More Radiation Clouds
In the late 1960s and beyond, the kind of additional fallout that underground testing critics had labored to prevent
did indeed occur—with several subsurface nuclear tests shooting radioactivity across the U.S. and into Canada.
From 1966 to 1975 the federal officer responsible for monitoring of off-site fallout from underground detonations
was Colonel Raymond E. Brim, chief of operations for the Air Force Technical Applications Center. On December
8, 1968, a thirty-kiloton Plowshare blast named Schooner sent up a storm of radioactivity over the Nevada Test Site.
As usual Brim’s agency began to monitor the fallout.
"This effluent cloud was tracked continuously by Air Force planes until it reached the border of Canada where
standing orders prevented tracking outside the United States," Brim revealed more than a decade afterward. "I
remember a few days later an article appeared in the New York Times which reported an increase in radiation
detected in Canada. When we read the article, we knew that it was the cloud we had tracked to the border."93 But, at
the time, Brim and his colleagues kept silent. And, with neither the U.S. nor Canadian governments willing to state
definitely that the American test was the cause of increased radiation levels in Canada, the matter dropped,
unresolved, from public sight.94
The Schooner test clouds also dropped radiation across the continent. "It didn’t register anywhere east of the
Mississippi because the AEC had no monitoring stations east of the river," according to Brim—who termed the
government’s strategy "a clever adaption of the switch-the-monitors-off ploy."95
While working for the Air Force, Brim went along with the Pentagon program and held his peace. During the
first several years after retirement, however, Colonel Brim mulled the implications of underground testing radiation
leaks. On August 1, 1979, he testified at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
"There is indisputable evidence on record that shows that the people, not just of Utah and Nevada but of a much
wider and more encompassing area of the United States, were unknowingly subjected to fallout of radioactive debris
that resulted from ventings of underground and cratering tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site," Brim told the
congressional panel. "Because of weather and wind patterns, this debris was frequently carried much farther than has
been reported to the public."96
Although Brim’s testimony came at an open hearing on Capitol Hill, The New York Times, The Washington Post,
and the nation’s other most influential newspapers did not print a word about it.
More than a year later, in January 1981, Brim declared flatly that "Americans were exposed to dangerous levels of
radiation from ‘safe’ underground tests all through the 1960s and 1970s, and remain in danger today." In an article
published by The Washington Monthly magazine, Colonel Brim charged: "Just as the risk of fallout continues, so
does the conscious government effort to cover up the situation. Department of Energy officials fully understand that
underground testing can’t fully contain radiation, yet downplay the information or even withhold it from the public.
Exactly as they did in the 1950s, officials refuse to reveal information necessary for those who live near radiation
accidents to protect themselves."97
It was a strong statement from someone who—for nearly ten years—served as the Pentagon’s top officer in
charge of monitoring leaks from underground nuclear tests. "Today it seems incredible that straight-faced
government spokesmen could proclaim that standing downwind of an open-air nuclear explosion was perfectly safe,"
Brim went on. "It seems equally incredible that people believed the claims. Yet that twin mentality continues to
operate, with Washington making what will, in years to come, be considered preposterous claims about the safety of
underground tests, and most people nodding their heads in agreement."98
The Nevada Test Site’s current manager, Mahlon Gates, made a public appearance before a 1979 congressional
hearing, ostensibly making a clean breast of past underground test radiation ventings. Colonel Brim observed,
however, that Gates’s "estimate of the total amount of radiation downwind of a test site in the period from 1951 to
1969 . . . worked out to less than a quarter of the radiation the Public Health Service recorded after a single blast on
the same site."99
Indicative of the kind of present-day hazards—and governmental deceit—Brim alluded to was the underground
nuclear test Baneberry. When it vented on the morning of December 18, 1970, Baneberry sent a mushroom cloud of
radioactivity eight thousand feet into the air. Ten years later the U.S. Government’s official log of nuclear tests was
still claiming that only "minor levels of radioactivity" were detected off-site from the Baneberry explosion.100
But Colonel Brim, who was responsible for off-site monitoring during the Baneberry test, has pointed to evidence
"that a dangerously high concentration of Iodine-131, a radiation byproduct, was found in the milk of Utah and
Nevada cows which had eaten vegetation exposed to Baneberry’s fallout. Deer and sheep as far as 400 miles from
the test range had abnormal concentrations of iodine in their thyroid glands, and the thyroid of a fetus from one sheep
contained five times more iodine than the thyroid of its mother."101
Favorable weather conditions mitigated the Baneberry fallout impact. Dr. Robert Pendleton calculated that if the
accident had happened in summertime the result for Utah residents could have been "a very significant radiation dose
to the thyroid."102
Baneberry radioactivity rode the winds to the Northwest, Midwest, and New England, also reaching Canada. The
following spring Dr. Ernest Sternglass and associates accumulated data on where the fallout had descended. They
compared the findings to U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics reports on mortality of infants born after the vented test blast.
"In all of the states where the total radioactivity rose highest—Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, Washington,
Nebraska, and as far away as Minnesota and Maine—infant mortality also rose sharply during the first three months
after the test," Sternglass discovered. "Across the rest of the U.S., the pattern of general decline continued."103
The fetal deaths for Bannock County in southeastern Idaho, directly in the path of the December 1970 Baneberry
fallout,104 rose to their highest level in 1971, compared with any of the five previous or five following years.105 That
year there were twenty-one officially recorded fetal deaths in Bannock County—62 percent higher than the average
annual total for the years 1966 to 1976.106
Was the Baneberry underground test venting a fluke unlikely to be repeated? The United States Government says
yes. But a 1974 confidential U.S. military memo, written by nuclear testing program officer Captain William Gay,
says otherwise. Made public through efforts by Senator Edward Kennedy in 1979, Captain Gay’s memorandum
stated that "on the basis of past experience at NTS [Nevada Test Site], a rather high incidence prevails for a release
of radioactivity like Baneberry." The Gay memo added that "the risk is not like one in a million or so low as to be
comfortable. Ventings have happened and will probably happen again."107
Captain Gay, director for tests in the Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Military Application, also wrote
in the memo: "Considering past experience, massive venting can be expected in about one [ratio blanked out by
censors] events."108 Even after the decision was made to declassify the document in 1979, the American people
apparently could not be trusted to hear a candid official estimate of the chances for future disastrous ventings of
underground nuclear bomb tests.
93. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, "Testimony of Raymond Brim,
Retired Colonel, U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C., August 1, 1979, unpublished transcript.
94. Ibid.
95. Raymond E. Brim and Patricia Condon, "Another A-Bomb Cover-up," Washington Monthly, January 1981, p. 48.
96. "Testimony of Raymond Brim."
97. Brim and Condon, "Another A-Bomb Cover-up," p. 45.
98. Ibid., p. 46.
99. Ibid., p. 48.
100. Announced US Nuclear Tests, p. 30.
101. Brim and Condon, "Another A-Bomb Cover-up," p. 47.
102. Deseret News, January 27, 1978.
103. Sternglass, Secret Fallout, p. 181.
104. The Baneberry fallout split into three general trajectories after venting. The westernmost segment went over the Idaho Falls area of southeastern Idaho,
passing directly over Bannock County. (Deseret News, January 27, 1978. See also, EPA, "Final Report of Off-Site Surveillance for the Baneberry Event,
December 18, 1970," Western Environmental Research Laboratory, SWRHL-107r, February 1972, especially pp. 31, 51.)
105. Bannock County and overall Idaho fetal death statistics are contained in anthropology master’s thesis by Edward B. Beldin, Idaho State University, "A
Bioanthropological Approach to the Effects of Air Quality on Human Health, with Emphasis on the Incidence of Stillbirths in Two Southeast Idaho Cities,"
1978.
106. Ibid. When put in ratio to live births, the Bannock County fetal deaths in 1971 were even more anomalous in comparison with preceding and subsequent
years.
107. Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation, Vol. 1, p. 125.
108. Ibid.