A bomb trials

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As before, he believed that model tests would provide valuable information about the effects of the bomb, but so would "simple laboratory methods. Moreover, the tests focused on a "trivial" problem because the "overwhelming effectiveness of atomic weapons lies in their use for the bombardment of cities, and of centers of production and population. Truman did not take well to the critique; apparently Oppenheimer had already antagonized Truman during an October meeting; according to a note which Truman sent to Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the "cry-baby scientist" had "spent much of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them.

During the weeks before Crossroads, Navy officials were making plans to deal with post-test contamination. Owing to the danger of radioactive contamination of sea water in the lagoon, a Bureau of Ships conference directed that no distilling plants for the production of water used on board or other apparatus on the ships using sea water would be operated after the tests until the water had been deemed safe.

The recently organized Federation of American Scientists, representing a large number of Los Alamos scientists, had set up an office in Washington, D. Disputing official statements that the tests were being held to produce scientific information, the Federation argued that "The tests are purely military, not scientific.

For example, the "number of ships destroyed will not be the best standard for judging the effect of the bomb. That would hardly compare to the level of destruction to a U. Head of the British delegation to the Manhattan Project, William Penney, was a central figure at Los Alamos he later led the British secret atomic bomb project.

Like others, Penney recognized that an underwater test would cause serious environmental contamination; he estimated that it would produce a water column of about 8, feet in height. Its collapse and the "strong turbulence developed will certainly cover many ships with water and contaminate them. Commending the Joint Task Force for its "excellent performance," the Evaluation Board noted that the detonation was off course by to feet, but did not dwell upon it.

The report covered the extensive damage to ships within a half-mile of ground zero, including 4 ships which sank promptly or within a day, a severely damaged submarine, and a "badly wrecked" aircraft carrier, the Independence. In addition, the explosion initiated "numerous fires" on ships, including one which was two miles away from the explosion point.

Major combatant ships within a half-mile had "badly wrecked" superstructures to the point they would have been "unquestionably put out of action. Admiral Blandy's report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff provided detailed information about the extent of the damage to the ships caused by Able's blast, radiation, and fire effects.

With respect to radiation effects, 90 percent of the test animals survived the explosion but recovered animals would "suffer severe radiation illness and most will die. Gilliam , Blandy only acknowledged that the "unexpected position of burst" --as well as an error in transmitting timing signals-- had caused the loss of some "records" e.

Seeman, was present at Bikini and sent the general his observations taken from the Blue Ridge , The military observers gained only a "slight appreciation of the physical phenomena" and the members of the press were "violent in criticism.

Colonel Herbert C. Gee, an Army engineer on Groves' staff, filed a report which provided a different perspective on the test itself as well as criticism of the Navy's reactions.

Viewing the test with the Manhattan Project observers group on the Cumberland Sound , 20 miles from the test, Gee had no problem in seeing the development of the mushroom cloud: its shape "was exactly that which had been predicted and resembled very closely the clouds which all of us had seen in pictures prior to our departure for Bikini.

So much emphasis was placed on the fact that the various vessels remained afloat that all of us became convinced that the Navy was indeed grasping at straws in attempting to build up a case for the battleships. Weapons: Testing: g. Proving Grounds-Bikini-General. Written after Able and probably before Baker, this unattributed memorandum assesses the 22 foreign observers, members of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, who sailed on the U.

Panamint to watch the Crossroads tests. The trip lasted several months and the passengers were cut off from the outside world with few diversions except for nightly motion pictures. The bulk of the report concerns France and the Soviet Union, both of whose national atomic energy programs were of special interest to Washington. With respect to the French, the drafter of this memorandum was interested in the status of the French atomic energy program, including what the observers, Andre Labarthe and Pierre Goldschmidt, had to say about Frederic Joliot-Curie, the French physicist and Nobel Prize winner , and son-in-law of Marie Curie.

Apparently Joliot-Curie was "deeply hurt by the statements against him which appeared in the Smyth Report [on the U. Mescheryakov and non-ferrous metals mining expert Simon Peter Alexandrov; according to the U.

A follow-up memorandum see document 29 indicated that Alexandrov was in charge of uranium ore procurement and reported directly to Beria. When asked what was wrong with it they said simply that it left us in too powerful a position, and when reminded that we had said we would destroy all of our atomic bombs, they answered simply: 'But we don't believe you.

Sailing on the Panamint was an interesting mix of military personnel with intelligence backgrounds, including Colonel Edwin F. Moreover, the head of Dutch Naval intelligence, Captain G. In their top secret message to Washington, the Evaluation Board provided more information on the Able test as well as their assessment of Baker. On Able, the Board declared that all ships within a mile of the detonation point would have become "inoperative" because crew would have been killed by gamma rays and neutrons produced by the "initial flash.

Comparing the two tests, the Evaluation Board noted that because of the radioactive water that Baker spewed upon the ships, the "contaminated ships became radioactive stoves, and would have burned all living things aboard with invisible and painless but deadly radiation. Possibly a statement prepared for a documentary film on Baker, it included a vivid and detailed account of the physical phenomena produced by the underwater detonation.

The commentary emphasized the "intense radioactivity in the waters of the lagoon" that the explosion produced, which included contamination by dangerous fission products. Moreover, the "highly lethal radioactivity" in the water deposited on the ships made it impossible for personnel to board them "for any useful length of time" for four days after the test. Comparing the "radiological phenomenon" produced by the two tests, Major Young suggested that "unprotected personnel" within a mile of Able would have suffered "high casualties" but those surviving immediate effects would not have been menaced by radioactivity persisting after the burst" compared to Baker.

According to this commentary, Baker's explosive yield was of 20 kilotons, although most reports agree that it was in the 23 kiloton range. Nichols, who was a key figure in the project. A major problem for the Able test was that the bomb missed its target by a half-a-mile thereby destroying scientific measuring devices placed at that site, including the Gilliam , a ship which carried important measuring devices.

Moreover, the explosion was too far from other equipment to measure it. According to Betts, photos taken from the bomber showed that the bomb "did not yaw or bob appreciably. After noting that the fleet had been moved to cleaner waters," Warren acknowledged that the "radioactivity is a more serious thing than they [Blandy and his advisers] tho[ugh]t. Betts' second memo to Nichols illustrated the dangers raised by Baker's watery radioactive fallout.

Decontamination of surviving target ships was a part of the post-test routine so they could be salvaged, but Betts reported that essential workers could spend no more than a half hour below decks when working aboard the New York and the Pensacola. Generalizing about the contamination problem, Betts observed that " Experience so far seems to indicate that the process of decontamination of very hot vessels is going to be a very long drawn out affair.

Those vessels that have been washed several times show that after the first treatment, which usually cuts the activity about fifty percent, very little progress is made with subsequent washings. They do not get real results until they can get the ship cool enough to put a crew aboard that can really scrub things down. In the days after he wrote his spouse, Stafford Warren became even more disturbed about the radioactivity threat.

By 7 August, his review of the potential dangers to personnel exposed to gamma radiation, beta radiation, and alpha emitters led him to conclude that decontamination and survey work had to be brought to an end quickly.

Just by living on the lagoon, Warren noted, personnel already had daily exposure of up to 10 percent of the permitted doses of gamma radiation 0. For example, with respect to alpha emitters, e. A report from Lieutenant Commander William A. Wulfman underlined the continuing uncertainty and danger: decontamination "work on target ships has increased to the point that it is impossible to provide adequate protection for the personnel involved in this work. As Betts reported, Admiral Blandy accepted some of Warren's advice by agreeing to a "serious slowing down of activity," but he would not agree to close down decontamination altogether.

Decontamination work would continue "no matter how long it may take. Solberg, Blandy's deputy, ordered an effort to recover measuring instruments and to continue decontamination work on 10 ships which were needed as targets for the third test.

Betts noted that his memo was classified secret because the "toughest part of test Baker" was the contamination problem. Blandy moved more decisively a few days later.

He recommended to the Chief of Naval Operations that target ships at Bikini lagoon be decommissioned "or placed out of service" because they "cannot be made absolutely safe to board in the near future.

Nevertheless, ten ships would be decontaminated as "consistent with safety" for use in the third test. A proposal to operate the machinery and engines of contaminated warships in the target area led Warren to urge that "no further work" be done on any of them unless "adequate and well organized safeguards were in place.

Moreover, people, food, clothing, hands, and food were also contaminated "in increasing amounts each day. This fascinating account of discussions with Simon Peter Alexandrov was based on an interview with a leading marine biologist, Paul Galtsoff, who had been trained in Czarist Russia and escaped at the time of the Bolshevik revolution and eventually became an employee of the Department of the Interior.

Galtsoff's account sheds focuses on Alexandrov, a Soviet loyalist who displayed considerable hostility toward the United States. According to this account, among the statements that Alexandrov made was that the purpose of the Bikini test was "to frighten the Soviets," but they were "not afraid," and that the Soviet Union had "wonderful planes" which could easily bomb U.

Galtsoff speculated that these statements represented a "deliberate attempt to transmit a subtle bluff to the U. United Press International reported that Alexandrov had stated that Moscow already had the bomb, while Alexandrov denied that he had made "such a flat statement"; according to UPI, his interlocutor insisted that the statement had been made.

In any event, Alexandrov's statement made it public knowledge that the Soviet Union had begun a weapons program. Also of interest in this report is the discussion of the relationship between the Soviet and Polish observers: the Poles told Galtsoff that they feared the Soviets and had been "forced" by Warsaw "to cooperate with the Russians. While the Navy was confronting the problem of contaminated target ships, on 7 August General Leslie Grove recommended that the Joint Chiefs cancel the third test.

For Groves the two tests had demonstrated what was already known: that a "properly placed" air burst could destroy a capital ship and that an atomic bomb "provides the same degree of energy transfer from bomb to water as to bomb to air. William Myers , a radiation expert at Ohio State University, sent Warren a memo on his experience after the Baker test. It began with his recommendations on how the experience at Bikini could be used to create a Civilian Atomic Bomb Monitoring Corps to survey radiological conditions after an atomic attack on the United States.

Toward the end of his memorandum, Myers observed that the contamination of his clothing led him to "believe that much air-borne probably as aerosols beta-emitting material was spread around by the Baker bomb. Yet he was concerned about the long-run impact because "many of us probably received much more penetrating, ionizing radiation than instruments of very low beta-sensitivity were able to record.

According to Commander Edgar H. Batcheller, one of the lessons of the Bikini tests was that compared to large fixed targets, ships were less vulnerable to atomic attacks because they could be dispersed more widely to limit vulnerability to a detonation. Therefore, the atomic bomb "seems much more valuable for employing against strategic targets in a country's industrial and population centers rather than for use tactically against a ship or well dispersed formation of ships.

Batcheller believed that the "performance of the target vessels in withstanding the attack was generally good," in that "ships were not atomized" and did not "disintegrate. Comparing Able and Baker, the "material damage" caused by the latter was "was less widespread than that caused by the air burst it was in most cases much more severe in its effect of the ship's military effectiveness. Over a year after the Bikini tests, the JCS Evaluation Board produced its final report, a review of the test results and their implications for national policy.

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