2 300,000 GIs Under the Mushroom Clouds
Dr. David Bradley sat among colleagues aboard a U.S. Navy ship docked just off the main island of the Bikini atolls
in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, about two thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. Bradley, a young Army doctor,
was one of a score of assembled physicians in training to be radiation monitors for the first peacetime atomic
detonations.1 He listened attentively as Colonel Stafford Warren, head of the Radiological Safety Section, explained
the scenario set for seventeen days later, on July 1, 1946.
An atomic bomb—the same size as the weapon that exploded over Nagasaki—was scheduled to detonate at
Bikini. In more ways than one the U.S. military high command and its civilian counterparts were testing the waters
with this "Operation Crossroads"—the name given to the 1946 Bikini test series. There was very little question that
the two plutonium bombs ready for detonation that July would work; the purpose of Operation Crossroads was to
evaluate impacts of existing nuclear weapons rather than to experiment with any new designs.2
The psychological aspects of atomic detonations—among direct participants as well as the general public—were
being carefully considered. It was no accident that journalists from around the world, photographers, and newsreel
crews were solicitously encouraged to observe Operation Crossroads in all its breathtaking, awe-inspiring atomic
glory. But the atomic test supervisors were able to meticulously control the stories those journalists turned in. All
information about the blasts—including the quantity and significance of radioactive fallout affecting plants, animals,
and humans—was most definitely the sole province of official sources.
To be stressed to the world in the summer of 1946 was the theme of fantastic power of nuclear weaponry, held
only by the United States—a nation capable of controlling nuclear explosions to protect its own citizens and allies
while inflicting enormous and selective damage on adversaries. The leadoff test, appropriately enough, was codenamed
Able.
The first lectures that Dr. Bradley and other scientists aboard the U.S.S. Haven heard were about keeping quiet.
Sitting on the balmy navigation deck of the sleek white ship equipped with elaborate laboratory instrumentation,
Bradley had listened to the initial briefing three days after the Haven left San Francisco. "The naval equivalent of a
Trial Judge Advocate read us the riot act on security, backing it up with selections from the Federal Espionage Act.
Before he got through it began to look as though Bikini would be but a brief stop on the way to Leavenworth,"
Bradley later recorded in his personal log.3
The tests were mounted with assiduous attention to detail. Along with forty-two thousand U.S. armed forces
personnel, and an armada of about two hundred ships and 150 planes dispatched to both withstand the atomic
damage and help in assessing it,4 there were hundreds of military and civilian specialists. The government had
assigned an entire ship, carrying animals and physicians, to study effects of radioactivity on the fish, plant life, and
coral atolls, and its spread by air and sea.5 Over four thousand nonhuman test animals6 were to be involved in the
Able atomic blast—including goats, pigs, rats, and specially bred mice—in addition to fruit flies.
As he concentrated on the final briefing from Colonel Stafford Warren, one of the American military’s top
radiation authorities, Bradley found himself both fascinated and concerned. To him, medicine was always destined
to be practiced "somewhere in that intermediate zone which combines both science and humanism."7 The scientist in
Bradley was fascinated; the humanist in him was concerned.
Colonel Warren explained that a B-29 would fly over Bikini to drop an A-bomb. A mobile "live" fleet would be
about twenty miles away, on the sea and in the air. The bomb would explode with a power of about twenty thousand
tons of TNT, sending off blinding heat equal to the sun’s.8
As the initial flash dissipated, two of the Navy’s Marin PBM-S flying boats (Bradley was assigned to be in one of
them) would cruise closer and closer to the blast until detecting radiation levels deemed "dangerous." While planes
and destroyers would be sent off to follow the mushroom cloud’s travel path, the "live" fleet would gradually head
toward the blast center—where ships berthed under the nuclear explosion would be examined to find out what an
atom bomb of twenty kilotons or so could do to aircraft carriers, battleships, and other military equipment.9 U.S.
commanders had designated seventy-three ships to serve as the atomic explosion’s target fleet.10
Having heard the last briefing and received their assignments, Bradley and most of his scientific colleagues went
ashore on Bikini’s main island—four miles long and about two hundred yards wide—a sandy sliver in the Pacific
immensity. "The sun was rich with its tropical intensity, and the sky full of the clustering thunderheads," Bradley
wrote in his notebook. "The beauty of this Bikini setting seems to belong to another world entirely, having no
relation to the strange mission which brings us here."11
Indeed, Bikini’s beauty masked radioactive poisons that would prove fatal to natives and GIs alike.
1. David Bradley, No Place to Hide (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948), pp. 18-20.
2. Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976), p. 19.
3. Bradley, No Place to Hide, p. 5.
4. Michael Uhl and Tod Ensign, GI Guinea Pigs (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1980), p. 34
5. Bradley, No Place to Hide, p. 15.
6. Uhl and Ensign, GI Guinea Pigs, p. 34.