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2 Fallout Stories Martin: How long have you been here? Denab: Since the beginning of your experiments in nuclear fission. Martin: What have you got to do with that? Denab: We are accumulating the energy released with each of your atomic explosions. Atomic scientist Dr. Doug Martin and the alien leader Denab, conversing under the Nevada Test Site in Killers From Space (1954) Bravo: Putting Fallout on the Map Nuclear radiation was one of the most potent icons of the atomic age. At first an abstraction associated with the horrors of a nuclear war, during the atmospheric testing era (1945–1963) radiation became a very real part of the lives of Americans, carried into their homes and minds by wind and rain in the form of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapon testing. As testing increased in the 1950s, and as thermonuclear weapons began to be tested, higher and higher levels of fallout reached deeper and deeper into the lives, and bodies, of Americans, and of people all around the world. Fallout was not discussed in detail in the early rush of articles and books about nuclear weapons after 1945; it forced its way into public consciousness through a series of events that devastated the health of those involved. On November 1, 1952, the first U.S. test of a thermonuclear weapon, or H-bomb (the Mike shot of Operation Ivy, exploding approximately 10 megatons), was carried out on Elugelab Island, in the Pacific Ocean. Elugelab, a tiny island in the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, was totally destroyed when the explosion created a crater about one mile in diameter and 175 feet deep at its deepest point. The Mike shot required several buildings to house the cryogenics necessary to cool the thermonuclear fuel to a stable point, weighing a total of 200,000 pounds.1 The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was successful in keeping information about the scale of the test secret from the press and public. 30 c The Dragon’s Tail Two years later, on March 1, 1954, the first shot of the Castle series, the Bravo shot, located on Bikini Atoll, tested a cryogenics-less (dry) weapon that weighed only 2,000 pounds and was deliverable from an airplane. The Bravo shot would prove to be so immense that it was impossible to contain information about its destructive power. Whereas the AEC had been able to limit knowledge of the fact that the Mike shot was a test of a hydrogen weapon, the thermonuclear nature of the Bravo shot was apparent to the whole world.2 Bravo yielded an explosive force of 15 megatons of TNT, a force one thousand times more powerful than existing fission weapons and at least twice as powerful as the weapon’s designers had predicted.3 Beyond the immense yield of the blast of Bravo, it immediately became apparent that this detonation had produced incredible amounts of radioactive fallout. The U.S. military Joint Task Force 7 (which conducted the tests) saw itself compelled to raise the “permissible” level of exposure for its personnel simply because the participants could not avoid receiving the higher dose.4 Since staging grounds on nearby atolls had to be abandoned because of high radiation levels, all operations had to be conducted solely from ships, impeding proper procedures. The ships were overcrowded with Task Force personnel who had been evacuated from the atolls.5 Radiation levels on atolls to the east of Bikini reached such alarming levels that the Task Force evacuated their 264 residents.6 Many of the islanders (who had been about a hundred miles from Bravo’s epicenter) suffered radiation sickness, with such effects as loss of hair and low white blood cell counts, hemorrhages, and skin lesions.7 The New York Times carried its first article about the exposure of the islanders on March 12, 1954.8 Two days later, a Japanese tuna trawler, known as the Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon), pulled into its slip in the Japanese port town of Yaizu. On the day of the test the ship had been at anchor over ninety miles east of ground zero (well outside the fifty-mile exclusion zone set up by the Joint Task Force), yet it had been exposed to very heavy amounts of fallout from the test. All twenty-three members of the crew were ill, and one later died from radiation exposure.9 The Bravo test, with its terrible toll on human life and health, marked the end of...

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