David Bradley

We present in this issue the concluding installment of DR. DAVID BRADLEY’S eveuitness account of the Bikini tests and the aftereffects of the atom bomb, Authorities have long since agreed that the violence of the atomic explosion brooks no defense. We believe that Dr. Bradley has shown, also, that there is no practical defense or countermeasure against the radioactive poison which persists for years after the mushroom cloud has disappeared. In laboratory tests, radioactivity may be removed from samples of paint, wood, and metal, but decontaminating an entire ship or the brick and c ement of a city is impossible. Dr. Bradley s book. No Place to llirle. has just been published under the Atlantic Little, Brown imprint.

Photographs of the U.S.S. Pennsylvania in a recant issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings carried the caption that this grand old veteran of the seas “survived hath atom bomb tests at Bikini and finally went down off Kwajalein more from the after effects of war damage at Okinawa than from atom bomb DAMAGEDAY ID BRADLEY, M.D., one of the team of medicos who were sent to Bikini “to see that no one got hurt,”wrote down in his Log testimony of a very different sort, for he and his fellow scientists detected with their Geiger counters that not only the warships at Bikini but the fish in the atoll, the oil flecks washed ashore, even the water itself, were contaminated with radioactivity as a direct result of the underwriter bomb. How deadly was this contamination will be seen in the pages that follow. This is the second of three articles drawn from Dr. Bradley’s forthcoming book.

The light carrier Independence survived the two atomic bombs at Bikini and when she was towed back to San Francisco men saw that she was still afloat. Actually she was a dangerous leper,so full of radioactivity that she could not even be used for scrap. Now we hear of plans for a super-carrier and the question arises as to whether we comprehend the lesson learned by a few at Bikini.DAVID BRADLEY,a graduate of the Harvard Medical School,had six months of training in the Manhattan District prior to the Tests. His Log,passed by the Office of Information Control of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, tells a story every American should know.