crossroads

Uncovered at the crossroads

By Ian Williams

As the 178 signatories to the Non Proliferation Treaty were at a crossroads in New York, it seems highly appropriate to review Jonathan M Weisgall’s distressing book “Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll.”

Every book about nuclear testing, every leaked report from the former Soviet Union reinforces the impression that whatever the devastating physical effects nuclear weapons, in a way their worst damage was mental. The possession of such diabolical strength seems to bring out the devil in decision makers; the hell fire they control seems to vaporise their consciences.

Other works have shown that nuclear tests almost wherever conducted, by who ever, involved immediate risks to the testers’ own troops and their own civil ians. But Operation Crossroads, Weisgall suggests, was conducted with even more recklessness than usual - and it was of course conducted on the tiny home land of Pacific Islanders whose welfare the United Nations had put in Trusteeship with the United States.

The two tests were even more bizarre than usual. There was no doubt that the atomic bombs worked. Many people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could testify to that. The test were the result as much of interdepartmental battles between the air force and the navy as much as they were a shot above the Soviet’s bows. The pur pose was to prove that the US Navy still had a role in modern warfare, in particular nuclear warfare.

When the results showed that the US Navy had little or no chance of surviving, that original purpose was sidelined. And the response of the Soviets seems to have been to redouble their efforts to ensure that they, too, could produce a nuclear weapon.

Soon after, the British declared inde pendence from the USA with their own bombs, and later France did the same.

Both shared the American preference for the Pacific as a test site.

Weisgall shows that the navy during Crossroads had the same difficulties as all

the later testers. Anyone can see the bang, the flash and their immediate after-effects of a weapon exploding. But how do you envisage a long-term, invisible, inaudible, tasteless and odour-less killer like radia tion? Billions of humans still smoke despite overwhelming evidence that it would give them heart and circulation problems and cancer. They do so because it is difficult to be scared of a long term

statistical probability.

If radiation shimmered with unearthly green lights, smelt obnoxious, or made loud noises then the techniques that humanity has developed over the years for avoiding danger might be able to cope with it more readily. But, as Weisgall points out, although the agonizing effects of fatal radiation poisoning were well document ed, and visible even in the test animals on the Bikini ships, there were political rea sons to downplay its effect. In one of those displays of fatuity that accompany nuclear experimentation as surely as a mushroom cloud, Lesley Groves, the man who had masterminded the production side of the A bomb project told Congress that “radiation poisoning was a very pleas ant way to die.” He was not, of course, speaking from personal experience.

At Bikini the problem was compound ed because the Geiger counters issued could not measure plutonium’s heavy alpha particle output. It was only after massive exposure by the clean-up crews on the surviving ships from the test shot that the navy realised just how risky the atoll and its environs had become, partic ularly after the underwater Baker shot, which was so dirty that it has been called a forerunner of Chernobyl.

Perhaps most horrifyingly, its effects had been exactly predicted - a column of water would be fountained some 8 to 10,000 feet into the air - not high enough to disperse it widely, but enough for it to fall back with its “witch’s brew” of radioac tive products on the ships in the area, concentrating the pollution in the vicini ty. Many ships stayed afloat, but were unusable for naval purposes. If they had been crewed, the sailors would have been dying of radiation poisoning.

Perhaps a measure of their unpre paredness was the steps the Navy took to try to decontaminate the 95 ships that took part in the tests. Everything from tra ditional swabbing of the decks, to fire hoses, to blasting the vessels with corn cobs, rice, barley, ground coffee, sand and coconut shells was tried, to no avail. The radiation pollution was so pervasive and insidious, that most of the ships were scuttled and never used again.

Unfortunately. Bikini atoll was to be used again, and again, making itone of the most polluted areas on earth, even almost 50 years after the first test.

While it is true that the testers were happy to expose US troops and civilians to high levels of radiation, their treatment of the Bikini islanders showed new dimensions of callousness.

Moved from their ancestral home, they were shuttled around small islands in the vicinity. The navy showed great solicitude - not to make the exiles too dependent despite promises to care for them if they cooperated in quitting their homes. “Let’s not civilize these happy people,” wrote the Deputy Commissioner of the Trust Territory in 1947. In the case of the Bikinians, he meant that the only benefits of civilisation they should get is the dubi ous honour of having 23 of the world’s most modern weapons exploded in their midst. Weisgall quotes comedian Bob Hope,“As soon as the war ended, we locat ed the one spot on earth that hadn’t been touched by war - and blew it to hell.”

As Weisgall points out, the islanders were as much the victims of incompe tence as of deliberate cruelty.

Weisgall’s book was sparked by his work as a lawyer seeking compensation for the islanders for their travails, but it has been written in an objective non polemical way. It is all the more damning for that.

Thousands of letters were written complaining about the use of animals in the tests. Few were written to protest what happened to the islanders. Perhaps Weisgall’s book will substitute for all those unwritten letters. ■