4 Test Fallout, Political Fallout
Out in the Pacific, hydrogen bomb tests seemed far away from American communities. But the nuclear explosions
there were producing unprecedented quantities of fallout—dropping on people around the world.
A 1951 two-page Life magazine photo spread hailing "Operation Greenhouse" at Eniwetok must have sounded
rather glorious to most readers: "Finally at sunup one April morning a blinding flash and shattering rumble came
from the tiny atoll. The AEC was busily engaged at its mid-ocean proving ground in testing its latest products. . . ."1
The first blast in May, code-named George and detonated from a tower on Eniwetok, proved to be a crucial
building block for achieving the H-bomb. "Without such a test no one of us could have had the confidence to
proceed further along speculations, inventions, and the difficult choice of the most promising possibility,"2 Edward
Teller later wrote. In the process thousands more American servicemen were exposed to atomic-fission products
from nearby explosions.
After the George test, U.S. Navy seaman Artie Duvall was aboard a ship ordered to ferry scientists to the blast
site. The scientists wore protective garb; the Navy seamen wore jeans, and many had their shirts off in the tropical
sun. Duvall and his crew took sick and began vomiting. "It was like having some terrible flu," he remembered.
They were ordered to sick bay. The next day, Duvall recalled, a wardroom briefing occurred, with an officer telling
the men that they had "received a lethal dose of radiation." A physician recommended weekly blood tests—which
were never conducted.3
Duvall developed skin cancer, and in 1962—unable to obtain dosimetry records—began a long battle with the
government. A decade later he had a heart attack, followed by major heart surgery. He was forced to sell his house.
The VA rejected his claim for service-connected benefits, telling him, "There is nothing that indicates that your heart
condition is medically attributed by your physician to the history of radiation."4
Duvall reminisced, "We had no knowledge at all of atomic bombs. I had no fear at all of radiation. I didn’t even
really know what radiation was."5
At Eniwetok, when the military did raise the matter of health hazards of radiation, it did so in its customary
fashion. Air Force Colonel Louis Benne—a decorated fighter pilot who received the Silver Star, Distinguished
Flying Cross Air Medal with twelve oak-leaf clusters, and Purple Heart—recalled his introduction to radiation at
Eniwetok as he lay dying from internal bleeding on May 11, 1978, at the age of fifty-six: "When we arrived at
Eniwetok . . . or even before we left Hawaii . . . we got a briefing that said that a lot of people were concerned about
the roentgens that we would be exposed to on these atomic shots . . . The Army said there was nothing to worry
about because there was no doubt in their minds that five roentgens a month is nothing . . . and even 20 is nothing. . .
. Well, the funny thing is, blowing of the wind shifted and everyone got about 10 to 15 roentgens, so they had to up
the roentgens to 20 on the first shot and, of course, we still had some shots to go. So, anyway, Dorothy, it was a big
joke."6
Of course to Dorothy Benne, who tape-recorded her husband’s statement, it seemed a very sad joke.
Another Operation Greenhouse veteran, Vernon Lee Hawthorne, was still a teenager when he boarded an Army
troopship for Eniwetok. By the time he died at age thirty from pancreatic cancer at a VA hospital in Amarillo,
Texas, the years of suffering had taken a severe financial as well as emotional toll on his family. "The last year he
was alive, we had a total income of $400," recalled his widow Bettye Hawthorne Fronterhouse. In the face of
continued VA denials of claims for benefits, "my children and I came close to starving."7 One son developed
prostate trouble; another had four tumors removed including one from the jugular vein; the youngest son underwent
surgeries for a two-pound mass tumor in his groin. Four of five grandchildren required treatment for anemia. A
grandson developed a tumor in his scrotum like his father’s, a granddaughter developed a tumor on her back. The
ills had no precedent elsewhere in the family tree.8
Bettye Fronterhouse told a citizens’ commission in Washington, "My husband should have had a right to know
when he went there that he might die 10 years later from cancer at 30 years old and never have a chance to see his
children grow and his grandchildren. Because we had plans for our future, but it was wiped out, taken away from
us."9
1. Life, June 25, 1951, pp. 28-29.
2. York, The Advisors, p. 77.
3. Atomic Veterans’ Newsletter, November/December pp. 10-11. For evidence linking radiation to heart disease, see Arthur Elkeles, M.D, "Alpha-ray Activity
in Coronary Artery Discase," Journal of the American Geriatric Society, May 1968, pp. 576-583.
4. Ibid., p. 11.
5. Ibid., p. 10.
6. Atomic Veterans’ Newsletter, spring 1980, p. 2.
7. Atomic Veterans’ Newsletter, November/December 1979, p. 8.
8. Michael Marchino, "A Wrongful Death," Progressive, November 1980, pp. 9-10.
9. Citizens’ Hearings, pp. 24-26.