5 Continued Testing: Tragic Repetitions
While the fallout debate raged during the mid-1950s, the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program continued to
escalate. American servicemen and civilians were, more than ever, in the radioactive line of fire. The government
gave scant priority to the health and safety of its own citizens.
The practice of exploding atomic weapons underwater was a case in point.
The first time the United States set off an atom bomb beneath the ocean surface, at the 1946 Baker test in the
shallow Bikini lagoon, the military vessels had been shellacked with unexpectedly tenacious, and long-lived,
radioactivity. The U.S. Government scuttled plans for a follow-up deep-water explosion to climax the first series of
atomic tests at Bikini.
There was no official acknowledgment that dangers of sub-ocean-surface nuclear explosions had prompted the
indefinite postponement.1 However, an analysis published in Science Digest in summer 1947 said such detonations
involve "some highly unpredictable phenomena." In fact, remarked author John W. Campbell, "no one has the
slightest idea of what might happen if an atomic bomb were set off at a depth of half a mile in sea water."2
The Atomic Energy Commission, in a report to the National Security Resources Board, later conceded that "if a
bomb is exploded in water, such as the [1946] Test Baker at Bikini, there will be considerable amounts of residual
radioactivity, depending upon wind, currents, tides, and the size of the body of water."3
American military officers, briefed by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project during the late 1940s, were
warned that underwater nuclear tests entailed special risks. The secret handbook used in the course cautioned that
radioactive mist from an underwater nuclear blast could be expected to spray "serious contamination over a large
area."4
On pages marked "RESTRICTED" the government’s own experts elaborated on the dangers. Dr. Herbert
Scoville, Jr., who later became deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote: "In an underwater
detonation the nuclear radiation effects are quite different from those resulting from an air burst and are of
considerably greater magnitude." Scoville recalled that the only underwater nuclear test up until that time, in the
lagoon at Bikini, had left enormous quantities of radioactivity—"estimated to be equivalent to thousands of tons of
radium shortly after the detonation. This is a billion times the radioactivity from a gram of radium. Such is the truly
fantastic radioactivity associated with an atomic bomb detonation."5
And, Scoville pointed out, in Bikini’s lagoon "intensities above tolerance were measured for almost a week."
Even "nontarget vessels" were severely contaminated.6
But nine years later the United States exploded a thirty-kiloton nuclear bomb two thousand feet below the surface
of the Pacific Ocean—just five hundred miles southwest of San Diego.7
1. Rather, the official explanation as United States News reported it was that the deep-water explosion set for Bikini was axed "chiefly because of the danger to
military security in tying up the needed technical man power and equipment at this time." (United States News, September 20, 1946, p. 19.)
2. John W. Campbell, "Why Atom Test 3 Was Canceled," Science Digest, July 1947, p 7.
3. The H Bomb, p. 35.
4. Dr. Herbert Scoville, Jr., "Nuclear Radiation Effects of Atomic Bomb Detonations," "Medical Indoctrination Course," Armed Forces Special Weapons
Project, Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., undated, late 1940s, p. 4.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. U.S. DOD, Prototype Report, DOD Personnel Participation, Operation Wigwam (Washington, D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1980), p. 12. Wigwam blast
location was 28 degrees 44 minutes north latitude and 126 degrees 16 minutes west longitude.