What do you think of our Atomic Age now? I've been reading Dark Sun and getting a better view of why we were testing fusion and fission devices and bombs so far out in mid-Pacific.

There was so much that was not known. There were predictions, calculations, and guesses, but until the actual tests no one knew what would happen. Several devices and bombs fizzled Some ran away to an unexpected high yield; like Bravo and Romeo in operation Castle. Bravo was more than twice as large as the best guess, yiciding fifteen megatons. Romeo nearly tripled the best guess and went to eleven. The Bravo test created the worst radiological disaster in U.S. history. Due to the failure to postpone the test, following unfavorable changes in the weather; combined with the unexpected high yield, the Marshallese on several islands had to be evacuated, but not before they had received high radiation doses. A Japanese fishing boat eighty two miles from ground zero was covered with fallout that could be seen on the deck, "like dirty snow". Some crewmen actually tasted it. One died from complications. Chuck Butkus had to bug out of this fallout plume. I would like for him to tell us that story.

I went back for Hardtack, in 58 and watched about twenty eight early morning fireworks, at Eniwetok and Bikini. In retrospect, I see that there was very little concern about the initial flash and all of that spectrum of hard radiation. We just stood there on the beach, protected our eyes with those shot glasses, drank bitter mess hall coffee, and watched the show. There was concern about fallout though, and we all wore film badges that were developed and read on a regular schedule. That burst of radiation, from ground zero, comes ripping through everything then it's gone. But fallout is inhaled, ingested, becomes imbedded in the skin, and even sinks into the bones, becoming a part of the body.

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This stuff has a half life of 4.5 billion years

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Now we have a new kind of fallout. To build nuclear bombs or power plants, uranium must be separated into it's two main isotopes: U238 and U235. U235 is fissionable. Some of the U238 is bombarded with neutrons to produce plutonium. The remaining metal, called depleted uranium, is nuclear waste. It has been accumulating since the first Atomic explosion. The U.S. has thousands of tons on hand. And it is, of course, radioactive. It is much heavier than lead, very hard, poisonous and oxidizes readily. So, what do we do with it? For some time now, we have been making it into bullets.

Primarily it has been used to make high velocity armor piercing anti-tank rounds. This was one ofthe reasons for our Gulf War success. When this projectile punches through a tank's armor plate it vaporizes and burns explosively inside the tank. Many of us saw this happen on television as we watched the Gulf War like a regular TV show.

Those black clouds of smoke we saw, puffing out of the rips in the wreckage, were mostly uranium oxide dust. Particles as finely divided as those in talcum powder were drifting on the breeze and slowly settling down. That is fallout in any sense of the word. People breathed it and swallowed it. It got into their eyes and ears and even into the pores of their skin. This stuff has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Separate and apart from the dangerous radioactivity, this heavy metal is more poisonous than lead and more intrusive than asbestos. We have laws that control the handling of those familiar materials, but the Gulf War Veterans say there was no control or precautions involved with this fallout. They breathed the dust while clearing away the debris. Children are playing in that contaminated soil now. They will live their lives exposed to fallout every day. It did not come directly from an atomic bomb, but it still fell out of their sky. We are responsible. It may be true that our civilization can't cope with the Atomic Age.

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