While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-fifth anniversary will be marked -- or mourned, if you will -- tomorrow, July 16.
Entire books have been written about the test, so I'll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there's much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America). It's related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.
In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren't sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, "The Father of the Bomb," worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.
Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer's staff proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, "What are you, Hearst propagandists?"
Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman's chief of staff -- who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan -- placed the weapon in the same category as "poison gas." And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.
Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over loosely-populated areas. "We were just damn lucky," the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.
The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves' first words were: "We must keep the whole thing quiet." This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for "downwinders" and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, "atomic soldiers," those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.
Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave from The New York Times and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist which he called the greatest "honor" that could come to a newspaperman) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.
In the weeks that followed, ranchers discovered dozens of cattle had odd burns or were losing hair. Oppenheimer ordered post-test health reports held in the strictest secrecy. When W.L. Laurence's famous report on the Trinity test was published just after the Hiroshima bombing he made no mention of radiation at all. Instead he hailed the birth of the atomic age, likening the Trinity blast to God declaring, "Let there be light."
Even as the scientists celebrated their success at Alamogordo on July 16, the first radioactive cloud was drifting eastward over America, depositing fallout along its path. When Americans found out about this, three months later, the word came not from the government but from the president of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, who wondered why some of his film was fogging and suspected radioactivity as the cause.
Fallout was absent in early press accounts of the Hiroshima bombing as the media joined in the triumphalist backing of The Bomb and the bombings. When reports of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki afflicted with a strange and horrible new disease emerged, General Groves, at first, called it all a "hoax" and "propaganda" and speculated that the Japanese had different "blood." Then the military kept reporters from the West from arriving in the atomic cities, until more than a month after the blasts, when it controlled access in an early version of today's "embedded reporters" program.
When some of the truth about radiation started to surface in the US media, a full-scale official effort to downplay the Japanese death toll -- and defend the decision to use the bomb -- really accelerated, including the deep-sixing of footage of the survivors shot by an American film crew, leading to an effective decades-long "Hiroshima Narrative." But that's a story for another day.
Greg Mitchell, former editor of Nuclear Times, writes the new MediaFix blog for The Nation, where this first appeared. He is co-author with Robert Jay Lifton of "Hiroshima in America." Email: epic1934@aol.com Twitter: @gregmitch
Follow Greg Mitchell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GregMitch
Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson: Hiroshima and the Transfiguration: A Meditation
The devices (Small Boy and Fat Man) used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were set off well above ground to maximize the blast potential of weapons. This meant that they were set off high enough so that the nuclear fireball didn't intersect the ground and create any local fallout. The radiation illnesses and deaths were due to the prompt radiation that is emitted from the bomb in the first few microseconds of the detonation, not fallout. The reason there were no discussions of fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is technical, not secrecy.
Yet the Clinton administration, which perhaps reduced the actual stockpile of US weapons from hundreds of times to mere tens of times enough to destroy the world, utterly canceled the Integral Fast Reactor project, which could have ended our dependence upon coal and oil quite safely, and without ever shipping bomb-grade material. We might have been spared the funding of bin Laden, the vast oil leak in the Gulf, and the apparent necessity of blasting mountaintops into their valleys in Appalachia.
The people who would shut down all nuclear power plants have not yet persuaded anybody in power to advocate abandoning our "Nuclear deterrent".
Perhaps we should keep the option of blasting Pyongyang or Tehran to radioactive smithereens, if their "rogue" governments actually launch nuclear weapons at us.. Meanwhile, I'm betting that the nuclear deterrent works for them, and its absence cost Saddam Hussein.
Wind turbines, solar energy, biofuels, and even energy frugality and efficiency have not yet shut down one coal burning plant.
Nuclear reactors breeding (renewing) their own replacement fuel are the only truly sustainable alternative, given that our energy profligacy has already seriously depleted not only the fossil carbon stocks, but also the forests which although renewable haven't been renewed.
We have whole governments that cannot afford the citizens' basic needs but can never compromise on their defense expenditure. Maybe it's time we returned to the Hippy generation's slogan of making love not war. End the lies and tiring conspiracies. Just bloody hell stop all wars!
who held back on an false alarm about a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union in 1983 and thus saved the world from a nuclear war with all its consequences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
Later accidents with fluoride that killed workers involved the liquid thermal diffusion process that killed 3 people with HF at a NJ shipyard pilot plant. These were some of the first workers killed by the Bomb's efforts and not nearly the last. The Cover-up related to Project F is extensive and continues even today. Groves clamp down on the Project F information lingers through today and many many people continue to be injured by the rising health impacts of fluorides in the food and water chain that today cause far more of the nation's health effects than the downwinder's experiences of those of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. Grove's secrecy killed many of those that built the bomb and the same basic health effects still affect millions today.
Atomic Age Timeline Animation:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf
Chernobyl Photos - Warning: Graphic Pictures
http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl
Chernobyl was an obsolete weapons-production design, and secrecy was what killed so many people. Not that it compares with the deaths attributable to motor cars and gaseous fossil fuel emissions.
Despite it's title, it's really about the hermonuclear arms race between the US and Soviets.
During one year (1960?), there were some 100 above-ground H-bomb tests.
H-bombs (for "hydrogen" bomb) are about 1000x as powerful as A-bombs discussed here.
The Soviets tested a 100 MT bomb.
If exploded over NYC, everyone from there to Boston would be dead within a month.
That's just one bomb; the US and Russia still have thousands of them.
The movie also covers "duck and cover" drills, and why we had them.
If you remember back then (I'm 60) the movie will send chills up your spine.
If you don't, see the movie. It's true, though you won't believe it. It was crazy back then.
Did Democratic Leadership Try To Buy A House Seat with a $25 Billion Nuclear Bailout?
http://action.foe.org/p/salsa/web/press_release/public/?press_release_KEY=515
OUR way out of dependence on foreign oil. I'm all aglow!
cf. http://skepticva.org/EnergyIndependence.html.
The folk who consider themselves 'green', as I do, and against nuclear weapons, as I am, managed to persuade the Clinton administration to cancel that program. Yet it successfully addressed all the objections to nuclear civilian power, except perhaps the fact that it could put coal miners out of work, and diminish the fortunes of oil barons.
Myself, I wouldn't have wanted to survive a nuclear accident or holocaust; no way Josita!
With what is happening in the Gulf can you imagine if that had been a runaway noocular reactor of the kind Obama ( he sez) wants to build on every street corner? Half the continent could be gone.
Secrecy is what it's all about, and until the Executive branch of the United States government is made accountable, the world remains as dangerous a place as it was during the Cold War, if not more so.
There is no such thing as a limited ie, winnable nuclear war, and anyone who tells the American public any different, well, I know what'd they'd do to them from where I come from.
The atom bomb was a neck and neck wat time race between Nazi Germany and the US. Recently declassified Biritish documents undermined US propaganda as to the success of the Nazi A Bomb project.
She was a fascinating and accomplished woman. Discovery channel has run a film about here, and there is an excellent write up in Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner