Excerpts from the book
Operation Crossroads
By Johnathan M. Weisgall
The amount of radioactive material that collapsed back into Bikini's
lagoon moments after the Baker shot was simply staggering. Unlike the Able
blast, the fission products at Baker did not dissipate in the atmosphere.
The water surrounding the bomb trapped most of the radioactive material
and rained it down over the target vessels. As much as half the bomb's fission
products remained in the lagoon's water or in the mist remaining in the
air after the surge of spray fell back into the lagoon.
Scientists knew from studies of radium-dial workers that only a few millionths
of a gram of radium lodged within human bones could prove fatal. Plutonium,
the main component of the Baker bomb, has the same effect and is even more
toxic. Test Baker, though, did not involve millionths of grams of radium,
or even hundredths of grams. It created the equivalent of thousands of tons
of radium. Within one hour of the blast, radiation levels in Bikini's lagoon
reached the approximate equivalent of 5,000 tons of radium, which is 1 billion
times the radioactivity from just one gram of radium.1 Initial dose rates
on the decks of target vessels closest to the blast exceeded 8,000 roentgens
per day, 80,000 times the daily tolerance standard and 20 times more than
a fatal dose.
During the first hour, wrote Ralph Sawyer, Crossroads's technical director,
"the radiation was roughly equivalent to that from several thousand
tons of radium." Even an hour after the shot the target ships a mile
from Zeropoint showed a dose rate of 1,200 roentgens per day, more than
three times the lethal dose, meaning that the daily tolerance dose would
be reached in seven seconds.2
The difference between dose rate and dose is similar to the difference
between what is measured by a speedometer and an odometer. Dose rate measures
intensity of radiation at any given moment in time, just as a speedometer
measures speed at any given moment. Dose measures cumulative radiation exposure
resulting from various dose rates, just as an odometer measures cumulative
miles traveled at different speeds. Thus, to say that a dose rate of 1,200
roentgens per day on a target ship was three times the lethal dose means
that someone would receive a cumulative dose of 1,200 roentgens by staying
in that place for 24 hours. Even staying in that location for one minute
would result in a dose of 0.83 roentgen (1,200 divided by 24 divided by
60), or more than eight times the daily tolerance dose of 0.1 roentgen.
Stafford Warren's radsafe (radiation safety) section had warned that
Baker could cause severe contamination in the lagoon and that the target
ships "may remain dangerous for an indeterminable time thereafter."
Virtually all of these warnings were ignored. Despite drone boat readings
of 730 roentgens per day near the center of the target array, the first
patrol boats reentered the lagoon 41 minutes after the shot to measure radioactivity
levels and to retrieve instruments. A salvage group reentered the lagoon
less than two hours after the shot, and shortly after that radiological
monitors and technicians temporarily boarded 12 target ships to retrieve
data and instruments. Ten were declared radiologically safe, and by the
end of the day 49 support ships returned to Bikini's lagoon with nearly
15,000 men on board.4
The warnings all came true. "About four o'clock," recalled
Warren, "I began to notice that the deep-water Geiger counters were
showing more circulation near and under the observation fleet. This was
horrifying to all these commanders. They had to move the fleet." Some
ships moved over toward the Eneu channel, while others moved all the way
out into open ocean. The blanket of radioactive mist had contaminated the
target ships to a much greater extent than had been foreseen. Adm. William
Blandy was cautious in his first message back to the Joint Chiefs: "Detailed
examination of target ships may be delayed several days by radioactivity
persisting in water and on board."
The day after the blast, Blandy tried to tour the ghost fleet with Stafford
Warren, but the frantic ticks of the Geiger counter on their small boat
confirmed that the ships were much too radioactive for anyone to venture
aboard, and they were forced to retreat in less than 30 minutes. Everyone
on deck, Blandy told reporters, would have been "goners-if not immediately,
at least later on."
Three days after the shot, several support vessels again had to shift
anchorage due to an increase in radioactivity near the target array. As
the radioactivity decayed, though, all support vessels returned to their
regular berths in the lagoon within a week after the blast, and many would
remain there for the next five weeks.
Radiation levels on some of the target ships remained dangerously high
even a week after the Baker shot, and boarding these ships was unsafe except
for brief visits. Some were so radioactive in the first few days after the
blast that the daily tolerance dose of 0.1 roentgen per day was reached
in less than a minute. Twenty days after the shot, a pile of sand on one
ship gave off a reading of 200 roentgens per day, meaning that a person
lingering over a "hot spot" like this would reach his daily tolerance
limit in just 45 seconds. About half of the radioactive material produced
by the blast remained in the waters of Bikini lagoon, and the largest part
of this was on the surface of the water.9
To make matters worse, radioactivity in the lagoon's contaminated waters
quickly spread to the support ships. Ships use saltwater for many purposes,
and planners were concerned that water lines might become contaminated with
fission products from the lagoon. The radsafe plan therefore cautioned that
no distilling plants, heat exchangers, or other apparatus on the support
ships that used saltwater cooling should be operated after either test until
the seawater in the lagoon was declared safe by the radiological safety
section.
Nevertheless, one day after the support ships entered the lagoon, Blandy
authorized them to operate their evaporators, which distilled seawater for
drinking. As a result, every nontarget vessel became contaminated just as
the planners had feared, as fission products became concentrated on underwater
hulls and in condensers, evaporators, and saltwater pipes.
Despite all the warnings that the highly radioactive column of water
would come crashing down on the ships, absolutely no one-not even the radsafe
section-had planned for the very disaster that had been predicted with amazing
accuracy. As the navy admitted a few months later, "Since the nature
and extent of contamination of the targets was completely unexpected, no
plans had been prepared for organized decontamination measures."
For all its thousands of pages of detailed plans, the U.S. Navy managed
to expose tens of thousands of men and more than 200 ships to radioactive
contamination more than 2,000 miles from decent port facilities without
ever having attempted experimentally to irradiate a ship or parts of one
to determine how-or whether-a ship could be decontaminated.
The examination of the target ships-the very reason for Operation Crossroads-could
not proceed if the vessels were too radioactive for reboarding and examination.
As a result, the science of ship decontamination was born at Bikini lagoon
following Test Baker. The first experiment, on July 27, was to wash down
the battleship New York with saltwater, using the huge fire hoses of the
fire fighting vessels.
Then, beginning July 28, the navy began to try to decontaminate the ships
using materials already at Bikini or obtainable from Pearl Harbor. It tried
detergent action with foamite, soap powder, lye, and even naphtha and diesel
oil, dissolving action with hydrochloric and sulfuric acid, and adsorption
by flour, cornstarch, and charcoal. Using air compressors, other men blasted
the contaminated ships with ground corn cobs, rice, barley, ground coffee,
and two products readily obtainable from Bikini- sand and coconut shells.
Crews even worked with the tried and true navy method-scrubbing.12
None of these measures worked very well. Prolonged washing with an acetic
acid solution proved helpful but simply was not feasible for mass application,
and the other reagents worked only to the extent that they actually removed
contaminated surface paint or corrosion. "When you realize that even
a small destroyer . . . had a superstructure that was about three acres,"
recalled Stafford Warren, "the job of cleaning the radioactivity off
was just impossible."
"The Navy considers this contamination business the toughest part
of test Baker," wrote the Army Corps of Engineers' Col. Cy Betts to
Kenneth Nichols, Gen. Leslie Groves's top deputy. "They had no idea
it would be such a problem and they are breaking their necks out here to
find some solution."
The radsafe monitors were ordered to be fully clothed at all times, including
rubber gloves and boots. They knew the value of protective clothing, but
teenage sailors did not. "No one told us about radiation or being exposed
to anything," recalled John Smitherman many years later. "We saw
these men coming aboard ship and they had these Geiger counters with them
and they were walking all over the ship. They had regular shoes on but they
had cloth pulled up over their shoes. . . . I still had on a pair of shorts
and my tennis shoes and my . . . little t-shirt with a sailor hat. And that's
all the clothing that I had on me."15
After the Baker test, over 40 percent of the men at Bikini were assigned
to tasks involving decontamination, inspection, or towing or salvaging the
target ships, with the brunt of the boarding and decontamination effort
being borne by the 8,463 crew members of those ships.16
Stafford Warren quickly realized that safety guidelines were not being
followed. During hosing-down operations, all personnel on tugs were ordered
to stay windward of the target ships to minimize contamination, but it was
impossible not to get wet. "We'd have to take the clothes off these
people," said Warren; "their clothes were all contaminated and
so was the skin of their back. They would not wear their gloves, so they
would get the palms of their hands contaminated. After a week of this, the
deck of that tug got so bad we had to put it out of service because it was
contaminated enough to be hazardous."17
Another unexpected problem came from the marine life in the lagoon. One
radsafe team cruised around near the target ships after the Baker shot,
recording the "hot&" readings in the lagoon water. When they moved
to "cooler" water, though, their Geiger counters showed that radiation
levels below deck did not drop to their lower levels. "It looked as
though we were somehow or other contaminated with radioactivity-as indeed
we were," wrote one monitor.18 It turned out that radioactive algae,
barnacles, and other marine life that concentrated fission products clung
to the ships' hulls below the water line and intensified the contamination
problem. "Their hulls were just hotter than a firecracker,"recalled
Warren.19
Three days after the shot, outboard bunks on one support ship showed
readings of 0.156 roentgen per day, and evaporator readings were at 0.104-both
above the daily limit before men were even exposed to the target ships.
"We had to move the bunks away from the hulls so that these boys wouldn't
get exposed," said Warren. Later studies showed that some marine organisms
can concentrate fission products by a factor of 100,000 times the background
level in their environment.20
Extensive malfunctioning and breakdowns of the radsafe monitors' instruments
only made matters worse. The X-263 Geiger counter, which was rushed into
production and never field tested, performed poorly. Worst of all, the X-263
could measure gamma radiation (high energy rays such as X-rays), but it
could not measure alpha radiation from extremely dangerous substances such
as plutonium, and its measurements of beta radiation were often misleading.
"I am not an alarmist, Colonel Warren," radsafe monitor Dr.
William Myers wrote. "Probably no permanent radiation injury was sustained
by any of the participants. I do believe, though, that many of us probably
received much more penetrating, ionizing radiation than the instruments
of very low beta-sensitivity were able to record."21
Warren agreed. Despite Blandy's assertion that no radiological safety
risks would be taken in this peacetime operation, Warren replied to Myers
that Operation Crossroads "was conducted as an emergency and a lot
of compromises were made to meet this emergency." Warren knew all too
well that Test Baker was a radsafe disaster. "I don't believe you are
an alarmist," he told Myers, "but I never want to go through the
experience of the last three weeks of August again."22
A government report later confirmed that Warren's task force had several
instruments for measuring alpha contamination. "None, however,"
it noted, "proved reliable for field surveys."23 The extent of
beta measurements was stated bluntly in another report: "Little effort
was made to measure beta radioactivity."24
A large part of the problem was caused by the shortage of overworked
monitors. The peak strength of this group was 350 men, but only a maximum
of about 150 was available on any one day to monitor decontamination efforts.
The remaining personnel had to measure film badges, analyze water samples,
maintain and repair the monitoring instruments, and carry out other technical
and administrative duties. The 381 monitors available for the Able shot
were just enough to meet the requirement, Blandy later wrote, but for Baker
there was a "severe shortage."25 "Those who have participated,"
Warren wrote Blandy, "have been worked hard for days and nights and
they are approaching physical exhaustion."26 There was virtually no
monitoring of nontarget vessels, and hazardous conditions sometimes went
unnoticed on the target fleet.
David Bradley, a radsafe monitor, tried to see the situation from the
navy's perspective."The whole business must seem like a very bad dream
to the regular navy men," he wrote. "Decks you can't stay on for
more than a few minutes but which seem like other decks; air you can't breathe
without gas masks but which smells like all other air; water you can't swim
in, and good tuna and jacks you can't eat. It's a fouled-up world."
And into this world had come the radsafe monitors. One afternoon Bradley
was assigned to survey the New York, whose decks had been sluiced with water,
washed with soap, alkali compound, and lye, and then washed again. Radiation
levels, though, remained dangerously high. The captain was "completely
bewildered," wrote Bradley. "The deck was clean, anybody could
see that, clean enough for the Admiral himself to eat his breakfast off
of. So what was all this goddamn radioactivity?"27
As the days passed after the Baker shot, the captains of the target ships
became increasingly upset with Stafford Warren. "Everybody is sitting
around . . . staring us in the face and saying 'when can we get aboard,'
he wrote his wife. "They wanted their ships back," he later recalled,
despite the fact that they were highly contaminated and no one could go
aboard for more than a few minutes at a time. "Well," remembered
Warren, "time passed and ships sunk. The Saratoga, of course, was the
most bitter one, because the navy was convinced they could save her if they
had only been able to get close to her."28
Admiral Blandy announced several days after the test that the carrier
Independence would go to Pearl Harbor, adding that her crew wanted to take
her all the way to the U.S. mainland under her own power, just to show how
much punishment the ship could absorb and still function. Rear Adm. Thorvald
Solberg, who was in charge of salvaging the target ships, shared this view;
he expected that the decontamination measures would reduce radiation levels
to the point where they could return to home ports under their own power.
Warren, for his part, confiscated Solberg's radioactive shoes and all the
personal belongings from the captain's cabin on the Prinz Eugen-even his
clothes and family photographs. Navy pride was in conflict with the demands
of radiological safety.29
One afternoon Blandy, who was caught in the middle between Warren's concerns
and the navy's increasingly angry sailors, ordered Warren to report to the
Wichita, one of the support ships. "You could just feel a kind of a
wall of hate when I walked in,"Warren later related." The tension
was just terrific." In front of 1,400 officers and sailors, Blandy
said, "Doctor, would you take the microphone and explain to the officers
and men what you're trying to do."
Warren explained that his orders from Blandy and President Harry Truman
were to protect the men from radiation hazards, which were everywhere in
the lagoon. His words fell on deaf ears. The captain of the New York, recalled
Warren, "was just madder than he could be, because he had his 1,200
or 1,400 men sitting in a barracks ship . . . in that heat. There was his
ship undamaged, but contaminated. I wouldn't allow him on board but twenty
minutes, and I wouldn't clear his ship for occupancy. I was just a dirty
stinker, you know. . . . It was all my fault."
The captain challenged Warren's radsafe measures. "He almost said,
'Any fool knows,' but he said, 'Most everybody knows that radiation varies
inversely as the square of the distance, but your men go around and some
of them put the Geiger counters three or four inches from the deck, some
hold it hip high and use any kind of way of doing it; there are no standards.'"
Warren did his best to field the criticisms. "I had it hot and heavy
for an hour." Blandy closed the meeting, but the tension with the officers
remained. Warren's colleague George Lyon, who headed the nonradiological safety team, wrote about one captain "who insists on a 'hairy-chested' approach to the matter with a disdain for the unseen hazard, an attitude
which is contagious to the younger officers and detrimental to the radiological
safety program."30 The navy simply did not accept this talk about radiation,
and it took Warren, a strong, vigorous, and honest man, to try to keep matters under control. "He was persuasive as hell," recalled one radsafe
monitor. "He had to be. He was the only Army Colonel who ever sank
a navy flotilla."31