On a Farther Shore (32 page)

The crew of the
Lucky Dragon
would end up confined to the University of Tokyo Hospital for more than a year. Initially they suffered from fatigue and loss of appetite. Later it was bleeding gums, then falling white blood cell counts and compromised bone marrow. Treatments included frequent blood transfusions and the regular administration of antibiotics to fight infections. Some of the men developed liver problems and jaundice that turned their once-blackened skin deep yellow. After only a couple of months their sperm counts had fallen to zero.

But then everyone began to improve—including the radio operator Kuboyama, who in August spoke with reporters on behalf of the crew. Kuboyama said the men hoped they would receive compensation from the United States for their hospitalization and lost income. He said he was feeling much better. But a month later, as the rest of the crew continued to recover, Kuboyama took a turn for the worse and died of liver failure. Japanese and U.S. authorities disagreed over whether the cause was radiation sickness or a hepatitis infection Kuboyama might have contracted from one of his many blood transfusions. Either way, Kuboyama’s death was the direct result of his
proximity to
the Castle Bravo test and thus became a tragic emblem of what was by then a serious international incident. Japanese fishing boats at sea all across the Pacific radioed condolences. The American ambassador to Japan offered his sympathy to Kuboyama’s family and sent the widow a check for a million yen on behalf of the “American government and people.”

The story of the
Lucky Dragon
had, of course, made headlines in the United States—where officials were initially vague as to what kind of test had taken place at Bikini atoll on March 1, 1954. At first, the contaminated fish seemed to be the main concern. The
New York Times
reported that the catch of mainly tuna and shark from the
Lucky Dragon
was sufficiently radioactive as to pose a threat to human life, and frightened Japanese housewives were avoiding the normally bustling fish markets.
Then, not quite two weeks after the
Lucky Dragon
came home shrouded in radioactive dust, two more Japanese fishing boats returned to port with dangerous levels of radioactive contamination after fishing in areas east of the Marshall Islands. None of the crew on either ship had fallen ill, but people were shocked to learn that one of the boats, the
Bright God
out of Shiogama, a port city northeast of Tokyo, had been exposed to the same “shower of radioactive ash” that had burned the crew of the
Lucky Dragon
despite being some 780 miles away from the Castle Bravo test site. The Japanese government, while conceding it had been informed the previous fall about upcoming atomic testing in the Pacific Proving Grounds, insisted that the
Lucky Dragon
never got any specific warning about the Castle Bravo test and never entered the restricted area.

On March 24, 1954, during a news conference, President Eisenhower acknowledged that the Castle Bravo test had produced an explosive force “never experienced before” that had “surprised and astonished the scientists,” who were now rethinking precautions for future testing.
One immediate step the United States took was to enlarge the restricted area to encompass four hundred thousand square miles—about eight times the size of the original restricted zone.
Then on March 28, three weeks after the test, the
New York Times
in an editorial abandoned the official description of Castle Bravo as a test of an “atomic device” and instead called it what everyone by then knew it was—a hydrogen bomb.

The
Times
said that the development of a hydrogen bomb was a cause for great concern under any circumstances, but that given what had happened to the
Lucky Dragon
even more caution was now needed to protect human and marine life in the mid-Pacific. Anticipating the concept of “mutual assured destruction” that was to become the central premise of a controlled Cold War, the
Times
took the occasion to hint that the U.S. victory in the race to build a hydrogen bomb meant that there was “still hope, though at present a faint hope, that the recent event in the Pacific may lead to some effective agreement with the Russians for the international control of atomic energy, no matter for what purpose it may be used.”

Public concerns did not slow the pace of testing in the Pacific Proving Grounds.
Another hydrogen bomb was exploded at Bikini atoll on March 27, 1954, followed by another on April 7, then by three more detonations—one “boosted fission” device and two hydrogen bombs.

In early April, the Japanese government asked the United States to halt future testing in the Pacific Proving Grounds during tuna fishing season, which ran from November to March, and to ensure that the Japanese commercial fleet received advance notice of all upcoming tests.
U.S. officials started negotiating financial compensation for the crew of the
Lucky Dragon
, while at the same time striving to reassure the public that there was no general radioactive contamination of fish in the Pacific Ocean. Japanese officials were dubious.

In July 1954, a team of Japanese scientists visited Bikini atoll, where they found fish and other marine life “seriously affected” by the H-bomb testing.
This was the same conclusion reached in 1947, a year after the previous testing at Bikini, when it had been reported that “everything that grows on Bikini or swims in the water is radioactive.”
Even so, the scientists seven years later endeavored to calm fears about seafood back in Japan by eating some raw fish caught
in the waters near Bikini atoll, apparently without ill effect. Their report said that although fish in the area were “radioactive about the gills and internal organs,” it seemed to be safe to eat their flesh.
Three months later, a large catch of tuna arrived at Yokohama in which one of every ten fish was found to be radioactive. They’d been caught one thousand miles east-northeast of the Marshall Islands.

The fleeting, cataclysmic chain reaction at the center of a nuclear explosion has been likened to a small manmade star that appears for an instant and annihilates everything nearby. In July 1945, scientists working on the Manhattan Project wondered exactly what would happen when they exploded the Trinity device in the first-ever nuclear test in New Mexico that month.
Most were confident—though not certain—that earlier calculations suggesting the bomb might set the atmosphere on fire were wrong.

The intended consequences of such a weapon in battle—death and destruction on a massive scale—had also been predicted. Devastation would be caused only partly by the heat and radiation that would vaporize everything close to the blast. The main destructive effects would come from the shock wave traveling outward and extending over a much larger area. Because the earth would absorb and also reflect much of the energy from a blast at ground level, a bomb would have to be detonated in the air above its target to achieve maximum results. Little consideration was given to the secondary contamination of remote locations from radioactive debris transported high into the atmosphere. But such fallout was to become the great fear of the nuclear age.

The mushroom cloud is not a unique signature of a nuclear bomb. A big explosion of any kind can create one, blowing a hole in the air and filling it with hot gases that rise rapidly, creating a powerful updraft of fire and smoke and vapor that vacuums in the storm of dust and debris caused by the blast and carries it all, elevator-like, straight
up. A nuclear explosion, being so much bigger and hotter than any conventional explosion, creates a huge mushroom cloud that not only picks up a great volume of debris but also makes it radioactive. And because it can rise far above the altitude of the jet stream, the radioactive debris in the mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb does not fall straight back to earth, but instead becomes entrained in upper-level wind currents, merging with the weather itself as it sweeps over oceans and continents, eventually raining back to earth where it will.

News of the hydrogen bomb test at Bikini atoll and the subsequent plight of the crew of the
Lucky Dragon
reached an American public largely unconcerned that what had happened on the other side of the world, in the middle of a vast ocean, was also happening here, over American farms and suburbs and cities.
Between 1951 and 1955, the United States conducted
forty-nine
aboveground tests of nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site, sixty-three miles north of Las Vegas. None involved hydrogen bombs, and some were small “safety” tests that produced little radiation and no fallout. In some tests the bombs were dropped from airplanes; in others they were exploded on towers.

The power of these devices varied considerably—from a small fraction of what was delivered when Little Boy went off 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, to some that were two or even three times as powerful as Little Boy. The resultant mushroom clouds carried hundreds of different fission products into the atmosphere, including at least twenty kinds of radionuclides—atoms with unstable nuclei that emit radiation—that were the most dangerous components of fallout. This continuing conveyance of radioactive debris into the atmosphere contributed to a perpetual global cloud of radioactive contamination also coming from nuclear testing by the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. All of this debris sooner or later returned to earth.

People could experience “ambient” exposure to radioactive fallout simply by getting close to it or touching it on the ground. Or they could inhale or ingest it. One effective route of delivery turned out to be cows pastured on ground that received fallout. Cows
that ate contaminated grass gave milk that contained concentrated radionuclides—milk that was, in turn, consumed by humans, mainly children.

Nuclear testing in Nevada was widely reported, of course, but the public paid little attention to fallout other than as a product of nuclear war, should one occur. Radioactive fallout had been discovered with the first atomic explosion—the test of the Trinity device.
In his top-secret report on the test to President Truman, General Leslie Groves, who was the military head of the Manhattan Project, said that Trinity proved not only that the atomic bomb was powerful—it produced what were described as “tremendous blast effects”—but that it also sent skyward a lingering mushroom cloud that was more massive than anticipated and that rose to an altitude that surprised everyone.

The Manhattan Project scientists were convinced that a temperature boundary in the atmosphere at about seventeen thousand feet would be an impenetrable barrier to any cloud from the explosion that might reach that high. But the mushroom cloud from Trinity “surged and billowed upward with tremendous power” and in the space of five minutes had shot past seventeen thousand feet and reached an altitude of forty-one thousand feet. It was understood that the blast cloud would contain “huge concentrations of highly radioactive materials,” and Groves felt it necessary to explain how worrisome this new symbol of total warfare was:

General Groves also informed the president that he had managed to keep local press coverage mostly confined to what the government’s official release said about the test, though some enterprising reporters had talked with a number of eyewitnesses who described the explosion. One of these, Groves said, was “a blind woman who saw the light.”

The extent of the fallout from Trinity had far more distant boundaries than General Groves realized.
A few months after the Trinity test, the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, started seeing blips and streaks on unexposed film it manufactured for industrial X-ray equipment. After some investigation, Kodak determined that the film was being contaminated by radiation emanating from the cardboard containers into which it was packaged. The cardboard had come from a couple of different suppliers in Iowa and Indiana—paper mills that drew their water from rivers flowing out of midwestern watersheds that were downwind of the Trinity test, albeit many hundreds of miles downwind.

The far-reaching effects of fallout were more dramatically observed in late January and early February 1951, following a series of Nevada nuclear tests that took place in the space of just over one week. The first bomb in the series, called “Ranger Able,” was a small one—less than one-half of one-tenth the size of Little Boy. But when it went off one thousand feet over the desert after being dropped from a plane it sent radioactive debris up in a mushroom cloud that reached seventeen thousand feet. Even though this was well beneath the jet stream, tracking planes followed the cloud all the way across the country. It arrived in New England after only two days. Along the way it became entangled with a storm, and radioactive snow fell on upstate
New York. Ranger Able was followed one day later by “Ranger Baker,” a bomb sixteen times as powerful. This time the mushroom cloud rose to thirty-five thousand feet and again headed for the East Coast, where three days after the test radioactive snow fell in Central Park in New York City.

Subsequent tests in the Ranger series broke windows in Las Vegas and entertained people by lighting up the sky before dawn every couple of days. When “Baker Fox,” the final bomb in the series and a behemoth almost twice as big as Little Boy, was detonated on February 6, 1951, crowds of gawkers parked their cars in the early morning darkness along the highways outside the bombing range to watch the display. The blast again smashed windows many miles away, and the searing light from the explosion, first white then dark red, startled passengers on an airliner passing over Durango, Colorado, six hundred miles to the east. The mushroom cloud rose above forty thousand feet, caught the wind, and headed straight south over Las Vegas en route to Phoenix, Arizona; Brownsville, Texas; and on out over the Gulf of Mexico.