Eniwetok
When American students opened Scholastic magazine’s first issue of 1948, they read that their country was
planning more nuclear bomb tests. Under the headline "ADVANCING SCIENCE" was the periodical’s account of
upcoming Operation Sandstone:
Eniwetok is a lonely spot. It is a sort of coral necklace of 40 tiny island "beads," far out in the vast
Pacific. It lies about halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines. The nearest land is more than 100 miles
away. The 147 natives of the atoll are being moved to another island.
But don’t get the idea that you can spend a nice, quiet vacation there. You couldn’t even get near the
place. Even the United Nations is barred.
For Eniwetok will become a "forbidden fortress of the atom." The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
plans to test atomic weapons there.129
Just two years after Operation Crossroads the United States was back exploding nuclear bombs in the Marshall
Islands. About twenty thousand American servicemen were there,130 during three atomic detonations from towers on
Eniwetok in April and May 1948. Men like David Lloyd and John E. Knights and Claude E. Cooper participated,
like the good soldiers they were, in the Pentagon’s scenarios.
Ten years after Operation Sandstone, Air Force veteran Lloyd got married. His son Scotty was born in 1960; at
the age of ten, Scotty was diagnosed with bone cancer. A year later Scotty was dead. His father was left with skin
cancer, which doctors termed recurring basal cell carcinoma, on his nose. Twenty years after the death of his son,
Lloyd, living in Topeka, Kansas, could not forget. "At the present time," he said, "I feel nothing but bitterness
towards my Government for using me and thousands like me as human guinea pigs."131
Lieutenant Colonel John Knights, of Tampa, Florida, had a long military career spanning service in the Army,
Navy, and Air Force. He was an Army major in 1948, exposed to high amounts of radiation a few days after the first
nuclear shot at Eniwetok, when he helped extricate a tank from a blast crater. Knights testified about the experience
in front of a citizens’ commission in Washington, D.C., thirty-two years later: "Back on board the radiological safety
ship, the needle on the radiation meter bounced off scale and I was sent to the showers for a scrub-down with stiff
brushes. I was still very hot and in a state of shock after the shower and I was sent back to my state room to
recuperate. An hour later I suffered severe nausea and vomited." Twenty years later he had bladder cancer,
combined with chronically itching skin and sharp pain in his groin that persisted for decades.132
U.S. Navy Lieutenant Claude Cooper died in 1979, after suffering from prostatic cancer with metastases to his
vital organs and all his bones. "I feel in my heart that my husband’s death was attributable to the radiation he
received while participating in Operation Sandstone at Eniwetok," said his widow, living in Long Beach,
California.133
The response to Lloyd and Knights and Mrs. Cooper from the U.S. Government was the standard one: Denial of
responsibility.
At Eniwetok in 1948 atomic weaponry took a substantial leap. Under joint auspices of the Defense Department
and AEC, the Operation Sandstone tests "evidently did result in substantial improvements in the efficiency of use of
fissile material," according to physicist Herbert York, a key researcher in U.S. nuclear weapons design.134 One
forty-nine-kiloton blast, code-named Yoke, expended more than twice the force of any atomic bomb detonation in
previous years.135
Operation Sandstone gave a lift to the politicians, industrialists, generals, and scientists pushing for bigger nuclear
weapons outlays. "Success" of the Sandstone tests "boosted morale at Los Alamos and helped garner further support
for the laboratory in Washington," observed York. "As a result, the construction of a new laboratory, located nearby
on South Mesa, was authorized as a replacement for the wartime facilities that were still being used."136 More than
ever the fix was in for nuclear testing to be perpetual scenery on the American political, economic, scientific, and
media landscapes; its tangible benefits had become obvious to its prime constituents.
One of the Los Alamos laboratory’s leading physicists, Edward Teller, recognized that nuclear bomb test
explosions would be pivotal for continually gearing up the nuclear weapons assembly line: from research and
development to production of warheads in bulk. Offered the directorship of the Los Alamos theoretical division,
Teller said he would accept the post only if the U.S. would conduct a dozen nuclear tests per year—a rate that
seemed unrealistic to Los Alamos chief Norris Bradbury in the late 1940s.137
Unable to force such a commitment, Teller declined the position.138 But his vision soon prevailed. In the first
five years after the end of World War II the U.S. tested a total of five atomic bombs; from 1951 to 1955, the
American government tested sixty-one nuclear bombs.
129. Scholastic, January 5, 1948, p. 6.
130. Uhl and Ensign, GI Guinea Pigs, p. 43.
131. Atomic Veterans’ Newsletter, fall 1980, pp. 9-10.
132. Citizens’ Hearings, pp. 17-19.
133. Atomic Veterans’ Newsletter, summer 1980, p. 9
134. York, The Advisors, pp 19-20.
135. Announced U.S. Nuclear Tests, p. 5. Unless otherwise noted, nuclear bomb blast dates and magnitude figures were derived from this source.
136. York, The Advisors, pp. 19-20.
137. Ibid., p 18.
138. Ibid.