Operation Upshot-Knothole
As the U.S. Government prepared for "Operation Upshot-Knothole," slated for the spring and summer of 1953,
civilian restraints over nuclear testing continued to erode. In a meeting between the AEC and the Department of
Defense it was established that "in the forthcoming tests the usual limits of physical exposure to weapons effects
would probably be exceeded." The AEC commissioners then acquiesced to a suggestion "that responsibility for the
physical safety of the troops participating in the exercise be delegated to the DOD [Department of Defense] and that
the DOD be informed of the possibility that exceeding the normal limits of exposure to radiation or pressure might
endanger the participating personnel."75
Servicemen at the atomic tests were thus left to the tender mercies of the Department of Defense. Official notes
depicted AEC chairman Gordon Dean’s view that "since the DOD apparently considered it necessary to conduct the
exercises in this manner, the AEC was not in a position to recommend that the normal limits [of radiation exposure
and blast pressure] be observed."76 For good measure, the AEC commissioners endorsed plans for a joint
announcement that the Defense Department would be taking responsibility for the safety of troops during the
forthcoming series of atom bomb tests in Nevada.77
As the newly elected President, Dwight Eisenhower, prepared to unveil his "Atoms for Peace" program,
promoting use of nuclear energy for electric power, the AEC and Pentagon put finishing touches on Operation
Upshot-Knothole. During the spring and early summer of 1953 a total of eleven nuclear test shots sent mushroom
clouds over the Nevada desert, concluding with a sixty-one-kiloton explosion code-named Climax. In less than three
months the Nevada blasts had unleashed a cumulative force of over 250 kilotons—about twenty times the power of
the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
About seventeen thousand military personnel participated in Upshot-Knothole. Routinely thousands were in
trenches within two miles of ground zero as a nuclear bomb exploded; obeying orders, they moved toward the blast
center inside of an hour after detonation in mock attack. The exercises even included, for the first time, direct
charges immediately after detonation. The Pentagon had nearly doubled the AEC’s prior theoretical limit for
radiation exposure of the servicemen, raising it to six roentgens.78
Meanwhile A-test overseers had been experimenting with nonhuman subjects as well—sheep, rabbits, and pigs
confined at varying distances from the blast site. Scores of porkers were clothed with specially fitted "uniforms"
made out of standard Army material, to test for protection of their skin. One of the more bizarre expenditures came
when one set of pigs had to be refitted with new uniforms after they outgrew their originals while waiting for the
weather to break.79
Former Army sergeant Cecil G. Dunn, an Operation Upshot-Knothole veteran, recounted from his home in
Pensacola, Florida, "After the blast, they marched us to ground zero. I will never forget the smell after that shot. I
have no idea how much radiation was there. I know of no film badges. I don’t remember seeing any of the men
wearing any. I know I never had one." Recalling subsequent chronic headaches lasting years, followed by
nosebleeds, a nervous breakdown, festering spots on his legs, and dizzy spells, Dunn said: "I feel like I am drunk all
the time, but I don’t drink. I tire very easily now. . . . All I have ever asked is to live like other people. But I cannot
help blaming the Government for subjecting me to nuclear testing without warning me of the potential consequences
and I will always wonder why it happened."80
Outside the borders of the Nevada Test Site fallout clouds intensified as Operation Upshot-Knothole progressed.
On April 25, 1953, four and half hours after a forty-three-kiloton81 blast named Simon, a spot outside the Nevada
Test Site boundaries registered 460 milliroentgens per hour along Route 93—nineteen miles north of the Nevada
town of Glendale. The potential dose was far in excess of the current standards set by governmental agencies.
Caught off guard, the federal government hastily set up roadblocks. A report by the U.S. Public Health Service
estimated about fourteen hundred people were living in the immediate fallout area. Starting nine hours after the
Simon explosion, for 150 minutes, traffic was stopped on major roads; out of some 250 vehicles stopped and
checked for radiation, 40 were judged to require decontamination. A Greyhound bus, bound for Las Vegas with 30
passengers, gave off readings of 250 milliroentgens outside, 160 milliroentgens inside.82
Three hours after the blast the tiny town of Riverdale registered readings of sixteen milliroentgens an hour.83 An
Armed Forces Special Weapons Project report, which was to remain secret for twenty-five years, commented: "The
amount of fallout was expected to be much larger than usual. However, due to the fact that no populated
communities were expected to be in its path, the decision was made to fire on schedule."84 But the Simon fallout
cloud also passed over Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it
encountered a tumultuous thunderstorm over upstate New York, southern Vermont, and parts of western
Massachusetts. It was one of the heaviest flash storms in memory, bringing down torrents of rain.85
Two days after the Simon explosion a group of students at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New
York—twenty-three hundred miles from the blast—noticed Geiger counters at their school radiochemistry lab were
registering high readings. They went outside to discover that the previous evening’s rain had brought down large
amounts of fallout. Radiochemistry Professor Herbert Clark called the AEC, where an official first thought Clark
was joking.86
But students systematically measured the area for radiation. Some samples from rain puddles showed 270,000
times more radioactivity than usually found in drinking water. Tests from city reservoir water showed levels 2,630
times higher than normal. Professor Clark and the Rensselaer students also discovered another problem.
Radioactive fallout clung to the roof and walls despite hours of scrubbing; the surface radioactivity in Troy/Albany
was comparable to measurements taken two hundred to five hundred miles from the point of the Simon detonation in
Nevada.87 In the mid-sixties that contamination would lead to a bitter controversy over health damage in the wake of
bomb testing.
75. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, December 23, 1952.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Rosenberg, Atomic Soldiers, p. 57.
79. Ibid., pp. 61-63.
80. Atomic Veterans’ Newsletter, spring 1980, p. 3.
81. In contrast to a continued official listing of forty-three kilotons, documents declassified in the late 1970s refer to the Simon test as a 51.5-kiloton blast. (The
Tribune [Salt Lake], New York Times News Service, August 12, 1979.)
82. The Tribune (Salt Lake), New York Times News Service, August 12, 1979.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ernest Sternglass, Secret Fallout (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 1-5. See also articles by Herbert M. Clark in Science, May 7, 1954, pp. 619-622, and
by Clark, et al., in Journal American Water Works Association, November 1954, pp. 1101-1111.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.