No Place to Hide: Did Any Ships "Survived" Bikinis Underwater Bomb?

by DAVID BRADLEY, M.D.

1

TUESDAY, July 2. — Rumors from the big fleet indicate a general disappointment over I he bomb. The lagoon is still full of ships, and most of them have been safely boarded. Few have been sunk and not many are seriously damaged. Doubtless many people who have been fed on the current fantasies regarding the bomb will find Test Able something akin to K rations. Anything short of a second Krakatao would have been a letdown.

Actually, of course, what has happened is about what one would expect from an air-burst of the 1946 Model atomic bomb. The damage done to the ships should be largely to the superstructure, not to the vital parts. The radioactivity now present on board is probably mainly that induced in the metal by the burst of neutrons at the moment of explosion. Neutrons, like any other projectiles, have a limited range — about 2000 yards in air, which is considerably less than the area covered by the target fleet.

It would appear that at least for the time being we have escaped from the real threat of atomic weapons: the lingering poison of radioactivity. The great bulk of highly dangerous fission products was carried aloft into the stratosphere, where it can be diluted to the point of insignificance in its slow fall-out. In this sense, therefore, Test Able is very similar to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki shots. The bulk of the damage will be from the blast wave, and probably only those experimental animals exposed directly to the neutrons and gamma rays at the moment of explosion will show the effects of “Atom Bomb Disease.”

WEDNESDAY, July 3. — Back to Bikini and the Haven. Able plus Two—already the lagoon is packed with shipping, as though where the bomb had struck down one ship two had risen in its place. The shore, the water, and most of the ships are nowconsidered to be radiologically safe. Having got off so lightly on Test Able, everyone seems to be in a festive mood. The beaches and bars were packed all afternoon; the poker games, enshrouded in a penumbra of smoke and profanity, have settled down for the night, and even the worst of pictures in Hollywood’s dismal repertoire is acclaimed.

THURSDAY, July 4. — I had a lucky assignment today, that of accompanying a group of Navy photographers while they took pictures of the entire target fleet. We went aboard no ships but had a chance to examine at close hand the superficial damage obvious on deck.

One sees plenty of evidence of the fury of that blast wave. The light carrier Independence is an impressive edifice of junk: its flight deck exploded, its hangar deck caved in, and all the complicated gadgetry of gun mounts, gangways, and electronic gear blown away or left dangling overside in fantastic disarray. The ancient battleship Arkansas, lacking most of its superstructure aft of the bridge, looks well on the way to being modernized. It wouldn’t take more than an ordinary bomb to turn her into a carrier. Similarly, the cruisers Pensacola and Salt Lake City have their superstructures torn loose and wrenched half overside. The decks of these ships are a shambles. Overturned airplanes, wrecked lifeboats, and all sorts of debris are strewn around, looking like something straight out of Fibber McGee’s front closet.

SUNDAY, July 7. — Test Able is almost a thing of the past. The evil cloud born a week ago tomorrow has dissipated itself in the northwest and no longer needs to be followed; the water of Bikini Lagoon is considered entirely safe, and most of the ships have been thoroughly inspected both for structural damage and for radioactivity. They are already being towed into position for the next round. Scientists of many specialties have been all over the area making observations, picking up samples, and detaching souvenirs. One of the fellows in the bunkroom had collected a chunk of metal from the ship considered to be nearest to the blast. He had it carefully stowed away in his locker beside the bed. Then one day somebody was checking a Geiger counter in the vicinity and began to pick up a strong emission. At once he tracked down and located the loot and showed its anxious owner that he had been sleeping in a shower of gamma rays.

The queerest stuff turns up radioactive: a ship’s bell of brass; some chemicals from a first-aid locker on deck; a bar of soap that had been caught in a stream of neutrons. You never can tell what insignificant thing will bear the invisible brand of the bomb. Souvenirs of all kinds have been forbidden throughout the Task Force, but observance of the order is too much to expect of human nature.

Today I had a chance to watch some of the footprints of the cloud as it passed over the western end of Bikini Atoll. All the tiny islets and sandspits of the far end of Bikini are uninhabited; nevertheless, they have to be officially cleared. Lieutenant Allan Bott, a Naval fighter pilot and recent addition to the Radiological Safety Section, and I were glad to get the assignment.

Early in the morning, a PGM (patrol gunboat) hove to alongside and picked us up. After an hour’s run to the westward end of the atoll we raised our first island — called Cherry, because its native name is unpronounceable. Merely a low rocky shelf, it is separated from its neighbor by a deck of shallows and is unapproachable from all directions save by a narrow passage between the shoals on the lagoon side and surging white water of the barrier reef along the ocean side. At that one point the eddying waters have built out a sandspit and surrounded it with clear green water.

The skipper had a dingy put over the side. Five of us—two sailors, an oceanographic man, Bott and I — dropped in and headed for shore. The oceanographer had installed certain instruments prior to Test Able by which he hoped to fell whether the atoll had been changed in any way by the violence of the blast. While he went off to make his readings, Bott and I struck inland.

It was clear that the great cloud had passed this way. Small amounts of radioactive materials had come down in its rain. Even below the high-water mark on the south shore, where the rocky ledges are constantly being sluiced by the foaming breakers, we found radioactive material, invisibly and almost permanently adsorbed to the surface of the rocks. Not enough of it to be serious, but it illustrates the difficulty of trying to clean any rough surface of tission products.

2

T

WEDNESDAY, July 10. — For the past few days diving operations have been going on in the target area, where several ships have been sunk, and with them a number of scientific instruments to register blast pressures and neutron intensities. Today it was my luck to be monitoring aboard one of the tugs when they hit a jackpot down below. The ship was a solid grimy seagoing bucket made for submarine rescue work. Previous diving attempts had located the hull of the sunken ship, above which the tug was now securely moored fore and aft. Those who had seen the hulk in the milky twilight of the lagoon floor described her as being broken in three pieces and almost unrecognizable as a ship. Divers, at least, are satisfied that the bomb is not an overrated weapon.

The morning proved windy and too rough for diving operations, but by noon the wind had let go and the sea was glassy hot. Four divers began getting into their complicated suits. They were big burly extroverts, with rough solid names—Marsh, Eichorn, Red Baith, and Goring (known as Herman, of course). There was certainly no fear in them; claustrophobia was too fancy a neurosis for them to bother with.

Baith and Herman were soon ready. In their elaborate costumes, weighing well over two hundred pounds, they looked like medieval sea monsters floundering about on land. Jockeyed into position on a steel platform, they were hoisted over the side, and then, after testing their suits in the water, they were lowered to the bottom, some 185 feet down.

We couldn’t get Herman on the phone, but Baith called up saving that they had landed near the bow of the sunken ship, and that Herman was starting off in search of the missing instruments, while he, Baith, would stand by to keep the lines clear. Herman was carrying a special watertight Geiger tube, fashioned in a long brass probe and transmitting to a counter on deck. Almost at once I began to get indications of radioactivity. At one point the needle went clear off scale. We called down to Baith to find out what Goring was doing.

“I think he’s resting, came the reply; “at least he’s sitting down.”

“Well, what is he silting on?”

“Looks like a stanchion, maybe.”

“Then tell him to stand dear. The Geiger man says it’s hot.” We could hear Baith laughing at Goring’s leap from the hot seat. Then the skipper lowered a hook to the bottom and took the brass stanchion aboard as a specimen.

After a long interval Baith excitedly called and said that Herman had found the instruments all strung together on a cable. They, too, were soon hoisted overside, and proved to be exactly what the Navy was looking for. They looked harmless enough, but a survey soon indicated that no one could be allowed on the fantail of the tug until the loot was taken over by the proper authorities.

3

FRIDAY, July 12. —Assignments for the next test, to be held on Baker Day, were given out last night. Ebeye, the seaplane base, is our home once more. Our group has changed a little. Charlie Wells, Tom Madden, Frank Larson, and I remain of the previous group. Bott has a carrier assignment and in place of him we have a trio of Navy buzz-boys.

WEDNESDAY,July 24. — Baker Day minus One has been very much like Able Day minus One.

Commander Pew called the squadron together for a final briefing and a parting word of confidence. We Geiger men tried to describe in a rough way what was expected to happen in a shallow-water blast. But honestly, who knows? Who can predict ?

Tom, Lars, Charlie, and I have checked and rechecked our instruments, our gas masks, and all the rest of the paraphernalia and nothing seems to have been overlooked. Nevertheless one cannot suppress a feeling of excitement mixed with a dash of anxiety when one considers the possibilities of tomorrow’s test. The four previous atomic bombs have been exploded in air, so that the bulk of the radioactive material produced as fission products has been swept up into the remote and harmless stratosphere.

But this will be entirely different. The bomb is suspended beneath an LCI (infantry landing craft) and will be detonated electrically. The actual depth beneath the surface is not known to us. It cannot be more than the 180-foot depth of the lagoon, and will probably be much less. Scientists who are familiar with the magnitude of atomic forces predict that a chimney of water half a mile in diameter will be thrown up many thousands of feet. Tons and tons of water will be vaporized to steam by the intense heat, and will then condense into a cloud around the top of the chimney. Whereas the cloud in Test Able climbed rapidly to 30,000 feet, the cloud this time is not expected to go half so high. Instead it will at once begin to rain down upon the target area, and the rain from the entrapped fission products will certainly be deadly. Dr. Hirschfelder, our Task Force oracle, says that it will not be safe to go aboard the ships for months.

Under the circumstances, should we pray for a dud? No such luck. A complete dud is unlikely in the nature of the bomb, and a partial explosion would be more dangerous than a total explosion, because a partial explosion would spread plutonium all over the ships and the lagoon. Plutonium is a far more deadly and insidious hazard than fission products for two reasons. In the first place, it is very hard to detect with field instruments. It is an alpha particle emitter, and our Geiger counters and ionization chambers will not detect its presence. A special and extremely delicate alpha counter is necessary for such work, and here at Bikini, under field conditions, no alpha counter would survive a single day’s work.

The second reason why plutonium contamination is so much to be feared is that its lethal action is roughly the same as that of radium. It lodges in the bones, destroys the blood-producing marrow, and kills its host by wrecking his red and white blood cells, or, if he survives that early period, by producing bone tumors, possibly years later. In some respects plutonium appears to be more dangerous than an equivalent amount of radium because, unlike radium, once lodged in the bones plutonium cannot be removed by processes known to medical science to date,

THURSDAY, July 25. — Baker Day called for us at 3.00 A.M. Most of us had only cat-napped anyway. The flight to Bikini seemed to pass more quickly than usual.

Soon we found the live fleet under us, coasting along as before in Indian file, barely leaving a green wake. The weather was ideal, and airplanes were checking in from all parts of the sky. Now and then, from the control center of the fleet came the solemn Harvard accent of the man who would detonate the bomb. “One Owah befoah How Owah. One Owah befoah How Owah.”

That hour passed rapidly, and the Harvard accent came back on the air: “Ten minutes befoah How Owah. Ten minutes befoah How Owah.”

Commander Pew was orbiting at the appointed station, about 15 miles northeast of the target, and we dropped in behind him.

hive minutes befoah How Owah.” No goggles were necessary for the underwater test, since the ultraviolet rays would be filtered out in the water. The marine photographer in the waist opened up his hatches and set up his bulky camera gear. At the one-minute mark our two planes straightened into a tangential course. The crew crowded to the ports, fixing their eyes upon the faint outlines of the Bikini ships on the horizon.

And so How Owah arrived, according to plan and to the split second. I suppose from this Task Force will come 42,000 different descriptions. Yet the sum total of them couldn’t give the true impression of the suddenness and the magnitude of that explosion.

The calm and implacable voice was saying: “Ten seconds — five seconds — four seconds — three — two—one—”

What his last word was I have no idea, nor can I tell what the color of that flash was. To me it was red; Lars swears that it was white. I have seen two hundred pounds of TNT go off at night from a distance of half a mile, but this shot in broad day, at 20 miles, seemed to spring from all parts of the target fleet at once. A gigantic flash — then gone. And where it had been, now stood a white chimney of water reaching up and up. Then a huge hemispheric mushroom of vapor appeared like a parachute suddenly opening. It rapidly filled out in all directions until striking the level of the first layer of clouds, at about 1800 feet. Here, as though intercepting a layer of plate glass, this shock wave (or more strictly speaking, this cloud of vapors which formed in the vacuum phase behind the shock wave) spread out by leaps and bounds beneath the clouds. I remember being alarmed lest our plane be overtaken and smashed by it.

By this time the geyser had climbed to several thousand feet. It stood there as if solidifying for many seconds, its head enshrouded in a tumult of steam. Then slowly the pillar began to fall and break up. At its base a tidal wave of spray and steam arose, to smother the fleet and move on toward the islands.

All this took only a few seconds, but was so astounding that it seemed to last much longer. With the final disappearance of the column of water the lagoon became obscured in a sallow rain cloud. For nearly twenty minutes the cloud hung over the ships. Eventually, however, the steady trades prevailed and the synthetic storm moved away to the northwest. One by one, the ships emerged, and when at last the long gray silhouette of the Saratoga was seen breaking out of the mist we all began to feel more at home. The Nevada, the black Nagato, the New York, and many others were soon identifiable, but the Arkansas, bluff old battlewagon, had disappeared for good.

Thirty minutes after the shot, most of the area was clear again and we could see the fleet still riding at anchor, miraculously unchanged. An oily slick was spreading out from the center.

It was past time to be going in over the target, and after an exchange of salutations Commander Pew’s ship left us and began climbing to the prearranged altitude. He was soon lost in the tufted strato-cumulus over the lagoon. Communications, however, were good, and at once we began to pick up their messages to the control ship: “Sadeyes, this is Applejack One. Legs one and two completed. Zero dose legs one and two.” That made us feel good, especially the fact that they had found nothing in the atmosphere. Then we heard: “Leg four completed. Brief dose on leg four.”After that, it was clear that Lars and Tom were getting into radiation over the center of the fleet even at that altitude. Indeed at one point they interrupted their broadcast to Sadeyes in order to advise us to make our first survey a thousand feet above the prearranged level.

This we did, and soon confirmed the radioactivity found by Lars and Tom. The pattern was one of radiation coming up from the ships and from the water. At a thousand feet lower there was a considerable increase in the dosage. Starting down a leg, we would get just the usual irregular click — click, click — click of background over our Geiger earphones. Then suddenly there would be a burst of clicks, a crescendo, merging into the high-toned screaming of increasing radioactivity. The needle of one Geiger counter would rapidly go off scale; then the next, set to a less sensitive range, would follow suit. Just as suddenly, the screaming would then die in our ears, the needles waver and return to normal, and we would be across the reef of radiation.

It always seemed a little strange to me that at such a time the pilot should be calmly looking down at the fleet or glancing over his instrument panel. And his navigator would be there, standing between the pilots, calmly directing our course, timing the legs, and indicating when the turns should be made. Something was wrong. It was there. It was hot. We should be able to feel this barrage of gamma rays tearing through our bodies.

We made only two flights. Lars and Tom, a thousand feet lower, were running into trouble — trouble in the form of radioactivity so intense as to be safe for only a few minutes. Finally we caught the message: “Abandoning leg four. Turning away upwind and standing by for further orders.”

Sadeyes soon wired back to both of us to discontinue our surveys. We were thankful for that. Not that we were in any immediate danger. But with radiation so intense at such an altitude, that at water level would certainly be lethal. And this was spread out over an area miles square.

By noon it was clear that our beautiful lady, the Sara, was in a bad way and would probably not see another sunrise. We soon had a message from Sadeyes to get some low-level photographs of her. No one cared much for that, for she evidently had a supply of torpedoes on deck. She was a complete derelict. Her flight deck was littered with wreckage. A stump of the island was there; the rest had been blown away. She was slowly filling up and beginning to list to port.

By midafternoon relief planes arrived and we could head back for Kwajalein. At evening the relief ships returned with the news that the Sara had finally gone down, her hull barely covered in the shallow lagoon.

4

FRIDAY,July 26: Baker plus One. — Back to Bikini with the dawn. The live fleet is now anchored at the entrance to the atoll next to Enyu Island. Sadeyes was wailing for ns with orders to drag the entire atoll. This we did at whitecap and palm-frond level, following the surf from island to sandspit to island around the coral ring. Radiation was not to be found except over the target fleet, and up on the islands to the northwest.

We did discover an area of rather intense radioactivity several miles to the north of the atoll. We found ourselves over an oil slick which, though miles from the island, must have come from the target fleet, having passed during the night over the reef between Amen Island and Bikini Island. Crisscrossing it several times, we found it to be well over a mile long and nearly as wide.

We also made several surveys at different altitudes over the target fleet. Some of the ships are beginning to show internal injuries. The hulking Nagoto has developed a list, and the A New York carries her stern half underwater. The radioactivity has died away remarkably during the night, so that low-altitude flying proved to be reasonably safe. This decline is to be expected; many of the fission products have short half-lives, fading away in a few moments or hours. The drop, precipitous at first, will probably level off just as rapidly and then we shall be stuck with the long actors.

Our air assignment is about over. The crude measurements of intensity are no longer necessary, and the next phase — making precise surveys of the ships, water, fish, coral, and so forth begins.

SATURDAY, July 27.— At 2.30 this afternoon word came from Kwajalein; “Re ready to leave on T.S.S. Flusser by 3.00.”

MONDAY, July 29.—Life aboard the U.S.S. Haven, in the hurricane center of this Task Force, is indescribable. The gangways swarm with the sweating, irate monitors of the Radiological Safety Section, heavily laden with gear; the laboratories are filled with queer stenches and flickering lights; stacks of secret and dangerous information pile up in the corridors. We appear to have struck it rich. If is an interesting operation. I suppose this is the first major offensive ever conducted by a fleet while anchored snugly in a harbor. The main objective, of course, is to get the target ships underway once more as soon as possible. The Navy seems confident that this will not be long.

However, the danger is here. The bomb did not explode and vanish as did its four predecessors; it is here, everywhere. Only very limited operations can yet be conducted aboard the ships. Many are not safe for hoarding at all. All sorties must be accompanied by a Geiger man, who decides whether an area, a ship, or a particular job is safe. He may allow only a few minutes before insisting that the spot be evacuated.

My particular sector on this changing front is most routine. It is in the “water-counting” laboratories. Here we receive hundreds and hundreds of samples of water taken from different parts of the lagoon and from different depths. We run these into specially designed pigs of lead in which a Geiger chamber has been mounted. Counting the clicks per minute is done by means of an automatic “scaler” and the results are plotted on a map of the lagoon and target array. It gives a day-to-day picture of the movement of water and tells whether our live fleet is anchored in dangerous water.

Such indeed proved to be the case this afternoon. We had found by repeated measurements that the water was steadily increasing in radioactivity, due presumably to an upwelling of material from the bottom. By noon the intensity was such as to endanger our water intakes and evaporators; so, at the request of the Radiological Safety Section, the entire live fleet up-anchored and sailed to a point nearer Enyu Channel.

WEDNESDAY, July 31.—Last night the Nagato disappeared into its shallow grave. For days she had been listing and apparently leaking from numerous seams, although she was reported to be the most unsinkable ship in the fleet. For all her double hull and intricate compartmentation, she proved to be obsolete in close quarters with the bomb. She was close in to the bomb, which, having its force confined by water and the shallow bottom of the lagoon, must have developed a fantastically powerful upward thrust, against which modern hulls and compartmentation are of no avail. (This same effect of confining and concentrating the power of a bomb would occur were one to explode down some metropolitan slot like Wall Street.)

FRIDAY, August 2. The work of the Task Force does not become easier with succeeding days. The skeleton crews of the target ships have been anxiously awaiting the signal to start the motors and get steam up. But so far most of the ships are still in quarantine because of radioactivity. Work in most instances is permissible below decks; but without the blowers on and the lights functioning, there is little to be done except to keep the ships pumped out. Some, like the New York, have to be pumped steadily. Topside these target ships, drenched by radioactive rain, are still so hot as to permit only short shifts of twenty minutes to an hour. Naturally the Navy has complete faith in the old ritual of “a clean sweep-down fore and aft,” but to date little seems to be accomplished by repeated scrubbings. Fission products, having fallen like a coat of paint over these ships, cannot be washed off by salt water and suds.

SATURDAY, August 3. — Most of the radioactivity dispersed in the water seems to have settled out. At least it is no longer necessary to do samples of lagoon water. The water-counting lab has therefore nearly gone out of business in favor of the more strenuous ship-monitoring jobs. We continue to check the ships’ evaporators and water lines so that faulty distillation will not be letting radioactive material through into our drinking water.

The evaporators aboard the U.S.S. Haven have become quite hot in themselves, the scale inside the evap tanks acting as a sponge for radioactive particles. Similarly the salt-water lines of the ship (fire lines, toilets) show the presence of radioactivity, and must be checked every day or two. A third area of radioactive infection aboard the ship is the green and brown algae which grow along the water lines. The algae especially have become hot from the fission products picked up during the first days following our return to Bikini. For some reason, the algae do not release their radioactivity, with the result that the water lines remain so hot that one may pick up a respectable radiation coming through the steel wills of the hull.

The presence of radioactive material on and within the ships of the live fleet suggests an interesting complication: what will happen when ihe ships are dry-docked for repairs? Will it be safe for workmen to remove the scale from the evaps and the barnacles from the hull? Will such tasks in the future have to be done with gas masks or oxygen rebreathers, and all the material collected and buried at sea?

To such questions theoretical answers are easy; practical ones are much harder. But in the end the Navy, in asking for this closer acquaintance with atomic energy, is going to feel a lot like Br’er Rabbit when he got mixed up with the Tar Baby; they may not know it yet, but they are stuck with it.

The whole business must be like a very bad dream to the regular Navy men: decks you can’t stay on for more than a few minutes, though they seem like other decks; air you can’t breathe without gas masks but which tastes 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 now the docs are measuring the evaporators and water mains, and saying that the ships will be too dangerous to haul out in dry dock! Damned Geigers and Geiger men!

5

FRIDAY, August 9. — This afternoon I was assigned to make a survey of the New York. This venerable old battlewagon, constructed about 1914, was pretty badly hit. Her superstructures aft are a jungle of steel, and she has been taking in water enough in the stern to require almost continuous pumping. There is no thought any more of getting steam up on her. Radioactive material has leaked into her after compartments and has come in through every portal and companionway above. Stores of food, hundreds of pounds of coffee, and even the drinking water have had to be condemned.

The work of the day, however, was in decontamination. All previous attempts have been notably unsuccessful. The decks have been sluiced down with water. When this caused no reduction in radioactivity, buckets of soap were broken out. Still the same result.

Today a trial was being made of alkali. The main deck forward had not been touched as yet, and here we proposed to run the experiment. I made a careful survey of the deck, finding the intensity to vary a great deal in a matter of feet. One gets the impression that fission products have become most fixed in the tarry calking of the planking and in rusty spots in the metal plates.

When the survey was complete the Chief turned his booted, sweating, profane, and laughing crew loose with brushes, water, and a barrel of lye. Yet when the hydraulics were done and the deck was rinsed clean again, another survey showed the invisible emanations to be doing business as usual. The portly Chief stood watching the dial of my Geiger counter, completely bewildered. 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 goddam radioactivity?

Finally he could stand it no longer: “Here, Doc, let me listen to that gadget, will you?'’

I fitted the headphones over his ears. He stood moving the gadget over the deck as I had done, and listening intently. He shook his head: “Must be fouled up. I only get static now.”

“That’s all you ever get, Chief. What did you expect Dorothy Lamour?”

He looked dubious: “Well, what are they, them clicks? Do they mean anything?”

“They sure do, Chief. Each of those clicks is a little bullet shooting through your body. You get enough of them and they will kill you. You don’t, know it, but this deck is a booby trap.”

Still unconvinced, but taken with the gadget, he went off for a cruise around his deck. He’d seen two wars fought out from that deck. He wasn’t particularly concerned about a stray bullet or two. Finally he hove to, beside a stanchion, where several of his men were resting. They grinned at him as he surveyed the area. Then suddenly he straightened up.

“Here, you guys,” he said with gruff authority, “get the hell off that stanchion. Can’t you see you’re sittin’ on a goddam booby trap?”

The sailors took off of that stanchion as though 440 volts had hit them, dusting off their jeans and feeling behind as if they expected to find something sticking there. Feeling nothing, they laughed.

“Ah, it don’t matter, Chief,” kidded one of them. “I got so many of them Geigers runnin round inside me now that you can see me all lit up at night like the Statue of Liberty.”

The Chief had been right. Where the stanchion was fastened to the deck there was a good deal of tar, and this had picked up quantities of the invisible stuff. When I showed this to the detail and let them listen to the earphones, it only convinced them either that I was just another old woman, dressed up as a medical officer, asking them to wear their rubbers out in the rain, or that they were all doomed to complete and rapid dissolution. They were not quite sure which.

So I told them a little about radiation sickness in experimental animals and what I knew of the people of Hiroshima, what the dangerous levels of intensity were, and what we were trying to do to protect everybody connected with Operation Crossroads.

“Most of the fission products are quite insoluble,” I said. “They won’t be absorbed into your body even though you breathe them in or get them into your mouth. So from them you only have to worry about radiation coming in from the outside

— and that we can control with a Geiger machine. But some of the material— plutonium remaining from the bomb — is dangerous; more dangerous than radium even. Like the rest of the stuff, it is spread around here like a thin coat of paint which can’t be washed off. So, although we cannot detect it specifically, if we pick up other radiations on our Geiger counters we have fair warning that the more dangerous substances may be around too.”

“And what happens when that little box gets snafued?” returned the boy that had recently been dusting off the stanchion.

“That is where the film badges come in. You all wear them in your pockets. The film is exposed just like X-ray film and we can tell how much you’ve been getting.”

The fallacy of such a protective measure was obvious to them at once: “Sure, but that only tells you afterwards. A lot of good that is when you’ve been fried all day in X-rays.”

“You’re right. That’s just it. And that is why we have been so conservative. The Task Force has accepted a certain limit of radiation as safe. But that limit is not the fatal one. It gives you almost a thousandfold safety factor. By that I mean you could probably take a thousand times that limit at one time and not be killed. And that is OK for peacetime maneuvers. It wouldn’t work for war. If this ship had been hit by an atom bomb during a battle—or if this were some big city back home

— we would all have to get in there and do what we could with the situation and take our chances on being killed now or later with Geigers, same as with fire and smoke and shells.”

SATURDAY, August 10.—Operation Crossroads as an experiment is being abandoned. A skeleton Task Force will remain out here to keep the target vessels afloat, and a skeleton Radiological Safety Section will stay to carry on the public health work. Volunteers are being rounded up for the job. Most of the trained scientific personnel, being civilian and pressed with teaching and research engagements stateside, will have to leave, and so of course will the higher echelon of Navy personnel.

Things have not gone according to plan. The target fleet, which was to have steamed triumphantly back to Pearl and the Golden Gate, invincible as ever, will remain here at anchor, blackened with flame and streaked with foamite and rust, until the ships can be safely disposed of. Some may eventually be towed to the West Coast; many will certainly be sunk in deep water.

A few ships, notably the submarines, have been given clearance to go to Pearl Harbor for repairs and further decontamination, but the rest remain. Some inkling of the danger which persists aboard these ships can be gleaned from the conditions imposed by the Admiral on all future operations: —

1. That all work will be done as before under the direct supervision of the Radiological Safety Section, with one tenth of a roentgen still the maximum daily dose permitted.

2. That all work henceforth will be confined to that necessary for closing up the ships.

This is a momentous decision, a momentous admission, and there are many reasons behind it. Among those which are no secret are: —

1. That these ships are fouled up with radioactivity to a degree far greater than was anticipated.

2. That this coat of radioactive paint cannot be scrubbed off or removed by any of the ordinary measures, short of chipping off all the paint and rust and uprooting all the planking from the outsides of the ships.

3. That there is a real hazard from elements present which cannot be detected by the ordinary methods.

One of these is plutonium. We have to assume the presence of plutonium on these ships because it is impossible for a bomb to be 100 per cent efficient. In the instant, of explosion not all atoms of plutonium can undergo fission. Some do. The rest are blown apart to a subcritical concentration and the chain reaction dies out.

The degree of efficiency of the bomb is top secret, but recent studies with the alpha counter have established the presence of alpha emitters, among them plutonium. These studies include samples of paint from ships’ decks, samples of rust, and even air samples taken from within ships by means of a vacuum cleaner device and filter paper.

These are probably some of the reasons why the care of the target vessels has become ultraconservative, and why the time schedule for Operation Crossroads has had to be scrapped. From a military point of view the bomb which wreaked havoc in Hiroshima also knocked out Task Force One. We’ve just come to the count of ten.

(To be concluded)