By Walter Pincus, March 7, 2024

There has been talk in the national security community lately about the so-called “merits” of resuming underground or even atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. I think this would be a grave mistake for many reasons—chief among them is that it forgets the horrific health effects that resulted from some previous nuclear tests.

To be clear, since 1963, atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons have been banned, as have tests in outer space and under water. And underground explosive tests have been banned ever since the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, or CTBT. (Technically speaking, while the United States and China have signed the CTBT, neither has ratified it. Russia did both sign and ratify the treaty but on November 2, 2023 Russia announced it had rescinded its ratification. All three countries, however, have so far abided by the CTBT treaty.)

Meanwhile, sub-critical nuclear tests—which use tiny amounts of plutonium but do not create self-sustaining, exponentially-growing, nuclear chain reactions—have continued to this day, in laboratories or in specially constructed underground tunnels. The US is building new tunnels for sub-critical tests at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site where they are expected to help in designing the new, US W93 nuclear warhead now under development.

Presumably, then, what we are referring to when we talk about the possible resumption of nuclear testing is not the latter sub-critical testing, but some version of atmospheric, outer space, underwater, or underground explosives testing.

And here things get tricky.

Because I think that enough time has gone by that the longer-term dangers of nuclear weapons, such as radioactive fallout, have largely disappeared from the public consciousness—much to the agony and despair of those afflicted to this day.

I believe that the more people understand and even can visualize the immediate and long-term dangers of nuclear weapons use, the less likely it is that they may be used. Several nuclear scientists have told me they have memories of specific past nuclear atmospheric tests, most memorably two who were involved in the Manhattan Project—Harold Agnew and Hans Bethe.

Agnew photographed the Hiroshima mushroom cloud from the US aircraft that followed the Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb. Agnew almost always brought up the effect that had on him when we met.

For his part, Bethe, at 88—on the 50th anniversary of the birth of the atomic bomb—wrote: “I feel the most intense relief that these weapons have not been used since World War II, mixed with horror that tens of thousands of such weapons have been built since that time—one hundred times more than any of us at Los Alamos could ever imagine.”

In an interview years earlier at Cornell University where he was teaching, Bethe had told me something similar—and at 91, I have never forgotten those words.

The closer you are to nuclear weapons, the more you are aware of the dangers if they were to be used again. However, I believe, most people today have forgotten, if they ever knew, what a single nuclear weapon could do.

Seeing is believing. But believing in this case should make you work to oppose their use, as can be seen in a very rough sort of timeline of my own life.

Nuclear weapons and nuclear testing have been an obsession of mine for the more than 60 years that I have been writing about national security affairs. Since atmospheric testing ended back in 1963—with the result that nuclear tests are no longer seen—current generations have not been exposed to actual nuclear test explosions, as I and my generation were when we were growing up.

When the first two atomic bombs were dropped over Japan in August 1945, I was 12-years old, spending the summer swimming and playing baseball at Schroon Lake Camp for Boys in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains.

While newsreel and newspaper pictures of mushroom clouds became fixed in my mind, the actual devastation was never real to me. All I knew back then was that that the Second World War would soon be over and that was enough.

In the following years, as nuclear testing began, I remember sitting in the Fantasy Theater in Rockville Centre, my suburban home town of 28,000 on Long Island, New York, as the “News of the Day” newsreels at our Saturday afternoon double-feature showed the various explosions out there in the South Pacific. In the 1950s, as testing moved to Nevada and then back to the Pacific, there was little talk of radioactive fallout in the eastern part of the United States. But we followed stories about fallout as radioactive debris drifted over Europe and Asia.

By the early 1960s  I was working in Washington, DC, and well aware, through newspaper and television coverage, that radioactive fallout from Pacific and Nevada test shots had resulted in cows in Denmark eating grass exposed to fallout and scientists measuring strontium 90 levels that had turned up in the milk produced for Europeans. I drank a lot of milk then and still do.

It was in February 1966, well after the 1963 atmospheric test ban treaty, that I first wrote about the impact of nuclear weapons. It was a rather flip, three-paragraph note in The Reporter Magazine, which no longer exists. The story concerned a law that had passed Congress the previous month, a measure which required the US Government to pay $11,000 to each of the 82 men, women and children—or their survivors—who had been on Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific on March 1, 1954 when the United States detonated Test Bravo from a tower on an artificial island built within Bikini Atoll, more than 120 miles west of Rongelap.

Bravo was the first US test of a deliverable thermonuclear bomb and was expected to have a six-megaton yield, the equivalent of six million tons of TNT. In fact, the explosion was more than double that—15 megatons—and one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Thanks in good part to thousands of documents on nuclear weapons declassified and released during the Clinton Administration, I was able to describe details about the Bravo explosion two years ago in my book, Blown To Hell: America’s Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders, as follows:

In a few seconds the fireball, recorded at one hundred million degrees, had spread nearly three miles in diameter, then quickly spread to ten miles. The sandspit and nearby reef where Bravo had stood, along with coral island areas, were vaporized down almost two hundred feet into the sea, creating a crater about one mile in diameter.

It was estimated that three hundred million tons of vaporized sand, coral and water shot up into the air as the fireball rose, and one-hundred-mile-an-hour winds created by the blast pulled additional debris up into the fireball. Within one minute, the fireball had gone up forty-five thousand feet with a stem four miles wide filled with radioactive debris. It continued to zoom upward, shooting through the troposphere and into the stratosphere within five minutes.

Later data showed the cloud bottom was at fifty-five thousand feet, the secondary mushroom cloud bottom was at one-hundred-fourteen thousand feet, and the upper cloud hit one-hundred-thirty thousand feet.

Ten minutes after detonation the mushroom cloud had widened and measured seventy-five miles across just below the stratosphere.

Original projections had predicted Bravo radioactive fallout would emanate from a fifteen-mile-wide cylinder that could stretch into the stratosphere. Instead, it turned out to be a one-hundred-mile-wide cloud where “debris was carried up and dispersed over a much larger area than was thought possible,” wrote Dr. William Ogle, the test’s task force commander of the scientific group that dealt with radioactivity.

Radioactive fallout and its long-term effects—things that the average person today does not really appreciate—would be the result from any future nuclear weapons explosion that touched the Earth’s surface. Fallout does not just affect the target, but also the surrounding areas—which could be as far as hundreds of miles away. And the effects could last for years, if not decades thereafter. These effects are worth spelling out in detail, using what happened downwind of the test as an example.

That March 1, 1954 morning, the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, with a crew of 23 aboard, was trawling its nets 90 miles east-northeast of Bikini. A crewman at the stern rail saw a whitish flare in the west that briefly lit up the clouds and the water. It grew in size, turned to yellow-red, then orange. After a few minutes, the colors faded and shortly thereafter the ship was rocked by the blast of an explosion.

The Lucky Dragon’s captain and the fishing master, who had read ship warnings before they left port, realized they might have strayed into a nuclear test area. They quickly decided to haul in their fishing nets and head back to Japan, almost 2,500 miles away.

It was another two or three hours before a fine white dust began to come down on the boat. With a light rain, the radioactive dust continued to settle on crewmen and the fish on the deck as they worked for another two hours to bring in their lines.

On Rongelap about 30 miles further east, at about 11:30 a.m., a similar powdery, radioactive ash began falling in the area. It stuck to the Marshallese people’s skin, hair, and eyes; many walked barefoot and the powder stuck to their toes; it fell on fish drying on wooden racks that would be eaten that night. Rain briefly fell as the fallout continued into afternoon, dissolving the powdery ash on roofs and carrying it down drains into water barrels that provided drinking water to each household.

On parts of Rongelap Island, where most people lived, the almost five hours of fallout led to drifts of up to one-inch or more high on the ground, on roofs, and along the beach. People recalled that when the moon broke through the clouds that night, it looked like patches of snow on the ground.

It would be two days before the Marshallese were evacuated from Rongelap and taken to the Kwajalein Navy Base by a US Navy destroyer. By then, most of the Rongelapese people had suffered from acute radiation exposure and nausea; some had experienced skin lesions as well.

Since the Bravo test was highly classified, a decision was made in Washington to keep the fallout incident secret, although the Atomic Agency Commission (AEC) had released a statement on March 1, 1954 that a nuclear test had taken place in the Marshall Islands Pacific Proving Ground. That had generated a small front page story in the March 2, 1954, edition of The New York Times. It was not until March 11, 1954, that the AEC admitted people “unexpectedly exposed to some radioactivity” had been moved to Kwajalein “according to a plan as a precautionary measure.”

Two weeks passed before the Lucky Dragon returned to its home port in Japan. It was only then that on March 16, 1954, the first story appeared in the Japanese Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper of what had happened to the boat’s crew and their fish—not what happened to the Marshallese. That story immediately triggered initial worldwide attention to the dangers of fallout from nuclear weapons.

However, it was not until President Eisenhower’s March 31, 1954 press conference that AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss, who had just returned from observing post-Bravo nuclear tests, admitted publicly that the Bravo test was “in the megaton range” and “the yield was about double that of the calculated estimate.” As for the evacuated Marshallese, Strauss said they “appeared to me to be well and happy,” and “the medical staff on Kwajalein advised us that they anticipate no illness barring of course disease which might be hereafter contracted.”

On that very day, American doctors dealing with the Marshallese considered, but did not, moving to Hawaii’s hospitals some Rongelap people whose white blood cell levels had fallen to about a fourth of normal levels due to radiation exposure.

In the question-and-answer session at the March 31, press conference, Strauss was asked: “What happens when the H-bomb goes off, how big is the area of destruction in its various stages, and what I am asking you for now is some enlightenment on that subject?”

Strauss responded, “Well, the nature of an H-bomb … is that, in effect, it can be made to be as large as you wish, as large as the military requirement demands, that is to say, an H-bomb can be made as large enough to take out a city … to destroy a city.”

Someone shouted, “How big a city?”

“Any city,” Strauss replied.

“Any city, New York?” was asked.

“The metropolitan area, yes,” Strauss said.

 The AEC Chairman would later change the transcript from “destroy a city,” to “put out of commission a city” as what he should have said.

With all the recent talk about nuclear weapons, when was the last time a reporter asked a government official what a specific nuclear weapon would do if it were ever to be used?

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On February 15, 1955, the AEC issued a public report entitled, “The Effects of High-Yield Nuclear Explosions.” It was unlike anything that could be published about nuclear testing now, or since 1963, when tests went underground.

In an introduction, AEC Chairman Strauss wrote: “It should be noted that if we had not conducted the full-scale thermonuclear tests … we would have been in ignorance of the extent of the effects of radioactive fallout and, therefore we would have been much more vulnerable to the dangers from fallout in the event an enemy should resort to radiological warfare against us.”

The early part of the 1955 report described the blast and heat effects of early atomic bombs detonated in the air, before discussing fallout from Bravo and other detonations. “In the air explosion, where the fireball does not touch the earth’s surface, the radioactivity produced in the bomb condenses only on solid particles from the bomb casing itself and the dust which happens to be in the air. In the absence of materials drawn up from the surface, these substances will condense with the vapors from the bomb and air dust to form only the smallest particles. These minute substances may settle to the surface over a very wide area—probably spreading around the world—over a period of days or even months. By the time they have reached the earth’s surface, the major part of their radioactivity has dissipated harmlessly in the atmosphere and the residual contamination is widely dispersed.”

The report then turned to what fallout would occur if the fireball hit the ground. “If however the weapon is detonated on the surface or close enough so that the fireball touches the surface, then large amounts of material will be drawn up into the bomb cloud. Many of the particles thus formed are heavy enough to descend rapidly while still intensely radioactive. The result is a comparatively localized area of extreme radioactive contamination, and a much larger area of some hazard. Instead of wafting down slowly over a vast area, the larger and heavier particles fall rapidly before there has been an opportunity for them to decay harmlessly in the atmosphere and before the winds have had an opportunity to scatter them.”

It described the Bravo fallout as looking like snow “because of calcium carbonate from coral,” and then noted its “adhesive” quality thanks to moisture picked up in the atmosphere as it descended. In the end it contaminated “a cigar-shaped area extending approximately 220 statute miles downwind, up to 40 miles wide,” from Bikini. It “seriously threatened the lives of nearly all persons in the area who did not take protective measures,” the report said.

The report then talked about radioactive strontium in fallout as having a long, average lifetime of nearly 30 years, noting it could enter the human body either by inhaling or swallowing. Deposited directly on edible plants, the strontium could be eaten by a human or animal. While rainfall or human washing of the plants would remove most of the radioactive material, radioactive strontium deposited directly on the soil or in the ocean, lakes, or rivers could be taken up by plants, animals, or fish. There it would lodge in their tissue where it could later be eaten by humans.

The report noted that radioactive strontium 90 fallout from all nuclear explosions up to that time —both US and Soviet—would have to increase many thousand times before it had any effect on humans.

The other radioactive element in fallout described specifically as a threat in the report was radioactive iodine. Even though the average life of radioactive iodine was only 11.5 days, it was described as a serious hazard because, if inhaled, it concentrated in the thyroid gland where it could damage cells, depending on dosage.

The New York Times on the morning of February 16, 1955 led its paper with the headline: “U.S. H-Bomb Test Put Lethal Zone At 7,000 Sq. Miles.” It added subheads: “Area Nearly Size of Jersey Covered by Atom Fallout After Bikini Explosion,” and “Strauss Warns That Human Survival Might Depend on Prompt Protective Steps.”

Calling it the AEC’s “first official estimate of the perils of a fallout of radioactive materials beyond the point of a nuclear blast,” the newspaper said the commission had temporarily called off nuclear tests at the Nevada site that originally had been scheduled for that day and the next.

The Times not only published the entire AEC report, which covered almost an entire inside page, but also presented a map—similar to the one the AEC left out—which showed how the Bravo H-bomb, if dropped on Washington, DC, could cause almost a 100-percent lethality rate from cigar-shaped fallout that stretched from the Nation’s Capital to Philadelphia.

Other newspapers that day ran similar major stories. The Los Angeles Examiner produced a front-page fallout map with that city as the detonation point. The Las Vegas Review-Journal carried a page one headline, “H-Bomb Fallout Terror Is Told.”

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One of the US Navy doctors taking care of the exposed Marshallese from Rongelap on Kwajalein was Robert A. Conard, then a Navy officer. A US Government decision in 1954 called for the Navy, initially, to carry out an annual examination of the exposed Rongelap people. As years passed, that role went to the AEC and eventually successor agencies. From 1956 through 1979, the medical examination team was led by Dr. Conard, who had retired from the Navy and moved to the staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The purpose was to provide medical care for the exposed Rongelap population, while at the same time trying to learn as much as possible about the long-term biological effects of radiation exposure. The dual purpose, which also had a control group of non-exposed Marshallese, became viewed by critics as the US Government using the exposed Rongelap people as “guinea pigs.”

In the initial years, Dr. Conard and the pediatricians he had brought with him to Rongelap had carefully watched the slow development of several children who had been exposed to the 1954 fallout.

Nine years after exposure, during the survey done in March 1963, the Conard team’s attention focused on two boys who had been one-year-olds at the time of the fallout. Both showed early signs of stunted physical and mental growth owing to a deficiency of a thyroid hormone often related to iodine deficiency.

Reconstructing what had occurred during the fallout, scientists decided the main source of radioactive iodine ingestion was water. Since it had been rationed over the two days before the exposed Marshallese had left Rongelap, it was assumed that both children and adults drank the same amounts. If both adults and children had the same amount of radioiodines, the smaller size of children’s thyroids meant they had received a larger dose.

Also of particular interest was the development of a palpable nodule in the thyroid gland of a 13-year-old fisherman’s daughter, who had been exposed to the Bravo fallout when she was four-years-old.

Conard in 1963 believed the findings related to the three children possibly represented the first signs of long-term radiation effects. He had the girl’s thyroid nodule sent for laboratory examination. Conard’s lab restudy found the Bravo radiation dose to a child’s thyroid at a level high enough to cause eventual trouble. By 1981, the annual medical examinations had shown 24 exposed Rongelapese had developed thyroid nodules, which were removed, including 18 of the 19 children who were teenage or less at the time of exposure.

“It has become evident that thyroid abnormalities—which include benign and malignant

thyroid tumors and thyroid failure—are the major late effects of the radiation received by the exposed Marshallese,” according to a 2017 paper produced by the Medical Center of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

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Three years after the Bravo fallout, after a new radiobiological resurvey, the AEC informed the Navy in late February 1957 that Rongelap Atoll was safe for the exposed Marshallese to return to—and to a new village built just for them. The exposed Rongelap returnees arrived in June 1957, along with another 150 of their relatives and friends.

The next year, while Conard’s 1958 medical exams on Rongelap were still going on, biologists from the University of Washington collected examples of what was growing on the land, in the lagoon, and at sea that the Rongelapese normally would eat. They also took soil and water samples, not only on Rongelap but also on several other islands in the atoll.

Conard’s medical examinations of the exposed returnees who had returned to Rongelap showed an increase of absorbed radionuclides. For example, the strontium 90 level, which been slight a year earlier at their last exam before their return to Rongelap, was up significantly, but still below the maximum safe AEC level. Since local food made up only part of the islanders’ diets, the radioactive burden was expected to rise even higher in coming years when the imported AEC food subsidy which supplemented local food was scheduled to be halted.

That turned out to be true. During the period from July 1981 to June 1982, the average Rongelap male’s body burden for cesium 137 rose 56 percent, while the average female level increased by 11 percent.  Including children, the overall population showed a 1.8 percent monthly rise in cesium 137, after showing a constant level of cesium 137 in the previous two years. The latest Brookhaven study said the rapid rise “may have resulted from the relaxing of restrictions to the northern islands of Rongelap Atoll as a source of coconuts and coconut crabs.”

Rongelap’s leaders, reacting to those findings, in 1983 called for the evacuation of the atoll. When there was no US response, they sought assistance from Greenpeace—the global, non-violent, pro-environmental group that had been peacefully protesting nuclear testing.

Beginning on May 17, 1985, Greenpeace began what it named “Operation Exodus.” That involved ferrying the Rongelapese and 100 tons of their personal belongings and stripped-down housing on its trawler, the Rainbow Warrior, to Majetto Island—112 miles away from Rongelap in the northwest corner of the Kwajalein Atoll. Many from Rongelap still live on Majetto today.

Back on Rongelap, despite some cleanup, there are few in residence. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2019, done by researchers from Columbia University, found that levels of plutonium and cesium in the soil on Rongelap and other Marshall Island atolls were “significantly higher” than levels that resulted from fallout existing from the July 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power accident—which occurred 28 years after US nuclear tests had ended in the Marshalls.

The Rongelap Marshallese as well as the Japanese seamen who were exposed to fallout on March 1, 1954, can be seen as surrogates for anyone caught in a future nuclear war. Rongelap Atoll, as well as Bikini Atoll, for the most part still cannot be inhabited despite attempts to decontaminate them. Think of what today’s cities would be like if hit by a thermonuclear weapon whose fireball struck the ground and created radioactive fallout.

Within weeks it will be 70 years since the Bravo test. The more the US public and the world are reminded of that test and the resulting Rongelap story, the more they should work to deter any potential use of nuclear weapons.

Keywords:Bravo Test, CTBT, Lucky Dragon, Marshall Islands, nuclear weapons, testing
Topics:Nuclear Risk, Nuclear Weapons