, to be surmounted by a crown of spreading branches far overhead. At thirty miles, it was as though we were right at the base of the cloud looking up, rather than out, at it.
We stood there in silence, looking at the cloud and quietly commenting on the colors. On the right side, close to the cloud, we could see two bright, stationary lights. They were visible for a short while, then they faded.
Over two minutes had passed, then the voice on the intercom began the countdown for the shock wave. 5...4...3...2... t ...Zero. The pressure wave at that distance was not violent; there was an increase of about one atmosphere, enough to make your ears pop; the sound was a long low rumble lasting about thirty seconds.
The sun began to rise, lighting the outside of the cloud and overpowering the internal glow. The cloud was identifiable for much of the day, with the. top being slowly torn to rags by the jet stream.
We steamed back to the atoll, rather sobered by the experience. We were quite curious about the mysterious lights we saw beside the cloud. About a week or so after the shot, I was speaking to one of the scientists that had been aboard. He said they also had been puzzled by the appearance of the lights. They finally concluded that what we saw were two bright stars, essentially as we would have seen them from outer space. Apparently, the heat of the explosion was so great that it literally burned away the atmosphere around the fireball. As soon as the temperature dropped sufficiently, the air collapsed back around the envelope, the starlight was attenuated and they disappeared.
We spent, if memory serves, about six months at Bikini. Every so often, we would steam out for a shot. Frequently, we would go out, muster on deck in the pre-dawn, the countdown would proceed, then, "The shot for today has been canceled," and we would steam back to the anchorage to try again the next morning. This might go on for ten days or more before they would finally set it off..
Once, the wind shifted after a shot and we were battened below in the stifling heat while the ship tried to run from under the fallout. Personnel that had to go topside were decontaminated and their clothes were taken for disposal. After a couple of days, we headed for Kwajalein, some four hundred miles away, until it was "safe" to return to the atoll.
Following one, either underwater or surface burst, the cleanup crews told of fish falling out of the coconut palms. The swimming float that had been anchored with huge concrete blocks in the lagoon was found floating at sea. Two of the blocks were found in the middle of the island.
The final shot of the series found us eighteen miles from ground zero. The heat was incredible; though this was a much smaller bomb, possibly a tactical warhead. The shockwave jolted the whole ship backwards several inches. It felt as though my whole body was struck by a sledge hammer. The sound was one sharp crack, as though a rifle or firecracker was fired off next to my ear.
After a few days spent dismantling the establishment on Nan Island, Bikini Atoll, we steamed for home.
In later years, I had nightmares of the bombs going off, where I would be standing, crying, realizing that some SOB had finally pushed the button and it was the end of all things. I would wake up covered with sweat, pulse racing and face wet with tears. Gradually, that dream receded, until I saw the rockets blasting out of their silos in The Day After. I was sitting with my arm around my son's shoulder. Suddenly, I began to shake and my eyes filled with tears. Each time another took off, it got worse. I knew what was going to happen, I had been there!
Since the program, it has been continually on my mind. Watching that reptilian Buckley, "Megadeath" Scowcroft and Kissinger sit there, speaking in Orwellian doublethink, explaining that more is less and death is peacekeeping, made me wonder how long these aging, frustrated cowboys are going to be allowed to determine how much youth and innocence is to die for this "ism" or that one, Weisel, Sagan, even McNamara, made sense. This is one fragile green and blue planet.
Buckley and company brought to mind the lectures we got from some Bircher neighbors, when taking our children trick-or-treating. We shouldn't trick-or-treat for UNICEF because UNICEF gave milk to "commie babies!"
There are no "commie babies" or "free world babies." There are just babies and children and youths and adults, all with their hopes and dreams. The man in the street in Moscow, London, Paris or Athens is no different from the one in New York or in Mill Valley. We are all frightened and we all simply wish to be left, in peace. The Russian and the European may want it more, because they have been overrun by war at least twice this century. They know what war on the home front means, something no American has suffered on the mainland since the civil war.
Every man, woman and child on this planet must let his government and political leaders know that nuclear terror must cease. It is no longer a viable option, if it ever was. The odds of a mistake are far too great and there is no way to retrieve the error, once an attack/counter-attack has been launched.
By virtue of our alleged intelligence, we have assumed stewardship of this planet and all of the creatures upon it. We have shown great callousness and ignorance in the exploitation of earth's natural resources, the casual dumping of toxic wastes and the wholesale slaughter of entire species. With wisdom and patience, some of these blunders can be retrieved, but with the development of nuclear technology, we have met our destroyer, one way or the other, if we do not call a halt to it. We cannot dispose of spent fuel and refining waste in a safe manner. The cancer and birth deformation rate has risen enormously since we began using it, there is no defense against nuclear attack or terrorism and there have been few signs of sanity or good judgement among those entrusted to do our thinking for us. Papers discussing an acceptable number of megadeaths in a nuclear exchange are not of strategic value, they are obscene, a visible manifestation of insanity and immorality.
Mankind has always had a tendency for its technology to outstrip its moral growth, It is time we begin to slow down the technical race and begin to think, not of what is expedient, or will show the greatest short-term profit, but what will benefit the planet and ourselves in the long run. What kind of agriculture will leave the land fertile and productive for a thousand years and more? What processes can be used that will leave only biodegradable wastes? Does society's existence depend on an endless flow of gadgets and novelties, designed to fall apart almost immediately? Must everything be designed to wear out in two or three years? Is it possible to recycle our mineral resources rather than continually mining more and allowing worn out products to decay, or simply rust in storage? Can't we produce crops and see that they are distributed, rather than stored to rot? Why don't we make a major effort to harness and use wind and solar energy for power and make a greater effort to reduce energy needs?
Let us pledge to make a start by informing all world leaders that nuclear war is out. The people of this planet will take no more of fear and terror!
Then, with this as a starting point, let us, as stewards of a fragile planet, begin the process of healing and growing, individually and as a species, to the point where all of this will seem an horrible, impossible nightmare. A lesson to be forever remembered, but never repeated. It is up to us.
Steve Osborn
Email: theplace@whidbey.net
Keith Whittle
February 25, 2001
[ Operation Redwing ]