Wigwam
For those who heard about the 1955 deep-water test ahead of time, it didn’t sound like much to worry about.
Government public-relations specialists saw to that. In the five months between President Eisenhower’s approval of
the detonation and the day it actually occurred, Pentagon image-makers busily prepared for the unusual nuclear blast,
tagged "Operation Wigwam."
About sixty-five hundred people, almost all of them servicemen, were scheduled to be there, so secrecy was out of
the question. But the AEC barred news correspondents from observing Operation Wigwam. And, although the
bomb was thirty kilotons—more than twice the size of the Hiroshima atomic weapon—the government succeeded in
depicting it as rather small. The San Diego Evening Tribune informed its readers that the Wigwam bomb was
"thought to have had an energy equivalent of 1 to 5 kilotons, certainly smaller than 20 kt."8
Internal government documents about Operation Wigwam remained classified for more than twenty years. In
1980 the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting was able to study official records and films of the
underwater test. The team of journalists concluded that "the planners’ major concerns were for the scientific and
military results of the test; concern for the possible hazards facing the thousands of men stationed at the blast site
appears to have been secondary."9
When the A-bomb exploded on May 14, 1955, it sent huge shock waves and gigantic walls of seawater at thirty
ships with more than six thousand servicemen aboard—many of whom had no idea they were participating in an
atomic test. A confidential document declared that the men were subjected to "extremely hazardous respiratory
conditions."10 And the Center for Investigative Reporting found that nearly 40 percent of interviewed Operation
Wigwam veterans recalled having no radiation-detection badges during the nuclear test.11 Out of thirty-five
Wigwam veterans located, seventeen had illnesses they attributed to radiation exposure during the blast.12
Twenty-four years after the Wigwam test Elroy L. Runnels faced television cameras in Honolulu and
remembered: "We weren’t told anything of the . . . gravity of the situation."13 Two days after Runnels’s filmed
statement he was dead—a leukemia victim. He had been seventeen years old while aboard the U.S.S. Moctobi in the
Operation Wigwam armada.
One of Runnels’s last efforts, from his deathbed in late summer of 1979, was to file a class action lawsuit against
the U.S. Government, charging it intentionally endangered him and the other servicemen involved in Operation
Wigwam. And because the government continued to stay mum about possible risks, Runnels maintained, his
leukemia "festered undetected until it had advanced to an acute, severely debilitating state."14
Elroy Runnels’s charges exposed basic inconsistencies in the government’s accounts of the nuclear test. Despite
the Navy’s contention that no servicemen were closer than five miles to the blast, the logs of Runnels’s ship showed
it as being well under a mile from the bomb detonation.15 He was not informed that he had participated in a nuclear
test until several weeks after Operation Wigwam was over.16
Nor was Operation Wigwam the last American underwater nuclear explosion. In the summer of 1958 two nuclear
blasts went off beneath the sea at Eniwetok. And on May 11, 1962, a test code-named Swordfish exploded with a
force of twenty kilotons, under the Pacific Ocean at a spot 360 miles southwest of San Diego. About five thousand
Navy servicemen were at the Swordfish test, which subjected them to what the Defense Nuclear Agency has termed
"extremely low-yield" radiation.17
For the most part America’s nuclear testers were content to detonate new warheads above sea level in the Pacific
Ocean. In 1958—a dozen years after the first atomic test in the Marshall Islands—the United States was exploding
massive thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs amidst those scenic isles. One Eniwetok blast, dubbed Oak, went off with
a force of 8.9 megatons on June 28, 1958. Two months later the last nuclear weapons test occurred in the Marshall
Islands.
The Pentagon moved on to other parts of the Pacific Ocean—Christmas Island and Johnson Island areas—where
in 1962 thousands more American servicemen were exposed to nuclear test radiation.18 Over a span of more than
sixteen years, beginning with Operation Crossroads in 1946, the United States exploded 106 nuclear weapons in
various parts of the Pacific.
8. Dan Noyes, Maureen O’Neill, David Weir, "Operation Wigwam," New West, December 1, 1980, p. 28.
9. Ibid., p. 27.
10. Ibid., p. 29.
11. ABC-TV, 20/20 program broadcast, March 5, 1981, transcript p. 7.
12. Ibid., p. 6.
13. Ibid., p. 3.
14. Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 4, 1979.
15. San Francisco Chronicle, United Press International, September 7, 1979.
16. Honolulu Advertiser, September 7, 1979.
17. The Oregonian, Associated Press, December 13, 1979.
18. Among the megaton-range explosions at Johnson Island was the 1.4-megaton Starfish Prime blast set off via rocket at an altitude of 248 miles on July 8,
1962. "For some time thereafter," Science magazine reported nineteen years later, "physicists puzzled over a resulting series of odd occurrences. Some 800
miles away in Hawaii, streetlights had failed, burglar alarms had rung, and circuit breakers had popped open in power lines. Today, the mysterious agent is
known as electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Physicists say a single nuclear detonation in near space would cover vast stretches of the earth with an EMP of
50,000 volts per meter." A few such nuclear detonations could shut down electrical power grids and communications systems for thousands of miles around.
(William J. Broad, "Nuclear Pulse (1): Awakening to the Chaos Factor," Science, May 29, 1981, pp. 1009-1012.)