No Place to Hide: What We Learned at Bikini

by DAVID BRADLEY, M.D.

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THRSDAY, August 15. — Thegreat Task Force of Operation Crossroads is breaking up into many smaller sections and spreading out in all directions. After tomorrow only a small group will remain. Those who are escaping from this lagoon of horrors have become a little euphoric. Great things, they feel, have been done out here for science and humanity and great things could still be done.

One of our most blissful optimists is a captain in the Air Corps, an entomologist by training. In his youth he studied cockroaches, and this passion he followed throughout t he war in t he ample laboratory resources of Army life. One day he was prowling around the battleship New York, ostensibly monitoring below decks but. actually looking to see if there might be something to eat. He found the larder — and what is more, he noticed that a large clan of cockroaches had moved in ahead of him. Finding that most of the food was contaminated with radioactive material (probably brought in on the shoes of hungry sailors weeks earlier), he was suddenly struck with the light. Cockroaches and food, radioactive food! Would they survive? How much could they eat? Would it affect their reproductive powers? So our friend collected a boxful of cockroaches, brought them back to the Haven, and carefully stowed them in his gear for study when he got back to the United States. I often wonder what his home life will be like when he arrives and the sweet little wife, asking for a souvenir of Bikini, is rewarded with a box of radioact ive cockroaches.

TUESDAY, August 20. — Urinalysis: approaching 3000 mark.

Findings: no definite evidence of radioactivity. Conclusions: well, let’s see.

What can you conclude from 3000 urine samples taken from crews who since Baker plus One have been off and on aboard the hottest target, ships? First you have to decide what are the limits of accuracy of your measurements and the factors which govern those limits.

The first factor is the accuracy of your instruments and the method of counting. Unfortunately out here we have only the instruments previously used for water counting for our urinalysis. In the early days following the Baker shot they were used to analyze lagoon water which was intensely radioactive. They naturally became contaminated by material which coated the tubes and lead pigs exactly as it coated the ships. This means that each counter has a high background count.

A second variable is the time when the urine was collected. The most reliable measure of fission products contained within the body will be found in the excretion which immediately follows the exposure. For practical purposes, however, such restrictions would slow down the work of the Task Force to a point where nothing would ever be done.

In the third place, one can never be sure that a particular sample which gives a reading above background really represents exposure of the patient. Contamination of the sample is too easy. Fresh bottles can be fouled up by material from the hands of the person giving the sample, and from equipment used in its analysis.

it is evident, therefore, that our urinalysis is scarcely a scientific procedure. Yet it is the best we can do under the limitations of our equipment and our method. It is always possible to cheek suspicious samples by evaporating and ashing down large volumes of urine and counting them for longer times in cleaner instruments — and this is done, but that method, too, is subject to similar limitations.

A fourth variable enters into any attempt to interpret a finding of radioactivity in urine. Fission products contain a multiplicity of radioactive elements, each with its own properties. Some may be so insoluble as never to be absorbed. Ot hers may be absorbed and fixed within the body, giving no sign of their presence thereafter. Some are quite harmless in small amounts owing to a rapid decay; others are toxic chemically or dangerous in very small quantities owing to their radioactivity.

One must interpret urinalyses within their proper context. The conditions mentioned, if less favorable than those of the Manhattan District laboratories, are still far better than one could expect in an atomic war. Indeed it is hard to imagine that a population or an army exposed to a similar rain of radioactive material could ever afford the luxury of urinalysis.

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THURSDAY, August 22.&emdash; With the discovery, by divers, that areas of coral were bleaching out into chalky white from some unexplainable and lethal agent has come an increasing concern over the fish. Small reef fish feed on coral and algae and have been picking up considerable quantities of the material and storing it in various parts of their bodies, notably the gills, the liver, the intestines, and the organs of reproduction. Some of the men down in X-ray have demonstrated t his most dramatically by means of “radioautographs" of the entire fish.

A radioautograph is made by taking a small fish, slicing it longitudinally down the middle, drying it in a blast of warm air, and t hen placing the fish, cut side down, on a photograph plate. After a suitable time ihe radioactivity present in the tissues of the fish will have exposed the adjacent film, which, when developed, will then outline the fish in tones which are proportional to the radioactivity present. We have several of t hem. They demonst rate clearly the pattern of selective absorption of fission products by the various tissues. One can sec the gills darkly outlined, the long coiled intestine, the large burst of radioactivity associated with the liver, and the less dark areas of the gonads. The rest of the fish shows only a trace of the material. This is hard on the fish but a most fortunate thing for man, since not a few fish have been eaten by careless or optimistic Waltonians out here.

What is true of the reef fish now will become increasingly true of the larger migratory fish— the tunas, the jacks, the sharks — as the latter, the predatory fish, eat more and more of the smaller fish that are sick with the disease of radioactivity.

Wc know that this process is going on. Almost all seagoing fish recently caught around the atoll of Bikini have been radioactive. Thus the disease is passed on from species to species like an epizootic. The only factors which tend to limit the disease, as distinguished from infectious diseases, are the halflives of the materials involved and the degree of dilution and dissemination of the fission products.

What the immediate results of this situation will be cannot be predicted. I believe that there is enough radioactivity present at the bottom of this lagoon to kill fish either by the total radiation to the body or by the destruction of vital organs which have absorbed radioactivity, but it would take a careful study of the fish population, extending over many months, to prove it. I doubt that the amount of radiation carried away by migratory fish to other parts of the Pacific will constitute any hazard either to fish or to man, because of the great dilution factor. But whether we would be safe in that assumption in the event of an atomic war, with a large number of bombs exploding in coastal areas and seaports, is another question. Conceivably the fishing industry would be entirely wrecked and the fish rendered unsafe for eating at a time when food of any kind was critically needed.

The gross and spectacular demonst ration of radioactivity in fish by means of radioautographs lias to be supplemented by a more accurate study of the separate tissues, isolated, ashed down, and counted in a sensitive beta-gamma counter. This investigation has been one of the side interests of the laboratory.

FRIDAY, August 23. — “Humphrey” Bogart, who few lagoon reconnaissance with me after the explosion of the underwater bomb, came in today with the latest information on the decontamination of ships. Having proved at last, to its own satisfaction, that salt water, lye, foamite, soap, spread with liberal amounts of Navy profanity, have no value in cleaning these ships of their coat of radioactivity, the Navy has recently decided to try sandblasting. This has been Humphrey’s assignment. It is tedious, hot work, and since there may be a danger from inhaled radioactive dust, it has to be carried on by men fully clothed and working in oxygen rebreathing apparatus. Next to a diver’s suit there is nothing more cumbersome and trying on the nerves than such a costume in the tropics.

It appears that sandblasting will remove radioactivity— that is to say, when all the paint has been blasted off. Clearly this is no answer to the Fleet’s problem. You can’t sandblast a whole ship under battle conditions. You can’t sandblast Pearl Harbor, or Bremerton Shipyards, or Chicago. No fact demonstrated by the Bikini tests is more important in its widest implications than the difficulty of ridding the habitable surfaces of our world of contaminating fission products.

Rex Huff, one of our doctors, performed a simple and revealing experiment the other day. He had been working with a crew of deck scrubbers aboard one of the big ships. And when they, like all the rest, found that no amount of lye and elbow grease was removing the radioactivity, Rex dug up a piece of wood from the deck. This he took to our carpenter shop, where he could plane strips from the surface, measuring the surface radioactivity after each planing. He found that he had to remove about a half centimeter — something less than a quarter of an inch — of the wood before he had removed all of the radioactivity. It was his conclusion that all the washing we were doing only served to soak the fission products more deeply and permanently into the wood.

If, then, we are faced with having to chip off all the paint and to plane off all the wooden surfaces of our contaminated ships, the degree of disablement of ships by a water-bursting atomic bomb is ever so much more than was anticipated before Test Baker. Doubtless there will be other methods of meeting the problem. Some of the more nimble-minded men of the Navy are suggesting that ships be painted with a plastic coat something like that which is now being used to protect the guns from weathering — a coat which, when contaminated to a dangerous degree, may be stripped off the ship in sheets and thrown overboard. But even if this could be made practical for ships, how could we take care of our cities with their brick buildings and cement sidewalks ?

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SATURDAY,August24. — We have had few medical emergencies out here. Considering how many seamen have been at work on these ships, encumbered by oxygen rebreathing apparatus and heavy clothing, working in dark gangways and on hopelessly wrecked decks, it is remarkable that there have not been more emergencies. Today we had our first serious radiat ion problem. Grover Carter, Huff, and I were working on a better process for urinalysis when a corpsman suddenly appeared.

“Sir, there’s an emergency in surgery. Dr. Williams would very much like someone to come down.”

“Okay. What’s the hitch?”

“Some sailor got cut with a cable and he thinks he’s full of them Geigers, sir.”

That was bad news. We ran down to the instrument room to get a counter, and then followed the corpsman down to the operating theater. The sailor, a husky fellow in his late teens, was lying on the operating table beneath the glare of the overhead lights. He was in no particular pain, but pale and sweating from fright. Two Navy doctors, gowned, gloved, and masked, were washing out his wound with sterile solution. It was not much more than a superficial laceration of the base of the thumb, and fortunately was still bleeding well.

Dr. W illiams was obviously relieved to see us. “Brad, this man got hurt on some cable aboard one of the target ships. It doesn’t look too bad — but I don’t know what to do with it.”

The sailor told us the name of the ship; it was one of the beached vessels and was moderately contaminated on deck. “We was trying to get her clear for the trip to Kwaj. I was heaving in on one of the cables when it gave way and tore my hand. Don’t seem too bad, but one of them Geiger men was there and he told me to report here on the double.”

“Did he examine the cable?”

“Yes, sir. It had been in the water, and he said it was radioactive.”

My thoughts went back to the Manhattan Project. There, in laboratories and plants where people are working with purified plutonium, policy requires immediate high amputation for anyone in a similar situation. The material is rapidly absorbed from cuts and lacerations, and once within the body it is quickly fixed in the marrow part of the bones, where, like radium, it may be lethal in fantastically small amounts.

The situation is a little different here. Most of the fission products are quite insoluble and will not be absorbed nearly so rapidly if at all. Plutonium is known to be present, but in small amounts. Knowing as little as we actually do of the various elements present on these decks, I hated to be responsible for an unnecessary amputation; yet an error on the other side would be worse.

I hesitated, and Dr. Williams, reading my thoughts, said, “I told him that he might have to have an amputation.”

At this, the sailor closed his eyes but said not hing. “Well, maybe, and maybe not,” I said to him. “You understand, though, that if you got a lot of hot stuff into your hand from that cable your best chance is to have your arm off.”

He nodded. “Sure. That’s what the Geiger man said too. . . . You’re the doctor.”

Carter, Huff, and I looked his hand over carefully, setting the Geiger tube right down on the wound. There was no count, so then Dr. Williams injected a novocaine block and debrided the edges of the wound. As the bits of tissue, dried on filter paper, also gave no reading, we felt confident that the wound was not seriously contaminated and could be safely closed without amputation. There was never a boy more thankful to be returned to duty than that sailor, nor a surgeon more thankful to be out of an operation than I.

SUNDAY,August 25: Baker plus One Month.— The Task Force is moving to the better winter anchorage of Kwajalein Atoll. Most of the ships have gone. Those of the target fleet not worth saving will be sunk by gunfire; the rest of the grim, disfigured fleet is getting under way comatose, obediently drifting behind the tugs.

The Haven got under way late in the afternoon. As we slipped out over the green opalescence of the bar a tremendous explosion took place on the shore of Bikini Island, where the Sea bees are blasting some sort of a channel in the barrier reef. It must have been a real charge— a sort of farewell salute — for the white cloud boiled up from behind the palms, ascending rapidly to several thousand feel and then mushrooming out into a magnificent plume. It looked like a miniature atomic explosion, and served to make us reflect on why we had come all the way to Bikini to do a job which no one wanted done, which everyone was afraid of. It made us wonder what we had learned, what use all the carloads of reports and graphs would be if we ever were faced with these problems again outside the fascinating laboratory of Bikini.

FRIDAY,August 30. — Kwajalein Atoll. Most of our Bikini fleet is here, anchored well out in ihe main harbor. We have not been the most welcome of visitors. No one has barbecued the fatted can of Spam for us — in fact, we are not allowed ashore at all except on special missions. Anyone who has been connected with Opera! ion Crossroads is a leper here.

SUNDAY,September8. — The status has remained pretty much quo this week. We are still riding our anchor chains here in Kwajalein and see little sign of change. The fleet of dead ships is still afloat, and little by little the ammunition is being carried off the larger vessels. They stand near-by, mottled with gray and tan, crippled, gaunt, silent, the twisted wreckage still untouched on deck, creaking with the slow rolling of the ships. They box the compass with the variable winds, and disappear in the rain squalls. But back again they emerge, and we wonder what in hell to do with them. I reckon that a lot of people besides ourselves have been wondering what to do with them.

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THURSDAY,September12. — Kwajalein Harbor is full of ships, eyed with suspicion by the shore-based Navy and with despair by the Crossroads Navy. Among the quarantined fleet is a particularly interesting ship. It is a great greasy, black tub, with a bluff bow, low sides, and a dormitory-like structure extending nearly the full length of its wide deck. It is, or was, a kind of floating barracks, having large rooms, mess halls, showers, locker rooms. When it became evident that boarding parties were tracking back quantities of radioactivity into their clean vessels, and thus endangering the whole Radiological Safety program, this seagoing shore installation was transformed into a locker and shower and clothing-issue room for all parties going to the target ships.

Today I had the duty with an ammunition unloading party aboard the Independence. One enters the change ship from one side, and in some distant locker room is given an issue of freshly laundered fatigues, along with boots, rubber gloves, and oxygen rebreathing gear. Thus equipped the party is assembled and transported to its destination. Once alongside, you strap on your oxygen gear and face mask, and feeling about as much in contact with your surroundings as Ben Turpin, you stumble over the side and climb the boarding nets.

The Independence is a ghost ship — its flight deck blown up, leaving the thick oak planks broken like so much boxwood, its hangar deck blasted down, and only a skeleton of the sides remaining. Gun turrets and gangways, twisted, crushed, dangle overside, grating and creaking with the roll of the ship. Doors are smashed in and jammed tight against the bulkheads, or blown out altogether, and the water sloshes back and forth across the rusty decks. For the most part the radiation is not particularly high, though sometimes those rusty pools will set your earphones singing and shoot the indicator needles off scale.

The route to the magazines is a maze of gangways and black passages barely visible through the bleary oxygen masks and the constant streams of sweat which fill one’s eyes. Each passageway and each new compartment has to be inspected for poisonous gases and for radiation. It was not our mission to remove any ammunition — merely to open up the passages and okay them for later parties. Many of the ships were heavily loaded with ammo, from machine-gun rounds on up to torpedoes. The process of unloading seems at the moment a truly Herculean assignment. A man can work only about thirty minutes in an oxygen rebreather; then he must go on deck and get some air, a cigarette, and a chance to release the steam from beneath his collar. Two hours aboard, under such conditions, is a day’s work.

After that, back to the floating barracks. Here the boats are scrubbed with soapy water and clothing is discarded to be laundered or buried at sea, depending upon the degree of contamination. The cost of even such minimal activities as we now engage in, in terms of clothing, boots, gloves, and oxygen rebreathing gear, and in terms of the gigantic daily laundry operations, must be staggering.

To the sailors it must all be incomprehensible. Here we are insisting on measures of extreme caution at a time when the radiation has had a month and a half to decay away, when the ships’ decks are probably not a thousandth as hot as they were in the first hour following the Baker explosion. These same measures were not employed in the first weeks — why then now?

There are good reasons. In the first place, it is good policy in public or industrial health to be as cautious and conservative as is consistent with the job to be done. In the first hectic week or two following the last shot, when ships had to be pumped or left to sink, when there were important instruments and experimental animals to recover, and when the problem of decontamination was less well understood -in those days, if such extreme precautions had been required, nothing at all could have been done and the experiment would have become a total failure.

We were in a position similar (though infinitely better probably) to that of a city bombed out with atomic weapons. No such rigmarole as rubber boots and gloves and oxygen rebreathing masks could conceivably be used if San Francisco were atomized, its population struggling to escape from the blazing debris, the smoke, and the terror of the unseen emanations.

But out here we are under no such duress. The experiment is largely done. Our job is merely janitorial. and so the maximum precautions consistent with our simple tasks are justified.

There is another good reason; the very fact that radioactivity is apparently decaying away makes caution the more imperative. This paradoxical statement is based upon the presence of dangerous materials which are not detectable on the ordinary Geiger counter — notably, remnants of the plutonium of the original bomb. Plutonium is more dangerous than an equivalent amount of radium; its half-life runs into thousands of years, and so for all practical purposes it will be here forever. A pure alpha-particle emitter, plutonium gives no hint of its presence in the beta-gamma counter. We can only assume, when other forms of radiation are present, emanating from fission products, that plutonium also may be present. Yet as this telltale radiation decays away, our sense of security may be entirely false.

This theoretical situation has been pretty well borne out by the experimental work of Lars and Tom Madden in the laboratory. Lars has made an intensive study of the rate of radioactive decay of many samples of material — paint, rust, wood, glass, rope, brass, calking, coral, algae. His graphs show a steady, predictable trend covering a month. The rate of that process is now becoming very slow. We have lost those components from the original blast which had short half-lives — a matter of seconds, hours, or days. Those that remain now, a month and a half later, have half-lives which will extend for years or centuries, or even longer. Therefore, we can expect little change in the intensity, except through day-to-day weathering and rusting.

Tom has become our specialist in alpha detection. The use of that precious alpha counter — of which we have only one, securely hidden away in an isolated part of the laboratory — requires considerable training and experience, and the meticulous Tom, after weeks of work, has become a reliable operator, Hlis results consistently show that there is a small but definite amount of plutonium spread atom-thin over most of the contaminated areas. Comparing these two studies, one cannot escape the conclusion that the relative danger from plutonium must necessarily increase in proportion as the shorterlived beta-gamma emitters (our warning signals) are dying away,

MONDAY, September l6.—Efforts at decontamination have come to a standstill with total defeat for he magic powers of soap and water. Asa matter of fact, Tom, Lars, and Bex Hull’ha ve demonst rated in the laboratory that fission products can be removed only by removing the outer surface of the area in question. They have been able, by means of strong acid, to remove most radioactivity from samples of paint, steel, and other materials. It works in a test tube, but a lest tube is not where most of us live. The problem of decontaminating the total surface of a battleship or the brick and cement of a future Hiroshima remains practically insoluble.

The same applies to much of our laboratory work. How can we translate our findings into the severely practical necessities of everyday life? For example, we have been trying to discover whether or not the degree of radioactivity present in Bikini water, after ’Test Baker, has harmed the metabolic processes of marine life. We can compare, in a crude way, the capacity of algae, exposed and unexposed, to produce oxygen in the presence of light as a by-product to photosynthesis. We can make radioautographs of the distribution of radioactivity in the bodies of little fish, and by means of fish population surveys attempt to discover whether or not the bomb had any effect on the life cycles of the lagoon inhabitants. These studies are important. They should indeed be carried on by men more competent in these fields than any of us, and above all they should be continued for months or even years, if necessary, so that the true picture may be known.

This is not merely academic. Such studies may influence the lives of people living on the Tibetan plateau. We don’t know to what distances from Bikini the radiation disease may be carried. We can’t predict to what degree the balance of nature will be thrown off by atomic bombs. We certainly have little idea what the long-range effects on our lives would be from an all-out atomic war, devastating our shores, our fish, and our agricultural industries. Bui at least at this time we do know that Bikini is not some faraway little atoll pinpointed on an out-of-the-way chart. Bikini is San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound, the East River. It is the Thames, the Adriatic, the Hellespont, and misty Baikal. It isn’t just “ King" Juda and his displaced native subjects whom we have to think about — or forget.

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SUNDAY, October 6.—Joint Task Force One is moving ashore in order to release ships like the Haven for more active duty. We shall take up quarters in the five Quonset huts on the far side of the island originally occupied by the two bombs and t heir at tcndant s.

It would seem that our work out here is about at an end. The derelict fleet may go on indefinitely, being pumped out or towed away to sink. All thought of decontaminating the ships and getting them under way again is, of course, out of the question, and save for the effects of weathering and rusting, one could study these ships as well ten years from now as today. The recent announcement by the President, canceling Test Charlie (the deep-water shot), would seem to be the final coup de grace for Operation Crossroads.

The Crossroads Tests at first glance might seem to have been a failure. From a military point of view the two shots confirmed what was already known of the effectiveness of a chain reaction as an explosive, and certainly proved beyond all expectations what was feared concerning the poisoning of land, sea, and air with radioactivity. Scientifically what was learned in the crude laboratory of Bikini remains to be evaluated and declassified from the archives of military secrecy.

But the greatest failure of all in these tests has been in apprehending their sociological implications. Evidently the bomb has failed to impress more than a few congenital pessimists with the full scope of its lethal potential. This error in publicity — an error of omission — might be justifiable on the basis of strict military secrecy. In the long run, however, the one thing more dangerous than informed governments abroad will be an uninformed American opinion making our policies. The question is not political so much as biological. It is not the security of a political system, but the survival of the race, that is at stake in the indiscriminate use of atomic energy for political coercion. Its unique problems are self-evident; there is nothing about them so profound as to require translation by a scientist. Among them are: —

1. That there is no real defense against atomic weapons.

2. That there are no satisfactory countermeasures and methods of decontamination.

3. That there are no satisfactory medical or sanitary safeguards for the people of atomized areas.

4. That the devastating influence of the bomb and its unborn relatives may affect the land and its wealth — and therefore its people — for centuries through the persistence of radioactivity.

These facts are substantiated in theory by experiments upon thousands of animals, and in practice by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini, it is in this sense that the Crossroads Tests have been anything but failures. Hastily planned and hastily carried out, they may have only sketched in the gross outlines of the real problem; nevertheless, those outlines show pretty clearly the shadow of the colossus which looms behind tomorrow.

THURSDAY, October 10.—With the abruptness and finality of orders in the Army we received our transfer back to United Stales duty and separation from Crossroads. Late in the afternoon a DC-4 came in from Guam with space available for Tom, Lars, and me. We were packed and at the airport within a half hour. As the great silvery ship, humming with power, lifted itself from the runway, passed over the Marine barracks, the huts, the post office, and up over the line of curling surf, we had our last glimpse of the spectral fleet. There lay the Nevada, still a proud cardinal with its tail feathers burned off; there were the Pensacola and the Salt Lake City, their superstructures dangling crazily overside; there too the sturdy, sullen Sew York, the destroyers streaked with foamite and rust, the Prinz Eugen, still the most beautiful ship of its kind afloat, and far in the distance the Independence, an exploded myth of military security.

Looking down at the lagoon with its toy flotilla, I wondered if we were really succeeding in running away. Radioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles — could they ever be eluded? Maybe not, but at least somebody else was taking over the graveyard shift, and for the moment we were happy in the illusion of escape. Like one waking from the toils of a nightmare, we welcomed the black night and the thousands of miles of black Pacific beneath. Johnston Island came and went, a pinpoint of iight in all that empty ocean — an island no bigger for us than the glare of the landing lights on the field, and the snack bar, with its bustle of sleepy-eyed patrons. Then Hawaii, like a beautiful monarch moth, half emerging from a cocoon of mist.

That evening we took off again and spent a long night in the comfortless darkness of bucket seats. Fourteen hours later the rugged coastline and golden hills of California were just shaking off the blanket of fog when we first saw them. How beautiful! How peaceful and prosperous! How wonderful to be home again! We wanted so much to return to the America we had left — a country victorious and magnanimous in war, a country still confident in its ways of peace. Minutes later we were down on the ground in that celebrated and lethargic California sunshine.

What was learned at Bikini of a scientific or military nature may have been of value. Unfortunately, much of it is disguised in the esoteric idiom of the scientist. The really great lessons of that experiment, however, belong to no special group but to all mankind. The atomic era, fortunately or otherwise, is now man’s environment, to control or to adapt himself to as he can.

Atomic research daily gathers momentum with its full train of military and social implications. For good or for ill we have embarked on this blind program.

There is no way back.